He continued, his voice meditative, “When I think about it now, I realize that Noelle really hadn’t believed me. She hadn’t believed that my price to marry her, other than the five hundred thousand dollars I got from her parents, was that she stay with me forever, or until I didn’t want her anymore. When she came dragging back with you—a screaming little brat—I took you away from her and held you over a big fire in the fireplace. The fire was blowing really good. It singed off the little hair you had and your eyebrows. Oh, how she screamed. I told her if she ever tried anything like that again, I’d kill you.

“I meant it, you know. I bet you wonder who your father was.”

She felt as though she’d had a ton of drugs pumped into her body. She couldn’t grasp what he was saying. She understood his words—he wasn’t her father—but she couldn’t seem to get it to the core of herself.

“You’re not my father,” she repeated, staring beyond his left shoulder toward the open door. She wanted to cheer. She didn’t have any of this monster’s blood. “You kept Noelle with you by threatening to kill me, her only child.”

“Yes. My dear wife finally believed me. I can’t tell you the pleasure it gave me to beat that rich little bitch. And she had to take it. She had no choice.

“Then you were sixteen and you saw me hit her. Too bad. It changed everything, but then I had good reason to get rid of you. Remember that last time? You came back into the house and I was kicking her and you got on the phone to call for help and she crawled—actually crawled—over to you and begged you not to call? I enjoyed that. I enjoyed watching you simply disconnect from her.

“I kicked her a couple more times after you left. She really moaned delightfully. Then I had sex with her and she cried the whole time.

“After that I was free of you for a long while. Life was really quite good those four years you were out of my house, out of your mother’s life. But I wanted to pay you back. I got Scott to marry you. That got you away for a little while, but you didn’t want him, did you? You realized he was a phony almost immediately. Well, it didn’t matter.

“I just had to bide my time. When I saw Jackie I knew what to do. You see, the Feds were closing in. I’m not stupid. I knew it was only a matter of time. I’d gotten very rich, but arms sales to places like Iraq are always risky. Yes, it was just a matter of time. I wanted to pay you back for all the trouble you caused me. Those six months you were in Doctor Beadermeyer’s sanitarium were wonderful for me. I loved to have you beneath me, watching me fondle you, fondle myself. I adored hitting you, watching you wince in pain. But then you got away and ruined everything.” He leaned down and slapped her, her left cheek, then her right cheek. Once, again and yet again.

She tasted blood. He’d split her lip.

“You fucking coward.” She spit at him, but he jerked away from her in time. He slapped her again.

“I never wanted to have sex with you in the sanitarium,” he said, close to her face now, “though I could have. I saw you naked enough times, but I never wanted you. Hell, Scott wouldn’t even look at you. He only came that one time because I insisted. Now that little bastard will take the fall because I won’t be around. Come on, Sally, spit at me again. I’m not the coward, you are.”

She spit at him, and this time she didn’t miss. She watched him wipe his mouth and his cheek with the back of his hand. Then he smiled down at her. She had a stark memory of him smiling down at her in the sanitarium. “No,” she whispered, but it didn’t change anything.

He struck her hard and she fell into blackness. Her last thought was that she was grateful he hadn’t given her more drugs.

30

“WE’RE IN DEEP shit,” Quinlan said and meant it, but he wasn’t thinking about himself and the other agents, he was thinking about Sally. If she was here in this black hole, she was still unconscious. Or dead.

There was a grunt from Thomas Shredder and a “yeah” from Corey Harper. It was true. They were in very deep shit. It was also true that it was as black as the bottom of a witch’s cauldron in this room where they were being kept.

No, it wasn’t a room. It was a shed with a dirt floor. Probably the shed behind Doc Spiver’s cottage.

“Look,” Thomas said, “Quinlan’s right. We are in deep shit, but we’re trained agents. We can get out of this. If we don’t, they’ll fire us. We’ll lose our careers and our federal pensions. I sure as hell don’t want to lose my federal health benefits.”