“Stop. Stop. It’s okay. It’ll all be okay. But sweetie, you have to go back out there now. You have to, but I’m here with you. You are not alone, Billy. I am here with you. I love you.”
“I love you too.” I put our end on mute.
“Sheriff Hancock, it’s Agent Hudson,” Luke said on his own phone. “We have an active hostage situation occurring at a place called Grey Manor. Mathias Morning and two more armed individuals have at least four hostages, including Billy Ballard.” He listened as I heard Billy flush the toilet. “We have open comms to the situation, that’s how. You need to get people…”
I took my phone off speaker and listened to my brother. Luke had the other stuff well in hand. Billy opened the door. “I really don’t feel well,” my brother said.
“Shut the fuck up,” Ken snapped. “You’re just lucky you’re here, asshole. I voted to leave you at the farm. Come on. Move your ass.”
“Shit! Well, we’re on our way. We’ll keep an eye out,” Luke said before ending his call. He looked at me. “All available units are at the farm. It’ll be twenty minutes before anyone can get there.”
“We’re less than five minutes away,” I said.
He met my eyes and nodded. “Okay.” No other words required. I loved that about us.
“Turn here.”
Without hesitation, he did. I kept listening to my brother’s nightmare.
“Feel better, son?” I heard Mathias ask.
“N-Not really,” Billy said.
“Sit down. We’re almost done here, right, Elliot? You don’t want us to think you’re stalling, do you? That last bullet should have been an effective teaching tool. The next one I put in your stomach. I was stabbed there once. It’s painful as fuck. Worse than a foot, let me tell you. Your son saved you from that gut shot when you tried to send that email; I won’t listen to him a second time.”
“You said it had to come from multiple accounts,” Elliot said through gritted teeth. “That takes time…”
“They definitely don’t have twenty minutes,” I whispered to Luke.
He put the pedal to the metal, dodging and weaving at eighty miles an hour through the streets of Grey Mills.
“Just do what they say,” Billy said sheepishly.
“I am!” Elliot snapped. I heard hand hit flesh before Elliot groaned in pain.
“Don’t speak to him like that,” Mathias chided. “He’s your son. He’s looking out for you here, Elliot. Appreciate that. And him.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” my father said. “I appreciate him. I do.”
“The only reason you and your wife will be breathing in an hour is because your son wants you to,” Mathias said.
A total lie. He blew up that house to make us think he was in there. That he was dead. It would have taken weeks of sifting through the forensic evidence to realize he wasn’t. He wasn’t going to leave three witnesses no matter what he told Elliot.
I pointed Luke down Elliot’s street, then to the house on the small hill. From the outside, everything appeared normal. The lights were on. No signs of forced entry. The only odd elements were the open gate, the drawn curtains, and an old Sonata sitting parked beside the BMW and Porsche. Luke parked one house down and shut off the engine. Things were quiet over the phone as Elliot got back to work, and Billy panted.
“Layout?” Luke asked.
“Uh…” I had to think for a moment. I’d been in there only once, when we had our blackmail meeting twenty years before. “I think living room, parlor, dining room, study, kitchen, and bathroom on the first level; I’m not sure about the second. I never went up there. Betsy has the maid and Judith Grey in the study, uh…maybe second door on the right? The others are upstairs in his office—no idea where that is.”
“Okay. You wait—”
“If your next words are ‘in the car,’ I will knock your teeth out,” I said.
“You don’t have a weapon,” Luke said.
“Betsy does. We take out Betsy, disarm her, and—”
“You are not going in there,” Luke snapped.
“And you’re not going in without me!” I roared back. “I dragged you into this! You wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me! If you go in there and get shot and killed because of me, I won’t live to see the goddamn morning either! I can’t lose you, you asshole! Anyone but you. Better together, remember? I’m going. I’m watching your back like always. Forever.”
