Page 152 of Things We Hide from the Light
“And now there are two kids watching.”
“Officers are en route. Two minutes out.”
Someone could poke a lot of holes in two minutes.
The brother jumped forward and made the wild slashing motion of an amateur.
Nash’s words rang in my head again. But it was either do nothing or let two idiots murder each other in front of children.
I tossed my phone on the seat, opened the door, and laid on the horn.
When I had their attention, I stood on the running board and shouted, “Cops are on the way.”
Both brothers started toward me.
“Seriously?” I muttered. “Why are criminals so stupid?”
I was laying on the horn again as they crossed the street when I finally heard the sound of distant sirens.
They stopped in the middle of the street, debating whether they had enough time to get to me.
I heard the squeal of tires behind me. A white panel van rolled up behind Knox’s truck and the door slid open.
A man in a ski mask hopped out, grabbed me by the wrist, and dragged me toward the van.
The brothers were running at us now.
“Get in,” Ski Mask said, pulling a gun out of the waistband of his pants. But he didn’t aim it at me. He aimed it in the direction of the advancing brothers.
“Um. Okay.”
THIRTY-ONE
WOULD YOU LIKE ONION RINGS WITH THAT?
Lina
“You guys didn’t grab me just to murder me, right?” I asked the van’s occupants. “Because you probably could have just let those guys back there do your dirty work.”
The driver and the passenger who grabbed me exchanged a look through their ski mask eye holes.
“No one’s gettin’ murdered,” the driver assured me. The sirens were getting louder behind us.
“Might want to hang on,” the passenger suggested. Just then, the driver took a hard left turn that had me hitting the floor.
“Ow.”
“Sorry about that.”
For abductors, they were pretty polite.
“Heard you’ve been trying to get a meet with Grim,” the driver said.
“Is that a problem or are you the welcome wagon?” I asked, rolling into a sitting position and wedging myself against the wall.
The van veered hard to the right as the driver cut across two lanes of traffic to catch an on-ramp.
“We’re clear,” the passenger reported.
