Roni lost what little color she had in her face, squirming in his grip to look at him. Terry eased the gun away from her neck, squinting at me.
He said, “That’s a load of crap.”
“I don’t think so. There was a reason you came looking for Lilly Chase before you went looking for the guns. Had to have been something more than her red hair that made you want to see her that bad, and she must have been glad to see you because you’ve been at her house so much I was beginning to think you’d moved in. I saw the way she touched you tonight, running her hand across your shoulders. I’d say she was thinking about asking you.”
“That shit don’t mean nothing!”
“Here’s the clincher. Lilly got pregnant while she was a teenager living at Rachel’s House. I did the math. You told me you disappeared the night of the Electric Park fire, fifty years ago. Lilly’s daughter, Martha, is fifty years old. She was pregnant when you ran away. She had your baby and never got married because she never got over you. And now you’re going to murder your granddaughter, the only child of your only child.”
Blood rushed from his neck into his face, turning him red, then purple with rage, his mouth twisting into a snarl as he flung Roni to the floor, raising his gun at me and aiming straight for my heart.
“You son of a bitch!”
The bullet should have struck me before I even heard the sound of shots being fired. In that instant, my body exploded in spasms, my knees buckled, and I wondered why there was no pain, but I knew the pain would come if I lived long enough to feel it.
It wasn’t until I saw Terry fall backward and collapse like a rag doll that I realized he’d missed me. As I corkscrewed to the floor, Roni scrambled to her feet, holding the Redhawk over Terry, the muzzle flashing and smoking as she pulled the trigger again and again.
She dropped the Redhawk and fell to her knees, crawling to Brett, turning him over and cradling his head in her lap. I managed to stand, steadying myself with one hand on the kitchen counter, taking deep breaths, drunk-walking the few steps to Terry’s body and picking up his gun and mine and the Redhawk, leaning against the refrigerator for support.
She looked up at me. “What now?”
“You surrender.”
She nodded. “It was self-defense. Just like before with Frank. I saved your life again.”
“And I’m grateful, but the first shot was probably enough.”
“Not after what he did to my grandma, leaving her pregnant like that. But everything will be okay now, won’t it?”
“Not for a long time. You’re in a tight spot.”
“But I didn’t know anything about the guns.”
“Then what were you doing here?”
She glanced around the room, blinking, her hands fluttering, her mind spinning.
“Brett called me. He said to meet him here. He was going away and wanted me to go with him. When I got here, he told me about the guns. He said he needed my help to get rid of them.”
“Why was he shuttling them from one house to the other?”
She brightened, her confidence returning. “The bank had a buyer interested in the other house. They were coming to look at it in the morning. He had to get the guns out of there.”
“That’s the trouble with making it up as you go along,” I told her. “It’s tough to make all the lies hang together. If that’s all he was doing, there was no reason to ask you to help and no reason to get rid of the guns. All he had to do was move them from one house to the other.”
“No,” she said, raising her hands in protest. “You don’t understand. He wanted out, and he wanted me to go with him. That’s what he said.”
“And you were going to run away with him and leave your mom and grandma without even saying good-bye. Is that it?”
She folded her arms over her chest, bending at the waist. “Yes. When he said he was leaving, I realized how much I loved him.”
“Roni, the moon isn’t pink. I hear what you’re saying, but we both know you’re lying. You remember what you kept telling me the last few days?”
“What?”
“You kept telling me that it’s over. Well, you’re finally right. It’s over.”
She sat up. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Sure you do. Frank and Nick were lousy businessmen, and Jimmy could barely hold a job. They let you pay their bills because they couldn’t even do that on their own. You told them they were finished if they didn’t find another way to make money. The stolen goods operation was your idea. You sold them on it and told them what to do.”
“No! That’s crazy.”
“Looking back, you’re right. But nobody wanted out of Northeast more than you did. You said so yourself, even your house was strangling you. Getting Jimmy to steal construction materials that Frank could fence was easy, but there wasn’t enough money in it to get you out.”
She eased Brett’s head out of her lap, scooting away, and started to stand. I pointed the Redhawk at her.
“I like you better sitting down.”
She slid back to the floor.
“Then one day, Brett told you that Cesar Mendez was looking to buy guns, and that was too good an opportunity to pass up, especially if you could build up an inventory so big that you could squeeze Mendez, maybe even threaten to sell the guns to another cartel.”
She ducked her head, avoiding me. “It wasn’t me. It was Brett.”
