Walter was now on the front porch and looking through one of the windows before moving over to the door and knocking on it. He probably noticed right away that the doorknob was busted, that the only thing keeping the door closed at all was a shoe rack on the other side.
Instead of pushing his way in, Walter leaned toward the slight opening and shouted, “Lucy! Allie! It’s me! Can you guys hear me? You can both come out now! It’s safe! I promise, it’s safe!”
Goddamned liar, she thought as his voice echoed in the night air.
There was no movement from inside the house, and Allie held out hope that Lucy wouldn’t respond, that she would know something wasn’t right when Walter showed up with two strangers in an SUV.
Be smart, Lucy. Something’s not right. You can see it, can’t you?
But all that optimism quickly vanished when a figure appeared from the far side of the building, and a voice shouted, “Dad!”
Allie sighed as she watched Lucy run toward Walter, who hurried down the steps and opened his arms. The girl practically jumped into them. The two of them looked like the picture of a happy family reunion, except, of course, Allie knew better.
Who are you, Walter?
She heard a low, rumbling growl and looked down at Apollo, sitting next to her. He only had eyes for the two suited men by the SUV, and she wondered if he recognized the one who had tried to shoot him back at the house.
“Easy, boy. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Promise.”
Apollo looked at her for a second before turning back to the men in suits.
She did the same thing when she noticed the one back at the SUV was leaning against the hood of the vehicle, looking through a pair of binoculars. The lens seemed to be glowing neon green, and the man was looking right at her.
Oh, hell, she thought, when the man pulled the binoculars away and said something. The tall one turned around, and he stared in her direction for the second time. He pulled something out from behind his back, and she learned what that “something” was when the man pointed it at her at the same time a bright beam of LED light hit her in the face.
She flinched at the sudden stab of brightness even as Apollo let out a loud bark in response.
There goes the element of surprise, she thought, fighting through the pain until she could see again.
Her vision returned just in time to catch the tall man dropping the flashlight and brushing back his blazer, the moonlight glinting off the steel barrel of his Uzi’s attached suppressor.
“Run!” she shouted.
Apollo was a blur of movement next to her, vanishing from her side even before she had completely spun around and flung herself away from the tree line. She was still in mid-air when the trunk she’d been sitting next to exploded and showered her with bark. The woods began emitting a strong burning smell as 9MM rounds slashed through the darkness, chopping into anything and everything.
She crawled forward on her hands and knees, desperate to get as far away from the tree line as possible, the gun still clutched in one hand. She didn’t get up until the man had stopped shooting and branches stopped falling, and only then did she scramble to her knees, then hopped up to her feet and took off running.
Apollo was right beside her, easily keeping pace.
“Goddammit, why did you do that?” someone shouted behind her. She would recognize the voice anywhere. Walter. “We had a fucking deal!”
She ran on, snapping twigs and swiping at branches that seemed to be dropping out of the sky for the express purpose of hindering her escape.
Even as her legs pumped and her breath crashed against her chest, Walter’s words echoed inside her head:
“We had a fucking deal!”
She kept running, her thoughts jumbled with the last five months as she struggled to understand what was happening, how this Walter was even the same one in the almost-plain suit who nervously asked her out that first time. She remembered taking the initiative and kissing him on their second date after being disappointed that he hadn’t already done it on the first one two days earlier.
Who was the real Walter? Was it the timid single father she had reluctantly allowed to enter her life after a year and a half of being alone, or was it the one back at the house, who had shot Jack down like a dog?
Goddamn you, Walter. Who are you?
Who are you?
Chapter 18
“We had a deal!” Walter shouted, rushing over to where Monroe was standing. “You promised I’d get to talk to her first, goddammit!”
If Monroe was the least bit intimidated, the man didn’t show it. He calmly inserted a new magazine from his back pocket into the Uzi, then tossed the spent one. “I said I’d try. Big difference.”
“Not to me, it’s not.”
Walter clenched his teeth in frustration, but he didn’t forget where he was, or who (Lucy) was standing behind him right now. He said in a low voice that only Monroe could hear, “Don’t test me. You pull another stunt like that, and we’re done. You hear me? We’re done, and you can kiss all those millions good-bye and go back to working for table scraps from people like Gorman and Smith. Have I made myself clear?”
Monroe stared back at him, and Walter wondered how many ways this man, this professional killer, could end his life right now. Sure, he still had Jack’s gun in his back waistband — hidden, so Lucy wouldn’t see it — but what were the chances he could get it out to defend himself if Monroe should decide, right here and now, that the money wasn’t worth the trouble of putting up with him?
But he didn’t have to worry about that, because Monroe raised an amused eyebrow and took a step back, a clear signal that money was, after all, worth the trouble. “Whatever you say, Walt. You’re the boss…Boss.”
“That’s what I thought,” Walter said, and turned around quickly, so Monroe couldn’t see the relief on his face.
“Dad, what’s going on?” Lucy asked. She was watching him closely, the confusion and uncertainty on her face obvious under the bright lights. “Who was he shooting at?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Walter said, walking back to her. “It might have been the men from the house, the ones that held us at gunpoint.” He touched his ear over the bandage. “The same ones that did this to me.”
“Allie went back there. She went back to get you.”
“I know, and we’re going to find her. My friends and I.”
He threw a quick glance back at Monroe, who had walked over to the tree line, the Uzi hanging at his side. If Allie was still in there, somewhere, and armed, it wouldn’t have taken very much for her to pick him off. The Allie he knew couldn’t have done something like that, but this Allie, who knew about suppressors and had gone back for him even after being chased out here by Jerry…
I guess I didn’t really know her after all.
The question was: How much of the woman he thought he knew actually existed? She couldn’t have hidden everything from him. They were friends before they dated, then became lovers.
The irony was, he was worried about her reaction to all of this when he eventually got around to revealing the truth to her. There were a couple of times when he’d found the perfect spot to tell her about tonight’s plans. But he hadn’t, because he didn’t think she could go through with it if she knew, because he didn’t think she was “that kind of a girl.”
He almost laughed thinking about it now, but he didn’t, because Lucy was still watching him intently.