by Sam Sisavath
“Punching me in the chest like that. You know kung fu or something?”
“That wasn’t kung fu.”
“Then what was it?”
“That was just a punch to the solar plexus.”
“The sol-what?”
“Solar plexus.”
“I don’t know anything about that, but it still hurts when I do this,” he said, rubbing his chest again.
“So don’t do that.”
Trent shot her a quick smirk. “Clever.”
“So why’s she dating an old fart like you?”
“Who?”
“This stacked thirty-two-year-old blonde.”
“Cynthia. And ’cause I have a good job and a nice pension on the horizon, and she has two kids and their dad’s a deadbeat. Oh, she lives in a trailer, and I don’t. So yeah, I really want to live through this to see her again.”
“What about her two kids? You want to live to see them, too?”
The deputy shrugged. “Meh.”
Fourteen
“Hey, Sarah. You know Tom? The husband who abused you and who you thought was on the verge of killing you? Well, turns out he’s dead. Someone went into your house last night and killed him. Oh, by the way, he was still alive when you left the house last night, right? Because as I recall, you don’t remember that part.”
Allie wasn’t exactly sure how she was going to tell Sarah about Tom, or bring up the unanswered questions of Tom’s life yet again, but it was probably not going to be quite as glib as the dialogue going around in her head.
There were so many questions this morning, even more so than last night. She had to replay everything Sarah had told her—or didn’t (or couldn’t, according to the other woman)—all over again. How much of it was a lie? How much was truth?
All of it? Some of it? Most of it?
Those questions, and a dozen more, swam around in Allie’s head as Trent got closer to the cabin. Not that Allie let him drive straight up to the front yard. Instead, she made him stop about half a quarter mile away before switching off the engine.
For the next ten minutes, Allie sat in the car with the windows powered down and just listened to the wildlife around her. There was nothing that indicated the Wells City Police Department had found the cabin or was preparing some kind of ambush. It would have been nice if Trent had a radio on him, but he didn’t—and neither did Evans back at the bar, now that Allie thought about it. A police radio would have allowed her to eavesdrop on the WCPD as they coordinated their efforts to find her. And by now, they would have zeroed in on her as Suspect #1.
“So, uh, we’re just going to sit here?” Trent asked after a while. She was actually surprised he had lasted over ten minutes.
“You are,” Allie said. She reached over and took out his handcuffs, then pulled the car keys out of the engine.
“Oh come on,” Trent said, because he already knew what she was about to do.
“Make a sound, and I’ll come back here and pistol whip you with your own weapon.”
“Harsh.”
“So make sure you don’t make me do it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Allie handcuffed Trent to the steering wheel of the Ford, then sat back and stared out the windshield. She was trying to decide if there was another, better way to go about this, but she couldn’t see it.
“You know, it’s not too late,” Trent was saying. “You can still salvage this. Just let me take you in. I promise you’ll get a fair shake.”
She gave him a wry look. “You really believe that?”
“Sure.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise.”
“Bullshit.”
“There’s nothing bullshit about everything that’s happened this morning. You’re just digging yourself a deeper hole.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, Deputy. Relax.”
Trent almost rolled his eyes. Almost. “Yeah, right. Relax.”
“Scout’s honor.”
“You were in the Scouts?”
“No.”
“Of course not.” Then, “I just realized that I don’t even know your name.”
“You don’t need to know my name.”
“Then what’ll I call you? You know how much paperwork I’m going to have to file after this?”
“Sorry about that.”
“Are you? Really?”
“No.”
“Figures. So what’ll I call you in all the reports they’re going to make me write?”
“Ma’am will work just fine.”
“Okay, ma’am, my offer still stands. Let me take you in, and we can defuse this before it gets any worse.”
“I need you to shut up and sit still now.”
“Ma’am—”
She gave him a hard look.
Trent sighed. “Don’t say I never gave you a chance.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
She got out and walked around the vehicle before looking back at the veteran deputy through the front windshield. Allie put one finger to her lips.
Trent smirked back at her.
Allie didn’t have any doubts he was going to try to escape as soon as she was out of view, but unless he could break the steering wheel off, then he had a Herculean task ahead of him. Allie herself could have picked the lock with something as simple as a paper clip. But that was a skill she’d mastered because of a previous experience with handcuffs. She didn’t think Trent had ever had any need to learn the same things she did.
She spent the slow—very, very slow—walk to the cabin trying to figure out just what kind of trouble she had found herself in. She abandoned the backroad as soon as she was out of view of Trent and the Ford and used the woods to pick her way through and around trees. She’d never been in this part of the hillside before, but the navigation had been pretty straightforward. As long as she kept the road to her left and moved parallel to it, she would come up on the rear of the cabin within a quarter mile.
It was a long quarter mile.
