Ninth Key

  This seemed to come as something of a surprise to Marcus’s flunkies. A couple of thickset frat boys who looked as if they were more used to pounding brewskies than people, they were out to impress the boss in a big way.

  At least until I threw down my book bag, hooked my foot behind the knee of one them, and brought him down with a ground-shaking thud to the wet asphalt.

  While Thug #1 lay there staring up at the overcast sky with a surprised look on his face, I got in an excellent kick to Thug #2. He was too tall for me to get him in the nose, but I knocked the wind out of him by applying my three-inch heel to his rib cage. That had to have hurt, let me tell you. He went spinning around, lost his balance, and hit the ground.

  Amateur.

  Marcus got out of the car then. He stood with the rain beating down on his fluffy blond hair and went, “You idiot,” to Thug #2.

  He was right to be upset, if you think about it. I mean, here he’d hired these guys to roust me, and they were doing a thoroughly bad job of it. It just goes to show you can’t get good help anymore.

  You would think that, with all this going on in front of a pretty popular tourist destination like the Mission—not to mention a school—somebody would have noticed and phoned the cops. You would think that, wouldn’t you?

  But if you’re thinking that, you obviously haven’t been in California when it was raining out. I’m not kidding, it’s like New York City on New Year’s Eve: Only the tourists venture outside. Everyone else stays inside and waits until it’s safe to come out.

  Oh, a couple of cars whizzed by going fifty miles an hour in a twenty-mile-per-hour zone. I was hoping one of them would notice us and decide that two guys on one girl wasn’t quite playing fair—even if the girl did look a bit like a hooker.

  But our little tussle went on for a surprisingly long time before Marcus—who’d apparently realized what his thugs hadn’t, that I wasn’t exactly your typical Catholic schoolgirl—cut the whole thing short by laying me out with a totally unfair right to the chin.

  I didn’t even see him coming. What with the rain and all, my hair was getting plastered to my face, obscuring my peripheral vision. I’d been concentrating on applying a knee to Thug #1’s groin—it had been a bad idea, his decision to get up again—while keeping my eye on Thug #2, who kept grabbing for handfuls of my hair—he had obviously gone to the Dopey school of fighting—and hadn’t even noticed that Marcus was headed my way.

  But suddenly, a heavy hand landed on my shoulder and spun me around. A second later, an explosion sounded in my head. The world tilted sickeningly, and I felt myself stumble. Next thing I knew, I was inside the car, and brakes were squealing.

  “Ow,” I said when the stars I’d been seeing had receded enough for me to speak. I reached up and touched my jaw. None of my teeth felt loose, but I was definitely going to have a bruise that there wasn’t enough Clinique in the world to cover up. “What’d you have to hit me so hard for?”

  Marcus just blinked at me expressionlessly from where he sat on the seat beside me. Thug #1 was driving and Thug #2 sat beside him in the front seat. Judging from the backs of their extremely thick necks, they were unhappy. It couldn’t have been too pleasant sitting there with all those various body parts throbbing with pain in wet, muddy clothes. My leather jacket had fortunately protected me from the worst of the rain. My hair, however, was undoubtedly a lost cause.

  We were going fast down the highway. Water sluiced on either side of us as we barreled through what had become a steady downpour. There wasn’t a soul on the highway but us. I tell you, you’ve never seen people as scared of a little bit of rain as native Californians. Earthquakes? They’re nothing. But a hint of drizzle and it’s head-between-the-knees time.

  “Look,” I said. “I think you should know something. My mother is a reporter for WCAL in Monterey, and if anything happens to me, she is going to be all over you like ants on a Jolly Rancher.”

  Marcus, clearly bored by my posturing, pulled back his coat sleeve and looked at his Rolex. “She won’t,” he said, tonelessly. “No one knows where you are. It was quite fortuitous, your leaving the school at the very moment we were pulling up to it. Did another one of your ghosts”—he said the word with a sarcasm I suppose he found scathing—“warn you that we were coming?”

