I heard my voice before I knew it was me talking.
“How about you put your gun down or the maid kills your partner with his own gun? He makes a nice, big target.”
Defoe laughed, and not for effect. He laughed as though the idea that he might care if his partner lived or died was his new favorite joke.
“Drop it, Sarah,” he said.
“No,” Anna said. “Don’t. Take the shot.”
Defoe’s smile turned to a snarl.
“Don’t play around, little girl,” he said. “This is my world, not yours.”
Lindsey, her voice shaking, said, “Please, do what he asks.”
“Take the shot,” Anna said.
“One,” Defoe said.
“Shoot,” Anna said.
“Two.”
“Shoot, goddamnit.”
“Three.”
I felt the floor shake beneath me, saw the chandelier swinging above me, and then everything went quiet again.
Chapter 44Sarah Roberts-Walsh
NOW I’D killed two men. I glanced around the room. Serena, lying on her back on the floor, held Broch at bay with the gun she’d taken from him. Anna sat at the head of the table, trembling, wiping Defoe’s blood from her face and neck with a handkerchief. Defoe’s corpse lay on the floor behind her. I wasn’t ready to look at him. None of us were.
I couldn’t look at Aunt Lindsey, either. Not after what she’d just seen me do. Me, her niece turned daughter. I remembered what she had said when I was caught cheating on a math quiz: “You can be anything you want in this life, except a disgrace.” I thought she’d say a lot worse now, but she slipped right into take-charge emergency room mode.
“For God’s sake, wake up, people,” she said. “Sarah, go find a knife and cut us free. Serena, if that brain-dead Aryan so much as twitches, give him one right between the eyes. We’ll just dig the grave a little deeper. Anna, stick the cash back in that bag. Come on, now. No time to waste.”
The marching orders were a blessing, a chance for me to cruise on autopilot while the shock died down. I limped into the kitchen, set the rifle on a counter, and started opening drawers. By the time I returned with a serrated steak knife, the cash was packed away and Serena was sitting upright.
It was Anna who asked, “So what now?”
“Now we end this,” I told her.
“End it how?”
I turned to Broch.
“Let’s ask him,” I said. “What was supposed to happen next?”
He told me what I could do to myself in no uncertain terms. It wasn’t that he was grieving Defoe: he just didn’t like being bested by a handful of women.
“Shoot him,” Aunt Lindsey said.
“Shoot him?” Anna asked.
“Aim for the kneecaps. That’ll get him talking.”
“Let me do it,” Serena said.
She sounded like a kid on line for the Ferris wheel. Anna and I exchanged a quick glance: coming from Serena and my aunt, this bloodlust was something new. It made me wonder how Vincent’s men had treated them.
“No, I’ll do it,” Aunt Lindsey said. “I’m old. My eyesight’s bad. I might miss and hit him in the crotch.”
“Ha, ha, ha,” Broch said.
“They always have such snappy comebacks in the movies,” my new aunt Lindsey said. “This one’s a disappointer.”
She took the oversize revolver from Serena, lifted it in both hands, and aimed for Broch’s right knee.
“Go pee if you have to, honey,” she said to Serena. “They weren’t exactly generous with the bathroom breaks.”
“I don’t want to miss this,” Serena said.
Broch growled. Aunt Lindsey ignored him.
“Now Sarah,” she said, “you go ahead and ask your questions, and if you don’t like his answers, say the word and I’ll put him right.”
I thought Aunt Lindsey and Doris would get along just fine.
“You ever fired one of those things, Granny?” Broch asked. “The recoil’ll knock your head off.”
“That’s it! Show some spunk,” Aunt Lindsey said.
“So tell us,” I said to Broch. “What was the plan?”
He blew me a kiss. Aunt Lindsey fired. I think she meant to miss, to scare him, but she wasn’t lying about her eyesight. She grazed Broch’s thigh, sent him reeling and writhing around on the floor.
“You crazy bitch!” he shouted.
Meanwhile, he hadn’t been lying about the recoil. Serena and I corralled Aunt Lindsey in our arms, kept her vertical. She was undaunted.
“Let me try again,” she said, pulling back the hammer.
“All right, all right,” Broch said. “We were supposed to hold you here overnight, get you good and scared.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“Vincent was going to turn up in the morning, give you all a real grilling. After that, I don’t know. No one knows but Vincent.”
Anna stepped up behind us.
“Then I guess we pay Uncle Vinny a surprise visit,” she said. “End this once and for all, like Sarah said.”
“Amen,” Serena said.
I looked around at my co-conspirators. My friends and family. Maybe this sounds strange or out of place, but I was proud of them. Proud to know them.
“What do we do with him?” I asked, pointing at Broch, who seemed to be teetering on the edge of consciousness.
“Oh, I can patch up that flesh wound, no problem,” Aunt Lindsey said. “As long as he doesn’t bite.”
“We’ll tie him up for you before we go,” Anna said.
“Good. I’ll keep an eye on him while you girls run your errand.”
“What about the dead one?” Serena asked.
“I know where we can leave him,” Anna said. “Though we should probably wrap him up first. There’s a linen closet next to the downstairs bathroom.”
“We’re going back through that tunnel, aren’t we?” I asked.
“I haven’t set foot in there in over a decade.”
“I think it’s changed since then,” I told her.
Serena pulled out her phone, snapped a photo of Broch with his eyes rolling back in his head.
“For Vincent,” she said. “In case we need leverage.”
“All right,” Aunt Lindsey said. “Let’s go, girls. Chop-chop.”
Chapter 45Anna Costello
GETTING DEFOE into that tunnel was no small task. We wrapped him in black satin sheets, tied his feet together with twine, made a
