Saint/Sinner

Chapter 9

Walter’s closest neighbor lived about half a mile away in a two-story house painted white along the sides and gray near the top, or at least in the parts that she could see from her angle inside the woods. There were bright LED lights leading from the unpaved road toward the long front porch. The windows were darkened, which told her the lamps outside were probably activated by sensors that turned on at night, and she saw panels that might have been solar cells. There was a garage on the other side of the property, but she couldn’t see any vehicles in the front yard.

There could very well have been an entire frat full of college students dozing inside the two floors at this very moment, for all she knew, but staring at the house for the last two (or was it three already?) minutes, Allie didn’t think so. She recognized an abandoned homestead when she saw one.

She glanced back at Lucy, crouched in the darkness behind her. Apollo sat protectively next to the girl, his head raised and ears at attention. The dog looked back at her with deep brown eyes and waited.

Allie put the Glock away in her back waistband, then tugged her shirt over it. If there was anyone inside the house (as unlikely as that was), it wouldn’t have been smart to walk out there with a gun out in the open. People had gotten shot for less on the news, and that was in the city. If there were people inside the house, what were the odds they weren’t armed, all the way out here in the country?

About the same odds as you getting ambushed at your boyfriend’s country house.

She got up and walked back to Lucy. “We need to find out if anyone’s home, and if they have a phone we can use to call the police.”

“You think someone’s home?” Lucy asked. “Wouldn’t they have heard the gunshots?”

“Maybe they’re just really deep sleepers. I don’t know. But we need to go find out either way.” She put a hand on Apollo’s head and scratched his scalp. “You stay here,” she said to the dog. “Guard Lucy. Understand?”

Apollo blinked back at her.

“That’s a good boy,” she said, and stood up. To Lucy: “Stay here until I call for you.”

“What if he finds us?”

“Then you run to me and yell as loud as you can.”

Lucy nodded, uncertainty all over her face. She was scared, and Allie didn’t blame her. Lucy was fifteen and had spent most of her life in the city. Running around out here in the woods being chased by a man with a submachine gun was not something she had any experience with. Allie wished she could have said the same for herself.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” she said, and left them behind in the shadows.

At the edge of the clearing, she leaned outside, just enough to see but not be seen. Then she took a deep breath and stepped out into the open. She walked across the front lawn, making a beeline toward the brightly lit porch, doing her very best to look unthreatening, which meant keeping both hands visible and to her sides.

The windows remained closed and dark as she approached the house from a distance. Closer, she glimpsed linen curtains on the other side of the windows, but still there were no faces looking back out at her. Which might have been for the best; a strange face peering outward, from the darkness, might have given her a heart attack.

The feel of the Glock against her waistband kept her moving steadily forward, the cold polymer plastic pressing against her back doing wonders to reassure her that should anything go wrong, the gun would be there, within reach. She flexed her fingers to keep the blood circulating, ready to reach for the handgun at a moment’s notice.

The stillness of the front yard and emptiness emanating from every panel of the house was unchanged by the time she stepped into the light and was twenty yards from the porch. There was something welcoming about the building despite the loneliness. Maybe it was the bright LEDs all around her. Whoever owned this place hadn’t skimped on the security. Which made her wonder what she was going to do when she reached the door and found it locked, because there was a very good chance it was going to be. With an alarm, possibly, just like at Walter’s house.

That was it, then. She wouldn’t even have to go into the house to call the police. All she had to do was trigger the alarm. If she was lucky, it would be a silent alarm, and she and Lucy could stay hidden from Jack and his buddy while they waited for the cops to arrive. If cops even came this far out, at this time of night.

Feeling suddenly more optimistic than she had been all day, Allie climbed up the front porch. She fought the urge to reach for the Glock with every step, somehow succeeding all the way to the door—

“Allie!”

She spun back toward the woods just as a figure raced out of the shadows.

Lucy!

“He’s here!” Lucy shouted. “He found us!”

She looked past Lucy in search of Apollo, expecting him to burst out of the woods behind her, but the dog was nowhere to be seen. That didn’t make any sense, but she managed to push the question aside long enough to hurry down the steps, pulling out the Glock and slipping her forefinger into the trigger guard by the time she was halfway down.

“Where’s Apollo?” she shouted across the front yard.

Lucy shook her head — or Allie thought she did. The girl was running as fast as she could, and every part of her was bobbing up and down with the effort.

Allie jogged to meet the teenager, at the same time keeping her eyes focused on the darkness behind her, waiting for either Apollo or Jerry to come bursting into the open. But there was nothing. There were just black shadows in the tree lines where Lucy had run out from.

“Where’s Apollo?” she shouted again.

