Billy pointed the gun at her face. “Planning on an ambush, were you?”
Hannah noticed the smell of him for the first time, and that same shit cologne—she couldn’t remember the name but it came in a red-and-white-striped box, making her always think of a barber shop—mixed with sweat and cigarette breath. The smell suddenly flooded her nostrils, bringing her twenty years and a thousand miles away.
Your momma’s just learning a little lesson, that’s all, Hannie. Nothin’ to be afraid of. See, if she’d done what she was supposed to, everything would be fine. Fact is, she don’t listen so well sometimes, so she’s gotta be reminded. Like a dog, see? Some hounds learn easy, some learn hard. Your momma, she’s a hard-learnin’ hound. Can’t say whether it’s stubborn or stupid, but in the end I don’t suppose it matters.
“You killed her,” Hannah said. “She should have left a long time before you did.”
He smiled and waved the gun under her nose, as if it was a bouquet of freshly cut flowers. “Oh no no no, darlin’. You are so wrong about that. See, she needed me. Once I was gone, she was gone. You see? I was her direction. Once I went to prison, she lost her way. So actually, you killed her. You fucked it all up, Hannie. Thought you were being a hero, but you destroyed our way of life. Broke up the family unit.”
On the last words Billy reached out with his free hand and squeezed her cheek, pinching it hard between thumb and index finger, like an overly zealous aunt coming to visit. It stung, but there was something amounting to affection in the gesture. Hannah would rather he had outright struck her.
“Now,” he said, suddenly bounding to his feet. “You’re going to tell me where that husband of yours is, aren’t you? Because he has my money.”
Hannah then remembered the camera. All this was being recorded. Hell, she didn’t even need Billy to say anything incriminating. Black’s murder was there in vivid detail.
She turned her head toward Black one more time, promising herself she wouldn’t look at him again, because the scene was too awful. Except the one outstretched arm, his body was crumpled, not peacefully as if in sleep, but constricted into a tight ball, as if every muscle shrunk in the moment of death, pulling him into himself. Blood painted the floor, but it had finally stopped growing into a wider circle. There simply hadn’t been any more left to come out of him.
Don’t cry. Don’t you fucking cry. Not even for Black. He’ll think you’re scared, and even if you are, you don’t cry. Not for fear, nor for sadness. Not for anything.
“We killed Dallin,” Hannah said. “We took him to a motel room, taped him to a chair, and he told us everything. Including the account number to your eight million dollars.” Hannah was going to die. She knew that now as clear as she had ever known anything. The past thirty days were full of nothing but lies, but this was one truth that slapped her full force across the jaw. She had maybe thirty minutes. An hour at best. Hell, maybe less than a minute. But she would die this morning, in this cabin. But that didn’t mean she had to be silent.
“He pleaded for his life,” she said. “He told us everything. About Justine.” Her sister’s name rolled off her tongue like she was naming a newly discovered virus. Justine. “And Connor. All about your plan to make me so scared I had to run. But I’m not scared.”
“Oh, you’re scared all right.” Billy no longer smiled.
Hannah ignored him. “Black took the account number and transferred the money to his own account, and you just killed the only person in the world who had that information. So I guess you’re kinda fucked now, aren’t you, Billy?”
Billy kept his gaze fixed on her but his eyes—wolf’s eyes, they’d once been called—narrowed just enough for her to know he believed her.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Either you know that account number or your husband’s alive. Maybe both. Either way, you know something I need to know, and you’re in a tight spot right now. I figure I can find a way to make you talk.”
Hannah felt something bordering on calm. She became detached, as if seeing this moment for what it was. Her last one.
She took a deep breath and let the air slip slowly from her lungs before speaking again. “Once he told us everything, I made Black leave the room. Told him I needed a few more minutes with my husband, just to tell him a few things. Private, husband-and-wife-only kind of things. Then the plan was to let him go. Just take the money and disappear for good. Eight million, that was enough, we figured. I convinced Black I could do that. Just disappear, let you all get everything you wanted except that money. There was more money, I knew. But I convinced Black I was okay with letting you all win. I was okay starting over. I could let it all go.” She looked to the side, feeling the need to break eye contact with her father, even if for a moment. “And when Black left the room, I told Dallin I was pregnant.”
