Page 59 of Bitter Falls

I hear the beeps stop.

I see Lanny shuffle slowly forward out of my peripheral vision, and I risk a quick glance toward her. She’s crying. Trembling as she holds up her hands. Sam makes a growling sound in the back of his throat, pure frustration, and when the second fake cop points the shotgun at Lanny, Sam crouches down and puts his gun on the floor. He kicks it across, too hard, and it smacks the far wall behind the man with the shotgun. But if Sam meant it for a distraction, it doesn’t quite work. The man doesn’t go for it. He just leaves it where it stops.

I can’t see Connor. I’m praying that he had time to get down the hall, that maybe,maybe, he’s getting out of the house.Go, baby. Run.

I’m flooded with panic-flavored adrenaline and shaking, and every cell of my body is screaming with rage. “What do you want?”Oh God.I turned the alarm off. I let them in. All this is my fault.

“I want the girl,” the man facing me says. At first I think he’s talking about Lanny, or even Vee, but then I know what he means.

“Carol isn’t here,” I say. I’m lowering my hands, but he doesn’t like that. He presses the barrel of the gun so hard against my forehead it feels like being branded, and I lean back and put my hands up again. “I don’t know where she is!”

“You have ten seconds to tell me the truth, or I blow the back of your head off. Understand me?” he snaps. “I want her, and I want the child. You tell me where they are, and you all live. Fuck with me, and you all die.”

The front door is still open, and stripes of red and blue light cascade through the doorway behind him; the glow makes him look like angel and devil in fast strobes. But then that color washes out, and I realize headlights are coming up the driveway. Bright, high headlights.

I draw my breath to scream for help, but I stop, panic trickling down my backbone in ice-cold drops. There’s no point in screaming for help.

It’s a big, old recreational vehicle. Boxy and faded from age.

It’s brought reinforcements.

A third man, the driver, steps out of the RV and heads inside. He shuts the front door and stands against it.

“Hey,” says the man holding me at gunpoint. As if I could have possibly forgotten him. “Focus. I’m still counting down from ten. Where’s Carol? Where’s the kid?”

“I don’t know anything about a kid!” I say. And that’s true. I don’t. “Carol vanished after I was arrested. I don’t have any idea where she’d go.”

“Four seconds,” he says.

“I don’t know!” I shout it at him, hopeless now, furious that after all that I’ve survived it comes to this,this. “Don’t hurt my family!” It’s all I can do in those last few seconds, beg for their lives. I feel like my skin’s too tight, too cold, like it might split open like a drum and let all the darkness inside spill out.

Time’s up. I get ready to die.

He doesn’t shoot.

He stares at me with dead, dark eyes and then turns to look at the man with the shotgun. “There’s supposed to be a boy here too,” he says. “Go find him. You, bitch. Down. On your knees.” He holsters my sidearm and takes the shotgun from the man who passes. He aims it right at me. “Down.”

If he was intending to kill me, he’d have done it by now. I risk a question. “Are you from the Assembly?”

It’s like I hit each of them with an electric cattle prod. They stiffen their posture and exchange looks. “Carol tell you that?” the man holding the shotgun asks. He sounds angry. “Get on your knees, woman. Pray. All of you! Down! Now!”

I lower myself down to my knees, hands still raised. Sam manages to move up so he’s next to me; I can feel the vibrating tension in him, the need todo something. But we are doing something. We’re buying time for Connor to get away and get help.

“Just let my daughter go,” I say. “Please. She’s a child. She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“She’s old enough,” he says, and I don’t like the way he looks at her, like she’s a piece of meat in a market. If I have to go out fighting, I will, andone movetoward my daughter...My whole body is trembling in time with the heavy, racing thud of my heartbeat. I’m coiled like a watch spring and ready to explode.

“Carol took a bus to Pennsylvania.” The lie comes out of me in a rush, and the words feel like they cut my tongue, they’re so sharp.

“A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall perish,” the man with the shotgun says. “Proverbs.” He aims at me, and I draw in a sharp breath. Fear is like a knife down my spine. “You’re lying.”

There are only two men now. The one with the shotgun, and the one who came from the RV and is blocking the front door. The third is looking through the house for Connor. I hear him opening doors down the hall.

I need to play for time.

“Check my phone,” I say. “I have a text.”

“God is watching you, woman,” the man with the shotgun says. I can tell he’s chewing it over, and I see a flash of frustration in his eyes. “Phone. Now.”

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