Locked Doors by Blake Crouch Read Free Book Online Page A

silence…they have never known silence.
    He steps through the first doorway on the right, a bathroom.   Opening the medicine cabinet above the sink, he takes out a box of grape-flavored dental floss.   When his teeth are clean to his satisfaction he returns the floss to its shelf and closes the cabinet.   Stepping back into the hall he tiptoes across the carpet into the first room on the left.
    A black and orange sticker on the door reads “Private—Keep Out!” and below it in stenciled characters: “Hank’s Hideout.”  
    The room is tidy—no toys on the floor, beanbags pushed into the corners.  
    A dozen model airplanes and helicopters hang by wires from the ceiling.  
    A B-25 sits near completion on a desk.   Only the wings and the ball turret remain to be affixed.  
    He smells the glue.  
    A bevy of Little League trophies lines the top of a dresser, each golden plastic boy facing the bed, frozen in midswing .   Luther reads the engraving on the base of one of the trophies.  
    Hank’s team is called The Lean, Mean, Fighting Machine.  
    He won the sportsmanship award last year.
    Removing his backpack, Luther lies down beside Hank atop a bedspread patterned with a map of the constellations.   The boy sleeps on his side, his back to the intruder.   Luther watches him for a moment under the orange gleam of a nightlight, wondering what it must feel like to have a son.  
    Because he’s dreaming, the boy’s neck snaps more easily than his little brother’s.
    Luther rises, unzips the backpack.   He takes out the gun, the handcuffs, the tape recorder, Orson’s bowie.   The gun is not loaded.   Silencers are hard to come by and under no condition will he fire a .357 at two in the morning in a neighborhood like this.  
    Slipping the handcuffs into his pocket, he moves back into the hall and arrives at last in the threshold of the master bedroom where Zach and Theresa Worthington sleep.  
    In the absence of a nightlight the room is all shape and shadow.  
    He would prefer to stand here, watching them from the doorway for an hour, glutting himself on anticipation.   But this isn’t his only project tonight and the sun will be up in four hours.  
    So Luther sets the tape recorder on a nearby dresser and presses record.   Then he thumbs back the hammer on the .357 and strokes the light switch with his latex finger though he does not flip it yet.
    Zach Worthington shifts in bed.  
    “Theresa,” he mumbles.   “ Trese ?”
    A half-conscious answer: “ Wha ?”
    Luther’s loins tingle.
    “I think one of the kids are up.”

13
     
    ELIZABETH Lancing couldn’t sleep.   She’d gone on her first date with Todd Ramsey tonight and a spectrum of emotions swarmed inside her head, giddiness to guilt.   Todd had taken her to a French restaurant in Charlotte called The Melting Pot.   Initially she’d been horrified at the prospect of making conversation over three hours of fondue but Todd was charming and they’d fallen into easy conversation.  
    They started out discussing their law firm where Todd had just made partner and Beth had been a legal administrator for five years.   At first they resisted the gossip but Womble & Sloop was a rowdy firm and the fodder was bottomless and irresistible.   This transitioned into a brief exchange on their philosophies of employment and how neither of them knew anyone whose work afforded absolute fulfillment.   They posited finally that the ideal job did exist but that finding it was such an excruciating chore most people preferred instead to suffer moderate unhappiness over an entire career.    
    Toward the end of dinner, as they dipped melon balls and strawberries into a pot of scalding chocolate, the conversation took an intimate turn.   They sat close, basked in prolonged eye contact, and compared only the idyllic slivers of their childhoods.  
    Beth knew that Todd had been recently divorced.   He was well aware that her husband had disappeared