I slipped my phone into my pocket and opened the car door. I was about to get out but turned to face him. I had to say it before I changed my mind and lost my nerve. “And I love you. Of course I love you, you moron. I am in love with you. How the fuck could I not be? You’re one of the strongest, smartest, bravest people I’ve ever met. You’re my best friend. You’re my partner. You know me better than anyone and haven’t gone screaming for the hills. And even when I was married, there were times I wanted to kiss you so bad I had to excuse myself to the bathroom to stop myself. God knows I have wanted to kiss you every fucking minute since you came to North Carolina. And I should have said it sooner. I should have. I’m just scared I’ll fuck us up. That one day you’ll wake up and realize I’m not worth the trouble. That I’m the Abortion Whore of Grey Mills whose own father didn’t want her. Whose own mother doesn’t like her. Because she’s still here. She’ll always be a part of me. And I can’t lose you. Like I said, anyone but you. So…I love you. I’m in love with you. I have been for years. I just…had to say that. And if it’s come too late…then that’s on me. You’ll be the biggest regret of my life. But I’m sure I will love you until the day I die. So I love you, Luke Hudson. Always. Forever. I love you.” I looked away. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
I got out of the car before he could say a word. I closed my eyes and exhaled. I felt a hell of a lot lighter after that confession. At least I wouldn’t be going to my grave with that hanging over my soul. I could face death with one regret wiped off my ledger. I stepped toward the house.
“Iris, wait!” Luke whispered as he got out of the car. I kept walking with the phone pressed to my ear. Billy was still breathing heavily as Elliot typed. Luke was suddenly by my side. “We need a plan—”
“The Becker case. Remember it? When we had to apprehend those four child-porn assholes before they split? Similar layout, similar placement of suspects. We just have to be as quiet as fuck and pray there’s a fucking window or door open.”
“Front door. Most likely they didn’t lock it behind them in all the chaos,” Luke said.
“Sounds good. Load the sound on your phone.” He obeyed.
I listened to my brother. Elliot was still typing, and I thought I heard Ken and Mathias talking quietly. Just keep stalling, Elliot, I thought as I hurried toward the house. It was a two-story stone Colonial Georgian with columns holding up a huge portico and small porch above the front door. My adrenaline pumping, I kept my eyes on the dozen large windows. All one of the bad guys had to do was peek out a window and see us approach, and it was game over. I banked on the hope that they didn’t want to be seen. I was right. There was no movement at the windows.
Luke somehow got ahead of me, moving low with his gun already in his hands in the tactical approach we learned at the Academy. He reached the front door first but waited until I reached him to enter. I could barely breathe, and not from the long walk up the hill. Death was a real possibility. We were outgunned, outnumbered, and out-eviled. All we had on our side was experience and the element of surprise. It would have to be enough.
Luke gently tried the handle, and it turned. Unlocked. Thank God. Slowly, carefully, Luke opened the door, gun pointed inside in case they were waiting there. No sounds. Possibly clear. He peeked in and must have seen nothing because when the door opened enough, he tiptoed in with me at his back. The house was as quiet as a crypt save for the faint, muffled sobs down the hallway. Judith and the maid. The house was as old as the town itself but had undergone some renovations, including the crystal chandelier
hanging about our heads. Hardwood to carpet wasn’t one such renovation. Every step toward the study produced a slight creak that raised my adrenaline a notch. We had to move slower than snails, even when we reached the carpet runner down the hallway. Luke kept glancing up at the staircase to our right, then down the hall, gun moving with his eyes each time. I held on to his back as we crept what seemed like a mile toward the open study door.
Luke peered around the corner into the study before clearing the door, stopping on the other side of it. He gestured to indicate there was one suspect with a gun and two others on the ground tied up. We put our backs against the wall. This had to go like clockwork. I nodded that I was ready, and he toyed with his cellphone. The sound of a baby’s cry began playing from it. It was an odd yet normal enough sound to get attention and require investigation.
“Do you have a baby here?” Betsy asked. Her hostages just mumbled through their gags. After an annoyed sigh, I heard footsteps coming toward us. I saw the gun first and the girl herself a millisecond later. I hated to do it, but the moment she saw us and began to open her mouth, I grabbed the arm holding her gun and kneed her in the stomach. A person can’t scream for help with no air. She doubled over and loosened her grip on her gun. My gun now. At the same time Luke pressed his hand over her mouth in case my kick didn’t silence her, and the other arm around her waist. He dragged her back into the study, and I turned back at the staircase, gun pointed in that direction. No one came.
