Snakes and Ladders Read online

  “You helped George Millard hurt Uncle Owen.”

  “No, I was only there to read his mind. I didn’t do anything to hurt him.”

  She was silent.

  “I’m like you,” he said, pleading now. “I didn’t ask to be this way—I didn’t ask to be able to do what I can do. Please take me with you. I just want to get out of here before the police get here.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” he said angrily. “Because they’re going to put me in jail for killing the attorney general of Pennsylvania, and without more of the drug I won’t have any squeeze to protect me. All I’ll be able to do is see what my fellow prisoners are planning to do to me before they do it.”

  She hesitated. “Hold on, I need to talk with Philip.”

  As she jogged painfully back to the marble bench, she heard the distant wail of a fire engine. There was no longer anyone sitting on the bench, but in the moonlight she could see an unmoving lump on the ground nearby. She skidded to a kneeling position next to it.

  “Philip!” She patted his cheek lightly, then harder. There was no response, but she could hear the labored whistle of his breath even over the crescendoing roar of the fire and the sirens. The gun was still gripped in his hand.

  The fire engine had turned off the road and was now making its way up the drive. Its wail had been joined by the distant whooping siren of a police car.

  Philip stirred slightly and muttered something unintelligible as she pried his fingers from the grip of the gun.

  “It’s Lizzy, I’m going to get you out of here.”

  She examined the weapon in the light of the fire. She flipped the switch on what she thought might be the safety, but when she went to slip it into the pocket of her jacket, she realized she wasn’t sure enough of what she had done to feel comfortable that she wouldn’t accidentally shoot herself. She fumbled at the various levers until the magazine ejected, then pointed the gun at the ground and pulled the trigger several times to make sure there wasn’t a bullet still in the gun. She put the gun in one pocket and the magazine in another.

  She bent to him again and shook his uninjured shoulder. “Philip? Philip!”

  There was no response.

  She patted his pockets until she found the pocket knife and ran back to the detached garage. She could hear the crackle of radio calls on the other side of the house, and strobes of blue and red danced in the branches of the trees.

  Mitchell had managed to move himself further back from the now blazing garage. She stopped a few dozen feet from where he sat, although she wasn’t at all sure that the distance was sufficient to protect her from him if he was lying about the limits of his ability or, she realized belatedly, if he had been able to inject himself with the steroid while she was with Philip.

  “Philip passed out,” she yelled over the growing cacophony. “I don’t want the police to get him—”

  “He doesn’t want to go to jail,” he said. “Back to jail,” he amended.

  “Stop doing that!” yelled Lizzy.

  “I can’t help it,” he replied.

  She took a deep breath. “Fine. Then I guess you know that I’ve got to get him to a hospital, and I can’t drive. I’m going to cut the ties on your arms and legs if you’ll help me do that, or at least get him away from here. Once you do that, you can go wherever you want to. If you can really read minds, then you can tell if I’m telling you the truth.”

  There was a pause. “Yes, you’re telling me the truth.”

  “But you can’t use the crush anymore.”

  “No, I won’t,” he said quickly. “I just want to be out of this whole mess.”

  Lizzy approached Mitchell cautiously, although at the moment he didn’t look very dangerous. Philip had said Mitchell was twenty-three based on his driver’s license, but with the flames from the house and garage illuminating the fear on his face, he looked younger—not much more than Lizzy’s seventeen years.

  Another vehicle—probably a police car—had joined the fire truck on the other side of the house, and Lizzy could hear radio chatter and shouts. Another approaching siren joined the auditory fray.

  She crouched by Mitchell’s feet and sawed at the tie around his ankles. She could tell by his flinch that she had cut him, but he didn’t make a noise. When the zip tie sprang free, she turned to cut the tie off his wrists.

  He was holding his arms out, the tie holding his hands in a position like a supplicant’s.

  “Sorry about your ankle. I’ll be more careful with your wrists,” she said.

  “I know you will,” he said.

  She cut the tie without drawing blood. Mitchell stood and staggered a bit, then gained his equilibrium.

  “Is your head okay?” she asked.

  He probed his scalp gingerly. “Yeah, it’s okay.”

  “Will you be able to drive?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  She had turned back to where she had left Philip when an explosion tore through the night. She dropped to the ground, covering her head with her arms. When she looked up, the fire was burning more furiously at the side of the house, and the radio chatter had taken on a more excited tone.

  “What’s that?” she yelled, with no fear of being heard by the growing army of first responders on the other side of the house.

  “The cars in the garage,” Mitchell yelled back. That theory was supported by another explosion a few seconds later. A twisted piece of metal that looked like it might have been a rear view mirror landed on the ground a dozen feet away.

  “One more,” yelled Mitchell, and sure enough, less than half a minute later a third explosion tore through the night. He scrambled to his feet. “That should be all of them,” he said. “What a waste.”

  She hauled herself up and went to Philip’s still unmoving form, her pace now not much more than a limping walk. When they reached him, she said, “You take his—“

  “I know,” said Mitchell.