“Well, isn’t that good news?” Billy said.
“It’s true.” Hannah shifted her gaze back to her father. “You would have been a grandfather.” She deliberately said would have, wondering what kind of reaction that would create. What was she hoping for? For him to say, oh, darlin’, I’m not going to kill you?
“Well, hell, there are too many fucking brats in this world anyhow.”
It had been many years since Hannah had hoped she wasn’t pregnant, but this was one of them. She wanted to be wrong. Wanted to think it was the stress on her body making her late. And this was a perfectly reasonable explanation, probably the most logical, except for the fact she simply knew and it crushed her, because her baby would die with her.
Hannah resisted being baited by him. She wanted Billy to react to her words, not the other way around.
“Dallin didn’t have the same opinion,” she said. “He was happy, actually, until I told him the baby wasn’t his.”
Billy barked a short laugh. “Well, there’s a whorey twist for you. Such a slut that you’re running for your life but you still can’t keep those skinny legs closed.” He shook his head and smiled, but it wasn’t a malevolent or even dismissive smile. There was a look of discomfort, like an athlete grinning through pain. “You fucked the man who arranged every part of your demise.” Billy nodded to Black’s body.
Again, Hannah ignored the hate in his words. It wasn’t very hard to do—she had built up armor for such things many years ago.
“Dallin was very upset when I told him,” Hannah said. “He actually cried, and for a moment, the briefest of moments, I felt sorry for him. Sorry that he was too weak to have faced responsibility. Sorry that you were able to force him into doing what he did.”
“He coulda done many things to change the course of all this,” her father said. “But he didn’t. He wanted you gone.”
“And that’s why my moment of pity for him didn’t last. I knew he was little more than a pawn in your and Justine’s plan, but you can’t win a chess game without any pawns, can you?”
“He served a purpose.”
She kept her gaze locked on him. “You should have seen the look on his face when I put the duct tape over his mouth. All…confused. Like a dog being beaten for no reason at all.”
“Oh, yeah? Why, you torture him and didn’t want him screaming?” Another smile, this one barely masking insecurity. Uncertainty. Billy shifted his footing, and his forearm veins pulsed as he gripped the gun more tightly.
“No, I didn’t torture him,” she said. “No point in that. There was nothing I needed from him. I knew the story behind what happened to me—he told me everything. Black had the account information from him. There was nothing we needed from Dallin. I put the tape on his mouth so he couldn’t breathe through it. Then I took a much longer piece and wrapped it twice around his head and face. Covering his nose.”
“Bullshit,” Billy said.
Hannah didn’t want to stop her momentum. “Then you really should have seen his face. Eyes bulging at me. Head thrashing back and forth. Skin turning red, then purple. It was awful, to be honest. I almost couldn’t take it. I came real close to
removing the tape.” Hannah studied her father’s face, his washed-blue eyes that now seemed clouded. Old. “But then I remembered everything he had done to me,” Hannah continued. “And I forced myself to watch. I watched him plead with his eyes, because that was all he could do. Wide-open eyes, to the point I thought they’d burst. I watched those eyes roll up and then finally look at nothing.”
For the first time, Billy seemed to have nothing to say. Then he crouched down in front of her, and the smell of sweat and grime filled her nostrils. With his right hand he ran his fingers slowly through her long black hair, causing Hannah to shudder.
“Hannie, darling,” he said, his voice little more than a coarse whisper. “You just don’t have it in you. You think you do, but when it comes time to pull the trigger, you just can’t. Trust me, honey. That’s a good thing. You don’t want to be like me. Always fightin’ the rage. Suffering the ball of pain in the stomach that just makes me so fuckin’ angry at the world. You think you’re like me, but you ain’t. I know you didn’t kill Dallin, so tell me where he is.”
