burst from the Ml6.
Grace's eyes were fixed on some distant point in the blackness as she remembered how ready she'd been to kill Deputy Lee when he'd been holding Annie in the lilac hedge. Not a quiver of guilt, not a single thought of hesitation, finger tight against the trigger. And then she remembered the big man stretching out his hand to her less than an hour later, and the way that hand had felt in hers.'Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride.' She gave herself that full minute to think of these things. It was all she had to give.
Sharon was scowling at the floor, damning her mother, her upbringing, the religion that had pounded the mantra into her head day after day, year after year, because for the second time this terrible day she was hearing it pop to lite inside her brain and she didn't know how to make it stop.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. And once again, holy Mary was just sitting up there, watching the innocent and maybe the foolishly brave get killed, and it was such a lie. It was such a goddamned fucking lie, and oh, Lord, she'd never said that word before, never even let it form fully in her thoughts, because that was a sin, and there was no confession for little Sharon Mueller, not now or ever again, and they were innocent, and now they were about to do something foolishly brave, and did that mean they would die, too, with the sin for thinking the f- word so fresh and unforgiven.
Annie was just plain furious, because that was the one emotion she really had a handle on. They told him flat out that he was going to die if he went out there, and the stubborn fool went on ahead and got himself killed anyhow. Sure, she'd been thinking about killing him herself in the lilac hedge, and she'd thought about it again when he'd fluffed out his strutting ruff like some randy grouse hell-bent on beating the shit out of some other randy grouse, but then the bastard had shown his true colors as a good and decent man and apologized. It was a purely mean thing to do. Annie didn't know what to do with sadness.
Grace was the one to break the silence. 'We're down to six hours
and ten minutes. We've got to hurry.'
The three of them felt their way to a workbench on the stairway wall. Grace and Sharon stooped to pull out the filthy wooden crate under the bench they'd seen earlier, the first time they'd been in this basement. While they were dragging the thing out into the open, Annie found treasure on top of the workbench and flicked the switch. The old flashlight shot a beam across the floor and startled them all.
'Good find, Annie,' Grace said. 'You have any pockets in that dress?'
Annie shone her light down on the eight-thousand-dollar ruin and sighed. 'I have a bra.'
'Same thing. Tuck a couple of these in.' She handed her two of the old Coke bottles, and Annie struggled to find a place for them.
'Could probably sell these things for some serious money on eBay.'
'The bottles or the boobs?' Sharon asked, and the second the words were out of her mouth, she snapped it shut in horror. Oh, God. Had she really said that? A thousand people were going to die, poor Deputy Lee was already dead, and a minute later, she was making jokes? What kind of a person was she?
Annie had slapped a hand to her mouth to cover the laugh, but it kept squirting through her fingers in little breathy snorts. Not funny, not funny, none of this is funny, she kept telling herself, but once she'd started to laugh, she couldn't seem to stop. It didn't help that Grace was laughing, too. Grace hardly ever laughed. It was scary. 'Omigod,' Annie gasped. 'We're hysterical.'
And that made Sharon start laughing, too, because she'd seen hysterical, and this wasn't it. Hysterical was when your mother raced stark-naked through the house, wailing at the top of her lungs, wringing her hands, settling briefly in this chair and that, until finally the chair she chose was the one behind the desk with the big, ugly gun in the center drawer.That was hysterical. And then there was the ten-year-old daughter crouched on the floor, legs scrambling as she tried to push herself into the wall she was leaning against, her mouth open in a silent scream, her eyes fixed on her mother's blood and brains sliding down the plate-glass window behind the desk.That was hysterical, too. But not this.
She took a deep breath that erased everything. Displacement behavior, she remembered, was the body's defense against stress. People laugh at funerals. Cats stop fighting and spontaneously groom themselves. Cats licked, people laughed.
Annie and Grace were letting out the last long, shaky exhales, letting it all go, and then Grace was passing out bottles again, and it was as if the laughter had never happened.
They started upstairs to leave the house by the front door-not outthrough the basement and into the backyard. The perimeter was out there, in the woods but closer than they'd thought. Deputy Lee had proven that. There was less chance that they would be seen with the protection of the buildings between them and the trees.
Grace was in the lead, shining the flashlight down on the risers, making the climb easier.
It's the flashlight, Sharon thought as she followed. Whoever has the flashlight is automatically the leader, as if light was some kind of royal scepter, even more powerful than a gun. Maybe in the Bible, she thought wryly.
In the feverish religion that her mother had practiced, plowshares were mightier than swords, and things like light and goodness and mercy always won out over the lesser weapons, like atomic bombs.God's sword will not be beaten, Sharon. Man's weapons are puny in theface of the Word of God. . ..But in the end, her mother hadn't stuck a Bible in her mouth and blown her brains out, now had she?
'Wait a minute,' she whispered, thinking of something as Grace prepared to open the door at the top. 'We don't have a lighter, or matches.'
'There are matches in the glass display case at the gas station,' Grace said.
Christ, Sharon thought. She sees everything. The tiniest detail. And never forgets it. Like a really excellent cop. She saw all the things that you should have seen, drew all the conclusions that you should have drawn, and that's how she knew that this town was wrong before we ever walked into it. You're not just a good cop scared off the street by a bullet in the neck-you were never that good to begin with. And Grace isn't the leader because she's carrying the flashlight- she's the leader because she just is. Something big and dark seemed to open a little in Sharon's head, and her next breath felt like the first one she had taken in a very long time. It almost made her smile.
Grace opened the door to the upstairs and turned off the flashlight, and they were all lost in a black void. They felt their way to the front door and slipped outside. The moon was below the tree line now, and the darkness seemed to have texture, it was so impenetrable. Grace could barely identify shapes more than ten feet distant. This must be what it's like to be blind and deaf, she thought-no sound, no light, no motion, not even a breath of air stirring in the hot, still night.
The hulking outlines of the cafe and gas station were barely visible, but the outside air had that sweet, wet, predawn smell that seems to gather in the last hours before sunrise on a hot summer night. We have to hurry, Grace thought.
They carefully crept across the broken asphalt between the house and the gas station-this was the one place they would be fully exposed to any line of sight from the woods. Once inside the gas station, Grace felt around the display case until she found the matches, tucked them into her jeans pocket, and they all moved into the adjacent garage bay. There were no windows in here; even the narrow back door was solid, and it was safe for Grace to turn on the flashlight.
Ten minutes gone, six hours left.
Grace found a red gas can with a gooseneck nozzle next to the hydraulic lift, checked it and found it nearly full, then swept the walls with the beam of light. 'Can't see it.'
'Give me the light,' Sharon said. 'They're usually somewhere near the counter.' She found the master switches that turned the pumps on and off under a shelf near the register that held about a decade's worth of dusty Veterans Day poppies. She pushed the two levers to the off position and hoped they worked.
When she came back to the garage bay, she shined the light on Annie and Grace, who were filling the Coke bottles with gas by touch. The smell was cloying in the closed space. Grace looked up at her. 'Pumps off?'
'Yes.'
'There's a box of disposable rags on the bench behind you. I couldn't find them in the dark.'
'Got 'em,' Sharon said after a few seconds with the light.
Annie gave up crouching after a few minutes and sat down on the filthy garage floor, fat legs crossed, expertly twisting and stuffing rags into the bottles. 'Haven't done this since I tried blow up Cameron DuPuy's BMW convertible sophomore year in Atlanta. Remember, Grace?'
