“Mom!” Tyler tugged frantically at her hand. His voice was a terrified whisper. His face utterly white, his eyes big as quarters, he had an expression on his face that struck fear into her heart. He looked like he had just seen every horrible monster that haunted his bad dreams come to life. “Don’t go in there! There are bad men! Quick! We have to hide!”
“Tyler!” Because he was alive and apparently unharmed, his name emerged in a rush of thanksgiving. It was all Sam got a chance to say before a man stepped into her peripheral vision, blocking her view of Mrs. Menifee, planting himself just inside the kitchen doorway. For the briefest of moments she got the impression that he was looking beyond her, down the hallway toward the front door. He balanced on the balls of his feet in a way that told her he was prepared to move fast if he needed to. Medium height, medium build. Medium brown hair, cut like a businessman, short and neat. A pale, round face with ordinary features. Maybe forty, forty-five. Nondescript clothes. Nondescript man.
Except for the gun in his hand, which he used to make a beckoning gesture toward her. Dear God, no. Sam’s breathing suspended. Her stomach plummeted down past her toes.
A satisfied smirk curled his lips. “Samantha Jones? Where’s Marco?”
Sam’s heart convulsed. If she ran he’d shoot her. If she stayed—he’d have Tyler, too.
“Run, Tyler!” Sam shrieked, shoving her son back behind her, knowing that she had no chance of surviving this but going for it anyway, because if she could slow down what was getting ready to happen long enough to give Tyler a chance to escape that was the best she could hope for, and what she was going to do. Jerking up her gun, whirling to face the intruder, she opened fire—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang in huge, earsplitting explosions that clearly caught the intruder by surprise, that tore up her cabinets and shattered her counters and filled the air with a sulfurous smell, that didn’t cause Mrs. Menifee’s poor bloody fingers to so much as twitch. To her astonishment the man didn’t fire back, didn’t shoot her dead where she stood, but jumped back out of sight into the kitchen, yelling, “What the fuck?” or maybe that was somebody else, because a different voice roared, “Get the bitch!”
That’s when it hit her: they didn’t want her dead, not yet, not until she told them where Marco was. So she turned to follow Tyler, turned to take a chance, to run—and saw that instead of bolting toward the front door, Tyler had fled into his bedroom. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the flash of his bare legs, the light green of his Incredible Hulk short pajamas, disappearing into the dark.
“Tyler!”
Behind her, the man popped into view again, filling the space just inside the kitchen, his gun up and aimed at her.
“No!”
Dizzy with fear, Sam leaped headlong after her son just as a bullet smacked into the wall inches away from where her left leg had been. No bang—a silencer. They might not want her dead—yet—but this guy had no qualms about shooting her. And there was nothing they wanted from Tyler. The knowledge galvanized her.
These had to be professional hit men. Hadn’t Marco warned her?
“Mom! Mom! Are you shot?”
Tyler slammed the door behind her as she hit the floor hard on her hands and knees, hanging onto the gun for dear life. Until then, she hadn’t even realized that she’d been screaming like a woman faced with imminent death—which it was terrifying to realize was exactly what she was. The hardwood was unforgiving. The jolt of her landing cut off her scream and shot through her wrists and knees. But she was so frightened that she barely even registered the impact. With the door closed, only moonlight filtering through the thin curtains kept the room from being pitch black. On the shelf above Tyler’s bed, a favorite stuffed snake glowed faintly yellow through the dark.
“No. Lock the door.” Still clutching the gun, she scrambled to her feet. Tyler did as she told him, his hands looking tiny and pale through the shadows as he snapped the tarnished brass dead bolt into place. But even though the door was big and heavy and old, she didn’t trust the lock to hold for longer than a minute or two. A grown man would be able to kick his way in easily, or they could shoot out the lock.
Even as the thought occurred, Sam’s heart leaped into her throat and she shrieked, “Tyler! Get away from the door!”
He did, darting toward the far wall.
