There are two pizza boxes with empty Mountain Dew two-liters strewn on the floor. Empty beer cans and take-out menus and all kinds of shit in the disaster of a front room. I don’t comprehend at first, but then, as I listen to him continue imploring her to understand the carnage he’s left in his wake, I see it.
On a TV tray near the guy in the chair, there is a half-eaten TV dinner and a Bud Light, and next to it, cutlery. I see the small steak knife and wonder if I can move the four or five feet and get a handle on it fast enough, but there’s no way. He’d be on his feet and I’d probably be dead before I could even reach it.
The man in the chair meets my eyes. He holds my gaze like he’s trying to communicate something, and then I look down and see that he’s stretched out one leg and hooked the side of his boot on the metal leg of the TV stand and he’s pulling it, inching it in tiny increments toward me to reach. It’s so subtle that Tom doesn’t notice. He’s locked on Sasha—explaining to her what their new life on a Mexican beach could look like. Cleaning up his misstep about Drew and including him in their grand plans—giving the kid a fresh start at a new school.
Sasha is locked in on him. She doesn’t let her eyes flit over to us for one second at the risk of giving us away. Once the TV tray is a couple of feet away, I start to lean, painfully slowly. A cold sweat is forming across my back, and my heart is racing. I keep my eyes on the side of Tom’s face as I lean the last inch and grab the knife, gripping it with my fist and leaping to my feet. I hold it over my head and see the spot right between hisshoulder blades. I go for that spot, but he’s on his feet, and as he raises his hand up to stop me, the knife sinks into the flesh of his palm.
The blade pushes all the way through and the tip of it exits the back of his hand. He screams in pain.
“Fuck!” He drops the gun and stares at his hand in shock before pulling the blade out of the muscle and tissue with a guttural sound that makes me shudder, and in this moment, Sasha gets up. She’s sobbing. I don’t know what she’ll do. The gun is between me and Tom and as we clamber over one another to reach it, Sasha runs.
She gets up and fumbles with the front door for a second and then she sprints into the inky black night and disappears in the trees. Tom tries to get a handle on the shotgun, but he has to make a choice, because the gun is too big to run after her with and he can’t let her go.
Then he does something that shocks and baffles me. He takes the steak knife, cuts loose the zip ties from the guy in the chair, and then... he runs.
And I finally hear the sound of sirens wailing in the distance.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Sasha
The rain turns from drizzle to a hard, pounding rain as she hears the sirens howl down the lane. She tries to run toward them, but she can’t tell which way that is in the darkness and the thick of trees. She feels Tom behind her. She hears his footfalls on the wet ground and hears his breathing, so she cuts a sharp turn and thinks she’s heading west of the house now, but in the darkness she’s only guessing.
She hopes that his pursuit of her means Regan and Raff will be able to escape, and if what Regan said is true and Andi is there and if she’s hurt, at least help is on the way now. All Sasha can do now is get as far away as she can. Tom has a new life planned for them all—he made an escape and a new identity sound easy. He made it sound like she has a choice, but she knows now what he’s capable of and there’s no choice. She has to reach the road. She can hear the sirens, maybe only amile away now. Maybe already on the dirt road leading to the house. She’s so close to escaping him and then...
There is a hand over her mouth and his arm around her neck. She coughs, gasps for breath and tries to cry out, but she can’t; he’s caught her. She can’t even beg him to let her go or reason with him because his grip is so tight and he’s dragging her with all his strength, back the way she just ran from. She realizes she’s practically gone in a circle and the dirt driveway is only yards away.
“Shhh, it’s okay, baby,” he soothes, forcing her into the shotgun seat of the pickup truck in the driveway and getting behind the wheel. He pulls out with a screech of the tires, headed down the wrong way—he’s driving into the wooded area on a path made for snowmobiles and hikers, not cars, but it’s the only way he can escape the police. There is only one road leading to Raffy’s house. Behind it is all woods and cliffside, so not to risk getting caught, he flies through the forest, branches scraping the glass, the truck bumbling and jolting. Sasha screams for him to stop, begs him, but he only drives faster, more recklessly.
“Slow down. Please, Tom. Stop!”
