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No shit, Walter, she thought, before looking over at Monroe. “What about him?”

Monroe wasn’t moving quite as easily next to them as before. He was clearly struggling with every step, his eyes permanently fixed on the ground. She still had to marvel that he was even moving at all. If he had heard a word of their conversation, he didn’t show it.

“He’s a company-hired gun,” Walter said. “It turns out I wasn’t being nearly as subtle as I thought leading up to tonight. They’d already suspected even before I started moving the money around and had been tracking me.”

“But you were working with him. Monroe.”

“Not at first, but I convinced him he could make more money by not turning me in.”

“You talked him into double-crossing Gorman and Smith?”

“It wasn’t that hard, Allie. Everyone wants a retirement package. Even hired killers like Monroe.” He paused for a moment; she could feel the sales pitch winding up, and he didn’t disappoint her. “Things didn’t work out like I planned. We won’t be able to talk our way out of this now, but we don’t have to. Forget about returning to the city. We could leave now and never look back. Ditch our old lives and start all over again.”

“Start over where, Walter?”

“Does it matter? It could be anywhere in the world, Allie, and we’d never have to work another day in our lives. You, me, and Lucy.”

“Lucy doesn’t know…”

“Of course not. But I thought about telling you. God, I almost told you so many times…”

“But you never did.”

“I didn’t think you’d go along with it.” There was something in his voice, almost accusing, when he added, “That was before tonight.”

He finally found the courage to stop and turn around, and his eyes sought her out. She didn’t know why, but she didn’t point the gun at him, and at the same time wasn’t afraid he would lunge at her. Maybe it was because she could see the old Walter in his eyes, but the new one Walter was also there, too, which was probably why she never took her finger off the trigger.

“I did this for us,” he said. “For our future. You have to believe me.”

“I do.”

“You do?” Surprise — maybe a little bit of shock — registered on his face. “You believe me?”

She nodded. “I believe you.”

“Allie, that’s great!” he said, and the confusion was replaced by a big old Walter-like smile.

“Except you don’t get it.”

The smile stuttered. “Get what? What are you talking about?”

“It’s not a matter of me not believing you, Walter.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s about me thinking you’re delusional.”

The smile vanished, replaced by the beginning of a frown. “I don’t understand…”

“The fact that you think we could just pretend tonight never happened, that we could just move on as one big, happy family. You’re out of your goddamned mind, Walter.”

His frown deepened and for a moment she thought he might start to cry, and she felt amazingly sorry for him. “I thought you understood.…”

“I do. And it doesn’t change a damned thing.”

“Allie.…”

“Turn around, Walter.”

“What?”

“Turn around. We’re going to walk back to the house, get Lucy, and we’re going to get into that car and drive away from here.” She tightened her grip on the gun. “Then I’m going to turn you in to the police and you’ll tell the Feds everything. About Gorman and Smith, about tonight, everything.

“Allie…”

“Shut up and turn around and start walking.”

He sighed and was turning around when a loud bang! shattered her eardrums and something wet and clumpy hit her in the face.

Allie fell to her knees even as the gunshot echoed, and she managed to scrape enough of the material out of her eyes to see—

Walter on the ground on his stomach, his head turned sideways, his face toward her, frozen in that same frown she’d seen just a few seconds earlier. There was a hole in his forehead that hadn’t been there before.

A second bang! and Monroe collapsed to the ground beside her. He fell and lay still, staring up at the dark sky beyond the tree canopies. In an odd way, she thought he looked almost relieved.

Allie had forgotten when she had dropped the gun, but instead of looking for it, she could only focus on the sticky substance caking her face. She scraped at them with both hands, flicking blood and something thick (Don’t think about it) clinging to her skin, as boots appeared out of the bushes and from behind trees.

Men in black clothing surrounded her. They were carrying rifles, moonlight flickering off the long, polished barrels. She recognized the sleek frame of their weapons — AK-47s. Assault rifles. They all wore gun belts, all except for one. The man had on dress slacks and a white dress shirt with a sleek blood-red tie. He emerged from between two massive trees and stepped over Walter’s prone body toward her.

He crouched in front of her, took out a silk handkerchief, and held it out. She spied a pair of initials in the corner: D.W.

“Long night, huh?” the man said.

She grabbed at the proffered fabric and wiped at the pieces of Walter still clinging to her face. There was so much of it that she couldn’t reconcile how it had all come from that small hole in his forehead, but then she remembered she was looking at the entry hole, not the exit…

“Was that you that fired that shot earlier?” the man asked. “That’s how we knew where you were, you know. Then there was all that chatter. Walter, begging, as he’s wont to do.” The man glanced over at Monroe’s body. “I told them one-shot, one-kill, and look. Talk about professionals.” He fixed his eyes back on her. “You look like shit, Allie.”

She focused on the man’s face and couldn’t remember the last time she had personally seen him outside of Gorman and Smith. All of her interactions with Daniel “Dan” Wasterman, her boss, were always at the office.

“It’s definitely been a long and violent night, that’s for sure,” Dan said, standing up. “But it’s almost over. Just a few more hours to tie up all the loose ends; then we can all go back to our regularly scheduled lives. Well, for some of us, anyway…”

Chapter 20

“I was the one who recruited him, you know,” Dan said. “All three times. The first time was when he came to work for us, then again when he stumbled across our dirty little secret; and finally, for this job. The irony is, Gorman and Smith didn’t always use to hide ill-gotten money for bad people. We really were, once upon a time, an honest to goodness, well, honest enterprise. But, you know, reasons.”

The more Dan talked, the more she wanted to punch him. Better yet, drive a knife through the back of his skull. She’d never hated anyone more than she did him now. He walked in front of her, hands in his pockets, like he owned every old tree and inch of ground around them.

He didn’t have to pay any attention to her or their surroundings, because the well-armed men in black military-style clothes did that for him. There were four of them, and they looked every bit like Jack and his two comrades — except deadlier and more silent. Two of them walked up front, flanking Dan, while the other two followed closely behind her. They hadn’t restrained her, but they didn’t have to. She had no illusions that she could escape from them. Not for one millisecond.

“Your résumé left out a few things about your past,” Dan was saying. “Walter called me post-Jack, told me what you did. Let’s just say we were both speechless.”