In that case, there is another person here Tom is focused on, so maybe I can take the chance to escape. But I really have no idea what’s happening. All I can do is pray, close my eyes and swing away. When the doorknob cracks, it falls to the ground, and I kick open the wooden shed door and I’m outside. Mercifully, I’m outside. I try to quickly assess whereI am, but I have no idea. I can tell it’s a rural homestead on a cliffside. These cliffs run for miles to the east, and I can see through a clearing of trees in the distance where it drops off. But whose house is this? Whose truck, whose shed?
I see the firepit a few yards away, and the fire Raffy was sitting by is just embers now. My bag is there. Clearly tossed in the fire and mostly melted into a clump of waxy makeup and charred leather, but the strap hangs over onto the ground, which is how I recognized it, and there’s my phone! It’s there. Inside the brick surround of the pit, it lies in the ash away from the fire. It must have tumbled out as it was thrown. A lifeline.
I rush over to it and snatch it as quickly as I can. I stab my finger at the screen and it lights up. The relief that washes over me almost brings me to my knees. The last person I called in the flurry of phone calls I made before I drove over to Sasha’s was Regan. When I open my call app to push 911, her number blinks at me, so I just tap on it and share my location with her. Then before I can even begin to dial 911, the phone is soaring into the air and skidding across the muddy grass... and Tom is there. He has a hard grip on my wrists, and he ties them behind me again before I can fight back. It’s so fast.
Then he snatches the phone from the ground and drops it onto what’s left of the burning embers in the fire, and I watch it melt.
“Why?” I scream in his face. “What do you want from me?” He doesn’t respond, which is even more frightening. He just pushes me back toward the shed, and I feel desperate.
“I won’t tell anyone I was here if you just let me go,” I say, because all I can think is that I got in the way. He thinks I know more than I do—those papers hold his secret, which iswhy he had to silence me, but I don’t know anything. The papers were nothing but confusing to me, and if they did point to him, I missed it. And anyway, he has the file now, so why keep me if I have no proof?
“I don’t know why I’m here. Whatever was in that file, whatever you think I know about you, I don’t. I don’t understand any of it. I’m not gonna go to the police, I promise,” I plead, but he just keeps silent and when we reach the shed door, he pushes me hard, trying to get me over the threshold, but I’m not going back in there. I resist and push my weight back against his shove as hard as I can, and I stumble forward. Just as he thinks I’ll fall into the dark, awful room, I grab the door frame and I don’t fall, I fight.
He didn’t expect me to be strong; I can tell by the look on his face.
“Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do,” he says, and I lunge at him, swiping at his face with my hand, catching his skin under my nails. He holds his hand up to his face, surprised, and looks at the spot of blood on his fingers when he pulls his hand away. Then he looks at me. He has me trapped with my back to the threshold and no weapon, and I see rage flash in his eyes, so I duck under his arm and I run.
There’s a long dirt drive that leads to a narrow two-lane road several yards down a muddy, sloped yard, and I sprint toward that road, without a moment to think about what I’ll do if I reach it or how far away any other houses or help might be. I just focus on escaping this psychopath, but he’s only a few steps behind me.
I round the side of the house, struggling not to slip and fall in the wet, slick grass, and just before I reach the driveway, I feel his hand swiping at my back. He gets a hold on mysweatshirt, and it stops me cold. I hit the ground, and he loses his grip. I scramble to my feet, but he’s already hovering over me, and that’s when I see the gun.
He pulls it out from where it’s been stuffed in the back of the waistband of his jeans. He doesn’t want to use it, I tell myself. He doesn’t want to kill me or he already would have. He looks flustered and panicked.
I can’t run because all that goes through my head is being shot in the back before I can reach the road. I have to reason with him. I have to believe he doesn’t want this.
“Tom, please,” I say, inching back, showing my palms in surrender, covered in cold mud and shaking. What else can I do but plead? He seems annoyed at the use of his name, so I change tack.
“Just tell me what you want,” I say, and I feel the tears climbing my throat as I think about Rox and Dez, and the fear that I won’t make it out of this alive becomes real as I’m staring down the barrel of a gun, having no idea why I’m here—what I did, what he wants. “I’ll give you anything you want. I have two kids at home—I have to go home. Please. Anything. Just...” And then I make a snap decision that I have to keep fighting, because his face is hard and emotionless and he won’t fucking speak, so I have to guess at his next move and his motives and I have to try... so I just lunge at him, and because he doesn’t expect that, I manage to bump the gun from his hand and it hits the ground and fires.
The sound is shocking, but I don’t hesitate. I clamber over to where it fell, just a few feet from where Tom is standing, dropping to his knees to grab it, but I get it into my hand just a fraction of a second before him. He grips my arm and tries to pry it away from me.
