Chapter 19
Jane parked her car three blocks away from her old house on Erie Street, a short side street that connected a pair of long straight streets like the center bar of an H.
When she was a child, she used to walk one of the two streets to the junior high, and the other one home.
Tonight, she was looking at cars. The Russian woman and her crew would have their cars fairly close to Jane’s old house, because they might need to get out of the neighborhood in a hurry.
If the woman had four men with her and she expected to capture Jane, they might have something like a windowless van.
They hadn’t done that the last time. They had come to Jane’s house in an oversize SUV with three rows of seats.
If they were smart they would probably have two of medium size, which would be less noticeable and avoid having every seat filled.
These were professional criminals, and that meant they were probably less predictable.
They would know that it wasn’t practical anymore to use a stolen car with the original plates on it.
A patrol car with a license plate reader could tell in seconds whether a car had been reported stolen.
If they hadn’t been caught by now, the vehicle or vehicles they’d brought would probably be new or nearly new, with valid New York State plates.
As Jane came closer to the Whitefield house, she recognized a few cars that belonged to locals parked along the curbs, but people in single-family residential neighborhoods in that part of the country were mostly in the habit of parking their cars in their garages at night.
In the winter it was almost essential, because cars parked on the street could be buried by snowplows under tons of snow, and in the summer the rains sometimes created streams of water that made it difficult to reach the car doors with dry feet.
She skirted the block where her family house was.
She went halfway around the block and then up the driveway of the Volmann house, behind hers, past the garage into the backyard.
The fence was only five feet, designed to keep the Volmanns’ dog, Ike, secure and available.
Ike had lived during Jane’s childhood, when most dogs were allowed to roam wherever they pleased as long as they had their collars on.
She looked at the darkened windows in her house.
There were likely to be eyes watching for her to return.
She was sure some of them would be in the bedroom windows upstairs, which would give them an unobstructed view of the street or the backyard.
If there were four men, there would be two of them to a bedroom, working in shifts.
She directed her attention to the less obvious spots—the kitchen, the den she’d used as an office, the garage.
Jane waited for ten minutes before she was satisfied that there had been no movement, no silhouette behind the glass, no sign that anyone was looking out.
She climbed over the fence behind the garage, slipped into the side door, and looked at the car parked there.
The license plates were from Illinois. It was too small a car to be the only transportation for five criminals.
Was it the runner’s? Were the license plates genuine?
She went outside and closed the door, climbed the fence again, and bent low as she walked along the far side of the fence in the neighbor’s yard. She stopped in the dark corner, went over the fence into her own yard, and reached the side wall of her house below the level of the windows.
Three years ago, when she had been chained to the pipes in the basement, she had not been able to move more than a few feet in either direction.
What she had used to send carbon monoxide up into the bedrooms was the old coal furnace, which was still connected to its old set of ducts.
What Jane hoped to use tonight was another obsolete remnant of coal heating.
On delivery day the coal truck would pull up beside the house.
The driver would open the coal door, fit the truck’s shiny steel chute into it, and raise the bed of the truck so the coal would slide down the chute into the Whitefields’ coal bin.
The wooden walls of the coal bin had been removed and the floor cleaned to make more space when she was a child, but the coal door was still in the basement wall, as it probably was in most of the old houses in this part of town, because there had been no reason to spend money getting rid of it.
Jane crept along the side of the house on the driveway, reached the coal door, turned the latch, and swung it open.
She pushed her feet into the dark space, turned onto her stomach, and lowered herself into the basement.
She could just reach the wooden coal door at the hinge side, and she swung it inward, pulled it shut with her fingertips, then went to the cellar steps and began to climb.
She needed to find this Brian Finlay. The fact that they hadn’t ditched his car yet gave her hope that he could still be alive.
She reached the top of the steps, slowly pushed the door open a half inch, verified that what she could see of the hallway was empty, and sat on the top step listening.
There was no sound for several minutes, so she moved her head and shoulders into the hall and looked.
The hall was clear, and so was the kitchen.
She stood and moved along the edge of the wall to go up the hallway toward the front of the house. When she reached the living room, she verified that her expectation was correct. The curtains on the front window had been opened a little and then closed imperfectly.
Light from the streetlamp in front of the Ronkowskis’ house shone through curtains on the gap, so she could see the living room dimly.
The big couch along the inner wall had a blanket folded on it and a pillow on top of that.
Someone had either slept here or been planning to.
Had that person gotten up to take a shift as lookout?
She glanced through the doorway of the den, and she could see someone was sleeping on that couch.
It could be anyone, but if they were still pretending the woman was Jane, they would not have Brian Finlay in an upstairs bedroom staring out windows to watch for Jane to arrive. This must be Brian Finlay.
Jane stepped into the den, saw it was a man, put one hand over his mouth, and used the other to squeeze his arm. His eyes opened, and she whispered, “I’m Jane. Come with me.”
He nodded. She let go of him and started down the hallway toward the kitchen.
He picked up his shoes and followed instead of putting them on.
Jane focused her hearing on the sounds of the house.
She listened for the sounds coming from the floor above their heads, for voices, for metallic clicks or sliding sounds that would warn her that someone she hadn’t seen was preparing to raise a weapon and pull a trigger.
