Down the Darkest Road

“I don’t want to,” she said. “Get down on the floor. Facedown. Spread eagle.”

He didn’t move. “What are you going to do?”

“That depends. I can call nine-one-one and have a sheriff’s car here in five minutes. But if my daughter comes in before they arrive, and she tells me something I don’t want to hear, I’ll blow your fucking head off.”

“I’ve only ever tried to help you, Lauren.”

“Get down on the floor,” she said, carefully enunciating each word.

She was astounded at how calm she sounded. She was anything but. Her hands were trembling. Her knees were shaking. She didn’t know what he was playing at or why. She knew she couldn’t trust him. She knew he had hurt her daughter. She had let him into their lives and he had hurt Leah. Her fault.

She still held her left hand curved over the top of the Walther. The end of the jammed cartridge vibrated against her fingertips, reminding her the gun would never fire if she needed it now.

Using as little movement as possible, she pulled her left hand back toward her, easing the pistol’s slide back just a fraction of an inch and releasing the tension holding the cartridge in place.

The spent shell casing fell free and bounced off the floor. The sound was a pin dropping—as loud as thunder.

The significance wasn’t lost on Greg Hewitt. His gaze flicked to the piece of brass and back, quick as a snake’s. Just that much of a smile curved the very corners of his mouth.

“What do you think, Lauren?” he said quietly. “Do you think the next round chambered?”

She had no real way of knowing without pulling the trigger.

“Do you want to find out?” she asked.

Hewitt weighed his odds.

It all happened fast.

His gaze darted over her shoulder to the kitchen door behind her, widening, as if in recognition. He expected her to buy the fake. She didn’t.

He lunged toward her, grabbing the barrel of the gun and pulling upward and to the side.

Lauren pulled the trigger.

The explosion was deafening.

I win, she thought.

The bullet bore through Hewitt’s right hand and struck him in the hollow of the right shoulder.

He roared like a wounded animal, but pulled the Walther from her hands with his left and backhanded her across the face with the gun.

Lauren felt her left cheekbone shatter like an egg. The gun’s sight sliced through the flesh of her face like a knife through butter. Blood poured from the wound like a waterfall.

She staggered sideways, falling into a chair. Stars spun through her head like the bits of colored glass inside a kaleidoscope. Her knees felt like water giving way beneath her.

“You fucking bitch,” Hewitt said, almost under his breath.

On her hands and knees, Lauren held very still, waiting for the room to stop spinning. She wondered absently where Leah had gone. Had she run for the nearest neighbor? Had she run to another phone in the house to call 911?

The question had no sooner crossed her mind than she heard her daughter’s soft whimpering.

“Mommy . . .”

Lauren’s left eye had swollen nearly shut. She had to turn her head toward the kitchen door.

Roland Ballencoa stood there, tall and thin and dressed in black. The Grim Reaper. One hand clamped around the throat of her daughter.

He almost smiled. “Now, Lauren, I have something you want.”

56

“She shot you,” Ballencoa said dispassionately.

Greg Hewitt looked at the ragged bleeding hole in his hand and then the hole in his shoulder as if just noticing. “I’m fine. It’s through-and-through. Just a flesh wound.”

Ballencoa had already dismissed the topic. He looked at Lauren. “Where are my journals?”

Lauren looked from one to the other of them. How the hell had this happened? How could they possibly know each other? Had Ballencoa somehow bought Hewitt off? How could he have gone from a man who came to offer her help to a man who could beat a fifteen-year-old girl for no reason?

She glared at Hewitt with her one open eye. The taste of her own blood was like liquid copper in her mouth. “You offered to kill him for me.”

“You should have taken me up on it, shouldn’t you?” he said, gingerly pressing his left hand to the wound in his shoulder. He had set the Walther aside on the table, out of reach.

Leah was crying as quietly as she could manage, her shoulders shaking.

Oh my God, Lauren thought, the full horror spilling through her like the blood spilling from the cut that had filleted her face. This is all my fault. I asked for this.

Not only had it been her mission to bring Ballencoa to justice, she had also brought Greg Hewitt into their lives.

No. That wasn’t exactly true. Greg Hewitt had come to her. He had come to her with his sympathy and concern, wanting to help, wanting to earn the fifty-thousand-dollar reward. She had accepted him for greedy, never thinking he could be something worse. He was supposed to have been her means to the ultimate end: confronting Roland Ballencoa.

I’m so sorry, baby, she thought, her eyes going to Leah.

Her daughter’s face was swollen, her left eye almost swollen shut. She was visibly shaking. To Lauren she looked so much younger than fifteen. She was a child, and Lauren wanted to take her in her arms and hold her and try to comfort her.

Comfort her by getting her killed, she thought. Comfort her by trading her life for one last shot at finding Leslie.

God help me. What have I done?

“Where are my journals?” Ballencoa asked again.

Greg Hewitt grabbed hold of her ponytail with his left hand and jerked her up off the floor like a rag doll. She grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself as he shouted at her. “Answer the question !”

Lauren wanted to spit in his face, but she refrained, afraid her defiance would be taken out on Leah. She had to think. She had to be smart.

If she’d been smart, none of this would be happening.

“They’re in my car,” she said.

“I want them back.”

“He wants them back,” Hewitt said.

He was pasty white beneath the blood on his face, and beginning to sweat profusely. He went to lift his right arm as if to strike her, but his shoulder seemed not to work. Instead, he cuffed her in the side of the head with his left hand, knocking her back to the floor. He kicked her in the ribs as she hit the ground.

Lauren curled into herself to protect her ribs, and the mini-cassette recorder she had hidden in her bra pressed into her breast and rib cage. She moved onto her knees, tucked into a tight ball with her arms pulled in tight to her sides. Surreptitiously she pushed the Record button. For all the good it would do her.

Hewitt kicked her again. “Get up!”

“Bring her outside,” Ballencoa ordered.

Hewitt grabbed her roughly by the arm, yanked her to her feet, and pushed her toward the door.

Ballencoa had parked his van on the back side of the garage, out of sight from the road and about twenty feet from Lauren’s car. The back doors of the van stood open wide, waiting.

“The cops come by every half an hour,” Hewitt said. “We have to get out of here ASAP.”