Saint/Sinner

Chapter 17

“Lucy, your dad’s a liar and a killer. Now let’s go home!”

Yeah, right.

It didn’t matter how long she thought about it; it still didn’t make any sense. What had she really seen back there, at the house?

Walter. And Jack.

Then Walter shooting Jack.

Walter shooting Jack.

She stopped and looked back in the direction of the house. It was somewhere behind those two large trees, but of course she’d been walking in a daze for the last few (Ten? Twenty?) minutes and might have been halfway back to Lucy by now without realizing it. That is, if she was even going in the right direction.

Apollo had stopped too, and sat on his hind legs, waiting patiently for her.

She looked back at him. “You saw what Walter did, too, right? It wasn’t just my imagination?”

The dog bent over and licked himself.

“Gross, Apollo.”

She looked behind her again. Walter was back there, maybe even still standing over Jack’s dead body. So who were the other guys with the Uzis?

Allie almost laughed out loud. She had thought that as the night dragged on, things would become clearer. If anything, they had only gotten muddier. If she was confused about what was happening before, that didn’t hold a candle to the insanity of the last hour. The smartest thing she could do now was return to Lucy and get the kid out of here. They didn’t have a car — she’d even checked the two-story house’s attached garage — but there was a road somewhere out there. Besides, “out there” was better than hunkering down in a shuttered house if the men in suits (and Walter) came looking for them.

“It’ll be great,” Walter had said. “It’s the perfect chance to get to know each other better.”

He’d really meant it was the chance for her to connect with Lucy, because even a blind man could see the drama that played out whenever she and the teenager were in the same room together for longer than a few seconds.

Or maybe that wasn’t what Walter had meant at all. After tonight, after what she had seen, she didn’t know anything anymore.

“Should have stayed out of the woods,” she said out loud. “Nothing good ever comes from going into the woods. Right, boy?”

Apollo stopped licking himself long enough to look up at her.

“Thanks. Glad we’re on the same wavelength.”

She turned around and continued through the woods, back toward the house. Back to Lucy.

She probably had ten minutes, give or take, before she reached her destination. Ten minutes, give or take, to figure out what to tell Lucy about her dad.

“Guess what, kid? Your dad’s not who we thought he was! He’s a liar and a killer, and God only knows the real reason he brought us out here in the first place!”

Yeah, that was probably not going to work, either.

As it turned out, she didn’t have to worry about what she was going to tell Lucy, because she could hear the sounds of fate taking that option away from her just beyond the tree lines. She knew what they were before she saw the bright LED headlights sweeping across the woods, making her drop to the ground on her stomach as they flashed overhead.

Apollo, trailing behind her, did the same thing.

After about ten painstaking seconds of trying to convince herself to get up and run in the other direction, she did get up, but crab-walked the rest of the way to the tree line. She looked out in time to see the tall man in the suit — the same one who had tried to shoot Apollo back at the house — sliding out of a familiar looking SUV in the well-lit front yard of the two-story house. A second man, also wearing a suit, climbed out of the driver’s side, but didn’t move away from it. Instead, he stood behind the open door and waited as his tall partner walked forward.

Apollo trotted over and sat down next to her, and together they watched the tall man stop halfway to the house and looked back toward the SUV.

“This is your show, boss man,” the tall man said to someone back at the car. He wasn’t talking to the one at the driver-side door. “What now?”

One of the SUV’s back doors creaked open, and a third figure emerged. She had no trouble recognizing the white bandage wrapped around his head.

Walter.

He’d led them here. Right to her and Lucy.

Her heart raced at the sight of him, all the questions she had been turning over in her head on the way over here rushing back in a tidal wave, more confusing now than ever.

“Let me do the talking,” Walter said as he walked past the tall man, toward the front porch.

“What if they’re not here?” the tall man asked.

“It has to be this one. My only other neighbors are miles away in the other direction.”

“If you say so, boss man.”

