Chapter 53
Jojo was not knocked completely unconscious by the blow to her head, but it did stagger her.
She dropped to her knees on the catwalk, felt her grip on her pistol loosen and the pistol fall away, then she crumpled onto her side.
The world swam in and out of focus to the heartbeat rhythm of the pain at the base of her neck.
She heard a voice, but she had to concentrate to understand what the voice was saying.
“… not even part of the plan. I just thought of it on the spur of the moment—that I could make you think I was down there by using the remote key to start my car. Brilliant!”
She kept her eyes closed and focused all her attention on coming to, on fully regaining consciousness. She had to come up with a Plan B, but she was helpless until her head stopped spinning.
“… are in deep shit, sweetheart. You walked into my web, said the spider to the fly.” He reached out and poked her with the toe of his boot. “Can you hear me?”
She remained limp.
He poked her again, harder. “I coulda let it go. I got Miss Susie Q and that’s all that really mattered.
She had to die.” He leaned closer and spoke softly.
“She was a virgin. I know she was because she didn’t even know …
when I touched her, she didn’t even … and besides, all Amish girls are virgins until they get married. ”
He stood up straight then, growling words, his voice the sound of a rusty chain dragged across metal. “Wasn’t no other man gonna have her … pure like that … that part was miiine.”
He kicked her hard then in the shoulder, but she didn’t flinch. She could feel it though, really feel it. She concentrated on experiencing the hurt and it helped to slow the swirling images in her scrambled brain.
“We were going to run off to California. I had it all planned out, how we’d camp in national parks, and I’d shoot game for us to eat.
And at night, we’d snuggle up in that sleeping bag—both of us naked—and I’d touch her like nobody ever—” He roared out some sound, wild and Jurassic, a cry of grief and loss and rage. “But you … you spoiled it all!”
Her hand was lying limp on the metal catwalk, and he stomped it with his booted foot. Pain exploded from her mashed fingers, turned the world purple … and brought her all the way back.
“I went to so much trouble to make you pay … I wanted to be there when that bull gored you, watch him stab a horn through your belly before he trampled you so your own mother wouldn’t recognize …
and you dodged a bullet that had your name on it.
” He paused. “Even pulled a Goldfinger on you and somehow …” His voice trailed off, then came back strong.
“When Mama called and told me you were looking for me, I knew I’d come to the end of it.
Found high ground for an ambush. I was just waiting for you to come roaring in one of these doors, gun blazin’ …
maybe I kill you, maybe you kill me … and then I thought about my car.
I put a remote start system on it and if I started it, you’d think I was in it and I could hide behind the door … ” He let out a whoop! “Hot damn!”
He kicked her shoulder again, knocking her from her side onto her back, and she opened her eyes.
Above her stood a grinning Jason Crawford.
He wasn’t wearing glasses, his eyes open so wide she could see the contact lenses, the pupils dilated so there was no color left …
just two black holes in his face. She looked into those eyes, saw in their depths shiny dark pools where something small and feral had drowned.
Clearly, the person who’d once been Jason Crawford had left the building, abandoning his empty shell of humanity, and unadulterated evil had claimed squatter’s rights, moved in, and was living there now rent free.
“I’m gonna go out in a high-speed chase—me out front in my Thunderbird and all these cop cars behind with their lights flashing, the news coverin’ it live from helicopters.
” Leaning over, he snatched up the Glock off the catwalk where it had fallen, examined it, then pointed the pistol at her, only inches away from her forehead.
“Imma put a bullet right there … right between your eyes.”
Jojo’s hand shot out, grabbed his wrist and twisted it to make him drop …
Except she didn’t.
She reached for him, but she was slow and clumsy, her head still spinning, and he batted her hand away almost casually.
Then he swung the barrel of the pistol from her face to the open doorway and pulled the trigger, the sound echoing extra loud off the slick metal sides of the silo before he pitched the pistol out the door into the night.
“That’s just a cap gun.” He shouldered his rifle, fingers loose on the stock and with a quick, practiced motion he opened the action and let a full-metal-jacket round slide free into his palm.
“I’m not gonna use these. I’m gonna use a hollow point.
” Then he tilted the rifle and worked the mechanism again and again until the weapon was empty, each round pinging on the metal catwalk.
“Imma splatter your brains out the back of your?—”
They both heard it at the same time.
Bark-bark-bark-bark!
Jason spun toward the sound of the loaf-of-bread dog at the house, yapping out a frenzied staccato cry.
“Backup.” Jojo’s voice was weak, but she knew he heard her. She spoke louder, with authority. “I told you I called for backup. They’re here.”
Don’t I wish!
Jason whirled on her, kicked at her face. She turned her head, and he missed, scuffing her cheek and mashing her lip so she tasted blood.
Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a box of cartridges, and emptied it into his hand. Well, he had brought extras. Now he would slam a hollow point into the chamber and shoot her where she lay. And she was powerless to stop him, still too dizzy to mount any kind of effective defense.
She watched in horror, a mouse gazing into the slitted eyes of a hissing cobra, as he thumbed the bolt up and drew it back, exposing the dark throat of the magazine. He dropped in a cartridge, the round clicking softly.
He didn’t push the bolt forward to seat the lone round into the chamber so he could shoot her, though, just kept loading.
This was her chance to make a break for it.
But he stood between her and the door and in her current condition she could never hope to get past him.
There was another door on the other side, of course, the front side, but he was blocking the catwalk to reach it.
She looked out over the corn to the door.
