Eye for an Eye (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  My phone lit up with an incoming text message. I glanced at the screen, and my heart stopped.

  It was from Jade; her response to my last message.

  I looked from the phone to the windows. Nothing was happening. I picked up the phone, and opened my messenger application.

  She’d written, “I love you too, Austin. I want to work it out.”

  Then a shot rang out, and a second, and a third.

  “What the hell was that?” Travers asked.

  “Shots fired, shots fired in the Miller house,” I called at the same time.

  * * *

  “You son of a bitch,” Marco said. “I knew Chief should have wasted you, all of you. The whole lousy crew.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Shannon demanded.

  At the same time, the front door flew open, and three guys burst inside with guns drawn: the outside crew, except for Tyler. Because, of course, Tyler was dead and buried, and not working the outdoor crew.

  “We heard shots,” someone said. “And Chief’s not answering his phone.”

  “This rat faced bastard shot Chief,” Sal said.

  The guy started to train his gun on me.

  “Not me,” I said.

  “Not him,” Sal confirmed. “Jimmy.”

  “You son of a bitch,” one of the new guys said.

  Another asked, “Chief’s dead?”

  “No,” the third said.

  “It’s true. We got to get the hell out of here. That cop was nosing around, asking questions about Day and the kids.”

  “He’s back,” one of the new guys said. “That’s what we wanted to tell Chief. He parked down the road, with his lights off.”

  The realization seemed to dawn on everyone at once. The jig really was up.

  “It’s time to go,” Sal said.

  “We got to split up and get the hell out of here,” one of the guys at the door said.

  “I’m not leaving until we kill this murdering son of a bitch,” Marco said.

  A fourth shot rang out now, from somewhere on the steps: loud and brutal in the stillness. No warning, no preamble. Just a shot, and then another, and another.

  Shannon, I thought. Defending her brother.

  Tony went down, and so did Marco. Sal leaped over the balustrade and returned fire over his shoulder. They were wild shots, but they sent Shannon retreating up the stairs anyway.

  I ducked into the kitchen, pulling the screaming kids with me. There was no door outside here: just the basement door. I threw a wild glance around, looking for the keys I’d seen earlier. They were gone: all of them.

  Shit.

  Someone else shot now, from further down the hall. “Come on,” I said, dragging the kids toward the windows. “We need to get outside.”

  Joey’s crew and Chief’s were shooting in a roughly straight line down the hall. But they were dodging fire, and they were pissed, and desperate. I did not want Daniel and Maisie near the crossfire, or anywhere where stray bullets might find them.

  Maisie trembled and clutched my hand while Daniel screamed. “Let go, sweetheart,” I told her. “I need to open a window.”

  She didn’t, but I pried my hand away anyway. The window was old, and the wood swelled with heat and moisture. The paint stuck and fought my efforts.

  Someone screamed in pain. Shannon called, “You kill my brother, I’ll kill every one of you motherfuckers.”

  I slammed the flat of my palm against the stubborn wood and tried again. It shifted, maybe a millimeter. I tried the other side. It shifted too. I tried again, and again. It went on shifting, until finally it gave.

  A distant siren screamed through the night.

  Someone called, “Cops! Cops are here!”

  The shooting ceased abruptly, and scrambling footfalls replaced it.

  I hauled the window up and looked outside. I couldn’t see anyone, or anything. Just light from around the house, somewhere. I said, “Okay, let’s go, let’s go.”

  Flashing red and blue lights lit up the kitchen. East Coast accents hollered up and down the hall.

  I hoisted Daniel up first. He clung to me. “I’m scared, Uncle Owen.”

  “I’m right behind you, kiddo. Stay by the house. I’ll be right there.”

  I lowered him through the window into a yard bathed in competing flashing light and long shadow. Then I lifted Maisie too.

  I scrambled out next and took stock of our situation. I could see figures running across the yard toward the SUV’s: dark silhouettes, heading for larger silhouettes. I could hear all kinds of voices, mostly men, but a woman’s too. Shannon was still alive, then.