‘Boss man?’

The tall man in the suit stood back and allowed Walter to approach the house by himself. The man looked around the yard, until he was suddenly peering in her direction. She took an involuntary step backward, moving further into the shadows, even though she was sure he couldn’t see her given the distance between them.

Probably.

The man kept turning until he was looking at another part of the woods. She breathed easier, but stayed where she was.

Walter was now on the front porch and looking through one of the windows before moving over to the door and knocking on it. He probably noticed right away that the doorknob was busted, that the only thing keeping the door closed at all was a shoe rack on the other side.

Instead of pushing his way in, Walter leaned toward the slight opening and shouted, “Lucy! Allie! It’s me! Can you guys hear me? You can both come out now! It’s safe! I promise, it’s safe!”

Goddamned liar, she thought as his voice echoed in the night air.

There was no movement from inside the house, and Allie held out hope that Lucy wouldn’t respond, that she would know something wasn’t right when Walter showed up with two strangers in an SUV.

Be smart, Lucy. Something’s not right. You can see it, can’t you?

But all that optimism quickly vanished when a figure appeared from the far side of the building, and a voice shouted, “Dad!”

Allie sighed as she watched Lucy run toward Walter, who hurried down the steps and opened his arms. The girl practically jumped into them. The two of them looked like the picture of a happy family reunion, except, of course, Allie knew better.

Who are you, Walter?

She heard a low, rumbling growl and looked down at Apollo, sitting next to her. He only had eyes for the two suited men by the SUV, and she wondered if he recognized the one who had tried to shoot him back at the house.

“Easy, boy. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. Promise.”

Apollo looked at her for a second before turning back to the men in suits.

She did the same thing when she noticed the one back at the SUV was leaning against the hood of the vehicle, looking through a pair of binoculars. The lens seemed to be glowing neon green, and the man was looking right at her.

Oh, hell, she thought, when the man pulled the binoculars away and said something. The tall one turned around, and he stared in her direction for the second time. He pulled something out from behind his back, and she learned what that “something” was when the man pointed it at her at the same time a bright beam of LED light hit her in the face.

She flinched at the sudden stab of brightness even as Apollo let out a loud bark in response.

There goes the element of surprise, she thought, fighting through the pain until she could see again.

Her vision returned just in time to catch the tall man dropping the flashlight and brushing back his blazer, the moonlight glinting off the steel barrel of his Uzi’s attached suppressor.

“Run!” she shouted.

Apollo was a blur of movement next to her, vanishing from her side even before she had completely spun around and flung herself away from the tree line. She was still in mid-air when the trunk she’d been sitting next to exploded and showered her with bark. The woods began emitting a strong burning smell as 9MM rounds slashed through the darkness, chopping into anything and everything.

She crawled forward on her hands and knees, desperate to get as far away from the tree line as possible, the gun still clutched in one hand. She didn’t get up until the man had stopped shooting and branches stopped falling, and only then did she scramble to her knees, then hopped up to her feet and took off running.

Apollo was right beside her, easily keeping pace.

“Goddammit, why did you do that?” someone shouted behind her. She would recognize the voice anywhere. Walter. “We had a fucking deal!”

She ran on, snapping twigs and swiping at branches that seemed to be dropping out of the sky for the express purpose of hindering her escape.

Even as her legs pumped and her breath crashed against her chest, Walter’s words echoed inside her head:

“We had a fucking deal!”

She kept running, her thoughts jumbled with the last five months as she struggled to understand what was happening, how this Walter was even the same one in the almost-plain suit who nervously asked her out that first time. She remembered taking the initiative and kissing him on their second date after being disappointed that he hadn’t already done it on the first one two days earlier.

Who was the real Walter? Was it the timid single father she had reluctantly allowed to enter her life after a year and a half of being alone, or was it the one back at the house, who had shot Jack down like a dog?

Goddamn you, Walter. Who are you?

Who are you?