Judith and a forty-something Latina in black and white livery sat on the Persian rug with their mouths covered with duct tape and hands bound behind their backs. Both were still crying and were trying to talk through the gags. Luke nodded at the duct tape on the end table as he held Betsy, who hadn’t stopped struggling against him. He’d have bruises for weeks. I quickly reached the tape and said, “Scream and I’ll punch you again. That can’t be good for the baby.” When Luke removed his hand, she let out the beginnings of a scream, but the tape stopped it. I taped her feet next even as she bucked. Next came her hands. As I moved over to the maid and Judith and removed the tape from their mouths, Luke lowered Betsy onto her stomach in the prone position. With her hands and legs bound, she couldn’t get up even with an hour of trying.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. Keep quiet. Keep quiet,” I whispered to them.
“Thank you, thank you,” the maid whispered.
Luke and I bit our way through their other binds. “Elliot?” Judith whispered.
“We’ll get him,” I whispered back. “The two of you need to tiptoe out the front door. Don’t make a sound, and run to a neighbor’s. We’ll cover you. The police are already on their way—they’re about fifteen minutes out. Just run and wait for them.”
“Okay. Okay. Thank you,” Judith panted.
“Come on.” We helped the women rise. Both were shaky but could walk if they leaned on one another. Making sure I had Betsy’s gun in hand, and that she was still squirming on the ground, I took up the rear with Luke in the lead and the women between us. We tiptoed to the front door, each creak causing a grimace or whimper from the women. I suppressed my own terror. When we hit the front door, they literally ran for their lives down the driveway. We’d just saved two innocent people. It was a start.
We left the door open and turned toward the stairs. Now we were on an equal playing field. Two against two. I listened on the phone for a second.
“Great job, Elliot,” Mathias said.
“They’re still up there. He’s almost done,” I whispered.
Luke took the lead toward the staircase, my purloined .38 revolver pointed in that direction. Two to go.
And then our luck ran out.
Luke was on the first step when Ken walked into view on the landing above. He was far more on point than Betsy. Two steps out he immediately sensed us, and his gaze whipped down. His gun swung in our direction a millisecond later. On instinct and training, Luke and I leapt into cover on the side of the stairs just as Ken fired for the first time. The bullet hit the bannister not an inch from Luke’s head. Without hesitation, we immediately returned fire through the rungs of the bannister.
“What happened?” Mathias shouted between the shots.
“Get back!” Ken shouted before firing again.
We shot again, then Ken. He was behind cover too, using the edge of the hallway. He had the tactical advantage with the high ground, not to mention we had to worry about Mathias in the office with my brother and father. We had to get up there. Fast. No choice. “I’ll draw him out. Cover me,” I said.
“Iris, don’t—”
Five feet. Only five feet.
I leapt out of cover, running toward the other side of the stairs. Ken peeked out to get a shot at me, playing right into our hands. He aimed at me, ready to shoot, but Luke fired before he could. When I gazed up, Ken was slumping to the floor, the hole in his forehead still smoking. Fortune favored the bold yet again. Luke and I, guns still trained on Ken and the hallway, quickly ascended the staircase. Even though it was obvious the man was dead, Luke kicked away the nine-millimeter by Ken’s hand and nudged the corpse. No movement.
Two down, one to go.
“Kenny? Ken?” Mathias shouted from three doors down.
Guns trained down the hall, Luke and I hurried in that direction. Time to end this.
“It’s over, Mathias,” I said as we reached the open door. “Surrender, and that will be taken into consideration at your trial.”
A bullet went through the door and into the back wall. “Fuck you.” When I moved across the door to get on the other side of it, there was another gunshot just as I reached safety. Too fast for him. Thank God. I very, very carefully peeked inside the office. He held my trembling brother in front of him, using Billy as a human shield. Worse, he had a gun pressed to Billy’s head. Elliot sat with his back against the wall, beaten to a pulp, with blood pooling around his mangled foot. I mouthed to Luke, “Do you have a shot?” but Luke shook his head.