  We needed to get to the cops, I decided. I had no weapon. I’d had to drop the razor and the gun. I had no way of defending us against men with guns.

  “Come on,” I said, as quietly as I could to get through to them over the screaming siren. “Stay close, and keep low. We need to get to the cops, okay?”

  * * *

  Deputy Austin Wagner, 8:15 PM

  My orders were to stand down. They made sense, in a cold, calculated way. I was one guy. I couldn’t take down a gang, much less two gangs.

  But I couldn’t sit back and wait, either. Not while hostages were being gunned down.

  So I said, “Sir, you’re cutting out.”

  Travers and the sheriff spoke at the same time. My boss said, “Wagner, you are ordered–”

  Travers said, “Don’t you dare–”

  I hung up the phone. And, for the benefit of my dashcam, said, “Shit. I lost the signal.”

  Then the shooting started all over again. I flipped on my lights and my siren, and squealed off the curb, kicking up gravel and dirt and making a hell of a racket. Which was okay. Better than okay. I wasn’t trying to surprise them. I was trying to refocus them.

  So hopefully they’d realize that live captives meant civilian hostages, and a bargaining chip. If they hadn’t already killed everyone, anyway.

  * * *

  We stayed low and walked quickly. One of the SUV’s blasted past, sweeping us with its lights as it squealed by. I caught a glimpse of one of Chief’s dark haired, olive-skinned crew in the driver’s seat. He either didn’t see us, or didn’t care, because he didn’t so much as slow.

  We kept going. We’d almost reached the corner of the house when another SUV’s lights swept us. I recognized the driver this time too, and the passenger: Cody and Paige Carter. She held a bundle, clutched tight to her with her right arm. Avery, I knew.

  How – and where – they’d found a key beat me. But they had, which was all that mattered.

  Paige spotted me and gestured excitedly with her left hand. I stood up and waved, big, active gestures to get his attention. He saw me, and recognition flashed across his face. The SUV squealed to an abrupt halt.

  “Come on,” I said to the kids. “To Cody.”

  They started to move, with me at the rear. At the same time, Cody’s expression changed. He threw a glance around the yard. He looked back at me.

  Don’t you dare, I thought.

  He did. He looked away and gunned it. The tires spun and the SUV jerked forward, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. Dust, and empty driveway.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. Then, “Back this way, come on.”

  “He left us,” Daniel said.

  “Forget about him. Let’s go,” I said.

  We turned and ran toward the cover of the house. A third SUV, and then a fourth blasted past. I didn’t know how many of Joey’s crew remained. I didn’t know how many of Chief’s did. Marco had been shot, I knew that. So had Tony. But that didn’t mean they were dead. It didn’t mean anyone was dead, except Chief himself.

  Worst case scenario was that everyone survived: eight people, two of them who would for sure want me dead, and six who might. With four SUV’s gone, one of them driven by the Carters, that meant a maximum of five guys still on the property.

  Hopefully, we weren’t dealing with the worst case scenario,
though. Hopefully some of them hadn’t survived. Hopefully, they’d doubled and tripled up in the SUV’s. That’d be best case scenario: me and the kids and the Millers were the only survivors left on the property.

  We came around to the front of the yard. I saw a single police vehicle.

  One, lonely car with its lights blazing and its siren blaring.

  I stared at it, a moment too long. Because I didn’t notice the movement on the front steps. Not until I heard a voice, booming over a loudspeaker, “Drop the gun, put your hands up.”

  I didn’t have a gun. The voice wasn’t talking to me.

  Which I realized a moment later, as Shannon catapulted off the front steps into me.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  She was the one with the gun, her and Jimmy. She didn’t use it on me, though. She wasn’t attacking me. She was just knocking me out of the way, so she could get to Maisie.

  The impact bowled me over. She moved on. I sprang up and got back on my feet, but not fast enough. She’d seized Maisie by the hair and jammed the barrel into the side of her skull. She was dragging her backward, shouting at me and the cop.

