More pounding and a scream from below. Cameryn, yanking at the cardboard lid, felt the box fly out from her fingers. Bullets rolled everywhere, like pennies from a broken roll, bouncing hard on the wooden floor. Swearing at herself, she squatted, opened the gun’s chamber, and loaded a single pointed copper bullet into a cylinder. She could tell they had stopped talking. One of them asked, “Is someone else here? Seth-you check the upstairs.”
Out of time! One bullet was all she’d loaded, but there was no time left. Staggering to her feet, she ran down the hall, not caring if they could hear her footsteps as she pounded down the stairs. “Stop!” she screamed as she rounded the corner.
One man held Ruth by the hair, her blonde locks coiled around his wrist like a rope. Ruth’s face was covered in blood and a pool of it stained the kitchen tabletop, a deep red blot the size of a dinner plate. Her eyes were so wide Cameryn could see the white all around, but it was the man she had to keep locked in her gaze. His hand clutched a gun, not yet fully raised. He stared at Cameryn, his face grizzled, his lip curled.
“I said stop!” she cried. “Drop your gun!”
“You’re just a girl,” the man said with disdain. He unwound his hand from Ruth’s hair and gave her a shove. “You see that, Seth? Another Jezebel in this house of defilement.” Nephi wasn’t tall, but he looked strong, his arms thick with muscle. His buzzed gray hair topped a sunburnt face, seamed as elephant hide. A plaid cowboy shirt, the kind with piping and buttons that looked like pearls, gapped over his ample belly.
“I see her.” Seth’s blue cap with a stiff bill cast a shadow across his own weathered features. Both men wore boots, cowboy boots that came to a sharp point.
“Drop your gun!” Cameryn demanded again, her own gun so heavy she had to hold it with both hands. It shook in her grip.
“You know, Seth, I don’t think she’s got it in her,” said Nephi, his voice suddenly cool. “Look at her shakin’ like a baby.” His own gun had begun to inch up, millimeter by millimeter. He was staring at her. Cameryn knew he was calculating his odds.
Her voice unnaturally high, she cried, “I know how to shoot.”
“Do it, then. You’re just a female. You think you’re gonna shoot me? Then shoot me. But you’ve never killed, have you?” He grinned. “It takes a man to do that sort of thing.”
Cameryn could barely breathe. She watched as Nephi’s gun moved higher still. He was calling her out, his small eyes hard, challenging her.
She cocked the hammer and told him, “I’m warning you-”
“And I’m warnin’ you right back,” Nephi said. “You drop that gun, little girl. Drop it, and we’ll go. No one will get hurt.”
“Don’t believe him! ” Ruth cried.
Suddenly Nephi’s arm jerked up and in the same second Cameryn squeezed the trigger of her Magnum. As the deafening blast burst through the air like a sonic boom, she felt a recoil so sharp she almost lost her footing. A blue lamp, inches away from Seth’s head, exploded into thousands of tiny pieces, leaving bits of ceramic scattered across the carpet like mosaic tiles. Adriel let out a loud shriek and both Seth and Nephi jumped. She could sense shock and fury burning behind their immobile faces.
She’d used her one and only bullet. But they don’t know that, she told herself. Hold it together or we die.
The men stared at her, wide-eyed.
“Put your gun on the floor and kick it to me,” she commanded. “I’m serious. Kick it to me or I’ll blow your freakin’ heads off.”
It was surreal. Cameryn, who didn’t even like violent movies, was talking like she was in an old Clint Eastwood film. Neither one of them moved, so she said, “I’m not a girl, I’m a woman. And this is a Magnum. Do you really want to mess with a Magnum?”
Nephi’s gun clattered to the linoleum. It was Seth who kicked it to her, the revolver spinning like a whirligig until it was stopped by a table leg.
“Ruth,” Cameryn cried, “are you okay?”
Ruth nodded. Blood oozed out her nose, but she wiped it away. Her lip was cut and one eye had begun to swell. Leaning over, she picked up the gun. Ruth wobbled as she stood, but when she raised her arm, her aim seemed deadly. In a steady arc, the barrel moved from Nephi to Seth. Adriel sat crying in her playpen as Ruth said, “Hush, baby. It’s okay now. Mommy’s okay.” When Ruth spoke, Cameryn saw that her teeth were coated in red. “Cameryn, can you call the police?”
A siren wailed in the distance. “I already did. That’s them now.”
Ruth croaked a single word. “Good.” She swayed for a moment before righting herself. Keeping the gun pointed at the men, she walked past Cameryn to the front door, and throwing it open, she let in the light.
Chapter Seventeen
“… AND SO YOU’RE saying that’s when you shot the lamp,” the corporal continued as he jotted down her words. “I’m sure those two have never seen spunk like that from a girl. You must have been quite a surprise.”
“It was more of an accident than anything else,” Cameryn said. “I’ve never shot a gun that powerful before. The kickback about knocked my arm out of its socket.”
“It was enough to stop them.”
She sat in a small interview room in the Durango Police Station, an older building cattycorner to the La Plata County Courthouse. Corporal Dunlop wore a regulation deep navy blue uniform, and he had a regulation haircut, too, buzzed flat on the top of his head. In the sparsely furnished room-just a metal table and two chairs-a small wall-mounted camera recorded everything she said, both audibly and visually. What the corporal wrote down, he told her, would be for his own files.
“Well, after two hours, I think I can safely say we’re just about done,” he announced, leaning back and stretching. “I’m sure you’d like to get out of here. Plus, I’ve got a truck-load of people coming. The FBI is getting involved, and Social Services. That town over there in Four Corners was run lock, stock, and barrel by this Childs group. When your deputy… What’s his name?”
“Crowley. Deputy Justin Crowley.”
“Oh, yeah. When Crowley talked to the sheriff in Placement, he had no idea that the man he spoke with was actually their Prophet. Crowley obviously didn’t get a straight story from the guy.”
Cameryn twisted her hair around her finger like a ring. “I just don’t get it-how could the rest of the state not know?”
“Don’t be too hard on Arizona,” the corporal told her. “That group lived in a closed community, way out on hardscrabble land. Their children were born without doctors. No birth certificates, no death certificates. Makes them hard to track. According to Ruth Gilbert, dissenters were executed and buried in the Childses private cemetery. The FBI will be in Placement tomorrow, searching for graves. And you,” he said, smiling from behind his desk, “were the one who put it all together. Why don’t you forget about forensics? We lawmen could use someone like you.”
He stood, signaling they were done. Cameryn, relieved, shook his hand and went down the stairs into the December sunshine. She was shocked to see Lyric and her boyfriend Adam leaning against her Jeep. Lyric laughed out loud as Cameryn halted, openmouthed.
"Surprise!” Lyric cried, running forward to hug her. “Justin called and told me what happened. Your dad’s in Grand Junction-”
“Yeah.” Cameryn hugged her friend back, hard. “Dad told me he’s already turned his car around and is on his way home. I think I may be in for it.”