Falling Awake

Belvedere and plotted his father’s death.”
    “Stop it.” Scargill raised the nose of the pistol. “I don’t want to hear any more. You’re trying to confuse me.”
    She had nothing to lose, Isabel thought. All she could do was keep talking and hope that some of what she was saying penetrated the haze that the CZ-149 had created in Scargill’s brain.
    “Amelia achieved her second goal, more or less. Through Randolph Belvedere, she got control of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research,” she said. “But things went wrong again when Randolph fired me. That’s Amelia’s big problem, you see. She’s brilliant but she keeps miscalculating because she doesn’t understand other people’s motivations. She assumes everyone is driven by the same things that drive her, but she’s wrong. I think that’s probably making her crazy.”
    Scargill looked at her with a strange expression on his face. “Maybe you’re the one who’s crazy.”
    “Always a possibility, of course.”
    a melia checked the screen of her phone. The tiny moving dot that was the Maserati was slowing. Angrily, she hit the redial button.
    “You’d better keep your speed up, Cutler. You’ve only got an hour and twenty minutes left. At the rate you’re going now, you’ll be late, and you know what that means.”

    “The fog is getting worse,” Ellis said evenly. “I can’t see five feet in front of the car. I’m using a back road to avoid traffic. That means occasional stop signs. In fact, there’s one coming up and I just passed a police cruiser. I’ve got to stop. Can’t afford to get pulled over for a ticket.”
    “It’s your choice, of course,” she said sweetly, watching the blip on the screen halt. “But if you’re late, you know the penalty.”
    “I won’t be late.” Ellis cut the connection.
    She hated that he felt in a position to treat her so rudely. Nobody gave her the respect she deserved. She started to punch redial but paused when she saw that the dot was moving again, faster than it had been a moment ago. That was a good sign. Cutler was running scared. She liked that. It was very satisfying.
    But not nearly as satisfying as watching Lawson go down.
    e llis parked in the trees, collected the gym bag and went the rest of the way on foot. He had thirty minutes until the deadline. There was still a little light left but the Roxanna Beach Amusement World was enclosed in an impenetrable gray fog. The only sound was the steady pounding of the unseen surf. It echoed eerily in the mist, creating a disorienting sensation. With luck it would mask any noise he was forced to make.
    He approached the amusement park from a point that was farthest from the main entrance, chose a spot that was concealed by the wall of an aged restroom and went to work with the wire cutters.

    a melia checked the dot on the phone screen again and hit the redial.
    “What do you want now?” Cutler asked in low tones.
    “You’re pushing the envelope,” she said, her anger building again. “You’re at least thirty minutes away from town. If I were you, I’d worry.”
    “I told you, the fog—”
    This time she cut the connection before he did, taking a great deal of fierce pleasure in the small, savage punch of the end button.
    She had made the right decision, she thought. They were all badly flawed. It had become obvious in the past few weeks that Scargill’s basic temperament wasn’t going to change. He still wanted to be a hero, another Ellis Cutler, for crying out loud. She couldn’t work with such a major personality defect.
    Isabel Wright was another mistake. She hadn’t turned out to be a meek, dithery little dreamer who would do as she was told.
    As for Cutler, well, she had known all along that he wasn’t going to stop being a problem until he was dead.
    The only answer was to get rid of all of them and start from scratch. With the resources of the Belvedere Center for Sleep Research, she would be able to find her own dream talent.
    Meanwhile, if everything went as planned, tonight she would not only get rid of her mistakes, she would start the first smoldering embers that would eventually burn down Jack Lawson’s precious empire.

    a t the far end of the park, Ellis dropped the phone back into the pocket of his windbreaker, making sure it was still set to vibrate, not ring, and continued working his way through the eerie landscape. The hulking shapes of the long-silent rides loomed like the ruins of an alien