“Are they still-”

“Yes. I could hear some things breaking inside.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not that I can see.”

“Where should I-”

“By the carport. On the right side. It’s cluttered with all sorts of tools and engine parts. You will be able to see them, but not be seen.”

“Okay,” Hope said. “Keep an eye out. I’ll talk to you afterwards.”

Scott hung up. He leaned against the side of the old, ramshackle barn and watched. There was very little light, he thought. No streetlamps in this rural section of the world. As long as Hope clung to the shadows, she would be fine.

Then he stopped, because the notion that she would be fine made absolutely no sense whatsoever. None of them were going to be fine, he realized. Except maybe Ashley, and she was the whole reason they were doing what they were doing.

Scott wondered, if he was so crippled and scared by the night that was unfolding, how did Hope, who was the actual performer on the stage the three of them had created, manage to control her doubts?

Running crouched over at the waist, more like some feral animal than the athlete she had once been, Hope cut across the side yard and slid herself up against the back wall of the carport. She pivoted about, lowered herself to the ground, and took a moment to get her bearings. The closest houses were all at least thirty or forty yards away, across the street.

She rolled her head back against the wall of the carport and shut her eyes.

Hope tried to do some sort of odd inventory of her emotions, as if she might be able to find the one that would power her through the next few minutes. She pictured Nameless lying dead in her arms and then, in her mind’s eye, substituted Ashley for her dog.

This toughened her.

She managed to find a little more iron in the thought that O’Connell would come after Catherine, as well. She knew her mother would fight hard, but that wasn’t a fight she thought the older woman could win.

She added up all the threats to their lives and did the equation. She tried to subtract doubt and uncertainty from the sum. Everything that had seemed so clear-cut and obvious when the three of them were sitting in their comfortable living room now seemed perverse, wrong, and wildly impossible. She was sweating hard, and she knew her hands were shaking.

Who am I? she suddenly asked herself.

There was a moment, she remembered, shortly after her father had died, that she had truly been scared. It wasn’t so much the fear of being left behind; it was instead a fear of not being able to live up to what he’d wanted her to be. She tried to imagine that her dead father would have wanted her to be precisely in the position she was, with her head up against a wall, the night surrounding her, the damp ground seeping through her coveralls. He would understand taking a chance to protect others. He always wanted her to take charge, whether it was for good or for bad. You’re the captain, she could hear his voice in the darkness.

Hope thought that in that moment she was truly on the verge of madness.

Clear your mind, she told herself.

She pulled the balaclava down over her head, so that her face was obscured.

She reached inside the backpack and removed the gun from its plastic bag.

She slid her finger around the trigger. It was the first time in her entire life that she’d actually held a handgun. She wished she had more experience with weapons, but was surprised to feel a certain electricity flowing from the steel handle into her hand, an unfamiliar, almost intoxicating power.

Hope scrambled to the edge of the carport and listened to angry voices coming from inside the home as she waited for the right moment to arrive.

“I need to know what’s going on,” Michael O’Connell burst out. Every word he spoke was laden with years of hatred for the man smugly rocking in his lounge chair across from him, and with all the weight of his love for Ashley. He could feel his heart racing; it nearly made him dizzy with rage.

“What’s going on? You’re here, shouting about some girl, when you ought to be a whole lot more worried about whoever it is that you’ve made into an enemy,” his father said, waving his hand in the air.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t burnt anyone.”

The old man shrugged infuriatingly. Michael O’Connell took a step forward, fists clenched, and the older man finally pushed himself out of the chair, squaring his shoulders to his son. “You think you’ve gotten old enough and strong enough to take me on?”

“I don’t think you want to ask that question, old man. You’re looking a little paunchy and out of shape. That fake back injury of yours might start acting up for real. What you were good at was beating up on women and kids, and that was a real long time ago. I’m not a kid anymore. You might think hard about that.”

The chill in his voice caused the older man to stop. He puffed out his chest and shook his head.

“I never had any trouble handling you back then. You may think you’re all grown up, but I’m still a whole lot more trouble than you want to try to take on. I can still crush you.”

“You were a weakling then, you’re a weakling now. Mom used to hold her own against you. In fact, if she wasn’t drunk, you couldn’t even have beaten her. That’s how it really happened, isn’t it? The night she died? She was too drunk to fight back, and you saw your opportunity and that’s when you killed her.”

The older man snarled.

“I should never have lied for you. I should have told the cops the truth all along,” Michael O’Connell said bitterly.

“Don’t be pushing things,” the father replied coldly. “Don’t be going places where you got no right to go.”

As their words dropped in volume and increased in hatred, the two men had closed to within a few feet of each other, like dogs in that instant before growls turn into a fight.

“You think you could kill me and get away with it, like you did her? I don’t think so, old man.”

The father suddenly jerked forward and slapped his son hard across the face. The sound of the blow echoed in the small room.

Michael O’Connell grinned savagely. He shot out his right arm and seized his father by the throat. Closing his hand around the old man’s windpipe was instantly satisfying. As he could feel muscles contract, and tendons start to crush beneath his grip, he felt a passion that almost overwhelmed him. Panicked, the older man grabbed at his son’s wrist, digging his fingernails into the flesh, trying to pull free, while he felt the breath quickly choke out of him. As his father’s face turned a deeper red, Michael O’Connell suddenly pushed him back, releasing him. The older man slammed against a coffee table, spilling its contents. He grabbed at the arm of the lounge chair as he fell to the ground, pulling it over, and lay back, gasping on the floor, his eyes wide with surprise. His son laughed and spat at the older man.

“Stay there, old man. Stay there forever. But hear me on this: if you ever get a call from Ashley, or anyone connected to Ashley, and you promise them you will help them in any way, I will come back here and kill you. First I will hurt you, so that you will be begging for me to stop. And then I will kill you. Do you understand that? I’d like to kill everything in my past. It would make me feel a whole lot better. And the place I’d like the most to start with is you.”

The father remained on the floor, frozen. The son saw fear spread throughout the old man’s eyes and, for the first time that night, thought that the drive north had been worthwhile.

“You need to hope that you never see me again, you pathetic old man. Because the next time, you will end up in a box in a hole in the ground, which is where you belong. Where you’ve belonged for years.”

Michael O’Connell turned and, without a single glance back, went out the side door.