  Scowling, I muttered, “Not exactly.” No way was I going to tell him I’d been sent home for violating the school dress code. I’d been humiliated enough for one day.

  “Just what were you doing there, anyway?” I demanded. “I mean, were you just going to stroll in and yank me out of class at gunpoint in front of everyone?”

  “Certainly not,” Marcus said, calmly.

  What I was hoping was that somebody—anybody—had seen Marcus slug me and had taken down the license number of his expensive Euro-trash car. Any minute sirens might begin to wail behind us. The cops couldn’t be afraid of a little rain—although to tell the truth, I don’t remember CHiPs officers Ponch and Jon ever venturing out in a downpour….

  Keep him talking, I told myself. If he’s talking, he won’t be able to concentrate on killing you.

  “So what was the plan, then?”

  “If you must know, I was going to go to the principal and inform him that Beaumont Industries was interested in sponsoring a student’s tuition for the year, and that you were one of our finalists.” Marcus picked some invisible lint off his trouser leg. “We would, of course, require a personal interview, after which we intended to take you—the candidate—to a celebratory lunch.”

  I rolled my eyes. The idea of me winning any kind of scholarship was laughable. This guy obviously hadn’t seen my latest geometry quiz scores.

  “Father Dominic would never have let me go with you,” I said. Especially, I thought, after I’d filled him in on what had gone on at chez Beaumont the night before.

  “Oh, I think he might have. I was planning on making a sizable donation to his little mission.”

  I had to laugh at that one. This guy obviously didn’t know Father D. at all.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “And even if he did, don’t you think he would mention how the last time he saw me, I was going off in a car with you? If the cops should happen to question him, you know, after I disappeared, that is.”

  Marcus said, “Oh, you’re not going to disappear, Miss Simon.”

  This surprised me. “I’m not?” Then what was all this about?

  “Oh, no,” Marcus assured me, confidently. “There won’t be the slightest question about what’s happened to you. Your corpse is going to be found rather quickly, I imagine.”

  Chapter

  Eighteen

  This was so not what I wanted to hear, I can’t even tell you.

  “Look,” I said, quickly. “I think you should know that I left a letter with a friend of mine. If anything happens to me, she’s supposed to go to the cops and give it to them.”

  I smiled sunnily at him. Of course, it was all a big fat lie, but he didn’t know that.

  Or maybe he did.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, politely.

  I shrugged, pretending I didn’t care. “Your funeral.”

  “You really,” Marcus said, as I was busy straining my ears for sirens, “oughtn’t to have tipped off the boy. That was your first mistake, you know.”

  Didn’t I know it.

  “Well,” I said. “I thought he had a right to know what his own father was up to.”

  Marcus looked a little disappointed in me. “I didn’t mean that,” he said, and there was just a hint of contempt in his voice.

  “What, then?” I opened my eyes as wide as they would go. Little Miss Innocent.

  “I wasn’t certain you knew about me, of course,” Marcus went on, almost amiably. “Not until you tried to run back there, in front of the school. That, of course, was your second mistake. Your evident fear of me was a dead giveaway. Because then there was no question that you knew more than was good for you.”

&nb
sp; “Yeah, but look,” I said, in my most reasonable voice. “What was it you said last night? Who’s going to believe the word of a sixteen-year-old juvenile delinquent like myself over a big important businessman like you? I mean, please. You’re friends with the governor, for crying out loud.”

  “And your mother,” Marcus reminded me, “is a reporter with WCAL, as you pointed out.”

  Me and my big mouth.

  The car, which had showed no signs of slowing down up until that point, started rounding a curve in the road. We were, I realized suddenly, on Seventeen Mile Drive.

  I didn’t even think about what I was doing. I just reached for the door handle, and the next thing I knew, a guardrail was looming at me, and rainwater and gravel were splashing up into my face.

  But instead of rolling out of the car and up against that guardrail—below which I could see the roiling waves of the Restless Sea crashing against the boulders that rested at the bottom of the cliff we were on—I stayed where I was. That was because Marcus grabbed the back of my leather jacket and wouldn’t let go.