“I’m more like you than you know,” she said. “And I’ve hated you every day of my life for it.”
“You didn’t kill me when you had the chance,” he said.
“I tried. God, I wanted to see you burn.”
“Killing is just not in your nature.”
“Then give me the gun and let me make up for past mistakes,” she said.
That elicited a brief smile. “Aw, that’s just self-defense for you and your little one. Anyone could do that.” He leaned closer. “Now tell me where Dallin is or you’re gonna burn.”
The word burn jolted Hannah, and Billy noticed.
“Yeah, little girl. I’m going to do to you what you wanted but couldn’t do to me. See, I got a spare can of gas in the trunk of my car, and I got a lighter in my front pocket. It’s going to make things easy, because I’m gonna torch this whole place. They might be able to figure out who you and your boyfriend are, but it’s not going to be easy. Have to do some of that DNA testing on your charred bones.”
When she was in her twenties, Hannah had gotten into meditation. This was soon after she had met Dallin and years before the use of meditation to help her with her stress was replaced by a wine bottle. She remembered one particular teaching that was focused on pain relief, and the teacher had said how by controlling one’s thoughts and by focusing deep within the self, a person could block out any amount of pain. It was a practice dating back to India some 2,500 years ago, and it had been used throughout the centuries to withstand the most brutal of torture. But very few could maintain the focus needed in those most dire of circumstances in the face of such pain.
Hannah always remembered that. Always shuddered at the thought of needing a skill like that. But now she could be minutes away from an unbearable pain and she was certain she would be unable to block any of the agony as she burned alive.
“Why did you always hate me so much?” she asked. “If you’re going to kill me, at least tell me that much. You beat Mom, but that just seemed like an outlet for you. Your real hate was always directed at me. What did I ever do to deserve that?”
Billy seemed to think about this for a moment. He looked on the verge of telling her something other than what he ultimately said.
“Because you were always different,” he said. “You just didn’t fit in, and you knew it. You thought you were too good for us.”
“That’s not true,” she whispered. “I just wanted out. How could I possibly want to stay any longer in a house like that?”
“Like I said, too good for us.”
“I didn’t deserve your hate,” Hannah said. “None of us did.”
“Well, Hannie, that’s the thing about life, they say. Not a lot of fairness spread around.” Billy walked back over and grabbed her cuffed hand, yanking it against the radiator until Hannah thought her wrist would snap inside the cuff.
“Yeah,” he said. “You ain’t going anywhere. Be right back, darlin’.”
Still holding Hannah’s gun, Billy then collected the rifle from the floor and went outside, leaving the door open. Hannah was at an angle where the partially open door blocked her view, but she felt cool air around her waist, just as she had from the open window. That air represented the outside, the vast woods, freedom. And it was just beyond her reach.
She yanked against the cuff until the skin chafed into a bloody ring around her wrist, but it didn’t do anything but transfer pain from her broken hand to the other side of her body. The radiator didn’t budge a millimeter.
Her mind fired thoughts at her almost faster than she could process them.
He’s not bluffing. But will he torture me first, hoping for the account number, or will he just set me on fire and watch me burn? I can’t scream. He doesn’t deserve that satisfaction. I’ll suck in the smoke. That’s how people die in fires, right? Smoke inhalation. Suck in as much as I can as fast as possible. Maybe I’ll die from that before the fire eats my skin. But he wants the account number. I don’t have it. Don’t even know how to get it. Black transferred the money to the new account and now that died with him. Will Billy believe me, or will he keep hurting me until I say something?
Then she heard a sound, soft but distinct. It was the sound of an approaching car, and she probably wouldn’t have heard it except for the fact the front door was open. The road leading to Black’s cabin ended there, she knew, so any car coming here was either lost or coming here specifically.
Peter, she thought. Peter was supposed to be here already. It must be him.
