“If you make another sound,” he says, “I’ll kill your baby.” It’s such a calm, quiet threat. I feel it shudder through me, and it leaves behind a horrible conviction that he means it.
Jonathan turns away from me. I hear a slight metallic jingle, and when I look down, I see he’s got a small metal carabiner clipped to the belt loop on his blue jeans.
Keys. That’s a ring of keys, and even from here I can see a handcuff key on it.
Get him over here, I think.
But not yet. He’s completely absorbed in what’s happening on the screen . . . and as I focus on it, too, I feel the same magnetic force draw me in.
Oh God, Gwen. Oh my God.
We should never have come here.
25
GWEN
There are more rooms, he said. I think about the implications of that as I walk through the processing room. There are other exits from this room, seven of them. I ignore the big doors he dragged me through before; those lead to the warehouse, to the trap where I last saw Kez.
I have blood on my hands. On my clothes. And I am not really rational.
It feels oddly fine.
“Which door?” I ask Jonathan. I know he can hear me. He’s played this game before, with many people. How many, I can’t really know.
“You choose.”
I do. I pick one at random, and I move past the silent, stinking fish conveyors. This door is smaller. It leads to a hallway running right and left. More choices. I go right. “You going to give me any clues?” I ask Jonathan. “It’s not much of a game if I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You know,” he says. “You’ll know when you get there.”
I’m not surprised to find that lights are working now. He’s kept the power on, of course he has. He controls the building, probably from whatever room he’s hiding in.
We’re playing hide-and-seek.
“Would you rather be rich or poor?” he asks.
“Neither,” I tell him. “Just not afraid.”
“That’s not how it works. There are only two choices.”
“That’s why the game is wrong,” I tell him. “Because humans aren’t binary creatures. We’re confusing. We’re flawed. We’re—”
I stop talking because there are three doors in the hallway, all on my left. The doors are shut. All have glass windows, but when I stand in the middle, I realize all the blinds are closed. No way to tell what’s inside.
“Three doors,” he says. “Three choices. Two are empty.”
“What’s in the third one?”
“A tiger who hasn’t eaten for months.”
I know this one. It’s a logic puzzle. A tiger who hasn’t eaten in months is dead. It doesn’t matter which door I open.
So I do it methodically.
The first door is an office with an empty desk, two filing cabinets, and a vacant office chair. It’s eerily tidy, like it’s waiting for a new employee to arrive.
The second door is the same.
The third door holds the monster, but as he promised in the riddle, the monster isn’t a problem anymore. I stare at the old, desiccated corpse. I can’t tell race, sex, anything; it’s just old skin, hair, and the outlines of bones now. The place reeks. The carpet’s absorbed decomposition like a bloated sponge. It isn’t immediately obvious how this person died—no severing of arms and legs, like Sheryl suffered. The corpse is handcuffed to a thick U-bolt driven into the floor.
I don’t speak. I just step back and shut the door. Jonathan’s disembodied voice says, “Do you want to know?”
“Just tell me where you are. Let’s get it over with.”
“That man abducted young women, some of them barely into their teens. He raped and killed them and made harassing phone calls to their loved ones,” Jonathan says. “I gave him a choice of dying of starvation or gnawing off his hand like an animal in a trap. He chose to starve.”
I lift my head and see the small, beady eye of a camera tucked in the corner of the hall. “I don’t care about your justifications.”
“These people weren’t unknown,” he says. “If the police had worked harder, they could have put the pieces together. They could have stopped him. But they didn’t. He did have a judge and a jury once. They arrested him for an attempted abduction. The case was dismissed.”
“You’re not omniscient. You can be wrong.”
“I let them tell me who they are. What they’ve done. What they’re capable of doing next.” He sounds calm, of course. Certain. “What you’ve done tells me who you are, Gina. If you want to find me, go to your left now.”
“Are you going to keep telling me your stories? Because I’d rather just die.”
“Go to your left.”
I take the other end of the hall. More offices. More blank, blinded windows. Three of them.
“Did you ever find him?” I ask.
“Who?”
“The man who killed your sister.”
There’s a very long pause. I wish I could see him, the way he can see me. I wish I could understand him better, because then I’d know how to stop him.
“Three doors,” he says. “Pick one. I’ll give you a clue. I’m in one of them.”
I feel my stance shift, getting ready for battle. A fierce, cold wind blows through me. He’ll be armed, I think. I still have the ankle gun, and I bend down and get it. There’s one bullet, and I need to make it fucking count.
I start at the far left. It’s empty.
So is the middle one.
I kick the last door open, smashing glass, blinds flailing wildly at the air, and leap forward in a flat-footed hop while the glass is still falling like sharp ice from the frame. My aim is steady.
I fire at his face. Right in his forehead.
He doesn’t blink. Glass cracks. He picks up a mug and drinks from it, and I realize through a sick, bewildered sense of disorientation that I’ve just shot a huge, flat television screen. It’s still working, despite the bullet that I’ve put through it. Jonathan sips again, staring at me with cool, empty eyes. “I didn’t lie,” he says. “I’m right here. It’s the only place you’ll find me in the building, Gina. There are twenty-one more rooms I’ve used. You can look in all of them. As you do, I’ll tell you why. And you’ll agree with me. They all deserved it. Every one of them.”
I scream at the monitor. I can’t help it; I feel a savage upwelling of rage, so deep that it tears something inside me. I can’t put words on it. I can’t reach him. I can’t stop him.
He’s a ghost. And this is just his graveyard.
That’s when I hear Kez’s voice. Not here, with me. From the screen. “Gwen, get out, he’s fucking crazy, he took me to the—”
Jonathan’s head swivels to his left, and then the picture and sound both die before she can finish that sentence.
He’s got Kez.
I don’t go to the other rooms. I don’t want to see more of Jonathan’s brand of justice. I’m barely holding on to myself as it is.
I need to get to Kez.
And this needs to end.
I shove myself under the still-stuck loading dock door and run across the broken, pitted parking lot. The Honda is still on the other side of the fence, and I wriggle under the chain link, earning bloody scratches on my face I barely feel. I pop the trunk and grab another gun—one of Kezia’s, a Smith & Wesson semiauto, loaded and ready—and I see another knife at the bottom of the pile. I take it, and an extra clip, and I slam the trunk.