  “Not so fast,” he said, trying to haul me back into the seat.

  I wasn’t giving up so easily, though. I twisted around—quite nimble in my Lycra skirt—and tried to slam my boot heel into his face. Unfortunately, Marcus’s reflexes were as good as mine since he caught my foot and twisted it very painfully.

  “Hey,” I yelled. “That hurt!”

  But Marcus just laughed and clocked me again.

  Let me tell you, that didn’t feel so swell. For a minute or so, I couldn’t see too straight. It was during this moment that it took for my vision to adjust that Marcus closed the passenger door, which had continued to yawn open, stowed me back into my place, and buckled me safely in. When my eyeballs finally settled back into their sockets, I looked down, and saw that he was keeping a firm hold on me, primarily by clutching a handful of my sweater set.

  “Hello,” I said, feebly. “That’s cashmere, you know.”

  Marcus said, “I will release you if you promise to be reasonable.”

  “I think it’s perfectly reasonable,” I said, “to try to escape from a guy like you.”

  Marcus didn’t look very impressed by my sensible take on the matter.

  “You can’t possibly imagine that I’m going to let you go,” he said. “I’ve got damage control to worry about. I mean, I can’t have you going around telling people about my, er…unique problem-solving techniques.”

  “There’s nothing very unique,” I informed him, “about murder.”

  Marcus said, as if I hadn’t spoken, “Historically, you understand, there have always been an ignorant few who have insisted upon standing in the way of progress. These are the people I was forced to…relocate.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “To their graves.”

  Marcus shrugged. “Unfortunate, certainly, but nevertheless necessary. Still, in order for us to advance as a civilization, sacrifices must occasionally be made by a select few—”

  “I doubt Mrs. Fiske agrees with who you selected to be sacrificed,” I interrupted.

  “What may appear to one party to be improvement may appear to another to be wanton destruction—”

  “Like the annihilation of our natural coastline by money-grubbing parasites like yourself?”

  Well, he’d already said he was going to kill me. I didn’t figure it mattered whether or not I was polite to him.

  “And so for progress—real progress,” he went on, as if he hadn’t even heard me, “to be made, some simply have to do without.”

  “Without their lives?” I glared at him. “Dude, let me tell you something. You know your brother, the wannabe-vampire? You are every bit as sick as he is.”

  The car, right at that moment, pulled into the driveway of Mr. Beaumont’s house. The guard at the gate waved to us as we went by, though he couldn’t see me through the tinted windows. He probably had no idea that inside his boss’s car was a teenage girl who was about to be executed. No one—no one—I realized, knew where I was: not my mother, not Father Dominic, not Jesse—not even my dad. I had no idea what Marcus had planned for me, but whatever it was, I suspected I wasn’t going to like it very much…especially if it got me where it had gotten Mrs. Fiske.

  Which I was beginning to think it probably would.

  The car pulled to a halt. Marcus’s fingers bit into my upper arm.

  “Come on,” he said, and he started dragging me across the seat toward his side of the car and the open passenger door.

  “Wait a minute,” I said, in a last-ditch effort to convince him that I could be perfectly reasonable given the right incentive—for instance, being killed. “What if I promised not to tell anyone?”

  “You already have told someone,” Marcus reminded me. “My nephew, Tad, remember?”

  “Tad won’t tell anyone. He can’t. He’s related to you. He’s not allowed to testify against his own relatives in court, or something.” My head was still kind of wobbly from the smack Marcus had given me, so I wasn’t at my most lucid. Nevertheless, I tried my best to reason with him. “Tad is a super secret keeper.”

  “The dead,” Marcus reminded me, “usually are.”

  If I hadn’t been scared before—and I most definitely had been—I was super scared now. What did he mean by that? Did he mean…did he mean Tad wouldn’t talk because he’d be dead? This guy was going to kill his own nephew? Because of what I’d told him?