  He hoisted Philip under his arms and Lizzy grabbed his legs, much as she had done with Mitchell not an hour ago. She started to tell Mitchell which way the car was, but he had already turned in that direction.

  71

  Mitchell walked backwards, holding Philip Castillo under the arms as Lizzy staggered under the weight of his legs. Just as they reached the wooded area that bordered the lawn, he saw a pair of firefighters rounding the corner of the house. They found the back door open and rushed in.

  He tried probing Lizzy’s thoughts again. Earlier, she had been easy to read—as easy as anyone he had ever met. It was as if her earlier panic had left her mind unprotected. But as she concentrated on the task of getting Castillo to the car, the clarity of her thoughts faded a bit. What he could still sense was the pain she was fighting through: sharp pain in her back and shoulders—that was from squeezing out of a window in the basement—and a throbbing pain in her ankle—that was from the snakebite. And layered over all that, the sting of desperation and bone-deep ache of exhaustion.

  As they made their way through the wood, a fourth explosion—no doubt the Range Rover—rang out, but Lizzy barely flinched.

  They were about a hundred yards from the house when she caught her foot on a branch and went down with a cry. He lowered Castillo’s body to the ground and bent over her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, although he didn’t really have to ask. Her mind was open to him once again, and he was jolted by the blue-black despair of her thoughts, so much like his mother’s in the final weeks of her life as the cancer had claimed her.

  Lizzy nodded miserably and tried to stand, but fell back.

  “Can you make it as far as the car?” he asked.

  A part of her mind answered in the negative, but she was having none of it. “I don’t have any choice, do I?” she said angrily, and pushed herself to her feet.

  “I think we’re not too far from the road,” he said.

  She steadied herself on a tree. “The car is a littl
e further down.”

  Mitchell looked back toward the house, now illuminated in a light show of flashers.

  “Why don’t I get the car and move it as close as I can.”

  She looked at him without speaking, her uncertainty clear in her mind and in her eyes.

  “I’ll come back for you. I promise,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “What?” He hadn’t seen that coming.

  “Why would you come back?” she asked.

  He hesitated. “It doesn’t do me any good if the police find you in the woods and start asking you questions about what you were doing there and who was in the house.”

  Lizzy sagged against the tree trunk. “I wish I could read minds,” she mumbled. Then she bent over Philip’s unconscious form, dug through his pockets, and pulled out a car key with a rental tag hanging from it. She handed it to Mitchell. His fingers closed over it but she didn’t let go. “Promise?” she asked.

  “Promise.”

  She released the keys with a look of resignation.

  The road was about fifty yards away. When he reached it, he grabbed a dead branch from the ground and dragged it onto the shoulder to mark where he had come out of the woods, then jogged down the road to where the car was parked.

  He started up the engine, then felt his heartbeat accelerate as he became aware that the thrumming he was hearing was not only the result of the blow to his head. He lowered the window and looked up—a chopper was hovering over the house. He stared at it for a moment, slack-jawed—were the police looking for them already? Then he realized that the chopper bore the markings of one of the Philadelphia news stations on its side.

  Without turning on the headlights, he coasted down the road and was able to pick out the dead branch in the moonlight. When he got out of the car, he realized that he wasn’t sure what angle to take as he entered the woods, then he saw a flicker of light in the trees. He made his way toward the light and found Lizzy stooped over Castillo. She slipped the phone, with which she had signaled Mitchell, into her pocket.

  The rest seemed to have revived her, and it took them only a few minutes to get Castillo to the car.

  They propped him up in the back seat, then Lizzy climbed in back with him, cradling his head in her lap. Mitchell got in the driver’s seat, started the car, and turned on the headlights.

  Just then, a light illuminated the interior.

  Mitchell glanced into the rearview mirror. “Someone’s coming,” he said.

  “What if they stop?” Lizzy asked, her voice tremulous.

  “If they stop, we’ll tell them our friend is drunk and we think he’s going to throw up—that should move them along.” He glanced back at Lizzy and Philip. “Do we have something to cover the blood up with?”

  But there was no time—the car, an SUV, was pulling even with them. It slowed slightly, then accelerated again. As it sped away, the lights from the rental car’s headlights illuminated its back.

  “That’s Uncle Owen’s car!” Lizzy exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “Not the car he has now—the one he used to have, before we left Pennsylvania. That’s his license plate: NUROBIO.”

  Mitchell knit his brow. “They had it hidden in a shed on the property,” he said. “That must be Louise.”

  “At least she’s heading in the right direction,” said Lizzy. “Away.”

  Mitchell nodded. “Let’s not worry about her right now,” he said, his voice tight. “Listen, I was thinking while we were getting him to the car—we should find a restaurant or bar. We’ll pull around back and roll him out. Then you can run into the restaurant and yell that there’s a guy who’s been shot, like you just happened to see him there. Then you run away. They’ll call 911 and an ambulance will come. It will look like he got shot there—nothing to tie him to Louise or the fire. And nothing to tie either of us to him.”

  “As long as he doesn’t have this,” said Lizzy.

