He popped off two quick rounds. They sounded like loud handclaps. The third round caused a sharp yelp of pain, a collision, and then silence. Neither the kids nor Larson made a sound. No one was breathing.
From above, a groan.
Larson led with the weapon and poked his head out the trapdoor. His first chance at standing, his legs throbbed with cramps.
“Come on,” he ordered the kids.
“You stay in the closet,” he told the boy as he pushed him up through.
And then he bent to pick up Penny. His hands touched her little waist. He felt it like an electrical charge. She placed hers on his shoulders.
“You’re bleeding,” she said as Larson clutched her and lifted her through.
“Never better,” he said, following her up through a moment later.
He checked the hallway. The man he shot writhed in pain. He’d taken one in the leg and one in the lower back. Larson tied him up with a lamp cord and left him.
The boy had peed his pajama bottoms.
“Shoes?”
Neither child answered, looking up at him with blank faces. It was mostly fairway. They’d go it barefoot.
He led them past the two downed guards in the front room, peered outside, and they made a run for it. With shots fired, although far from the manor house, he expected others.
The three of them running now across the dark fairway, the kids keeping pace, Larson felt sweat reach his wounds. He steered them for the unseen barn.
He pulled out his phone as they ran. He slowed, allowing the kids to run a ways in front of him. But at that instant the phone’s face lit up-neon blue-and announced the arrival of a text message.
Hope!
The sound of a stream grew close. They were nearing the barn.
Desperate for word from her, he read only a number on the small screen:
911
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
“Shots fired,” LaMoia reported into his headset. He told those in the van, “The spiders report hearing six to eight shots fired.”
There was no longer any need to await the AUSA’s warrant.
“Hampton and Stubblefield. Over the wall!” Rotem ordered. “NOW!”
All those in the back of the police van had spent the last ten minutes preparing for the raid. Hampton and Stubblefield, already having donned Kevlar vests and radio headsets, were handed white-phosphorus grenades and stun grenades by members of SPD’s elite ERT squad.
LaMoia said to Rotem, “Say the word and you’ve got twelve of our best special ops on the field with them and two sharpshooters with positions on the lodge.”
“How long?”
“Give me seven to ten minutes.”
“Okay, go, but I want no mistake. Your two spiders and three of my guys are going to be on the ground. No friendly fire. Positive makes or no shots.”
“Understood.”
Rotem also directed LaMoia to call up cruisers or patrol personnel and to seal every gate. Anyone attempting to flee was to be detained as a material witness.
Hampton and Stubblefield took off toward ladders set against the wall. Rotem’s phone rang, and he stuck it to his ear, too excited to hear at first, then stunned by the voice he heard on the other end. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!” he shouted, too loud for the small confines of the back of the truck. The men went immediately silent.
“It’s Larson,” he told the group. They’d heard the name bandied about, but probably did not understand the significance of the call.
“Go ahead,” Rotem barked into the phone, a trickle of sweat rolling down his cheek.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Philippe suspended the auction at seventeen million five hundred thousand, two families having formed a quick alliance across the table and pooling their money to win the witness protection list away from a Reno hotelier unwilling to bid higher. The hotelier’s father, brother, and two first cousins had all died of mob hits, and he believed the names of their killers were on that list.
Philippe called a ten-minute break, encouraging everyone to try the catered food. He’d done so not out of greed, but because this time one of his own men had interrupted, calling him from the meeting. First Ricardo, now him: embarrassing as all hell. But a few words whispered into his ear convinced him he’d had no choice.
“We’ve got the Stevens woman upstairs.”
For a moment he was dumbstruck, the news nearly unfathomable. He had men out sweeping the grounds while the Stevens woman had infiltrated the manor house?
He rounded the landing on the first floor in time to see outside: Ricardo climbing into the back of a black Navigator. Philippe hurried to get a better look. Katrina was propped up in back wrapped in blankets, her face smeared with blood, her eyes blinking but unseeing. The door shut and the car motored off, Ricardo calling out, “Back gate!”
“What the fuck?” Philippe asked his nearest soldier.
“Thrown from a horse,” the man reported.
More likely Ricardo had been pulled from the meeting because Katrina had been caught leaving him, and this was how he’d punished her.
“How bad is she?” Philippe knew it then: He’d kill Ricardo.
“Stab wound right below the tit,” the man said. “Like a fuckin’ machete got her, is what I heard.”
Philippe climbed the next flight of stairs heavy with concern over Katie’s condition, asking his guy to keep her situation monitored by the minute. He arrived into the empty suite of rooms on the third floor to see Hope Stevens sitting in a comfortable chair. She jammed her hand down into a crack in the chair and Philippe signaled his man over to inspect. He came up with the blue BlackBerry.
“You let her keep that?”
“Keep what?” the young kid said. “I never saw it.”
“You patted her down?”
“Of course I patted her down.”
“But not her crotch, did you?”
“What?” The man mistook the question, believing himself accused. “Listen, Mr. Romero, I did not in no way touch her in that kind of way.”
“Get the fuck out of here,” Philippe ordered him, disgusted.
Just before the man left the room, Philippe stopped him and asked for his gun. Alone with her now, he stepped closer.
“You have been one major pain in the ass, Ms. Stevens.”
She held her head down, her hands gripped firmly, pressed between her legs. “Let my daughter go.”
“Shut up.”
“Do what you want with me, but let her go.”
“Shut up.”
“She’s a child.” She looked up at him then, her eyes glassy but not tearful. “What’s the point in killing a child? What can it possibly gain you?”
“There’s nothing to discuss with you. You’ve wasted far too much of my time and resources as it is.” He came around the back of the chair.
Hope no longer could control herself. Her entire body shook. Her teeth chattered, and she heard herself whimpering. She so wished she could have been stronger at this moment, could have found the words to defend herself and put him in his place, this human monster who was behind her daughter’s abduction, her years of running, her loss of life despite her living. She managed to say, “You took away my life once already.” Then she added the words that were the most difficult of all to say; words she had practiced reciting from the moment she’d been discovered down the hall.
“God forgive you,” she said.
At first she thought he’d fired the shot and blown a hole in her head, that somehow she’d transformed herself at that moment, feeling no pain, rising above her own body to hear the gun’s discharge more distant and disconnected, more like a round of fireworks than the last sound she would ever hear.
But then a flash of light entered the room and she realized she could see that light. More fireworks went off. Only to realize he’d not pulled the trigger. He’d spun around to face the window frozen at the spectacle outside.