She was already spinning away toward the rocking chair beside the bed, the one in which she’d left Mrs. Menifee, in which she had spent many an hour soothing Tyler when he was a baby, an old friend. Purchased at a yard sale and lovingly repainted, it had a wood slat back and a cane seat, and it was sturdy and just the right size and absolutely better than nothing. Picking it up—it was heavy—and practically lunging with it the eight or so feet needed to reach the door, she strong-armed the chair beneath the knob, wedging it tight, bracing the door as best she could. It wouldn’t hold up to a full-scale assault, but at least now, she hoped, the door wouldn’t spring open under a single hard kick.
A bullet drilled the door. Clearly aimed at the lock, which it just missed, it plowed into the floor near Sam’s feet. She screamed, an instinctive reaction that tore its way out of her throat and that she quickly swallowed for Tyler’s sake. Tyler gave a high-pitched cry that ripped at her heart and threw himself toward her. Catching him, throwing an arm around him, she took him with her as she bolted toward the room’s solitary window. Escape, was what she was thinking. They had to get out of that room if they were to have any chance of surviving.
“Are they gonna get in?” Eyes huge with fear, Tyler clung to her even as Sam, struck by an epiphany, whirled back to face the door.
“No,” she promised grimly. Clapping Tyler’s head to her side and covering his exposed ear with her free hand, she pointed the gun at the wall in the approximate vicinity of where she calculated the shooter might have been standing in the hall beyond it, gritted her teeth, and pulled the trigger.
The enormous bang bounced off Sam’s eardrums. The bullet tore through the plaster, leaving a pale pockmark on the navy blue wall. The resultant shouts from the men outside told her that it had gotten through and that they had taken notice, which was what she wanted, even if she hadn’t hit one of them. Anything to hold them off.
“They killed Mrs. Menifee.” Tyler was trembling.
“They’re not going to kill us,” she promised, thrusting the gun back down into her waistband, and hoped with every fiber of her being that it wasn’t a lie.
Turning, whipping the curtains open, she found herself looking out at a scraggly honeysuckle bush, the blank side wall of a neighboring garage, and the narrow strip of grass between residences, all shrouded in the deep charcoal of night.
“Cover your ears,” she warned as she went to work on the window lock. Tyler did, and she screamed at the top of her lungs, “Help! We need help! Call 911!” toward the glass, hoping that it would penetrate far enough for a neighbor to hear, knowing even as she did it that it was probably a waste of breath, because even if someone did hear the people around there had been programmed by many long years of casual neighborhood violence not to get involved and above all, not to involve the cops. Gunshots, screams, shouts for help—they weren’t so unusual that anybody would stick his neck out unless she got very, very lucky.
“Trey’s coming,” Tyler told her, his eyes big dark pools in his small face. She could feel shivers racking the warm little body pressed against her. “I called him. He’s on the way.”
That made no sense, but Sam didn’t have time to worry about it. “Okay.”
“Can you get it open?”
“Yeah.” As she wrestled the recalcitrant lock the final few millimeters needed to free the bottom half of the window, she tried to sound calm. Which was a joke: her kid wasn’t an idiot, he knew she was scared witless, knew that they could die, but still the mom in her tried to protect him from the full magnitude of her fear.
“I tried. I couldn’t open it.”
“I’m bigger.”
With
half her senses focused behind her, on what was going on outside the bedroom door—she could hear nothing, which made her so nervous she wanted to puke—she grabbed the handles at the bottom of the sash with both hands and yanked.
The window didn’t budge.
“Hurry, Mom,” Tyler said breathlessly.
“Get her out of there,” she heard one of the men order as she strained without success to pull the window up. From the direction of his voice, he was in the hall, near the kitchen. But closer than before?
If there was a reply, she didn’t hear it.
Sam thought about snapping off another shot in their direction, but she really didn’t want to ignite a firefight that the other side was sure to win and that would endanger Tyler. Anyway, gunfighting was not her thing; before tonight she had only ever fired a gun at a practice range or in the air as a warning. Besides, she only had—a quick check confirmed it—two bullets left.
Her stomach twisted into a pretzel.
That was not enough. Not near enough to save them.