Twenty-five feet. The corn’d been there long enough that it had a slight crust. If she could manage not to break through the crust, she could cross it and climb up the ladder on the silo wall to the door.
Jason shoved a second shell into the internal magazine. Three more to go. Trying to escape was useless. She’d never make it. Not. A. Chance. He’d shoot her as she struggled through the corn, or on the ladder, or …
So … what? Just lie here and die? Give up? Hell, no!
Joanna Kaufmann would never quit. She reached up and touched Liam’s Navy SEAL trident pin on the chain around her neck and then she moved.
Flinging herself sideways, she rolled over once, slid beneath the lower railing of the catwalk and landed splat on her face on the corn below. The corn was semi-solid on the top where it had set. But that crust was incredibly fragile.
Inhaling the sickly-sweet aroma of the corn, Jojo moved in a kind of swimming motion toward the ladder on the opposite wall, her mind hauling out for her enjoyment every horror story she’d ever heard about a farmer killed in a corn silo.
It was rare, because farmers understood the danger.
Get so much as a leg up to the knee stuck in the corn and the pressure of the corn—as viscous and flowing as quicksand—was so strong you couldn’t pull that leg out without burying the other one beside it.
Rescuing a farmer from a corn silo required a team of men—all strapped to harnesses suspended from the silo ceiling—inserting a metal tube around the imprisoned farmer and then using a machine to suck the corn out from around his body.
She heard another shell click into place. She didn’t need to worry about getting stuck in the corn. Jason would kill her where she lay spread-eagled on top of it. She heard him shove the final shell into the rifle.
“You sure are struggling hard for somebody who ain’t got a snowball’s chance in hell. Do you think I’m just gonna let you go … Let you climb up that ladder and get away? Imma pop you right now.”
“Go for it,” she said with more bravado than she felt. “Give away your position so the backup doesn’t have to search for you. It’ll save them a lot of trouble.”
He giggled. Feigning a ridiculous Elmer Fudd accent, he said, “You know, you’re wight! I need to be vewry, vewry qui-et.” Then he giggled again.
Meanwhile, Jojo was desperately “swimming,” distributing her weight as evenly as she could, toward the ladder on the other side of the silo.
Once she got there, it’d be a neat trick to pull herself up off the top of the corn pile without breaking through the crust and burying a foot … and then the other foot.
Jason let out a theatrical sigh. “I’ve enjoyed our time together, I really have. But I think I need to make my exit now.” She could hear the grin in his voice. “And it is definitely time for you to make yours.”
She turned to look at him. It seemed impossible, but his grin had gotten even wider—clown wide. Jojo had the wild image of a GIF where the corners of Jason’s mouth met at the back of his head and the whole top of his skull toppled off.
“Car’s all warmed up, ready for me to blast outta here … Catch me if you can!” He lifted his rifle toward her.
Jojo tensed, readied herself.
Then he cocked his head to the side. “But gunshots are so noisy. And I need to be vewry vewry qui-et …” He paused. “Sooooo …”
Instead of shouldering the rifle and pointing the barrel at her, Jason reached out in exaggerated slow motion toward a switch on the wall, giving her time to realize what it was and what he was about to do.
There was a sudden rumbling thump as the discharge gate in the bottom of the funnel-shaped walls of the silo opened beneath the corn. Instantly the corn began to pour downward through the cone, forming a whirlpool at the center that sucked Jojo toward it.
“Bye-bye, sweetheart. Tell Miss Susie Q I said hello.”
Both Jojo’s feet disappeared instantly. She tried as hard as she could to keep swimming toward the ladder on the side of the silo. But there was no denying the corn. It spun around and around in a circle in the middle of the silo, pulling Jojo inexorably toward it.
Buried up to her knees now, she was caught. She lay back flat on the corn, trying desperately to stay on the surface, but it sucked her down.
Waist deep.
The movement of the corn stirred up dust and it hung in the air, dry on her skin, stinging her eyes and bitter on her tongue when she licked her lips.
Jason reached out and flipped the switch again, and she heard the gate below close. “Can’t let you fall out the bottom.”
The silo wouldn’t empty all the way now … but the whirlpool remained, as the corn flowed down to fill the void of the displaced corn beneath her. She was up to her chest now—still being sucked downward.
Jojo turned her face away from Jason, didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her terror.
He’d soon figure out she’d been bluffing.
Whoever was out there had not been summoned by Jojo’s imaginary call for backup.
Maybe it was Jason’s uncle coming home. Maybe it was teenagers looking for a place to park and make out. It could be anybody.
Then she saw a beam of light flash through the open door in the front of the silo, and Jason jumped back out of sight.
A voice from outside called out, “Jason, this is Lieutenant McCaffrey. You remember me. I need to talk to you—just talk.”
It was Conor! He’d come looking for her.
Jason bolted along the catwalk to the front door.
“If you’re armed, you need to put your weapon down now,” McCaffrey continued.
Jojo was buried up to her shoulders, her arms outstretched, hands still clawing frantically for purchase on the sliding corn. But Conor was here now.
And she had … a chance.
She could yell, cry out … something. What?
He wouldn’t hear and she couldn’t waste air screaming.
She needed air in her lungs now. More important, she had to let go of everything beyond herself, had to draw inward.
She cupped her hands over her nose and mouth, focused on the three inches there that she could control and sucked in a big, deep breath.
She relaxed, allowed all the tension to drain out of her body.
As the corn rushed in to cover Jojo Kaufmann’s face, her mind whispered, “Bug off, Monster.”