“I’m sure you let him think it was his idea. That way you could use him as the front man and Mendez wouldn’t know anything about you.”
She looked at him, reaching out, caressing his head. “He wanted to impress his father. Show him he really was a man.”
“And Nick, Frank, and Jimmy went along because they needed the money.”
“They were wiped out. The banks wouldn’t loan Frank and Nick another dime, and Jimmy couldn’t find work. It was a simple plan. It should have worked.” She started to cry, the tears coming fast, easy, and honest, but they were for her, not for him.
“I didn’t want any of this to happen,” she said. “I just wanted to get the money. Grandma still owed more than a quarter of a million dollars for my mom’s medical bills. She’d leveraged the house and everything else she owned. If we didn’t come up with the money, we’d end up like the others.”
“What happened to the money you got for the construction materials Frank Crenshaw moved?”
“I hid it at the house.”
“Why didn’t you split it up with the others? Everyone was broke. Didn’t they need the money?”
“Yeah, but I needed to keep them in the game more than they needed a few bucks. We were going to get top dollar for the guns, enough to get us all back on our feet. It would have worked, too, except Frank shot Marie.”
“You must have thought you were the luckiest girl in the world when Terry murdered Frank because there was no way you could have convinced him to keep quiet.”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. Everything just got out of hand.”
She and Adam Koch were reading from the same hymnal.
“Actually, things started to come unglued when Jimmy Martin picked his kids up to take them for ice cream. You just didn’t know it.”
She winced, like she’d been slapped. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Jimmy took his kids out for breakfast the day they disappeared. He was supposed to be stealing copper for you, but he couldn’t pass up the chance to be with his kids. I’ll bet you called him to see if the job was done and he told you he’d get to it later. That’s the way Jimmy did things. When he told you he had his kids, you told him to drop them off with you and pick them up when the job was done. Then, when he got busted, you realized you had a big problem if Jimmy talked, so you went to see him and told him that if he said a word, he’d never see his kids again.”
“No!”
I opened my cell phone and read the text message from Superintendent Fibuch. “Then why did you go see Jimmy at the Farm the day he was arrested and once a week after that?”
“I would never hurt those kids, never! I was going to give them back as soon as I got the money for the guns. I swear I was!”
“But Mendez wouldn’t pay your price, and you decided to hold out, make him sweat.”
“I couldn’t believe it! He wouldn’t pay, and Terry wouldn’t either.”
“People like Terry Walker and Cesar Mendez don’t negotiate like that. When they say take it or leave it, they mean it. It’s easier and cheaper to kill you and steal the guns.”
She wiped her face on her sleeve, forcing a smile.
“But it can still work out. Everything can still be okay. We can tell the police what I told you, that I didn’t know anything about the guns, that it was all Brett and the others.”
“That’s why you put two extra bullets in Terry. You didn’t care that he jilted your grandma fifty years ago. You wanted to make sure he was dead because he was the last one besides me who could tie you to all of this.”
“For God’s sake, Jack. I’ve saved your life twice. You owe me!”
“Not that much. Why would I let you walk away from this?”
She stood, her face grim, her lips peeled back.
“To save Evan and Cara. Back me up, and as soon as the cops say that everything’s cool, I’ll tell you where to find them and you’ll be a hero all over again.”
“And if I don’t?”
“Then no one ever sees those children again. I’ll go to my grave, and their parents will never know what happened to them. You have to choose, Jack. If you want to save those kids, you have to save me first.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m not bluffing, Jack. I’ve got nothing left to lose.”
I used the cord from a floor lamp and the belts Terry and Brett had been wearing to bind her to a kitchen chair.
“You know what people like you always forget? There’s no such thing as a simple plan. There are too many moving parts and too many things that happen that you never thought could or would. Like you paying the utility bills for this house even though it’s vacant, in foreclosure, and Nick didn’t have the money.”
Her eyes widened. “How could you possibly know that?”
I smiled. “See, that’s what I mean. It never occurred to you that when you left your office unlocked I’d walk in, look at your computer, and find the connection between Nick Staley and Forgotten Homes LLC. And I’ll bet you never thought I would break into your office tonight and steal your mail, but I did. I saw the utility bills addressed to Forgotten Homes and saw that the accounts were current. Nick didn’t have the money, but you did and you paid the bills.”
“The bank demanded that I keep the power on.”
“I believe you,” I said, walking out of the kitchen.
She strained against the belts. “Where are you going?”
I gathered my gun and Terry’s and the Redhawk. “Upstairs to get Evan and Cara.”