“Pull harder,” Tyler urged, and Sam did, planting her feet, putting every bit of strength she had into dragging open that window. It didn’t work.
“I’m pulling as hard as I can.” Her voice was thin and breathless. Probably she shouldn’t have admitted it, not to Tyler, but the admission just came out.
“We don’t want to hurt the kid,” another man yelled, the words clearly intended for her ears. He sounded closer, nearer the door. “Come out now, and we’ll let him go. You make us come in and get you, and things could go real wrong in that regard.”
“Mom.” Tyler tightened his grip on her.
Sam’s heart pounded so hard that it felt like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest. Her pulse thundered in her ears. Whatever it took, she was not letting them get their hands on Tyler. Swallowing the panic that rose like bilge in the back of her throat, she shook her head reassuringly at him.
“You come anywhere near us and I’ll blow you to hell,” she yelled back. They couldn’t know she only had two bullets left. I don’t care how bad they are, they have to be wary of a gun. She figured that the knowledge that she had it was the only thing keeping them from storming the door.
“Will you really shoot them if they come?” Tyler whispered. He was holding tightly to her, hampering her movements more than a little as she tried rocking the window, shoving hard against the frame, jiggling the sash this way and that, but there was no way she was pushing him away.
“Yes,” she said, and this time she wasn’t lying. If they came anywhere near Tyler, she absolutely would. Although, and she hated to even let the grim truth into her consciousness, it still might not be enough to save him.
Another bullet plowed through the door. Silent and deadly, it buried itself in the wall maybe a foot away from the window with a sound like a hand slapping flesh. She and Tyler both froze, staring at the pale pockmark where the bullet had hit with widening eyes, before Sam roused herself and gave a desperate, do-or-die heave to the handles. Nothing; she came to the terrifying conclusion that the window was painted shut.
“Are we trapped, Mom?” Tyler sounded on the verge of tears.
“No way.” She gave Tyler a fierce, one-armed hug while she frantically assessed the window. She was so frightened that she could hardly stand still. Sweat poured over her body in a wave. She could not—“Tyler?”
He had broken away from her. “I have to get something.”
From the corner of her eye she saw him slide partway under his bed and emerge with—of course—Ted. The sliver of her attention that had gone with him returned to rejoin the rest in focusing on the window.
Could she break it? Even if she broke the glass, the wood would still be intact. Maybe . . .
“Mom, here.” Tyler was back, holding trusty Ted by the paw, thrusting something—a glance down discovered a cell phone, to which she reacted with a quick, hopeful thrill—into her hand. “I called Trey. You can call somebody.”
Trey again. Even as she drew a blank once more on the name—superhero? imaginary friend? playmate she couldn’t place?—she gave Tyler a you did good look and started punching in 911.
Pheww. Pheww. The peculiar hissing sounds were immediately followed by a pair of sharp smacks as two objects hit the baseboard opposite the door at maybe an inch above floor level. An awful chill of premonition slid down her spine. Casting a startled glance around, Sam heard another breathy pheww and watched a shiny sphere the size of a paintball blast beneath the door to slam with a smack into the baseboard maybe a yard away, where it burst. A shimmery aerosol was released into the air, expanding outward in a growing cloud. Two other similar clouds stretched toward each other, the products, she concluded with a thrill of horror, of the other two smacking sounds. Sam didn’t have to smell the acrid odor, to feel the first burning tingles in her nostrils, to realize what was happening: they were shooting pepper balls under the door.
To drive her and Tyler out.
“Come to Papa, bitch,” one of them yelled gloatingly from just beyond the door.
Sam’s blood ran cold.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Mom, what is it?” Tyler started rubbing at his eyes.
“Close your eyes! Don’t touch your face!”
“It burns!”
It did, like airborne acid feathering across her skin, searing the inside of her nose, making her eyes water, making them sting . . .
“Hold your breath, baby!”
Coughing, gasping, Sam jammed the phone into her pocket, yanked out her gun, pointed it at the window, and shot the glass and the center of the wood strips, aiming right for the spot where the strips crossed: bang, bang. She used her last bullets, then kicked out the shards and decimated wooden supports with a desperate strength. Snatching up Tyler, whose eyes were shut and whose face was all puckered up like it got when he got ready to jump off the side of the pool in the summer, which she knew meant that he was holding his breath, she lifted him through the hole she had made into the blessedly fresh night air.