Sarah’s bloody face flashed across her mind’s eye. Then Sarah in the Don’t Stop In with Tom. The man whose image Allie had only seen glimpses of in person, but there was a better picture of him under the directory where she’d located his home address: Early thirty-something, blond hair, blue eyes, and what Allie thought was a somewhat mischievous-looking smile, in a professionally snapped picture.
She tried to recall everything Sarah had told her about what had happened last night before she fled the house, but nowhere in any of their conversations—then or this morning—had the words Tom and dead ever come up. If anything, Sarah had been avoiding the topic, almost as if she didn’t want to relive it. Was that because she had killed Tom? Was that why she’d blocked it out? Trent said someone had killed Tom in his own house. The deputy hadn’t said how or when, probably because he didn’t know.
Did you kill him, Sarah? Is that why you can’t remember? Because you don’t want to remember?
If that were the case, how was Allie supposed to feel about that? An abused woman fighting back against her abuser played well in the public eye, and she supposed it did to her as well. Not just as a woman but as a fellow human being.
Still, if that was what had happened, it bugged her that Sarah hadn’t confessed to it. Unless she really couldn’t remember. That was very much possible. Trauma did different things to different people: It turned Allie into a specter of vengeance, but Sarah wasn’t Allie by any stretch of the imagination.
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. My client was beaten regularly by her husband. Abused! Everyone knew it, but no one did anything about it. She had no choice, you see. She had to fight back! Can you blame her? What if it was your sister or mother?”
Allie couldn’t blame her if Sarah had killed Tom last night, and neither would a jury. Unless, of course, Tom Marshall’s family was as powerful as everyone kept telling her, in which case even the truth might not be enough.
Lucy was right. I should have gone on that cruise…
The cabin appeared as dull and simple as it did the first time she saw it almost a week ago, and likewise as unspectacular as when she left it this morning. There was nothing off about it, and no signs of a vehicle anywhere. But more importantly, there were no hints that vehicles had ever arrived after she left. If the Wells City police had found the place, there would be clues—if not obvious tracks, then something.
Except there was nothing. There was just the cabin.
Allie crouched in the tree lines and waited, not trusting what she was seeing. She opened up the rest of her senses, listening for voices that shouldn’t be there and trying to smell other humans in the area besides herself.
Five minutes…
Ten…
She hadn’t exposed herself, but she wasn’t exactly hiding, either. Allie kept Trent’s Glock at her side, her own SIG still covered behind her back. The presence of a weapon out in the open would have been more than enough reason for a police sharpshooter to take her out.
But no one did, because there was no one out there.
Allie got up and jogged across the clearing and toward the cabin. The lack of police presence was a relief, but the absence of Sarah outside or even visible through the front windows was disturbing. Was the other woman keeping herself in the back with William?
The door was unlocked, which wasn’t a good sign. Allie remembered telling Sarah to lock the doors and not open them for anyone but her.
And yet, the front door was unlocked.
Allie stepped inside, the Glock at her side.
“Sarah,” she said.
There was no response.
She tried again, louder this time: “Sarah!”
Again, no response.
Allie closed the door behind her before looking around. There were two cups on the kitchen counter—one was hers, the other Sarah’s from this morning. But there were no signs of Sarah or the baby. There was also no evidence that Sarah had cooked anything other than the empty bowl sitting next to the sink.
“Sarah!”
Like the first two times, there was no answer.
Allie hurried through the great room and toward the back hallway. Three bedrooms, the first one used for storage. Sarah and William had taken the second, while Allie had the third all the way near the back.
The second bedroom door was ajar and Allie pushed it in slowly before peering inside.
Empty.
No Sarah and no William. The bed was unmade, the blankets on the floor, so she hadn’t imagined mother and son sleeping in the room the night before. They had been here, just not now.
Not now.
Sarah and her baby were gone. There were no obvious signs of a struggle, but there wouldn’t be if Sarah had been taken at the point of a gun. There was no way the woman would put up a fight with her baby in peril.
Had the man from last night come back?
Shit. What if he had? What if he’d been waiting out there all this time for Allie to leave, then returned to finish what he’d started last night?
Everything and anything was possible right now after the morning she’d had.
She left Sarah’s room and hurried over to hers. Her laptop was where she’d left it on the nightstand next to the bed. Allie grabbed it and turned to go but forgot about the attached power adapter, and it snapped loose from the PC.
She crouched to pick it up, and as she did—
Sunlight glinted off a metal object on the floor, just underneath the bed. If it’d been deeper inside, she might have missed it, but there it was.
A gun.
A silver-chromed revolver, to be exact, lying on its side, the muzzle pointed at her.
It wasn’t hers. She’d brought just the SIG Sauer. She also distinctively remembered sweeping the floors when she first arrived, and there hadn’t been a weapon down there or she would have noticed. You didn’t exactly gloss over a gun.
Which could only mean one thing: Someone had put the pistol down there, and recently, too.