She slumped in her chair, defeated. “How did you know?”
“One of the bills was from the cable company. I doubt that the bank made you order Disney movies. At least you let the kids watch TV while they were locked away upstairs. After all, how much fun could they have, especially after you boarded up the windows? Be sure you mention that to the judge before he passes sentence.”
There were two bedrooms upstairs, both of them locked. I knocked on the door at the top of the stairs and heard the same hurried footfalls as when I came in the house.
“Evan and Cara, my name is Jack. Your mom sent me to bring you home. Move away from the door.”
I waited a moment and kicked the door open. They were huddled together on the bed, wearing pajamas, arms around one another. A lamp on a nightstand next to the bed provided the only light. Stuffed animals and other toys were scattered on the floor along with empty McDonald’s bags. A small television sat on a dresser, the screen blank.
“You’re safe now, but I want you to sit tight until the police get here.”
I left them to go back downstairs. I had to call Adrienne Nardelli, Quincy Carter, Lucy, and Joy. I was buzzing with adrenaline, and, for the moment, I wasn’t shaking. I made it to the top of the stairs when I heard a familiar voice.
“Hello, Jack,” Braylon Jennings said. “Walk down slow and easy and keep your hands above your shoulders.”
He was standing in the front hall next to Cesar Mendez, who was aiming a shotgun at me, one of his men from earlier in the evening backing them up. They were too happy to see me, Mendez taking my guns when I reached the bottom stair, emptying them and dropping them on the floor.
Jennings said to Mendez. “Go see what’s upstairs.”
Mendez cocked his head at the other man. “Alvaro,” he said, passing Jennings’s order down the line.
“I told you to go,” Jennings said to Mendez, “not Alvaro.”
Mendez screwed his face tighter than the grip on his shotgun, swallowed, and trotted up the stairs. It was Jennings’s way of reminding Mendez of the pecking order and telling me how wrong I’d been about Jennings.
He was on the Nuestra cartel’s payroll, sent by the home office to find the guns Mendez had promised. He needed Brett Staley to do that, which was why he had made certain Quincy Carter let Brett leave the hospital Sunday night and why he pushed so hard to get Roni released from jail when Brett went off the grid.
I wondered how he found me until my cell phone rang. I’d turned it back on a couple of hours ago, long enough for him to have picked up the signal and tracked me down. It was Joy.
“Give me the phone,” Jennings said.
I threw the phone across the floor, skipping it like a stone on a pond into the room with the duffel bags. Jennings motioned to Alvaro, who retrieved the phone as he launched a roundhouse punch to my gut, folding me in half and forcing me to my knees.
I clenched my jaw, seeing stars, sucking hard to find my breath as he grabbed me by the hair and pressed the barrel of his gun against my temple, the click of the hammer being pulled back echoing in my ear.
“You’re a piece of work, Jennings. How much is Nuestra paying you?”
“A helluva lot more than my pension, and that’s all you need to know.”
“Too many people know that Roni and I are here. You won’t be able to cover your tracks.”
“You’d be surprised what a remodeling fire will do.”
“Look at this,” Mendez said from the top of the stairs, the shotgun resting on his shoulder, aimed behind him and at the ceiling.
Evan and Cara were standing in front of him, quivering, crying silently, Mendez grinning like a wolf that had found his dinner. I knew there would be no negotiations, no keeping them talking while I thought of something clever to say. The kids were an impossible complication. Mendez and Jennings couldn’t let them go any more than they could let Roni or me go. They’d kill us, take the guns, and burn the house down before I could give them a reason not to.
Mendez was tall, looming over the kids, an irresistible target out of my reach until Jennings loosened his grip and lowered his gun and spoke what I hoped would be his last words.
“What the fuck?”
I grabbed his gun with both hands, flipping the barrel up, aiming at his chin, forcing my finger inside the trigger guard and blowing a hole through the top of his head. I yanked his gun free and shoved his body toward Alvaro, who fired wildly, hitting Jennings and coming after me.
I spun toward the stairs and put two rounds in the center of Mendez’s chest as he racked the slide on the shotgun. Mendez pitched forward, knocking Evan and Cara to the side, tumbling down the stairs and firing the shotgun. I flattened myself on the floor, the blast catching Alvaro in the face.
Bolting up the stairs, I swept Evan and Cara into my arms, the three of us sitting on the floor. They were crying, and I was shaking, their slender arms locked around my chest, squeezing me in a hug that did what no other hug had ever done: It made the shaking stop.