Jeffrey leapt across the porch. The door was locked. He took a step back and kicked it open. His gun pointed around the room, but nothing looked like he’d been expecting. The dining room. The living room. The kitchen. He couldn’t see any of it. There were doors everywhere, all of them closed.
“On your left!” Matt bolted past him. Hendricks took up the rear. The gunshot had been like a starting pistol. Matt busted through the flimsy door into the hallway. Hendricks broke into the dining room. Jeffrey took a step. His foot hit something hard. He watched Lena’s gun skitter across the floor.
“Lena!” he yelled.
A shotgun went off.
Brad Stephens stumbled into the kitchen.
“Lena!” Jeffrey took the stairs two at a time. He was halfway up before he remembered that someone could’ve been at the top waiting to blow off his head.
Jeffrey ducked and rolled. He ended up in the hall bathroom. He looked behind him. Four bedrooms. The doors were closed.
Lena screamed.
Jeffrey ran toward the master bedroom. He splintered open the door.
Lena was crumpled by the bed. Her head was bleeding. She had fallen against a wooden desk. Jeffrey felt sick as he ran toward her. His responsibility. His fuck-up. Lena’s life. He checked her pulse. The tap of her carotid against his fingertips slowed down his own heartbeat by a millisecond.
He glanced up.
He saw the laptop computer on the desk.
Children.
Jeffrey swallowed the bile that swirled up his throat. He swiveled his eyes around the room. Cheap plastic blind on the window. The closet door was missing. Clothes were piled onto the floor. The bed was a mattress on the carpet. A dirty white gym sock was crumpled on the floor.
“Chief!” Matt was at the end of the hall. Brad was taking up his rear. They started busting open doors.
Lena whispered, “Jeffrey?”
The world slowed down as he turned back toward her.
She had never called him by his name before. There was something so intimate about the way she said it. Lena’s arm was raised. Her hand was wavering from the effort.
She was pointing to the window. The plastic slats clicked in the breeze.
“Shit!” Jeffrey ripped away the blinds. The window had guillotined, the top panel sliding down behind the bottom. Daryl Nesbitt was inches away, standing on the overhang above the kitchen door.
As Jeffrey watched, the man ran and jumped. Daryl’s arms were out. His legs bicycled through the air. He landed with a thump on the roof of the shed.
Jeffrey didn’t stop to think.
He kicked out the window. He stepped onto the overhang, which gave him no more than five feet. Ten more feet to the shed. The roof sloped just the way Matt had said, like a ski jump.
Jeffrey took a running start and hurled his body through the air.
His arms flailed. He tried to line up his feet for landing. He found himself calculating all the things that could go wrong. He could miss the roof. Break through the plywood. Land sideways. Break his leg, his arm, his fucking neck.
Jeffrey landed on the toes of his right foot. He felt his body twist on impact, his spine painfully torquing. He caught himself on his left foot, stuttered back onto his right, then tumbled down the back side of the slope. He landed flat on his ass on the ground.
He had to shake the stars out of his eyes. The wind was knocked out of him. He looked around.
Daryl was running through the backyard. He glanced over his shoulder at Jeffrey as he hurdled the fence to his neighbor’s yard.
Jeffrey was up and running after him, gasping for breath as he jumped the fence. His foot slipped on the grass. His skull was pounding. He felt like something had ripped in his back. He gained his footing as he ran around the side of the house.
He saw Daryl sprinting toward the street. His arms started windmilling as he took a sharp turn onto Valley Ridge. His bare feet skipped across the asphalt. By the time Jeffrey made the turn, the man was thirty yards away.
“No-no-no,” Jeffrey begged.
He couldn’t close the gap. The kid was too fast. Jeffrey looked down the street, searching for Dawson. The patrol car was a football field away. Dawson had seen Daryl. He was out of his car, running toward the action.
Jeffrey’s sense of relief was cut off by a woman’s piercing scream.
Again, the world slowed down to a crawl, the blur of houses and trees in Jeffrey’s periphery stuttering into freeze-frame.
The woman had been walking to her car. Jeffrey saw her mouth open. He watched Daryl’s fist swing back.
Jeffrey tried, “No!”
It was too late. The woman collapsed to the ground. Daryl scooped up her car keys.
Jeffrey kept running.
He earned fifteen hard feet while Daryl fumbled with the door of the woman’s red station wagon.
Another five feet while Daryl tried to crank the engine.
Another five while he shifted the gear into reverse.
Jeffrey squeezed out the last ounce of adrenaline in his body and lunged toward the open car window.
His hand grabbed the first thing he could reach, a fistful of Daryl’s greasy hair.
“Motherfu—” Daryl punched at him, his foot still on the gas.
Jeffrey’s head snapped back. His shoes skipped along the road. Daryl punched him again, then again. All at once, Jeffrey’s muscles gave in to exhaustion. Daryl’s hair slid through his fingers.
Jeffrey hit the pavement. His head cracked against the asphalt. Something told him to get back on his feet as quickly as possible. He pushed his hands against the pavement. He looked up.
From behind the windshield, Daryl’s mouth twisted into a smirk. He was going to run Jeffrey over. The kid stood on the gas pedal.
Jeffrey scrambled.
Instead of lurching forward, the car shot back, bouncing over the curb, slamming into the house across the street.
Not just the house.
The gas meter.
Like every man who had ever started a barbecue grill, Jeffrey had seen fuel catch fire before. The blue-white glow was almost mesmerizing as the fumes ignited into thick flames.
