Down the Darkest Road

55

The gate to the property stood open. Lauren immediately recognized the car parked in the driveway. Greg Hewitt. Confusion shorted out her thought process for a moment. How had he gotten the gate open? More to the point—why? Why would he be here? Had he decided to watch out for Leah after all? Just as he’d taken it upon himself to follow Ballencoa, even though she’d told him she didn’t want his help.

Even as she had one good thought about him, she was just as quickly irritated. She’d told him she didn’t want him anywhere near her daughter. Now not only was he in the vicinity, he was on the property.

He had opened the gate. Did he think having sex with her entitled him to do as he pleased? Had he come to press her for the money to take out Ballencoa?

Leah hadn’t answered the phone. Even if she had gone to bed, she was a light sleeper and there was a telephone on her nightstand. She should have answered.

When the answering machine had picked up, Lauren had dropped the receiver of the pay phone outside 7-Eleven and abandoned her thoughts of Ballencoa. Leah was home alone, not answering the phone. Ballencoa could wait. She had his journals. She needed to know her daughter was safe.

At the most basic instinctive level, fear had already built to a nearly intolerable degree. She could hardly wait for the car to stop before she was getting out of it. She ran to the front door, fumbling with her keys.

The door stood ajar.

Lauren barreled through it, not taking the time to wonder why or wonder what she would find on the other side.

“Leah? Leah!”

She saw Greg Hewitt first. He was bleeding from a cut on his cheek. His expression was ugly. Lauren’s brain was spinning. What was he doing here? Why did he look like that? None of this was making any sense.

“What the fuck are you doing in my house?” Lauren demanded, a split second before she saw Leah, then there was no time or inclination to think, only to act.

Her daughter was sitting on a chair, bent over, her face purple and swollen, her expression pure anguish.

“Leah! Oh my God!”

“Mommy!!”

Hewitt grabbed Lauren by the shoulders before she could get past him. Acting on instinct, she dropped down almost to her knees, wrenching free of him, twisting away from him. He grabbed for her hair. She brought her elbow high and sideways and broke his nose.

Blood spewed everywhere, splattering the pristine cushions of the sofa. Hewitt made a sound of rage, muffled by the hand he clamped to his face.

Lauren kept moving toward her child. Leah was halfway out of her chair. Lauren grabbed her daughter’s arm and shoved her sideways.

“Leah, run!!”

Hewitt hit her in the back and she sprawled across the harvest table, her breath leaving her in a huff as she landed on the gun strapped to her abdomen beneath her clothes. Arms swimming, legs kicking, she fought to get out from under half of Hewitt’s weight as he pinned her.

Pushing and pulling herself across the table, she fell to the floor on the other side, sending chairs toppling.

Rolling onto her back, Lauren tore at her shirt, pulling it up, reaching her other hand for the gun. The Walther’s sight snagged on the fabric of the panty. Frantic, she tugged and fumbled, just pulling the pistol free as Greg Hewitt came over the table.

He was on her before she could straighten her arm enough to shoot him. His body trapped her arm between them. Lauren pulled the trigger anyway, hoping to God the shot would go into him and not her.

The explosion burned them both as the hot gases escaping the chamber came in contact with clothing and skin. Even muffled by their bodies, the sound was loud and it startled Hewitt just enough that he pulled his upper body away from her.

Lauren clawed at his face with one hand as she moved her right arm and shoved the nose of the Walther into his solar plexus and tried to pull the trigger again. But the spent cartridge from the first shot had not been allowed to eject free of the chamber, and there was no second shot.

But Greg Hewitt didn’t know she’d pulled the trigger. He knew the muzzle of a .380 was jammed up against him and that the next shot would surely kill him. He went very still.

Their breathing was ragged and loud. The fleeting thought crossed Lauren’s mind that they had sounded like this after sex. She wanted to vomit.

“Get off me,” she said. “Slowly.”

He said nothing. His eyes were the eyes of a wolf—wary, watching, sharp for the next split second’s opportunity. Lauren held her left hand curved over the slide of the Walther so he couldn’t see the piece of brass that had caught on its way out of the chamber. She kept her gaze hard on his, afraid to so much as blink.

“Get off or the next one goes straight through your spinal cord, Greg.”

He moved in slow motion, lifting his weight from her, getting to his feet.

“Hands out at your sides,” Lauren ordered, her eyes on his, the gun still trained on him. Using just her abdominal muscles and raw determination, she managed to sit up. The pain along the edge of her rib cage was like fire where she had landed on the gun. She curled her legs beneath herself and got to her feet.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What did you do to my daughter?”

His gaze went from her eyes to the gun in her hand and back. He said nothing.

“That’s not a good answer,” Lauren said. “That makes me think I should just shoot you and let God sort it out.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” he said. His nose had gone off-center, and the blood was all over his mouth and chin. He bent his head and tried to rub it off on the shoulder of his jacket. “I came to keep an eye on her. She panicked. She freaked out. I grabbed her and she pulled away and fell.”

“You’re lying,” Lauren said.

She wanted to look to Leah for dissent, but she didn’t dare turn her attention off Greg Hewitt. She thought Leah must have gotten out of the house. She couldn’t hear her crying, no talking, no ragged breaths.

“And you jumped me because . . . ?”

“I knew you’d assume the worst,” he said. “And I knew you had a gun.”

“You know me too well.”

“I could know you better,” he said, trying to look earnest. “If you’d let me.”

Lauren wanted to laugh. “Do you really think I’m that stupid, Greg? That I’m going to fall for your phony charm?”

Something cold flashed in his eyes. “You liked it well enough when I was fucking you last night.”

“You just can’t help yourself, can you?” Lauren said. “What did you want? Money? Did you think you could take Leah and get money from me? Are you that desperate that you’d kidnap my daughter if you couldn’t get me to pay you to kill Ballencoa?”

“You don’t know me, Lauren,” he said.

“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.”