Knight sighed, rolling his eyes at me. “You know, this will go a lot faster if you just assume anything I can do, I did do.”
“It’s my house.”
He stared at me. “Sure.” He turned away from me and kept walking. “Now, the escape hatch will lead you to a tunnel that will come out?—”
He stopped walking and turned back to glare at Mav.
“What?”
“I don’t trust you. Obviously, I can’t tell you where the tunnel came out.”
Jesus, this was never going to end. “You can trust him.”
“It’s your funeral. The escape tunnel comes out under the falls.”
My feet nearly tripped over themselves as his words reverberated in my head. “You…dug a tunnel underground all the way to the falls?”
“Well, if I dug it above ground, that would be pretty fucking pointless, wouldn’t it?”
“But…how did you even—it hasn’t been long enough for you to dig a tunnel!”
“It’s amazing what money can do. Now, the escape hatch is not reversible. Not from that direction. However, if you go into your shed at the southeast corner of the property, I have another route ready for you. From there, you can access the house. The exit point is in the pantry.”
He strode over to the pantry and opened the door, pointing to the false wall at the back that he easily pushed against to open.
“If everything else has a code, how the fuck did you open that?” I snarled.
He wiggled his fingers at me. “Fingerprints. The whole door is an electronic scanner. Moving on?—”
I couldn’t believe I was dealing with this shit.
But I followed him anyway, taking in the guns hidden in the fake wall in the entryway, the scanner at all entrances that would keep anyone from bringing weapons into the house, other than Blake or me, and even the updated killer robot.
But what really took the cake was the final item on the agenda. Just the smirk on his face had me cursing under my breath. There was no way I could handle this. I was positive it would kill me.
“Finally, the last thing you need to be aware of is this,” he said, stopping by the fireplace.
“Why? What does it do?”
He looked at me in confusion.
“Does it shoot flames at anyone who might look dangerous? Is there really an explosive inside that, when the fire is lit, sets the whole house on fire?”
“Why would it do that?”
“As some sort of booby trap,” I snapped.
“Actually—”
“Oh, wait,” I laughed. “Maybe it’s not even a fireplace. Maybe it’s athirdescape hatch!” I leaned in and looked up the chimney. “Do I just start climbing? Is there a ladder somewhere?” I asked, jumping inside the massive fireplace to reach the metal rungs.
“Parker—”
“No escape hatch, huh? Well, maybe you built the fireplace so big because it’s large enough to fit a dead body. That’s it, isn’t it? The final piece of the puzzle. You’re going to bring your kills here and have me dispose of the bodies, right? I bet there’s even some button to flip to send the ashes into the earth, right?”
I felt along the stone wall, searching for anything that might be it. When I found it, I laughed. “Ah-ha! There it is.” I flipped it, but all I heard was a whirring sound.
“So, it’s even quiet. You’ve made it so quiet, no one would realize I was sucking the ashes into some huge ass suction system that will eliminate any and all evidence that anyone was killed here!”
