She looked back toward the house — or where she thought it was. The truth was, she hadn’t fully oriented herself to the wood’s layout and there was a very good chance she was turned in the wrong direction.
“Allie?” Lucy said. “What about Dad?”
“We have to go for help.”
“But Dad…”
“I know. But we have to go for help first.”
She walked over to Lucy and, putting the gun in her front waistband, reached over and laid both hands on the girl’s shoulders and squeezed. Lucy eyed her back, but the rebellious teen who had made Allie question if dating Walter was worth the headache had been erased entirely from those brown eyes that were so much like her father’s. And just as big, too.
Walter…
“He’s safe for now,” Allie said. “It’s us I’m worried about.”
“How do you know he’s safe?” Lucy asked.
“They want your dad for something; something important enough to go through all this trouble. They were going to use us as leverage against him because they couldn’t afford to hurt him. So believe me, Walter’s fine back at the house. But he might not be forever, so what we need to do is go find help. Call the police, if they aren’t already on their way. That’s what Walter would want us to do. Most of all, he’d want you to be safe, and that means not running back to the house.”
She couldn’t tell if Lucy believed her, but the girl nodded after a few seconds. “You’re right. We should go call the police. That’s what Dad would do.”
Allie nodded, then glanced over at Apollo. “Anything?”
Apollo was turned back toward the house, and if he’d heard her, he didn’t show it.
“I guess not,” she said.
“Does he ever answer you?” Lucy asked.
“Not really, no.”
Without a word, Apollo turned around and walked over to them, then on ahead as if he already knew where they needed to go.
And maybe he did, she thought. Apollo, more than her and definitely more than Lucy, had spent a lot of time in woods like this one. It helped that his former owner had been a devoted hunter.
“Come on,” Allie said. “Follow the dog.”
She took the Glock out from her waistband and let it hang at her side (just in case), then threw a quick look over her shoulder. There was no one behind them, definitely no Jerry with a reloaded MP5SD or Jack with his assault rifle. But that didn’t mean they weren’t back there, somewhere, tracking them.
And further back, between her and her pursuers, was Walter.
What did you do, Walter? What did you do to put us in this mess?
But there were no answers to be found behind them, so she turned back around.
Ahead of them, Apollo was slipping into a dark patch of shadows, and she and Lucy followed wordlessly.
Chapter 8
Jack left the door open so he could hear the tap-tap-tap coming from inside all the way from the living room. He didn’t worry about Walter getting brave all of a sudden and making a run for it. If Walter hadn’t been the action-first gung-ho type before, he wasn’t in any position to morph into that now, not after what Jack had done to him. So the tap-tap-tap was like music to his ears, every tap representing another step closer to the kind of life he’d always wanted but always seemed out of reach, until now.
He cleaned the blood off the Ka-Bar using one of his pant legs, then put it away. He had gotten specks of red on his fingers without realizing it. It was probably when Walter began struggling, once he realized what Jack was going to do. That was okay, because Jack was used to blood, and he swiped his hand on the same pant leg.
He stopped in the living room and looked around when his right ear clicked.
“It was a dark and stormy night, and I’m stuck tracking down two chicks and a dog,” Jerry said through the earbud. “Minus the stormy part, anyway.”
“What’s your situation?” Jack asked.
“Wishing I was somewhere else.”
“Besides that.”
“I’m still tracking them. The dog’s like a ghost, but the two humans are leaving plenty of clues. Don’t quote me on it, but I think I’m somewhere between the house and one of the neighbors. Close enough I can see lights in the distance; looks like LED lamps with auto sensors. Good news? I don’t see any cops.”
“Can you hear sirens out there?”
“Negative. Of course, they might be waiting until morning to show up. We’re not exactly in the city, are we? Shit tends to run slower out here, or so I’ve heard.”
Hope springs eternal, Jack thought.
The lack of police sirens or any law-enforcement presence at all was more than he could have hoped for. It was a good sign Walter’s neighbors were MIA, and like Walter, were using their houses out here as a vacation spot instead of a permanent residence. He would have loved to know for sure, but they hadn’t had time to investigate the surrounding area when they first arrived. It was yet another reason why he hated taking jobs without the lead time for proper preparations.
“Report in as soon as you can,” Jack said into his mic.
“What about Jones?” Jerry asked.
“He’s dead.”
“Aw, man.”
“The dog took a chunk out of his neck. Bled out in the room.”
“So they didn’t shoot him?”
“No.”
“Still, death by fangs… Damn.”
“Concentrate on what you’re doing out there. I have everything under control at the house. Everything’s back on schedule, and we’ll be done by morning.”
“What are you going to tell the client?”
“About what?”
“Didn’t they say not to hurt Walter?”
“Yeah, well, desperate times,” Jack said. “Just get your part done.”
“Back atcha,” Jerry said. “Over and out.”
Jack resumed walking through the living room, looking left, then right, trying to find an answer to the question that had been nagging at him ever since he found Jones’s body: How the hell had the dog gotten into the house after they had locked all the doors and windows?
They had locked all the doors and windows, hadn’t they? Of course they had. Then again, that was Jones and Jerry’s job, and what was that saying about doing something yourself if you wanted it done right?
The question was going to drive him insane the more he thought about it. Maybe it didn’t matter anyway. The dog was gone; it’d gotten what it came for: Its owner, the woman Allie. There was no reason for it to come back, because there was no reason for her to come back. If she was smart, anyway, and Allie had proven to be pretty goddamned smart.
He shook his head and headed back to Walter’s room to check up on the work-in-progress when gunshots echoed in the distance from outside the house.
From the woods.
Jack stood still and listened. He couldn’t tell how many shots had rung out, but they had to have come from a distance because he could just barely make them out, and wouldn’t have if the house weren’t so quiet.
He hurried to the front doors, clicking the PTT as he went. “Jerry, report.”
There was no response.
At the door, Jack made sure it was still closed. They had deactivated the alarm as soon as they had secured Walter and the women as a precaution, and he had to lock the door the old-fashioned way now by manually twisting the deadbolt into place.
“Jerry, answer me.”
Still no response.
He peered through the security glass at the top of the door. Walter’s vehicle was the only one parked in the front yard, the SUV he, Jones, and Jerry had arrived in earlier still hidden in the woods. It was too dark beyond the halo of the lights to make out anything that wasn’t a trick of moonlight.