Thursday grabbed the rifle but left Mr. Dawson’s guns on his body. Brynn threw the man over her shoulder, crouching a little with the weight, and jogged east, toward the gift shop. That woman, she knew how to get things done.
Fuck just having a crush on Brynn. I really was in love.
* * *
Gertrude was shaking, holding herself up against the tyrannosaur.
I ran ahead to greet her. She opened her arms, and I let her fall against me. She held me tight.
“I saw the basement,” she said. “Oh god. I saw what he’s done.”
“We’re going to make him confess.”
“No one will believe you, about the magic. Not really. They stare at me because they think I came back from the dead but they don’t really believe it. I think they actually stare at me because they don’t approve of me leaving my husband after a near-death experience.”
“When they see the basement, though,” I said.
“He’ll go to prison, for a long, long time. And you kids will be off the hook.”
She sighed, then pulled a phone out of her purse and dialed a number. It rang for a long time, then someone picked up.
“Hey,” she said. “It’s Ms. Miller. Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. No, listen. You’ve got it backward. I wouldn’t have believed it either. The library people. Yeah. It was my husband all along.” A long pause. “Look. Just come to the shop and don’t threaten anyone until you’ve looked in the basement. Come see for yourself.”
Everyone else trudged inside. I wanted to go with them, because as terrible as I assumed it would be, I really wanted to know what was in that basement. Someone needed to stay with Gertrude, though, and for some unknowable reason she’d taken a liking to me.
So I was standing with her when the posse—what else could I call it?—rolled up. Two dozen men, all armed. No one leveled a weapon at me, but neither did anyone give me any impression that I was in any way free to go.
“Well,” one man said, stepping forward and lifting his baseball cap. He was the spitting image of that corpse we’d left in the street, and he had an assault rifle with a hunting scope. “My father’s dead, and the only reason I’m not shooting this stranger right here and now is because she’s a woman.”
“Fuck you; shoot me.”
I said it without thinking. There were at least three reasons why that was the wrong thing to say. But fuck. I hate that shit so much.
“What?”
“I didn’t kill your father. I saw Sebastian Miller do it.”
“Bullshit.”
“Come inside, Trent,” Gertrude said, shaking her head, tears in her eyes.
We went inside.
* * *
Whatever blood there had been at any point was washed off the furniture and the cement floor.
There were three large dog cages, reinforced with welded rebar. There was a shelf filled with glass jars of salts and herbs. The tranquilizer gun sat on a workbench, with darts and vials of toxin next to it. Most damning of all, a third of the floor had been ripped up to reveal three grave-length mounds of dirt in parallel lines. Next to them, two empty graves. Beside that, a pickax, shovel, and the hill of exhumed dirt and rubble.
A dentist’s chair stood in the center of the room. There were no restraints cobbled on, nothing like that. The chair alone was terrifying enough.
Thursday, Vulture, Brynn, and Heather stood over Sebastian, who was still gagged and bound with tape.
Trent Dawson took off his ball cap and held it over his chest.
“I would never, not in a million years . . .” he said, before trailing off. A few of the others came down with him, and one ran back upstairs immediately, presumably to tell everyone what was down there.
Trent strode over to Mr. Miller and ripped the tape off his mouth.
“Say something,” Trent said. There was gravel in his voice, barely concealing rage.
I stared at our captive, trying to guess what lies he would tell, and how we might have to counter them. Sebastian staggered up to his knees.
“No,” he said, simply.
“I said say something!” Trent roared.
“No.”
“You killed my father, you son of a bitch.”
“I would like to speak to a lawyer.”
“I ain’t the cops!”
“I would like to speak to a lawyer.”
Trent raised the barrel of his gun level with our prisoner’s face. No one moved to stop him, though Vulture got out of the way in case the bullet kept going.
“Ricochet,” one of the townspeople mentioned. That was, apparently, the only objection to putting Sebastian down right then and there.
“To hell with you, Sebastian Miller.” Trent spit. He said hell like he believed in the place, which is frankly a different kind of curse than when I use it. “Gertrude, in respect for you, for everything you’ve been through, I’m going to walk away. You come and find me, let me know whether you need me to call the cops or fill in one of those graves.”
They left us, simple as that, tromping heavily back up the stairs.
“Well?” I asked Gertrude.
“Gertie,” Miller said. “I did it for you, Gertie.”
“Gag him,” Gertrude said. Brynn obliged.
“Anyone know how this thing works?” Gertrude lifted up the dart gun.
Sebastian whimpered.
Vulture stepped over. “You have to know your target’s weight in order to use it safely,” he said. “It’s probably loaded for you or Isola, so probably not strong enough to guarantee it’ll knock him out. Two shots almost certainly would, but there’s a chance it’ll kill him.”
She turned, aimed, and fired. The dart went into his lower ribs. He looked up, more surprised than afraid.
“Lord forgive me,” she said. “But I cannot let this man walk upon your earth another day.” She fired again. The second dart pierced his belly. Either the toxins were fast, or he fainted.
“Hey,” Vulture said. “We’ve uh, we’ve got kind of a choice right now. We’ve got a guy who’s about to be dead soon anyway. In case we wanted to, you know.”
“It’s never too late to