“You have to trust me, Sasha. I have a plan for us.”
“I’ll do whatever you want. Just... please. You’re gonna get us killed. Tom. The police are coming. Everyone in that house just witnessed everything. You can’t run,” she says, trying to make sense of it all and rationalize it in her own mind, but knowing deep down that if any of the stuff Drew showed her is true, Tom is so deeply cunning and evil. He probably has every step of this planned, an option for any outcome.
“Don’t worry about the witnesses. It’s all falling into place,”he says as the truck hits a low-hanging branch and the window cracks. Sasha screams. She feels like her heart can’t take any more. There’s blood seeping from Tom’s hand and covering the steering wheel and clutch. She feels like she’ll throw up. She shakily feels for her seat belt and buckles it, certain he’s going to crash into a tree at any moment.
“What’s falling into place? What do you mean? The police are on their way to that house.”
“Yeah. Good. Your deadbeat ex-husband is taken care of. I cut him loose.”
“What does that mean?” she yells over the driving rain and humming motor as she hangs on for dear life.
“His gun killed Andi. I wore gloves. The only fingerprints they’ll find are his. I’m sure there are years of his fingerprints on it. Not mine,” he says. “Tia’s headband was found by the kids in his firepit. I used his truck when I shot Jack. They didn’t see my face. Raffy is guilty. I took care of him for you. Even if we’d stayed at the house, I’m sure the police would find all of this verifiable and arrest him. But of course we had to run for our lives. He’s a maniac. We were in danger. I told you I’m taking care of this family. I’m only thinking of you. Now we’re free. Can you not see that? Jack was my last job. We’re out. Babe, can’t you see that this is amazing? It’s all behind us. And Regan? That’s just a happy accident—having the most unreliable and unhinged bitch in town shoot me when it’s her husband who committed the federal crime by faking a death? Didn’t expect that, but I’ll take it.”
As he talks and the weight of it all sits heavy on her chest, as each piece of the puzzle finally comes together, she sees the panic on his face before she sees what’s coming. The worldgoes completely silent as she watches his eyes bulge and his foot desperately slam the brakes. The car tires start to skid over the wet ground, but it’s too late. Tom can’t stop what he’s started. The cliffside is close. He can’t stop in time.
The truck crashes into the metal safety rail at the edge of the lookout, skidding violently through the steel and over the edge of the cliff. Sasha closes her eyes, gripping the dash so hard she’s sure her fingers are bleeding, screaming as her life unfolds before her, and that’s really what happens—she sees flickers and flashes of memory: a doll she lost when she was six, a school dance she left crying, a first kiss, Raffy singing karaoke on a cruise ship, Drew’s drum set he doesn’t know he’s getting for Christmas, Chloe’s drawing on the fridge—thoughts that don’t belong in this terrifying moment.
They soar through the air and her stomach flips and then she hears the crashing metal and her body is smashed and thrust into the dash and slammed back again against the side door, and she knows this is the last moment of her life and she wails for her kids that she didn’t protect and for Raffy. And then, when everything stops and finally goes quiet, she opens her eyes and finds she’s not dead.
The metal rail must have softened the blow and slowed the skid of the truck enough that it didn’t go soaring into the jagged rocks fifty feet down below. Instead, it dropped and crashed only eight feet or so onto a ledge of rock jetting out below as part of the walking trail leading down to the riverbed at the bottom.
The truck has flipped and dangles over the edge of the rock, threatening to drop with any sudden move, teetering on the edge. Sasha tries to take it in—where she is, and how delicate any movement is. She’s strapped into the seat, suspended and hanging precariously by her seat belt, upside down, holding her breath, terrified that if she so much as breathes, the car will plummet to the rocks below.
It’s so quiet. She looks to the driver’s seat, and Tom isn’t there. She squints in the dim light from the dashboard, which blinks as it shorts out.
“Oh, God,” she whispers to herself. She feels the truck shift and hears rocks beneath it crumble, then tap and knock as they fall the distance down the side of the cliff. She doesn’t move. She barely breathes. She hears Tom. He makes a low moan, but he’s not in the truck. She was belted in, but he must have been flung from the car on impact. He’s close, though.