Lucy gasped, her mouth opening and closing, but each time Allie thought she was going to say something, only labored breaths came out of the teenager.

Then she heard it: A mechanical whirring noise coming from the woods.

Suppressed gunshots.

It was Jerry’s MP5SD, the one with the built-in suppressor. She would recognize the sound the submachine gun made when it was firing anywhere, especially on full-automatic.

“Come on,” she said, and grabbed the girl around the wrist and led her back to the house.

“Apollo ran off,” Lucy said between gasps. “I’m sorry.”

“Apollo can take care of himself, but we have to get into the house.”

“Is it locked?”

“Not for long.”

They charged up the steps, Allie clinging to Lucy as the girl stumbled along. She let go of the teenager’s arm when they reached the landing, and stalked forward alone. She took a breath, measured her distance to get into the exact position she needed to—

She slammed the sole of her sneaker into the section of the door directly under the doorknob, while avoiding the brass lever itself. The door cracked, but didn’t open. Allie smashed it a second time, then a third before the door finally snapped free and swung inward, the doorknob still clinging to the doorframe by the deadbolt.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing Lucy by the arm again and leading her into the darkened living room of the two-story house.

He emerged out of the woods at almost the exact same spot that she — and then later, Lucy — had. Maybe he didn’t know he was following in their footsteps, or maybe he just didn’t care he wasn’t being very clever about his approach because of the thirty-round weapon he had in his possession. Despite the dark clothes, she easily spotted his shadowy outline moving out there even before he stepped into the first pool of light that dotted the front yard.

There were no signs of Apollo anywhere, but Allie didn’t have that gnawing feeling in her gut that something had gone wrong. She wanted to believe she and the dog had formed a bond since he had come into her life, but maybe that was just her trying to convince herself he was still out there, somewhere, alive and kicking.

According to Lucy, Apollo had taken off without warning, and it was about ten seconds later that she heard the first gunshot — or “coughing sound”—followed by a man cursing loudly very close by, even though she couldn’t see him.

Lucy was sitting against an armchair to her left at the moment. The furniture, like the sofas and half of the living room behind her, was covered with a heavy tarp. Just her luck that the first of Walter’s neighbors she ran across weren’t home, and from all indications, hadn’t been for some time. She thought this might have been a summer residence, but from the dust that she had unwittingly rubbed onto her clothes and the cobwebs she was still picking out of her hair, it had been more than one summer since anyone had lived here.

The teenager had her back against the thick white covering and her knees pulled up to her chest, staring forward at the pitch-black living room. Allie wasn’t sure if Lucy was more afraid of Jerry stalking toward them or the emptiness of the large house around them. It was quiet, so quiet, which only added to the eeriness.

Thirty seconds after he stepped out of the woods, Jerry was already halfway to the house, all the while moving slightly hunched over with the submachine gun in front of him. His head was in constant motion, searching the grounds for anything and everything. She couldn’t see any wounds on him as he stepped in and out of the halo of lights, which meant he had survived Apollo unscathed. She just hoped the same was true for Apollo.

For some reason, the Glock in her hand felt heavier now than when they first settled next to the window to wait for Jerry. The linen curtain that bookended her view of the front yard was very still and she wished she could open the window even just a crack to ventilate the stale air inside the house that made just breathing a chore, but that would have been a dead giveaway, and she needed Jerry to get close.

Way, way closer than he currently was at the moment.

Which was why she clenched her teeth when the bastard suddenly stopped about forty yards from the front porch.

Closer, she thought, willing him to keep moving.

But he didn’t. Instead, he went down on one knee and peered at the house.

Had he spotted her hiding behind the window to the right of the front door? Could he make out the damaged door that she had closed back up as much as she could, using a metal shoe rack to lodge it (just barely) in place? Or had the moonlight given him an angle on her that she hadn’t accounted for or thought possible?

Closer. Come just a little bit closer!

Instead, he got up and started sideways, and she knew instantly he was going to try to go around the house and sneak up on them from the back. And if he did that, she’d have to reacquire him again, which would mean she would lose the element of surprise—

Dammit!

She rocked backward and picked herself up from the floor, then scooted another couple of steps back from the window, lifted the Glock, and squeezed off a shot that shattered the glass, the gunshot booming inside the house.

Jerry was running right even before the first piece of glass pelted the porch outside. Maybe he’d even seen her moving before she pulled the trigger and shot through the window. Either way, she didn’t wait to see if the first shot had hit him. She fired again, trying to track his movements. He was surprisingly fast for a man wearing all that gear.

The ground where he had been standing erupted with dirt—another miss! — and the man was still on his feet, still moving impossibly quick — until finally he disappeared out of her field of vision before she could squeeze off a third shot.