  Mitchell turned around to see Lizzy holding up his wallet. He reached for it, but she moved it out of his reach.

  “Trade you for the squeeze medicine,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The squeeze medicine. Crush medicine. Whatever you call it—the stuff Louise Mortensen gave you to be able to give strokes.”

  Mitchell hesitated a moment, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the case holding the vial and syringe. He handed it to Lizzy. She unzipped the case, glanced at the contents, then zipped it back up and slipped it into her pocket. She passed him his wallet.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Sure. I don’t know what I’d do with it.”

  He put the wallet in his pocket, then continued. “After you let the people in the restaurant or bar know that he’s in the parking lot, you can slip away in the confusion and we can meet up and get away from there.” He gestured toward her face. “You have blood on your cheek.” He dug in his pocket and passed a clean handkerchief back to her.

  She pressed it to her cheek and winced, then examined the streak of red staining the cotton.

  “I think there’s a water bottle up there, can you hand it to me?”

  He passed the bottle back to her and she wet the cloth and rubbed her cheek gingerly.

  “So, what do you think of my plan?” he asked, although he knew already.

  “Yeah, it sounds good,” she said, her fatigue clear in her voice as well as her thoughts. “Let’s do that.”

  72

  Mitchell took a circuitous route that brought them to Route 1 near Longwood Gardens. When he got to the intersection, he asked, “Which way?”

  “Right, I guess,” said Lizzy. “That will take us toward Kennett Square.” As Mitchell made the turn, she added, “My dad and I used to live not that far from here, in Parkesburg. I think there’s a Wawa somewhere along here. That would be a good place—it’ll be open, and we know there will be people there who can call an ambulance.”

  “Too many people,” said Mitchell. “And probably security cameras everywhere. We need someplace that isn’t a big chain.”

  They scanned the businesses lining the road looking for candidate locations, their slow speed less of an issue than it would have been during the daytime when the four-lane road would have been buzzing with traffic. Lizzy periodically tried to assess Philip’s condition in the light of the oncoming cars’ headlights.

  After a few minutes, Mitchell pointed. “There, that’s perfect.”

  He pulled off the road into the parking lot of a restaurant with a sign in front reading Dos Sombreros. He slowly circled the building.

  “Hurry up,” said Lizzy tensely.

  “I don’t see any cameras. This looks good.” He coasted to a stop. “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  They stepped out of the car.

  “You’ve got blood on your pants,” he said, pointing toward her leg.

  She looked down. In the dim light, she saw a smear of blood on the side of her pants where Philip’s shoulder had rested.

  “Maybe I should go in to the restaurant,” he said.

  “No, I’ll go. I’m not planning to stick around long enough for anyone to ask me about it.” She looked at him. “Plus, you have some blood on the arm of your coat.”

  He brushed ineffectually at it.

  “Come on,” she said, “let’s get him out.”

  Mitchell pulled Philip out of the car, largely complying with Lizzy’s hissed instructions to be careful.

  Lizzy arranged Philip so he looked a bit more comfortable, then stepped back. “Is the idea that he was supposed to have been mugged?”

  “I guess so,” said Mitchell.

  “Maybe we should take his wallet.”

  “Good idea.”

  Lizzy retrieved Philip’s wallet and put it in another of her rapidly filling jacket pockets.

  “Anything else we should take?” he asked.

  Lizzy patted her pockets. “No, I have the duct tape and the zip ties.”

&
nbsp; “He gave you something else, didn’t he?”

  “It’s none of your business,” she said, realizing even as she said it that evidently everything she thought was, in fact, Mitchell Pieda’s business.

  He looked at her for a long moment, then shrugged. He looked up and down the nearly deserted highway. “I’ll pick you up down there,” he said, pointing to an intersection about a hundred yards from the restaurant.

  “Okay.”

  Mitchell got in the car and drove slowly away. Lizzy didn’t even watch long enough to see if he turned at the road he had pointed out—if he was planning to leave her behind, there wasn’t much she could do about it now. Mind-reading … she would give her right arm to swap abilities with Mitchell Pieda.

  She checked Philip as best she could in the dark. His breathing was loud and rough. She tried to imagine what she must look like—she thought she had gotten most of the blood off her face, and hoped that the cut from the falling glass hadn’t opened up again. At least her hair was too short to get messed up.

  Casting one more concerned glance toward Philip, she jogged toward the restaurant entrance. The interior was cheerful with Mexican decor: piñatas hung from the ceiling, and the backs of the chairs and booths were etched with brightly colored landscapes. Despite the late hour, several of the tables were occupied: a young man and woman, probably on a date; a slightly older man and woman with two small children; a group of three teenagers.

  She wrenched the door open and stepped inside.

  “There’s a guy in the parking lot, and it looks like he’s been shot!”

  The entire restaurant emptied into the parking lot, the cook leading the way. Lizzy led them to the crumpled form on the pavement. The crowd gathered around Philip, the cook kneeling next to him.

  ”¿Quién es?”

  “I’ll go get help,” Lizzy said from the back of the crowd.

  “No, le voy a marcar a la policía.”