  “You come for us, and she dies, you understand? I kill her.”

  Maisie stared with wide-eyed terror. I started toward her, but Shannon pressed the gun against her skull with enough force that she whimpered. “I’ll kill her,” she said simply.

  I stopped moving. Daniel clung to my side.

  Behind me, Jimmy staggered down the steps. He’d taken at least one shot. That was clear. He could barely walk, and a dark streak of blood stained the front of his shirt and trousers.

  The cop over the loudspeaker called out, “Let her go. Put your gun down.”

  Shannon shouted back, “Put yours down. Come after us, and we kill the brat.”

  Jimmy finished hobbling over to his sister. “Come on,” she said. He didn’t argue. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look fully capable of talking at the moment.

  The final SUV blasted past, bathing us all in light. Jimmy looked bad in the full light. Very bad. He’d taken three bullets that I could see for sure, and maybe a fourth.

  Shannon dragged Maisie backward, toward the garage, one step after the other. I followed a step here or there, but she’d jab the gun into Mais’s head, or side, or stomach when I did.

  They were headed for vehicles. I knew that. The SUV’s had all gone. That left the Carters’ truck, the one we’d used to haul Joey’s body to the back for burial. Maybe they had the keys, maybe they didn’t.

  There was no good way for that to go. If they had the keys, they’d either shoot Maisie, if they decided they didn’t need her anymore, or take her with them as a hostage. If they didn’t have the keys, they might shoot her out of retaliation when they realized they were stuck.

  The cop, meanwhile, had stopped shouting. I heard nothing at all from him, which I guessed meant he was radioing in the situation.

  Shannon and Jimmy reached the garage and dragged Maisie behind it. I turned to Daniel and pointed him toward the police vehicle. “Go,” I said. “I need to help your sister.”

  He hesitated.

  “Please, Dan. Trust me.”

  He went, and I darted forward, trying to close the gap between Maisie and myself.

  Then I heard the roar of a V8 engine coming to life and saw the brilliance of a set of new headlights. The truck squealed forward, blasting around the side of the garage and heading straight for the road.

  I turned, wondering what if anything the cop would, or could, do to stop it. Would he try to disable it, with a child hostage inside? Could he?

  Then I saw lights on the horizon: more flashing lights, a whole line of them, in both directions.

  Shannon saw it too. She slammed the brakes, and the truck skidded to a halt. Then she gunned the motor again and turned a hard left into the nearest field with the exaggerated jerkiness of a panicked driver.

  I stood rooted to the spot for a long moment, feeling for the first time really helpless. They had Maisie and a truck. I had nothing – no way to pursue them and no way to stop them.

  There were miles and miles of fields here. Cutting across country, they could wind up just about anywhere. Or they could disappear into the forest. There was no way cruisers could clear the fields, much less forest.

  They could vanish, forever.

  “Hey,” a voice called behind me.

  I spun around. I knew the voice. It was Marco. He was propped up against the door frame, bleeding from five separate holes in his chest and stomach. He raised his arm in a halfhearted way.

  It took me a second to understand; and then, only because I saw something small and dark flying through the air. “For the old truck.”

  Keys. He’d thrown me a set of keys. They landed at my feet with a clinking sound. The silver metal reflected the strobing police lights.

  “Get your kid,” Marco said.

  I nodded and scooped up the key. “Thanks.” It seemed the right thing to say in the moment. The guy was dying, after all. And he hadn’t needed to give me those keys.

  “Just kill those sons of bitches for me,” he said.

  I didn’t respond. I just ran for the old truck, with its twisted frame and rusted out body. A truck that was probably older than me. I knew it ran, because Joey had said they used it to collect Callaghan’s body. But whether it could take a cross country chase?

  I didn’t know.

  The cop shouted something after me. Now that it wasn’t distorted via the loudspeaker system, it sounded like Wagner’s voice. I ignored it and kept going.