Someone had put it there.
The thought was still reverberating around in her head when she heard the slowly-building sound of police sirens.
Outside.
Coming up the road.
Getting closer…
Allie reached for the revolver—
No, what are you doing?
She pulled her hand back and stood up, opened the nightstand, and snatched the handkerchief inside. She used it to pick up the revolver—.38 Special Cal. was written on the side of the small snub-nosed barrel—and ran back to the door.
She wasn’t entirely sure what she was going to do with the gun, but there was no way she was going to leave it just lying in her room, under her bed, and in the cabin she was renting.
Outside, the sirens had grown in volume. It sounded like the entire Wells City Police Department was charging up the road.
Allie stopped for a second and stood in the back hallway, looking down at the revolver in her hand, even as the last twelve or so hours came rushing back to her like flash cards.
Tom Marshall was dead, killed inside his own house last night.
Someone had conveniently spotted her car in the area, leading to an APB being put out on the white Ford this morning.
And now, someone had taken the opportunity to plant a gun in her temporary place of residence while she wasn’t home. What were the odds that the gun in her hand wasn’t the same weapon that had killed Tom Marshall?
And oh, lest she forgot, suddenly the cops knew exactly where she was.
I’m being set up.
Fuck. I’m being set up!
Allie turned and ran to the back of the cabin and burst through it without hesitation. She sucked in a lungful of chilled fresh air before breaking off into a mad run through the woods, darting around trees and ducking underneath low-hanging branches.
I’m being set up.
She clutched the revolver with one hand. It was impossible not to feel its weight, seemingly much heavier than it should have been, but maybe that was just her imagination. The police sirens from behind her continued to invade the peace of the woods, growing and growing…and growing…
Fifteen
“Things aren’t going exactly as you planned, huh?”
“Not exactly, no.”
“Well, that’s the thing about best-laid plans…”
“Shut up and get out.”
“Can I finish?”
“No.”
“Oh come on. I’ve been practicing it since you took off.”
“Get out. Now.”
“You’re no fun.”
Fun went out the window last night, Allie thought as she watched Trent climb out of the Ford’s driver seat. Allie had already given him the keys to his handcuffs, and the deputy had used them to unlock himself from the steering wheel.
The veteran cop stood next to her, rubbing his wrists. “Sounds like the whole Wells City PD and then some are back there. Wouldn’t surprise me if the county sent some of their boys to help out, too. A case this big. Not every day a Marshall gets dead.”
He was talking about the police sirens, which were as obvious now as they had been when she first heard them. The sudden and very loud presence of humans had scared away most of the wildlife in their immediate vicinity, but a few still skirted rebelliously along branches nearby.
Allie focused on Trent. “The trunk.”
“The trunk?” Trent said, but from the way his eyes widened slightly, she thought he already knew what she was going to do next.
“The trunk,” Allie said again.
“No, no, not the tr
unk.”
“The trunk. Now.”
“This is not cool. I thought we were getting along?”
“Now.”
Trent sighed and walked toward the back of the car. “You should give yourself up. Game’s over. If they know where you live, then they know who you are. Two plus two gets you four, right? At least the last time I was in school. Who knows these days, what with all those fancy curriculums and whatnot.”
Trent’s knowledge of school courses may have been a little muddled, but he wasn’t wrong about the cops knowing her identity. All those police cars swarming her cabin, that she could still hear in the distance, was all the proof she needed to confirm that latest bit of bad news.
And the day’s still young…
It was possible Evans had spotted and called in the Ford’s license plate, and from there they could have easily gotten Aubrey White’s fake ID from the car company. The cabin was being rented under her alias, but there shouldn’t have been any way for the cops to link her to it. And yet, they had.
…because someone had told them.
It was clear as day. What wasn’t clear at all was who.
Was it Sarah? Was she part of the setup? Or maybe it was the man from last night. Was he working with Sarah? Or maybe she had nothing to do with it. Maybe the man had come back, taken Sarah and her newborn, then sicced the police on her.
“Think about this,” Trent was saying as she followed him along the length of the Ford. “It’s not too late.”
“I need you to be quiet now,” Allie said.
Trent sighed again. It was overly dramatic and obviously done for her benefit. “Listen, kid, you don’t seem like a bad person.” He stopped and turned around. “I don’t know if you killed Marshall or not, but you’re obviously involved somehow. Even a blind man can see that. Now I’m not the smartest guy on the force—hell, I’m still a deputy and I’m pushing fifty, for God’s sake; so that obviously says something—but even I can figure out there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”
Allie didn’t answer him. Instead, she wondered if Trent really could help her. She had flashbacks to Hank Pritchard, who had ended up becoming an ally. And that was after she had shot him. She hadn’t shot Trent yet. Though she’d taken him hostage at gunpoint, he didn’t seem to be holding a grudge.