She opened the door to the cellar and sent him down the steps ahead of her, and then closed the door and followed.
She passed him at the foot of the steps.
She went to the wall, reached up and opened the coal door, and then went across the cellar and carried a bucket to the spot, inverted it, and set it down under the opening.
She stepped up on it, grasped the edge of the opening, pulled herself up, and crawled out onto the driveway.
The man stepped on the bucket, lifted his hands to the opening, and pulled himself up, and as he did, a car came around the corner of Franklin Street.
The headlights swept across the driveway and illuminated the man for a second.
He was wearing a white T-shirt, and Jane saw the tattoos on his neck and arms, as in a photograph—eight-pointed stars on the shoulders, a pair of scorpions, a Christ on a cross.
He wasn’t her runner, he was one of the Russian gangsters.
She stomp-kicked the door against the man’s face and the blow sent him sliding backward into the cellar.
The man pushed the coal door open again as he tried to get to her.
She kicked the door again, and it caught his face again and then one of his wrists.
He bellowed and the weight of his body falling off the bucket pulled his arm free.
Jane slammed the coal door fully shut, turned the catch to lock it, and dashed toward the Volmanns’ fence, went over it, and crouched there.
There were other voices shouting in Russian, a couple of lights going on, and the sounds of people running on the upper floors of her house. She saw something she had not expected.
The window in Jane’s parents’ old upstairs room slid open, and a man’s legs emerged.
Within seconds his whole body was out, and he was descending by clinging to a pair of sheets knotted corner to corner, and sliding down.
The sheets only stretched about fifteen feet, and when his hands were all that held him, he dropped the final six or seven feet and ran. He dashed for Jane’s garage.
Jane kept low but ran along the back of the Volmanns’ fence and reached the garage just as he did. He saw her roll over the top of the fence and froze.
“I’m Jane,” she said. “Keep moving.”
He flung the door open and ran for the driver’s seat. Jane went to the garage door, preparing to open it. The man tried to start the car, but couldn’t. He fiddled with the controls some more, and then opened the door and searched for something.
“I’m Jane,” she said. “They probably sabotaged your car. Come on.”
He got out of the car, ran with her to the Volmanns’ fence, and climbed over beside her.
They lay still for a moment, silently listening to the sounds of low voices and running feet.
Jane tried to get a sense of where the footsteps were going, but they seemed to be heading in several directions, so she couldn’t be sure.
After another few seconds she heard a car engine start, and then the car accelerating.
There would not have been five people getting into a car and driving off, so she remained still and waited.
She saw flashlight beams moving around in her yard, saw a beam pass over her head along the top of the fence, and come back rapidly, then disappear.
Jane waited, but the lights and sounds had moved away.
She didn’t dare to speak, so she tugged the man’s hand in the direction of the front of the Volmann house, and began to move. She ducked and ran to the first stretch of thick shrubbery along the side of the house and looked back.
There were still two flashlights, but then they moved off toward the street at a run, and before they reached it, went out. Jane leaned close and whispered, “What’s your name?”
“Brian,” he whispered.
“Right answer. Now we run.”
Jane emerged from the bushes and moved along the side of the Volmann house to the street, and then began to trot.
She made it to the cross street, turned, and ran along the side of it.
She listened to Brian’s footsteps and the sound of his breathing behind her as she increased her speed and the length of her strides.
She knew nothing about this man except that he looked about five years younger than she was, so she had hopes he could keep up the pace.
The left side of the street had most of the big trees and the taller houses, and the right side had most of the streetlamps.
As she ran, she tried to keep them on a course that kept them in the darkest spaces.
She knew the gangsters had gone after them in cars.
She was thinking ahead about the moment when the pursuers realized that they had gone farther than anyone could have run in that time, and not caught up with them, so they would pick the next street and drive back toward Jane’s house. She hoped they didn’t pick this street.
As they neared the end of the residential stretch of the street and approached the old industrial area, she couldn’t help thinking about the sleeping arrangements in her house.
The man she had guessed would be Brian because he’d been sleeping in the least desirable spot had been a gang member.
Brian must have been sleeping upstairs, since he had escaped out an upstairs bedroom window.
Brian certainly wouldn’t have been up there taking a shift as watchman to help catch Jane.
Only a day ago, he had called Karen Alvarez with his suspicions about the people in the house, but he obviously had not had a chance to escape.
He was still alive, so the Russian woman could not have discovered he knew she was an imposter.
Far ahead there was a curve in the street, and Jane saw the double cone of light from a car coming toward them.
She ran to the right across the street toward a pair of empty redbrick buildings that had been a factory when she was a child but had long ago closed down.
There was tall grass growing in the cracks of the big parking lot, and the grids of translucent windowpanes had all been broken out years ago, so the place had a clean, skeletal quality.
She got Brian into the narrow space between the main production shop and the warehouse, and stopped.
She listened to the sound of the engine as a car made the turn and kept coming up the street.
She was trying to detect the sound of the car coasting as the driver eased his foot on the gas pedal but the driver didn’t.
He kept his foot on the accelerator, ignoring the dark buildings and raising his speed as he saw that he was at the start of a long, straight stretch of road.