  I could see Shannon’s truck bouncing along the field, its lights jumping and dancing with every bump and through every ditch and rut. Putting distance between her and me with every second.

  The doors were locked, and I fumbled for moment with the key to unlock them.

  A breathless voice a few paces behind me demanded, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” It was Wagner.

  “I’m following my niece,” I said.

  “Like hell. Backup’s here.”

  “They won’t be able to get across country.”

  “Day, I’m ordering you to stay put.”

  I turned to look at him. “I’m going. And the only way you’re going to stop me is if you shoot me.”

  Then I hopped up into the truck.

  Wagner stood rooted to the spot for half a second. Then he said, “Dammit, I’m coming with you.”

  * * *

  Deputy Austin Wagner, 8:26 PM

  Owen Day looked like he’d been through hell. He looked like a madman. Not the stark, raving lunatic kind of madman, with trembling hands and panic in bloodshot eyes.

  This was something else. Something much worse. He was calm and steady. Which made the murder in his eyes that much worse. Like something had broken behind that steady gaze. Like someone had taken the safety off.

  I didn’t worry about the boy I’d left behind. There were dozens of cops waiting to take care of him. I worried about the guy I was going with, and whether one cop would be enough to handle him.

  The engine roared to life, and I raced to get to the other side of the truck. I’d barely gotten in when he started to move. The old door creaked on rusty hinges, but I managed to pull it shut. And a good thing, too, because he swung a sharp turn. Dust and gravel flew up all around us, obscuring the yard for a moment.

  “Lights,” I said, grabbing onto the dash to steady myself. “Turn your lights on.”

  He shook his head. I saw the motion because of the faint glow of the instrument panel: the same fixed look in his eyes, the same determined set to his chin. “No lights. I don’t want them to see us as we come after them.”

  “You won’t be able to see where you’re going,” I said.

  “There’s moonlight,” he said. “I’ll be fine.”

  I doubted that. This was an old truck. The engine roared away like it was brand new, but the rest of the vehicle hadn’t fared so well. The frame look
ed like a strong breeze might blow it away in a hail of rust. And I didn’t know how old, but it sure as hell predated airbag laws. If we wound up plowing into a tree or a boulder, we were going to be in a sorry state.

  I secured my seatbelt and took stock of our surroundings. A shadow landscape raced past us, with stray beams of red and blue light illuminating random features. I’d see the trunk of a faraway tree, grayish and grim on the horizon, or a strip of weeds, all rusty and red for half a moment. Then it would disappear, and the world would return to the old dusky darkness.

  It didn’t help that the field was uneven, with great furrows tilled into it; or that Day was driving like a lunatic. Even with my seatbelt on, I bounced and jostled over every dip and rise. The old truck creaked and groaned, but its engine roared on, faster and faster.

  Maybe half a mile ahead of us, a set of taillights blazed from behind a travelling cloud of dust. The lights lit up the dust, and the dust dimmed the lights.

  Maybe I was imagining it. But it looked like we were gaining on the taillights.

  “We need a plan,” I said. “For if we catch them.”

  He said nothing.

  “Your niece is inside that truck,” I said. “So anything we do has to take her safety into account.”

  “It will,” he said.

  We bounced along. The lights seemed to grow in the darkness. I thought, I should call this in. Then I remembered I’d left my phone in my own vehicle.

  “What’s your plan?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Day,” I said, my tone sharper this time. “Do you have a plan?”

  “Disable the truck. Get Maisie out.”

  “They have guns.”

  “So do you.”

  “There’s two of them,” I reminded him. “And they’ve each got guns.”

  He said nothing to that. He just kept on watching the taillights with the same manic gleam in his eye, gunning the motor while the truck rattled and jumped and shook.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Shannon cut across the Millers’ fields, speeding through the weeds and over seasons-old troughs and rises. She went slowly, probably because Jimmy couldn’t take the bouncing and jostling. Not with the bullets he’d soaked up. But she rarely got above twenty-five miles an hour.