Sacred (Kenzie & Gennaro 3)

Desiree knocked me out of the chair by pistol-whipping the back of my skull. She crammed the muzzle into the side of my neck. “Let’s go.”

Julian took a flashlight off the top of a bookcase and pushed the French doors open onto the back lawn. We followed him out as he turned left, the light dancing across the grass ahead of him in a halo.

With Desiree gripping the back of my head and her gun against my neck, I was forced to bend to her height as we stepped off the lawn and followed a short pathway that led around the corner of a shed and an overturned wheelbarrow, broke through a thicket of trees and out into the garden.

It was, in keeping with the rest of the place, enormous—at least the size of a baseball diamond, fringed on three sides by frosted hedges four feet high. We stepped over a plastic tarp rolled up in front of the entrance, and Julian’s flashlight bounced over furrows of iced dirt and the pikes of grass hardy enough to survive the winter. A sudden movement, low and to our right, caught our eyes, and Desiree stopped me with a yank to my head. The halo light jerked right then back to the left and an emaciated hare, its fur spiked by the cold, jumped through the circle of light and then vaulted off into the hedges.

“Shoot it,” I said to Desiree. “It might have some money.”

“Shut up.” She said, “Julian, hurry up.”

“Dear.”

“Don’t call me ‘dear.’”

“We have a problem, dear.”

He stepped back and we looked past him at the circle of light shining into an empty hole about five and a half feet deep and a foot and a half square.

The hole might have been tight and neat once, but someone had made an awful mess coming back out of it. Trails of dirt deeper than rake marks were ripped through the earth, and soil had been spewed in a wide radius around the hole. Someone hadn’t just been desperate pulling herself out of that hole. She’d been angry.

Desiree looked left, then right. “Julian.”

“Yes?” He peered down at the hole.

“How long since you last checked on her?”

Julian consulted his watch. “At least an hour.”

“An hour.”

Julian said, “She could have reached a phone by now.”

Desiree grimaced. “Where? The nearest house is four hundred yards away, and the owners are in Nice for the winter. She’s covered in dirt. She’s—”

“In this house,” Julian hissed, looking back over his shoulder at the mansion. “She could be inside this house.”

Desiree shook her head. “She’s still out here. I know it. She’s waiting for her boyfriend. Aren’t you?” She called to the darkness, “Aren’t you?”

Something rustled to our left. The sound might have come from the hedges but it was hard to be sure with the surf raging just twenty yards away on the other side of the garden.

Julian bent by a row of tall hedges. “I don’t know,” he said slowly.

Desiree pointed her gun to her left and let go of my hair. “The floodlights. We can turn on the floodlights, Julian.”

“I really don’t know about this,” Julian said.

A whisper of wind or surf noise curled against my ear.

“Goddammit,” Desiree said. “How could she have—?”

And something made the sort of squishing sound a shoe makes when it steps in a puddle of icy slush.

“Oh, my,” Julian said and shone the flashlight down on his own chest at the two shiny blades of garden shears that protruded from his sternum.

“Oh, my,” he said again and stared at the wooden handles of the shears as if waiting for them to explain themselves.

Then the flashlight dropped and he pitched forward. The blade points popped out through his back and he blinked once, his chin in the dirt, then sighed. Then nothing.

Desiree turned the gun toward me but it popped out of her hand as the handle of a hoe smashed into her wrist.

She said, “What?” and turned her head to her left as Angie stepped out of the darkness covered in dirt from head to toe and punched Desiree Stone so hard in the center of her face that I’m sure she was well into dreamland before her body hit the ground.

41

I stood by the shower in the downstairs guest bathroom as the water sprayed across Angie’s body and the last of the dirt sluiced down her ankles and swirled into the drain. She ran a bath sponge along her left arm, and the soap dripped down along her elbow and hung there for a moment in long teardrops before falling to the marble basin. Then she went to work on the other arm.

She must have washed each part of her body four times since we’d come in here, but somehow I was still entranced.

“You broke her nose,” I said.

“Yeah? You see any shampoo in here?”

I used a facecloth to open the medicine cabinet. I wrapped the cloth around a small vial of shampoo and squirted some into my palm, walked back to the shower.

“Turn your back to me.”

She did, and I leaned in and rubbed the shampoo into her hair, felt the wet tangles envelop my fingers, the soap churn up through the roots as my fingers massaged her scalp.

“Feels very nice,” she said.

“No kidding.”

“How bad’s it look?” She leaned forward and I pulled my hands from her hair as she raised her arms and scrubbed her hair with more force than I’d ever use on my own hair if I intended to reach my forties with it still attached to my head.

I rinsed the shampoo off my hands in the sink. “What?”

“Her nose.”

“Bad,” I said. “Like there’s three of them all of a sudden.”

I came back to the shower as she tilted her head back under the water and the white foamy mixture of soap and water poured between her shoulder blades and cascaded down her back.

“I love you,” she said, her eyes closed, head tilted back to the spray, her hands wiping the water away from her temples.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She threw her head forward and reached for the towel as I put it in her hand.

I leaned in and shut off the water and she wiped her face, blinked her eyes open and found mine. She sniffed at water in her nose and wiped her neck with the towel.

“When Lurch dug the hole, he dug it too deep. So when he threw me in there, my foot hit a rock sticking out of the wall of dirt on the way down. About six inches above the bottom. And I had to tense every muscle in my body and keep my foot on this little ledge. And it was hard. Because I was looking up at this prick shoveling dirt on me with absolutely no emotion in his face.” She lowered the towel from her breasts toward her waist. “Turn around.”