She heard a car door open and then close.
Then Billy. “The hell you doin’ here? I told you to stay put.”
And then silence for what seemed like a lifetime. In that silence her imagination spun at a frenzied pace, and perhaps it was all in her mind, but her hearing seemed to suddenly become superhuman, picking up on the slightest of sounds outside the cabin. A distant bird calling to another. The spiny needles of the pine trees brushing each other in the late-fall breeze. A deer stepping delicately around rocks as it foraged for food.
Then laughing. A low chuckling. Mocking.
“That’s about right,” she heard Billy say.
More silence, though the air seemed filled with the electric current preceding a lightning strike.
Then a sharp crack. Hannah jumped at the sound, yanking her hand against the cuffs, further tearing the skin around her wrist.
Gunshot.
The echo lasted longer in Hannah’s ears than it did in the air, rippling through her brain, fading only to a dull, distant drumbeat. Adrenaline surged through her, heightening every sense, studding her flesh with goose bumps and raising the hairs on her arms.
Footsteps, slow and cautious. Two steps. Stop. Two more. Stop.
A low moan. The scraping of dirt.
Finally, a shadow stretched along the inside of the cabin, a few feet past the front door. A long alien head and body created by the low sun in the sky. Something in one of the alien hands. Hannah knew in that instant that the person casting the thin, stretched shadow wasn’t Peter.
The door was silent as it fully opened.
Hannah looked up to the figure of her sister standing with the morning light streaming in behind her. Then her gaze flicked to the gun in Justine’s hand.
“I killed Dad.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Justine’s face was cloaked in shadow and the sunlight lit the long strands of blond hair that draped her shoulders. She just stood there, swaying slightly, like a steel suspension bridge in high winds. Hannah didn’t know if her sister was drugged, drunk, or in shock, but there was a weakness in her stance, as if the slightest touch would topple her.
Hannah tried to focus her hearing, listening for any sign of Billy in front of the cabin. Justine remained silent, looking down at her older sister, saying nothing else after her murder confession.
Hannah finally spoke.
“He’s really dea
d?”
Justine’s answer was simply to walk a few more steps into the cabin and gaze around blankly.
“Justine, did you shoot him?”
Justine finally focused her attention on her sister.
“You dyed your hair,” she said.
“Justine, listen, whatever you think of me. No matter the reason why you hate me, we need to work together right now.”
“Is Dallin here?” Justine asked, dazed. Again she craned her neck, scanning the room, but now Hannah could finally see her sister’s eyes, and it was clear she was firmly detached from reality.
“Justine, I’m going to ask you again. Did you kill him? Because if not, he’s coming back in here to kill me.”
“That was what I wanted all along,” Justine said. Hannah had never seen her sister in such a fugue-like state. She wondered how she had been able to drive over here and find the cabin, much less shoot someone. “I wanted you dead,” Justine continued. “Out of the way. It’s what Daddy wanted, too, but I was the reasonable one. I knew if you were dead it would be a problem. The next best thing was to have you run away.”
“Justine, listen very closely to me. There’s a key to these handcuffs in Billy’s front pocket. I need that key. Can you get it for me?” Hannah was edging closer to hopefulness, which she warned herself away from. She had no idea if her sister would simply raise the gun and put a bullet in her skull at any moment. “Justine, get the key, and then we’ll talk this out. I’ll tell you where Dallin is.”
Justine’s eyes widened for a moment at the sound of Dallin’s name.
“I need him,” Justine said.
Hannah’s sense of massive betrayal at the hands of her sister was supplanted by her need for survival, so she didn’t respond to Justine the way she wanted to. She just said, “I know you do. So go out and get me the key, and then I can tell you where he is.”
Justine’s face held a near-catatonic lack of expression. She didn’t nod, smile or frown, didn’t look at her sister with disdain or distrust. She asked nothing, not even if Dallin was still alive. After a few seconds of silence, Justine turned and went back out the door.
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