I’m where you dropped me.Send.
Please come back so we can figure out a plan B.Send.
Shayla’s phone rang.
“Get out of there.” Peter spoke softly and didn’t say hello.
“No. I have cell service here. Those photos for Izzy? They’re still sending.”
“Fuck.”
“Peter, we need to figure out—”
“Something’s up,” he said. “I’m hearing only bits of it, but our three bad guys are worried as fuck about something. I do know their boss—Nelson—will be here in about twenty-five minutes. Figure twenty. We are out of time. Wait, shh! One of them is saying something—I need to listen….”
As Maddie turned to watch, Stank broke away from Eddie and Dead-Eyes, moving toward her and Dingo. “Our best shot at surviving this is to kill these motherfuckers, right now! He’s going to kill them anyway—and if we do it for him—if he gets here, finds them dead, and us gone? He’s gonna let us go. It’s called détente. He’ll know that we won’t ever come back, and he won’t come looking for us!”
“That’s bullshit,” Dead-Eyes countered, following him. “Hewillcome after us. If we’re out there, floating free? He’s going to know that the second we hit trouble, the minute we catch a case, we’re going to be looking to make a deal.”
“You’rebullshit!” Stank exclaimed. “You’re a fucking idiot, Cody! No way are we going to cop to three murders just to make a deal—because that’s what we’d have to do. We’d just be screwing ourselves.”
“I’m just saying it’s fucking idiotic if we kill them and leave,” Dead-Eyes—Cody—said. “And do what, then? Go where? I say we kill them—and stay. We show Nelson that we’re loyal—and move up in his organization.”
“How about if I make a deal?” Dingo called out, his voice thin and reedy in the sudden stillness. “Right now. I’ll confess—to the police—to killing Daryl, if you let Maddie go. Right now! Just let her walk out the door!”
“Dingo! No!” Maddie said, but it came out “Mmph! Mmph!”
Pete could hear Shayla breathing on the other end of the call as he watched through the hole in the roof, as Dingo offered to sacrifice himself for Maddie.
When he’d first climbed up here, he’d secured his length of rope on an ancient antenna that had held his body weight. He’d tested it. And he’d coiled it there, ready to grab-and-go when it was time to slide back down to the ground.
“Hey,” he told Shay, as he picked up that rope now, as in the garage below he could see that the three armed bad guys had rejected Dingo’s offer.No deal! No deal!There was a fuckload of shouting. And when armed idiots got into a raging disagreement, it never ended well. “I think out of everything I told you, I left out the most important part, and that’sI love you. I didn’t want it to go unsaid.”
“Peter.” Her voice was thick with emotion because, as always, she knew what he was about to say.
“Call nine-one-one, Shay, and then get yourself to safety. Please. I can’t wait any longer. I’m going in.”
He cut the connection. Peter had cut the connection!
Shayla sat in his truck, stunned for one second, then two—but thenDo it!
She didn’t need Harry’s voice in her head to know that she had to move. Now. Fast.
Instead of hitting the emergency number on her phone, she dialed Lindsey Jenkins’s number, even as she put the truck into gear and peeled out of the lot, heading for the road that led to the front of the garage.
Maddie sawed frantically through the piece of rope that bound her wrists together. She’d made a stupid mistake, and cut through the rope that tied her to the pole, but if she’d done this one first, she would’ve already been free. Live and learn. Please, God, she wanted to live….
“We’re running out of time!” Stank shouted as Dead-Eyes and Eddie argued over whether or not it would work—Dingo confessing to killing his friend Daryl in a crazy drunken fight over some girl. Fiona. Fiona would like that. Fiona was going to love hearing that Maddie and Dingo were dead. Maddie sawed even faster.
“It could work,” Eddie said.
“Nelson’ll never go for it,” Dead-Eyes insisted. “You’re deluded if you think he would.”
“And you’re deluded if you think he’s going to walk in here and give you agood jobsticker for killing the girl. He’s going to kill! Us! All!” Stank had reached his limit, and he likewise reached into his jacket and pulled out his gun. With a roar, he turned and aimed it at Maddie.
And she kept sawing at that rope, even though she knew these were her last few moments on earth. Her last effort, her last breath, her last heartbeat.
She wished she’d never sat with Fiona in the stupid cafeteria.
