Page 79 of The Midnight Knock

Tell her what?Hunter had said through the bars of the cell.

Tell Sarah, the mountain—

Here, in room 4, Ryan looked at the sprawled corpse of Sarah Powers and shook his head. He searched the room quickly, unimpressed by what he found. There were some ashes in a dinner plate on the corner table with bits of burned film poking out. Under the ash, he found a curious silver substance melted to the plate’s surface, brilliant as liquid chrome. He didn’t know what to make of that. He wasn’t a chemist.

In the bathroom, he found where the burned pictures must have come from. A roll of film was tucked away in a black plastic cylinder on Sarah’s bathroom vanity, right next to a fancy-looking camera.He held the pictures to the light, found where the last six shots had been sliced away neatly. A pair of nail scissors rested next to the sink. Probably their work.

Stowing the film in his pocket, Ryan searched the room once more, stood back, shook his head at the chaos. Sarah’s unbuttoned pants, the tossed luggage: child’s play.

Instead, to Sarah’s corpse, he said aloud the question he’d come here to ask earlier in the evening, just to get it off his chest. “?‘The mountain is getting restless.’ What the fuck was that supposed to mean?”

As if in response, the motel’s generator stuttered. The lights dimmed down to nearly nothing, dark washing over the motel. TheSHRIEKScame from very, very close by.

Ryan stood completely still, his back against the door, his heart in his throat. It sounded like those things were in the parking lot.

The generator came back. The things dispersed, shrieking all the way.

Ryan looked at the bulb burning over his head. He wasn’t stupid.

They’d be lucky if they made it until midnight.

Back in the office, he found Stanley Holiday still unconscious. The boy, Ethan, had moved from the floor to a chair, the Colt Python still in his hand. The pool of blood around Hunter’s corpse had stopped spreading right at the edge of Ethan’s boots. The grooved rock that Kyla had dropped earlier still rested in the gore. Hunter was still very dead.

The twins were still standing behind the desk, stone-faced. Ryan said, “You guys have any fuel for that generator?”

They said nothing.

He ignored them. Crossing the room, he said to Ethan, “Do you think you could do one more thing for me? There’s a supply room down the porch. I’d like to get us some privacy, Stanley and I.”

Ethan blinked. He rubbed his head like he was fighting off a hell of a migraine. “What are you going to do to him?”

“Just talk. What? You think I was going to work him over?”

Ethan studied him. Ryan had the uncanniest impression the boy was measuring the dimensions of his heart.

Ethan said, “You look like the kind of man who could.”

Ryan said, “Torture’s more trouble than it’s worth. People lie the minute you start hurting them. It takes days to get anything useful.”

“You still sound like you know a lot about it.”

“I’ve known some pretty bad people in my life. I’m not one of them.”

Before he’d returned to the office, Ryan had found a sturdy chair in the cafe and taken the liberty of relocating it to the supply room. He’d also taken the liberty of wiping away some bootprints he’d left, earlier in the night, on the room’s dusty floor. Anyone with half a brain could figure out Ryan had been lying when he said he’d been asleep from the time he’d finished his cigarette with Hunter to the moment Tabitha had started screaming, but he also didn’t see a reason to make it easy to figure out what hehadbeen up to.

Old habits die hard.

From a shelf of gardening supplies, he’d dug out a length of old rope and brought it with him to the office, where he laid it, now, along the front desk. Ignoring the twins, he reached over the desk to pluck a pair of scissors out of a cup of pens. He measured lengths of rope against his forearm. He made some cuts.

Ryan said, “Keep the gun trained on Stanley, would you? Careful you don’t aim it at me.”

Ethan did as he was told, holding the gun level as Ryan took two lengths of rope and tied Stanley’s wrists and ankles.

Ethan said, “What were you talking about earlier? Some motel in Fort Stockton Stanley wouldn’t want people to know about?”

“Stanley takes women there. He likes to rough them up. Sometimes badly. He’s got a nasty streak, Mister Holiday.”

“But everyone knows that. He pays those girls. It doesn’t mean he killed Sarah Powers.”