then a hoarse scream. It wasn’t shrill. It wasn’t a piercing scream.
It was a startled, guttural cry that he might not even have heard if
he’d been upstairs; nevertheless, it managed to convey stark terror.
Vince paused with one hand on the stair railing, standing very still,
head cocked, listening intently, heart suddenly hammering, momentarily
frozen by indecision.
Another scream.
Ross Morrant, Vince’s bodyguard, was in the kitchen, making a late-night
snack for both of them, and it was Morrant who had screamed. No
mistaking the voice.
There were sounds of struggle, too. A crash and clatter as something
was knocked over. A hard thump. The brittle, unmelodic music of
breaking glass.
Ross Morrant’s breathless, fear-twisted voice echoed along the
downstairs hallway from the kitchen, and between grunts and gasps and
unnerving squeals of pain, there were words: “No . . . no . . .
please . . . Jesus, no . . . help . . . someone help me . . .
oh, my God, my God, please . . . no!”
Sweat broke out on Vince’s face.
Morrant was a big, strong, mean son of a bitch. As a kid he’d been an
ardent street fighter. By the time he was eighteen, he was taking
contracts, doing murder for hire, having fun and being paid for it. Over
the years he gained a reputation for taking any job, regardless of how
dangerous or difficult it was, regardless of how well-protected the
target was, and he always got his man. For the past fourteen months, he
had been working for Vince as an enforcer, collector, and bodyguard;
during that time, Vince had never seen him scared. He couldn’t imagine
Morrant being frightened of anyone or anything. And Morrant begging for
mercy . . . well, that was simply inconceivable; even now, hearing
the bodyguard whimper and plead, Vince still couldn’t conceive of it; it
just didn’t seem real.
Something screeched. Not Morrant. It was an ungodly, inhuman sound. It
was a sharp, penetrating eruption of rage and hatred and alien need that
belonged in a science fiction movie, the hideous cry of some creature
from another world.
Until this moment, Vince had assumed that Morrant was being beaten and
tortured by other people, competitors in the drug business, who had come
to waste Vince himself in order to increase their market share.
But now, as he listened to the bizarre, ululating wall that came from
the kitchen, Vince wondered if he had just stepped into the Twilight
Zone. He felt cold all the way to his bones, queasy, disturbingly
fragile, and alone.
He quickly descended two more steps and looked along the hall toward the
front door. The way was clear.
He could probably leap down the last of the stairs, race along the
hallway, unlock the front door, and get out of the house before the
intruders came out of the kitchen and saw him. Probably. But he
harbored a small measure of doubt, and because of that doubt he
hesitated a couple of seconds too long.
In the kitchen Morrant shrieked more horribly than ever, a final cry of
bleak despair and agony that was abruptly cut off.
Vince knew what Morrant’s sudden silence meant.
The bodyguard was dead.
Then the lights went out from one end of the house to the other.
Apparently someone had thrown the master breaker switch in the fuse box,
down in the basement.
Not daring to hesitate any longer, Vince started down the stairs in the
dark, but he heard movement in the unlighted hallway, back toward the
kitchen, coming in this direction) and he halted again. He wasn’t
hearing anything as ordinary as approaching footsteps; instead, it was a
strange, eerie hissing-rustling-rattling-grumbling that chilled him and
made his skin crawl. He sensed that something monstrous, something with
pale dead eyes and cold clammy hands was coming toward him. Such a
fantastic notion was wildly out of character for Vince Vastagliano, who
had the imagination of a tree stump, but he couldn’t dispel the
superstitious dread that had come over him.
Fear brought a watery looseness to his joints.
His heart, already beating fast, now thundered.
He would never make it to the front door alive.