Page 262 of Things We Left Behind
“You should have listened to the warnings,” Wylie said sadly. “It shouldn’t have come to this.”
I debated sharing the news that the FBI would be closingin on both of them, then rejected it. They wanted me dead to protect themselves. Having absolutely nothing left to lose probably wouldn’t make them any more amenable to letting me stay alive.
“Where are we doing this?” Wylie asked.
“Do I look like I give a good goddamn where we kill the girl?” Atkins demanded.
“How about the front yard?” I suggested weakly.
“We’ll take her in the back of the house,” Wylie decided and waved his gun at me. But there was something in his stare. Something pointed. His gaze slid to the library cart just inside the living room doorway, then back to me. It was stacked high with several thick thriller novels.
He lowered his chin at me, and I nodded once.
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing me to walk into the living room.
I stepped into the room, the wall briefly hiding me from the judge’s view. Praying I hadn’t misread the signal, I grabbed the end of the cart and shoved it with all my might just as Atkins rounded the corner.
There was a crunch, a groan, and a muffled shot followed by three louder, rapid shots.
I patted down my torso and was exceptionally relieved to find no holes in me or my dress.
“Son of a bitch,” Atkins gurgled as he lost copious amounts of blood on my hardwood floor from wounds in his neck, chest, and torso.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” I chanted as Wylie picked up Atkins’s gun. “What do we do now?”
“I really hate to do this to you, Sloane, but you gotta understand,” Wylie said, pointing both weapons at me.
“Seriously, Wylie? Why the fuck do youstillwant to shoot me?” I screeched.
“Tying up loose ends. With you and the judge gone, there’s no one left to point a finger at me. The money I got from Hugo was nothing compared to what Atkins got. A fewthousand here and there. I never even cared about it. I only cared about the job.”
The job he’d abused. The job Nash had taken from him.
“So what if I made a little money on the side? A police chief’s salary ain’t nothin’ to write home about. I was proud of my work. And Nash Morgan took that away from me. I’m sure as hell not gonna let his little friend take my reputation too.”
I closed my eyes for a second as the realization sunk in. “You put Nash’s name on that list, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity. Metzer was makin’ a list. I helped him out. My fee was adding one more name.”
I shook my head. “So you set it all in motion.”
He shrugged. “I have a legacy to protect. It’s all I have left.”
“That’s not a legacy. That’s a pattern of bad behavior.”
“You don’t know what it takes to protect an entire town.”
“Yeah? Well, obviously neither do you. You put a seventeen-year-old boy in jail and let his abusive father nearly kill his mother becauseyou were fishing buddies.”
“Say what you want because it don’t matter. Only one of us is walking out of here tonight, and it ain’t gonna be you.”
“What are you going to do? Shoot me with the judge’s gun?”
“Seems like a good plan to me.”
I heard a squeal of tires on the road out front and prayed that help was on the way.
“No one is going to believe that you just happened to come upon a district judge threatening me and shot him,” I told him.
