The handcuff popped open.
Tyler pivoted in his seat.
Trish ducked, and the handcuff chain snaked through the gap between the grab bar and the ceiling, the empty cuff coming with it.
Gunshot.
The rear window puckered, Tyler’s bullet missing as she dived to the floor, spread-eagle on Lilith, the Glock whipping toward her, and Trish seized the girl’s wrist and held the gun away, grappling with her in a tangle of limbs.
“Shoot her!” Lilith screamed the words. “Tyler, she’s on top of me, shoot her, shoot her!”
Tyler’s gun angled down, pointing blindly, and Trish threw her body to the left, the world cartwheeling, she and Lilith trading places.
Lilith’s eyes widened as she understood who was on top now. She opened her mouth in the beginning of a scream—
And Tyler fired into the rear compartment, two shots, three, bullets ripping through Lilith’s shoulder and abdomen and neck, Trish wincing as the deflected rounds burst out of Lilith’s body in new trajectories, drilling into the bench seat and the wall, and then Tyler was shouting, “Did I get her Lilith”
Blood foamed from the girl’s mouth. She sagged, dead weight, the Glock still clutched in her hand, muzzle pointed at the back of the driver’s seat.
“Did I get her”
“You got her,” Trish whispered, and she curled the forefinger of her left hand over Lilith’s trigger finger and squeezed.
The gun blew a scorched hole in the seat. Tyler wailed, a wounded animal, and his gun discharged, thunder rolling through the van, and Trish fired again, again, again, the driver’s seat bucking, the van skidding, her finger flexing convulsively, emptying the gun, until somewhere a horn blared, an idiot noise, monotonous and pointless.
She abandoned the Glock in Lilith’s frozen grip. Pushed the girl aside, struggled upright, thrust her head into the front compartment, and there was Tyler, dead, slumped over the wheel, his back blooming red roses, his forehead sounding the horn as the van weaved, driverless, at reckless speed.
The road veered to the left. Directly ahead, a dense stand of pines.
The van would meet those trees at sixty miles an hour less than three seconds from now.
76
Cain hustled Ally out of the Porsche. She struggled fiercely, her bound hands thrashing. He hardly noticed.
His thoughts were on the final stage of the night’s operation, so long delayed.
Mr. Kent would not like hearing his daughter raped and murdered just outside the closet doors. He’d told Cain to do her quickly, painlessly. But after all the trouble she had caused, she wasn’t going to leave the world without a scream or two.
Anyway-Cain smiled-it would do Charles good to eavesdrop on the girl’s death. The experience would put him in the appropriately grief-stricken frame of mind. He would cry real tears in the presence of the police.
Up the flagstone steps with Ally. Into the foyer.
Cain paused to retrieve his roll of duct tape.
“For you, sweetcakes,” he said, twirling the spool.
He was feeling fine. The plan had worked, actually worked. In spite of every imaginable setback, he would complete his assignment and earn his pay.
Five million dollars … split three ways now, not five.
He stepped out of the foyer, then froze. Ally stiff at his side, both of them staring at the doorway of the den.
Charles Kent stood there, gun in hand, standing guard over his wife and the Danforths.
There was a moment when mother and daughter locked gazes, a moment electric with a shared thrill of anguish, and then Ally sagged in Cain’s arms, resistance sighing out of her.
Charles ignored the girl. His frightened stare was focused on Cain.
“They got free, found a phone.” The words spilled out in a panicky jumble, his voice an octave too high. “I had to stop them.”
Cain pushed Ally effortlessly into a slashed armchair.
“Very resourceful, Mr. Kent.” He spoke in a monotone, aware that everything had ended for him, his hopes and plans, his grand dreams-all of it ashes now. “Where did you get the gun”
“From your duffel bag. In the kitchen.”
Cain nodded slowly. “From my duffel bag …”
“I checked the clip. It’s loaded.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
He was very calm. He breathed in, out.
In. Out.
The little ritual he always performed before a kill.
77
Trish lunged for the steering wheel.
Out of reach.
The wall of pines rushed closer. The horn blared.
She stretched between the bucket seats. Her groping hand closed over the wheel and wrenched it hard to the left.
Scream of tires.
The van skidding.
Trees blurring past the windshield.
Rattle of branches, shatter of glass. Forked fingers thrust through a side window, then whipped away.
The van careened into the middle of the road, still speeding at sixty, slammed by every rut and pothole, the shocks creaking like old mattress springs.
She had to get Tyler’s boot off the accelerator.
Grunting with strain, she squeezed into the front compartment. Her wounded leg pulsed with angry flare-ups of pain. The bandage might have come loose; she thought she was bleeding again.
The driver’s seat bucked and wobbled, the frame shattered. Roughly she jostled it, the open handcuff dangling from the locked cuff on her right wrist, a bauble on a charm bracelet, coruscating in the dashboard’s light.
With a gasp of effort she shoved the broken seat all the way back, then crowded next to Tyler and pried him from the wheel, silencing the horn.
Even in death, he wouldn’t let up on the gas. The speedometer crawled toward seventy.
She kicked his right leg until his boot lifted off the pedal.
The road curved again. She knew this spot. Intersection with Skylark Drive.
Kneeling on the edge of the driver’s seat, grappling with the wheel, she steered through a shrieking turn.
The van barreled north on Skylark. Toward the Kent estate.
She tried to find the brake, and then Tyler inclined sideways, his head in her chest, the blood-matted ponytail bristling on her chin like a wet paintbrush.
Get him out of the seat, out of the seat.
Reaching across the body, she threw open the door. Snatched the Glock from his slack fingers, jammed it in her waistband, pushed him away, and another sharp curve flashed out of nowhere.
She grabbed the wheel, swinging the van to the right.
