Jake glanced at his mother. She looked for a moment at her husband, then turned to her oldest son. The expression on her face told him all he needed to know. “Just do it,” she mouthed.
Jake narrowed his eyes, and grunted in frustration. “Whatever,” he said. He flapped out his hand and tossed the comic in Davey’s general direction.
But the comic hit the front seat instead and ricocheted into the side of Liz’s face.
Liz stared wailing as Davey grabbed for the book. She pushed at the comic, knocking it from Davey’s hands and onto the floor.
“Mom!” Davey screamed. “He did that on purpose!”
Liz’s cries grew louder.
“I did not!” Jake said.
More crying.
“Liz, honey, it’s okay,” their mother said, turning to the back seat.
“He threw it at me!”
“I was holding it out to you, not my fault you can’t catch.”
“Liz, sweetie, it’s okay,” their mother said. She slipped her shoulder strap off, leaned between the seats, then rubbed her daughter’s cheek as Liz continued to sob.
“I can’t reach it!” Davey wailed louder than Liz. He was stretched out as far as he could go, but the comic book was still beyond his grasp.
“Jake, please pick it up and hand it to your brother.”
“He’s the one who dropped it,” Jake said. “He should—”
“Enough!” Harold Oliver roared. Jake looked up. The side of their father’s face was red with anger.
“I’ll get it,” Davey said quietly. He unbuckled his car seat and leaned down to the floor.
“I tried to give it—” Jake muttered.
“I said
The police later said that it could have been a rock in the road. But the more Jake thought about it, the more he suspected his father accidentally turned the steering wheel a few degrees to the left as he looked back at his kids.
Whatever the reason, the car changed direction just enough so that when Harold looked back, there was no chance of avoiding the deep drainage ditch that paralleled the opposite side of the highway. The best he could do was to keep the car from going straight in. It slammed down on the driver’s side before coming to rest against the slope of the ditch, flipped partially on its roof.
A broken leg, a broken clavicle, a gash on the side of a head.
And one dead son.
That was the tally.
The only one to come out of it basically unscathed was Jake. Bruises from the impact, a few cuts and abrasions, that was all. If only he’d been hurt worse …
Though his father had never openly placed the blame on him, Jake was sure that’s how he felt. Because, deep down, that’s how Jake felt, too.
They laid Davey to rest five days later, Harold on crutches and Jake’s mother with her left arm strapped across her chest. Liz sported a bald patch on the side of her head covered with a bandage. Beneath was the gash that would form a scar that would be with her the rest of her life.
The scar Jake bore—that Quinn bore—was invisible, but just as permanent.
PETRA AND MIKHAIL FOUND A MOTEL 6 OUTSIDE of Lowell, Massachusetts. Petra dragged herself to her room, then tried to sleep, but it just wasn’t happening. At 4:30 a.m. she gave up.
Kolya, like Luka, was dead.
She had known at the start of their mission that death was always a possibility. But she had expected any bullet would have hit her, not one of her team members. But twice now, it had happened. At least, unlike with Luka, she wouldn’t have to tell Kolya’s family. They had all died when he’d been just a child. It was why Kolya had joined the search for the Ghost in the first place. If he had any family at all, she and Mikhail and the others in their group were it.
She tried to push him from her mind, but what filled the void was just as devastating. All of them, every person on her list, was dead. Chang, McKitrick, Thomas, Winters, the others before them. And now Moody.
His death was the hardest to take. They had found him alive. They had even talked to him. He knew people in the photograph. But the final step, identifying the two strikingly similar young men standing at opposite ends of the bar, had not been completed.
With Moody dead, the trail to the Ghost had disappeared. That was unless Stepka could pinpoint who the Ghost had hired to do the killings. If he failed, the Ghost would live up to his nickname and fade away. Forever lost, and forever unaccountable.
She knew she should wait for Stepka to get back to her, but doing so would make her crazy. She turned on her side and grabbed her phone.
“What?” Stepka said as he picked up.