  I couldn’t let that happen. I had no idea what Marcus intended to do with me, but one thing I knew for sure:

  He wasn’t going to lay a finger on my boyfriend.

  Although at that particular moment, I had no idea how I was going to prevent him from doing so.

  As Marcus yanked on me, I said to his thugs, “I just want to thank you guys for helping me out. You know, considering I’m a defenseless young girl and this guy is a cold-blooded killer, and all. Really. You’ve been great—”

  Marcus gave me a jerk and I came flying out of the car toward him.

  “Whoa,” I said, when I’d found my feet. “What’s with the rough stuff?”

  “I’m not taking any chances,” Marcus said, keeping his iron grip on my arm as he dragged me toward the front door of the house. “You’ve proved a good deal more trouble than I ever anticipated.”

  Before I had time to digest this compliment, Marcus had hauled me into the house while behind us the thugs got out of the car and followed along…just in case, I suppose, I suddenly broke free and tried to pull a La Femme Nikita–type escape.

  Inside the Beaumonts’ house—from what I could see given the speed with which Marcus was dragging me around—things were much the same as they’d been the last time I’d visited. There was no sign of Mr. Beaumont—he was probably in bed recovering from my brutal attack on him the night before. Poor thing. If I’d known it was Marcus who was the bloodsucking parasite and not his brother, I’d have shown the old guy a little compassion.

  Which reminded me.

  “What about Tad?” I asked as Marcus steered me across the patio, where rain was pattering into the pool, making hundreds of little splashes and thousands of ripples. “Where’ve you got him locked up?”

  “You’ll see,” Marcus assured me as he pulled me into the little corridor where the elevator to Mr. Beaumont’s office sat.

  He threw open the elevator door and pushed me inside the little moving room, then joined me there. His thugs took up positions in the hallway since there was no room for them and their over-muscled girth in the elevator. I was glad because Thug #1’s wool peacoat had been starting to smell a little ripe.

  Once again, I had a sensation of moving, but couldn’t trace whether it was up or down. As we rode, I had a chance to study Marcus up close and personal. It was funny, but he really looked like an ordinary guy. He could have been anyone, a travel agent, a lawyer, a doctor.

  But he wasn’t. He was a murderer.

  How proud his mom must be.

  “You
know,” I remarked, “when my mom finds out about this, Beaumont Industries is going down. Way down.”

  “She’s not going to connect your death with Beaumont Industries,” Marcus informed me.

  “Oh, yeah? Dude, let me tell you something. The minute my mutilated corpse is found, my mom’s gonna turn into that creature from Aliens 2. You know the one where Sigourney Weaver gets into that forklift thing? And then—”

  “You aren’t going to be mutilated,” Marcus snapped. He was obviously not a movie buff. He flung open the elevator door, and I saw that we were back where all of this had started, in Mr. Beaumont’s spooky office.

  “You’re going,” he said, with satisfaction, “to drown.”

  Chapter

  Nineteen

  “Here.”

  Marcus, by applying steady pressure to the small of my back, had steered me into the middle of the room. He went around the desk, reached into a drawer, and pulled out something red and silky. He threw it at me.

  I, with my lightning quick reflexes, caught it, dropped it, then picked it up and squinted down at it. Except for the lights at the bottom of the aquarium, the room was in darkness.

  “Put it on,” Marcus said.

  It was a bathing suit. A Speedo one-piece. I tossed it, as if it had burned my fingers, onto the top of Red Beaumont’s desk.

  “No thanks,” I said. “Racerback straps don’t really do it for me.”

  Marcus sighed. His gaze strayed toward the wall to my right. “Tad,” he said, “wasn’t nearly so difficult to persuade as you.”

  I spun around. Stretched out on a leather sofa I hadn’t noticed before lay Tad. He was either asleep or unconscious. My vote was for unconscious, since most people don’t nod off in their swimwear.

  That’s right: Tad was sans apparel, save for those swim trunks I’d been lucky enough to have seen him in once before.

  I turned back toward his uncle Marcus.