Allie stood up and pressed her body against the wall, staying out of view of the window even as glass continued to trickle onto the wooden deck outside. Without the window, the chilly night flooded the house and swamped her in a cool breeze that dug all the way through her layers of clothes and to the bones underneath. Next to her, Lucy, who had mirrored her movements and was now leaning against the wall, shivered against the sudden surge of cold air.

“Did you get him?” Lucy asked. She sounded like she was holding her breath.

Allie shook her head. “He’s going to try to outflank us, come in from the back.”

“Can he do that?”

“Yeah.” Allie looked around her, then, “We need to get up to the second floor.”

“It’s dark up there…”

“It’s dark down here, too,” she said, “but at least we’ll have higher ground on him.”

The girl looked petrified, not that Allie was feeling so great about their chances, either. Especially against that submachine gun…

It didn’t take Jerry very long to find his way in through the back door. She could hear his boots squeaking against the kitchen’s tiled floor, the sound of his voice as he communicated with someone over a radio. The fact that he wasn’t even trying to disguise his approach was proof of how little he thought of her and Lucy as potential threats.

Maybe he even knew she only had five bullets left. The Glock had seven remaining when she tried to pick him off through the window. She knew, because she had counted while she and Lucy were waiting for him to come out of the woods.

Five bullets against however many magazines Jerry was carrying with him in that pouch around his waist. He’d probably already reloaded once, maybe twice. Would he really carry more than two extra magazines? Anything was possible, and right now she had to err on the side of caution. Besides, even if Jerry had used up all of his submachine gun’s ammo, he still had the sidearm. How much spare ammo did he have for that?

The answer was more than she had.

She might have sighed out loud, because Lucy, hiding behind the ajar bedroom down the hall from her, moved slightly, the fabric of her pants rustling in the darkness. Allie didn’t look back at her, a little afraid that her own lack of conviction might show on her face and infect the girl.

Instead, she gripped the Glock tighter and pressed her chest closer — though there wasn’t a whole lot of space left — against the second-story floor and peeked through the two balusters in front of her. She was so low to the ground that she could see and smell the dust gathered round the base of the wooden poles even in the pitch-darkness. It had definitely been a while since someone put a Dustbuster to work on this place.

He was moving slowly from the back of the house to the living room, as if he had all the time in the world. And maybe he did. She had kicked the door in expecting sirens to wail or at least lights on the alarm panel to start blinking. Except there wasn’t any panel on the wall, and nothing blinked. While waiting for Jerry to show up, she had been holding out hope that the house had a silent alarm, with the control panel somewhere else in another part of the residence calling out to the authorities at that very moment.

Except no one had come. Not even after she had fired two more shots into the dead silent night.

So maybe Jerry was right. Maybe he did have all night to stalk her, maybe—

A loud growl from the darkness interrupted the silence.

Jerry heard it at the same time that she did. He stopped almost directly below her on the first floor and spun around, lifting the MP5SD as he did so.

She didn’t know why, but something prompted her to jump up to her feet and shout down, “Hey, dickhead!”

He might have been in the process of pulling the trigger at something down there, but her scream cut through him like a knife, and Jerry instead whirled back around in her direction and opened fire.

She ducked her head and ran along the length of the second floor as the wall exploded around her, the sound of the submachine gun’s parts spinning sending shivers up and down her spine. She thought she was ready for it; she had seen it at work up close and had even held and used one at the range. But she wasn’t quite prepared for the sheer violence of its thirty rounds, all of which seemed to be coming at her at subsonic speeds.

She stuck out her hand and fired the Glock blindly down at the living room while shielding her face with her free arm against the chunks of the wall swarming around her. It sounded and felt as if every inch of the second floor was coming apart at the seams and there would be absolutely nothing left when this was over.

Then, a sharp, ferocious bark broke through the whirring gunfire and the clink-clink-clink of empty brass casings scattering across the tiled first floor. The wall behind her stopped exploding just as Allie reached the head of the stairs. She didn’t so much as stop as she rammed into the wall and didn’t have any more room to keep going.

She didn’t have to turn her head very far to glimpse Jerry below her at the same time a rocket of white fur — easily visible against the dark living room — streaked toward him. Jerry reacted much faster than the bigger Jones had at Walter’s house, and instead of trying to shoot the dog, Jerry lifted his submachine gun and swung.

A sharp yelp filled the house as Apollo was knocked out of the air by the stock of the weapon and landed in a pile of fur on the floor. The dog quickly scrambled to his feet, but despite his breathtaking speed, Apollo wasn’t fast enough. Jerry had already dropped the MP5SD and drawn his sidearm and was lifting it—

Allie aimed, praying that she hadn’t wasted all five remaining rounds during her mad dash across the floor, and pulled the trigger.