Snowbound - Blake Crouch [61]
Rachael kept wiping her eyes, shoulders bobbing. She sat down, spent thirty seconds scribbling on the sheet of paper. Then she got up, hurried back to the door, knelt down, and shoved the paper underneath.
Devlin had to stand under a light to read what her mother had scrawled, the handwriting wobbly, as if she hadn’t held a pen in years.
Get out of this place. Don’t try to do anything. Just get out back to safety and find help. I love you so much.
Devlin set the paper on the floor and scribbled under her mother’s handwriting:
Wolves outside and blizzard. Our pilot not coming back until tomorrow.
Devlin slid the paper through. Rachael picked it up, holding it flat against the door while she wrote.
It came back quickly, and as Devlin grabbed it, she heard footsteps.
Terrible people here. You cannot let them find you. Go to an empty room and hide there until you can leave. You have to listen to me. I love you. Now go.
The footsteps were coming up from the lobby stairs. Devlin took the sheet of paper, wrote “I love you,” and held the message up to the peephole, then moved quickly into the alcove and down three steps before stopping.
Now there were footsteps climbing this stairwell, too, these faster, with a kind of clicking, like a dog’s toenails on a hardwood floor.
She backtracked to the fourth floor, glanced around the corner from the stairwell, the footsteps getting louder on the lobby staircase, at the other end, the faster ones rushing up beneath her.
She ran into the fourth-floor corridor, searching for that unlocked door, finally finding it four down and across the hall from her mother’s room. She slipped inside just as someone’s head emerged into view from the lobby stairs.
She eased the door shut, stared through the peephole.
A long black shape loped by.
Five seconds later, it returned, stood staring at the door, whining and sniffing the floor.
A man walked into view—the tall, cowboy-hatted guard with long hair. He patted the wolf’s head, knelt down, let the animal nuzzle into his neck.
Another man drew everyone’s attention—short and round, wearing a green kimono, sandals, with a red bandanna tied onto his left arm, pursuant to Ethan’s instructions.
The great black wolf sat at attention beside the guard, hackles raised, eyeing the guest.
“Hey, Reynolds,” the guard said. “Good to see you again.”
“Likewise, Gerald, likewise. Say, would you be so kind as to point me in the direction of the pregnant woman Ethan mentioned this morning?”
“Sure, right this way.”
The men and the wolf started back toward the alcove, and just before their voices diminished entirely, Devlin heard the guard say, “She’s in four twenty-nine. I think you’re going to enjoy yourself, my friend.”
FORTY-EIGHT
Devlin stood outside room 429, the corridor empty, her right arm sagging with the weight of the gun.
The high twang of Reynolds’s voice passed easily through the door: “I want you to take that off right now and sit down. You know how much money I’ve made this year?”
“How much?”
There was a sound like a hand clap. “Don’t you fucking say one word to me. Eighty-four million. One year. That moisten you up?”
Devlin thought she heard footsteps coming up the staircase at the other end, hustled into the alcove for a moment to wait, but no one came.
When she returned to the door, she could hear the bed creaking, Reynolds making noise.
Winded, he said, “Feel free to moan or whatever the fuck.”
Her mother moaned.
“You know I could kill you if I wanted?” he said, breathless.
Devlin wiped the tears out of her eyes so she could see, tried but couldn’t stop herself from glancing through the peephole, saw it happening, knew instantly she never should have looked, that the sight of the small, fat man riding her mother was an image she would never expunge, and a deep seed of rage sprouted up in the pit of her stomach, swelling her throat, flooding her eyes.
She put her hand on the doorknob, turned it, the bolt retracting, the room unlocked.
A hairsbreadth from pushing