Feeding the Beast: (John Rader Thrillers Book 3) by Ian Quarry

Author:Ian Quarry [Quarry, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-06-09T16:00:00+00:00

21

Rader lay still, eyes following the maze of light straight ahead through the darkness, which may not have been electric light, but natural illumination. He touched the side of his head and grimaced, feeling something sticky. Blood. Rader frowned as he touched it again, finding the blood on his hair thick, jelly-like. He asked himself where he was, and why, and remembered the farmhouse.

Now he looked around in the dark, those tiny light traces that made it through the cracks showing rock, jagged at the edges, splintered in many places, and wet on those parts where moisture dripped from an unseen source. The dripping was constant, coming as it did from four areas; three large drops and one droplet, each falling at separate intervals. Rader lay on a sheet of rock, the droplet falling close to his shoulder, a tiny pool forming until it rose enough to issue down the rock-face past his hands. Sometimes he heard other sounds, but no matter how carefully he listened, they made no more sense than the near-darkness.

Slowly, he sat up. His arm caught a chunk of loose rock and it clattered into the shadows with an echo. Rader held still now. If his captor had heard it, that couldn’t be helped. After thirty seconds there was movement above. That was the sound he’d heard before, he thought, but now it was more pronounced. As he listened, he remembered the farmhouse again. Arriving here not in the Shelby but the Dodge—if this was where he was now—and exploring before Linda came behind him with a gun. He couldn’t remember much about what happened next. He was here on a case—Meagen, who had disappeared, was his client—and then he remembered Linda again; remembered her screaming as a man whacked him with a frying pan. He felt inside his jacket, and of course his gun was gone, as was his wallet, his cellphone.

Rader sat up some more, and stretched his arms out gradually. His reach in all directions but down found nothing but air. From those traces of light, he saw enough of the rock to understand that he was captive somewhere that was mostly flat, a cellar maybe, or a dungeon. His initial feeling—that he was sealed in a disused mineshaft—was what Rader regarded as a rogue thought, to be discarded.

He began to move again, easing his body across the smoothest parts of the rock shelf, until his feet could feel the ground. This ground being of a broken sort, friable, scattered with debris that cracked under his weight. Taking a few steps forward, arms out, he saw that the maze of light shone through a few cracks in a door. He tapped it, just a fingertip, harder now, then rubbed the surface; heavy reinforced wood.

The door spanned five feet or more, the frame built on solid rock. Wrought-iron bands were bolted across one side, but as he traced his fingers lightly across the surface, he found no lock, no handle. He kept thinking about

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