I scream in his face. “Fuck you. Let me go, you psycho!” But he bends my arm and it contorts so painfully that I’m forced to drop the gun and then... everything that happens after that is a blur of colors and light because it’s all so fast, so surreal, it feels like slow motion. Before I can process any of it, the gun is back in his hand and I hear the shot, and it takes a moment to realize I’m bleeding. I look down and see bright red spreading across my sweatshirt. I hold my hands over my stomach in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding, and then everything starts to fade.
Bursts of white light flash behind my eyes and then I feel impossibly cold and calm as I collapse to the wet muddy earth. I feel the blood pooling underneath me, and I know I don’t have much time.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Regan
I sit on a vinyl bench in the dark hallway at the hospital, waiting to hear how Jack is doing, if he’s okay. When I called the medics, they came fast considering the location, and now I just sit and pray, over and over again, that he’ll make it. I just got him back, please, God.
I told the police everything he said—that Tom Blanc is the brother of the man Jack put in prison and the family has a criminal history. I can’t prove it was him, though. I didn’t see his face and I had never seen the truck before. I was running for my life, so it’s not like I stopped to take down plates. It’s just like Jack said. They can do something like this and get away with it, but that seems impossible.
All they can do is question him, so they’re headed to Sasha and Tom’s house now. I tried to call Sasha—to warn her—but her phone goes right to voice mail. I told my mom to pickup Hallie from school, and I didn’t answer all of her questions because the less she knows, the better. There’s nothing more I can do to protect my family at this moment unless the police find something, anything, and can make an arrest. How likely is that if this family has gotten away with unthinkable crimes for years? Is Sasha a part of this? Does she know?
When my phone buzzes, it echoes down the hollow corridor and jolts me out of my thoughts. I fish it out of my bag and see a message from Andi. I stand up and my hand instinctively flies to my mouth. There’s no actual message. It’s just a location. It’s almost forty miles away near the cliffs in Pine Bluffs. But there are messages from earlier I didn’t look at. She tried to call me, saying she was heading to Sasha’s. Said she needs to talk to me about Jack and sent a series of photos from her phone. A photo of Jack’s real name, a photo of Dominic Terreli, who I now know is Tom’s brother in prison. Does Andi know that? She didn’t give an explanation... just said that it’s urgent we talk. Oh, my God. Jack was right. None of this is coincidence. It’s all connected.
She’s left a voice mail just now. I’d ignored any calls or messages that weren’t about my daughter getting to her grandmother’s or about Jack, so I just now click to listen.
There’s no message. It’s just white noise until I hear her in the background. She’s muffled, but I hear her screaming. “Why? What do you want from me?” Holy shit. My pulse races. Then there are sounds of a struggle and I hear her say, “I won’t tell anyone I was here if you just let me go.” Jesus.
I call the police, who tell me I have to call the police in Pine Bluffs. When I do, they tell me the best they can do from my statement is a welfare check, but they need an exact address. I don’t have one. I have an area to look in, but Andi’s phonedidn’t send an exact address. Maybe because it’s so rural, or because Andi’s signal strength wasn’t great. And the photos are meaningless to the cops. I babble, trying to tell them how I think this string of events is related, and they tell me to come in to make a formal report. I don’t have that kind of time.
I tell a nurse I’ll be back in a little while, because there’s nothing I can do sitting here right now anyway. What if this is my only chance to catch the son of a bitch? This could be my only opportunity to avoid running for the rest of my life and leaving my family and always living in fear. What if this is the only way out? I could be wrong, but I have to at least try. Is my life more in danger doing nothing and waiting to be picked off? And what about Andi? The police can’t send someone out to an approximate location, and they don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about when I spout about drug lords in prison from an arrest ten years ago, and they can’t exactly act on my conjecture. It’s up to me.
I take a taxi the few miles to my house, and when it drops me off, I move quickly. I open the garage and take the Remington 870 out of the safe. Jack’s old pickup, the one he always wanted to fix up but never had time for, is still sitting here—I’m so glad now that I didn’t have the heart to get rid of it. I shove the gun onto the floor of the truck and screech out of the drive to find the place on the map Andi sent me.
It takes me to a rural road lined in evergreens and boney oaks that have shed most of their leaves. The location she sent indicates this road, but I have to find out where she is exactly. There are only three houses on the whole mile stretch. It’s dusk now and a light rain starts to fall, but I can still see down the long driveways as I pass in the afterglow of the sunset, and I can make out the shapes of the houses and see movement.The first house is 12091 and there is a mother with a baby on her hip closing the car door in the drive and hollering into the house for help with her bags. She looks down the drive at me with something between a scowl and confusion at my presence. Not the one. The next house is dark, so I pull in and creep up the drive with my light off. I see the figure of an elderly man in the front window. The television illuminates the dark front room, and I see his silhouette. He stands and comes to the front door, peering out at me.