Fuck. I checked my gun. Empty. The man was unhinged. Desperate. I had to get Luke a shot. I had one play that never failed with psychopaths. Hubris. “I’m tossing my gun into the room,” I said to Mathias. “I am unarmed otherwise.”
“What the hell are you doing?” Luke whispered. “Iris—”
I slid the revolver into the office. I looked at Luke. “Wait until the gun’s off Billy,” I whispered. Then I announced, “I’m coming in, Mathias. Unless you’re afraid to face me like a man, just know that the 2010 FBI Marksman of the Year has a gun pointed straight at your head. But it doesn’t have to end that way. Nobody here wants it to. I’m coming in.” I lifted up my shirt to my bra so he could see I was unarmed.
“Iris, don’t—”
I slowly stepped into the doorframe. I was almost shocked that he didn’t shoot me there and then. I think this move unnerved him, overtaxed his brain. He actually pressed the gun harder against Billy’s head. “I’m lacing my hands behind my head, okay?” I said as I did so. “I’m just here to talk.”
Mathias chuckled. “You are ballsy, girl. You really must trust your boyfriend with your life.”
“Hell, fuck my life, I trust him with my brother’s.” I took a tiny step to the left. “You okay, Billy?”
“Yeah. Yeah,” he panted.
I stared Mathias square in his hard eyes. “Come on, man. It’s over. We both know it. Even if you kill us all, you’re caught. So just let Billy go. He’s the father of your great-great-grandchild. If you wanted to kill him you would have left him at the farm.”
“Where’s Betsy?” Mathias asked.
“Downstairs. Tied up. She’s fine, I swear.”
“And Ken?” Mathias asked, his voice shaking.
I frowned. “Took a bullet to the head. He’s unconscious but alive,” I lied. “I don’t know for how much longer. Maybe half an hour. So you need to let Billy go so we can call an ambulance and get him to the hospital.”
Mathias chuckled. “As if the police aren’t alre
ady on their way.”
“They won’t be here for a while.” I took another tiny step left. “They were all at The Apex when a neighbor called 911 about suspicious activity here,” I lied. “We have a good thirty minutes.” Another small step sideways. “My friend Joyce at the station called me on the off chance it was related. Guess the universe wanted you caught, huh? All those innocent people you killed tonight to cover your escape, all the planning, all made moot by a nosy neighbor. The whims of the universe, huh?” Another little step. He turned a little too. “Did your followers know? Was it suicide? The history books will want to know.”
“What does the great Iris Ballard think?”
“That many people? Hell no. You’re good, but not forty-people-killing-themselves good. Even your old buddy Jim Jones had detractors. You probably drugged them with your communal dinner and drinks. Then you doused the house with gasoline, turned on the gas, and kaboom. But why so many? Even with five or six you could have achieved the same result.”
“Everyone dying, all the truly devoted, fit my narrative better. We all died for our beliefs. Five or six? I’m just a thug covering up my alleged crimes. Forty-two? I’m a guru who truly believed. Not to mention it would only take one of them to see us leaving to tell the police. I did spare the children.”
“Yeah, you get a brownie point there.” Another tiny step. “And the note?”
“I forged the signatures. At the meeting today I had everyone sign a letter to the DEA asking them to leave us alone. Although they probably would have signed the one you found,” he chuckled. “Fucking morons. I don’t think a one of them read it. Not even Billy boy here.”
“Then why spare him? I doubt you’d risk everything for familial loyalty.” Another step.
“We needed him to get asshole here to open the gate and door,” Mathias said, nodding at Elliot. “Billy here’s the only one of my people with rich relatives nearby. We needed money, real money to last the rest of our lives.” He pressed the gun against Billy’s head so hard Billy had to bend forward. “Plus I planned to have our boy here execute his father. That way he’d be just as guilty as the rest of us. My Betsy could keep her husband, Billy could finally reach catharsis about his father’s abandonment, and if he didn’t obey me…well, I was already going to have three bodies to disappear, what’s one more?”
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