“Watch the glass,” she warned in an urgent undertone as moonlight glinted off the debris from the window that was scattered beneath the honeysuckle bush. Even in this moment of extremis, she took care to set him down in a clear spot.
“Mom!” As his feet touched the ground his eyes popped open and he clung to her.
“Run, Tyler.” She pulled free of his grip. “Go. Head for the truck. I’m coming.”
With one last look at her he turned, shoved his way through the honeysuckle branches, and took off, heading toward the street. The fence was in the way. God, would he have time to get through the gate before the monsters in the house figured out that their prey was getting away? His little bare feet flashed pale through the darkness; his pajamas gave off the faintest of neon glows. Something small and dark bobbed at his side. In the split second that it took Sam to recognize Ted, paw still clutched tightly in Tyler’s hand, she already had one foot braced on the windowsill. Eyes burning and watering so badly that things kept going in and out of focus, feeling like her skin was blistering everywhere that it was exposed, Sam took a split second to pulverize the shards that still clung to the sill and then scrambled out the window, taking in greedy gulps of the honeysuckle-scented air even before she hit the ground. Somewhere in the distance she heard a siren; closer at hand, the brittle snap of glass breaking under her boots and the rustling of the bush she’d landed in were overridden by the sound of her pulse thundering in her ears. Careful not to rub at her burning eyes—no stranger to pepper spray, she knew that would only make the effects worse—she cast a quick, involuntary glance behind her, through the shattered window toward the bedroom door. Her vision shimmered and shifted, due to both the watery veil of stinging tears that obscured it and the menacing vapors that filled the room, but she could see the rocking chair, which was still in place, and the door, which was still shut. Wonder of wonders, they weren’t trying to break into the room. Maybe the knowledge th
at they had just filled it with pepper spray was keeping them at bay. Maybe they thought the two shots she had just fired at the window had been aimed at them. Or maybe—horrifying thought—they were already racing for the front door, to catch her and Tyler in the enclosed yard . . .
Terror formed a hard, cold knot in Sam’s chest as she, too, plunged through the honeysuckle and bolted for the street.
Bam! Bam! The unmistakable sound of splintering wood behind her made her heart lurch. It sent panic shooting along her nerve endings, gave fresh wings to her feet.
“Party time, bitch.” The words, which unmistakably came from inside the room she had just left, had an oddly muffled, slurred quality.
“I don’t see her! Or the boy!” It was a different voice, filled with consternation, speaking a heartbeat later. It had the same odd muffled quality as the first.
“She’s got to be here. They’ve got to be here! Search! Check the—”
“They went out the window! Look! There she goes!”
A quick, fear-filled glance over her shoulder showed Sam a man in a dark hoodie leaning out Tyler’s shattered bedroom window staring after her. If the moonlight hadn’t gleamed off the gun he was holding, she wasn’t even sure she would have spotted him through the darkness and the overarching honeysuckle. But it did, and she did, and her breath caught and her heart slammed against her chest wall and her stomach did a back flip. Only, his face was weird—eyes like a bug, dark and featureless lower down.
For a shocked instant that felt like a moment out of time, she went shivery with horror. What kind of men were these?
Then she realized: goggles and a bandanna. He was wearing that, or something similar, plus the hood pulled over his head and who knew what else to protect himself from the pepper spray. They both—all—however many of them there were, however many were in that room—must be swaddled in protective gear. That accounted for the distortion of their voices, for the fact that they had dared to enter the room so soon.
If the murderous asswipes turned and ran for the front door this minute, this second, they would be barely behind her as she raced for the gate, Sam calculated. If they just wanted her dead, they could shoot her—and Tyler—from the porch. It was a footrace now, and not one that she was sure she could win. Heart jackhammering, with all need for subterfuge past, Sam ran for her life, letting loose a scream that split the night as she tore around the corner of the house—
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