Saint/Sinner

Chapter 1

She knew something was wrong before Walter opened the door and Lucy rushed past the two of them. It was in the air — a strange electricity she hadn’t felt in a long time. That, she told herself, was why it had taken her so long to understand what she was sensing; two years ago she would have acted without hesitation.

Before she could put feelings into words, the fifteen-year-old girl was gone in a blur of jeans and a T-shirt and squeaking tennis shoes.

Walter looked back at her with one of those apologetic smiles that seemed to appear (too) often where his daughter was involved. “I guess she’s excited. We haven’t been here in a long time.”

“Walter, there’s something—” she started to say, when Lucy’s scream froze both of them in place, and she thought, Too late. Too late!

Walter dropped their bags and disappeared through the door before she could grab him. She ran after him instead, pushing the door open before it could close on her. She skidded for a half-second against the polished foyer floor, caked in the fresh dirt Walter and his daughter had tracked inside as they’d gone through the same spots seconds earlier.

“Walter!” she shouted. “Wait!”

But Walter didn’t wait. The scream was Lucy’s, and Allie would have needed an extra pair of arms to hold him back. He was up ahead of her and moving fast. She wasn’t prepared for that kind of speed; in all the months she’d known him, he had never once moved that fast.

She had never been to Walter’s house in the country, and the newness of it temporarily disoriented her even as she attempted to keep up with Walter’s fleeting form. The house was one story but wide, with the kitchen area to her left and the living room in front of her; that left the bedrooms to her (as now, unseen) right. She got a quick glimpse of the back patio through the glass door at the back and nothing but woods on the other side.

“It’s great,” Walter had said. “It’s quiet. Out of the way. It’s private land, so it’ll just be the three of us out there most of the time. My closest neighbor is on the other side of the woods, so far away we can make all kinds of noise and no one would hear.” He had said that last part with a mischievous smile, Walter’s awkward attempt at a sexual joke while forgetting the fact that his daughter would also be there with them. “You’ll love it.”

She was sure she would love it, even if it meant leaving the city behind and coming out here. “The woods,” she had thought when Walter brought up the idea. She had sworn to herself never to venture back into the woods.

And yet here she was, trying to catch up to Walter, and gaining little by little just before he made the turn. She followed, her sneakers squeaking against the polished floor, even as her mind dreaded what she would find on the other side—

Allie slid to a stop at the sight of Walter on his knees, hands clasped over his head, while a man wearing all black stood in front of him, holding a gun to Walter’s temple.

She would have sighed if she hadn’t been so winded from the running. Christ, she was out of shape! Two years of comfortable city living had not only dulled her ability to discern danger, but it had also made her slow. How else to explain Walter outrunning her?

The man wore all black, his light brown eyes looking out at her from behind a balaclava that covered almost his entire face. The gun was black, like his clothes, and the way he held it made the object appear like an extension of his gloved hand. He had something else — a rifle of some sort — slung over his back. It was long and ugly and dangerous. All that dark color made seeing the small details difficult, but Allie’s senses hadn’t been so dampened to the point where she didn’t know, without a single shred of doubt, that she, Walter, and Lucy were in big, big trouble.

“You must be Allie,” the man with the gun said. “Do me a favor and don’t scream.”

“Private land, with the nearest house almost half a mile away,” a second voice said from behind her. “She can scream all she wants.”

Allie whirled around as a second black-clad figure wearing an identical ski mask to the first one stepped out from the kitchen. She wished she could have said she had detected him earlier — she’d even looked across the kitchen at the back patio as she was running through the foyer, for God’s sake — but that would have been a lie.

Both men wore tactical gun belts, bulky pouches tapping against one thigh as they moved. The one behind her was holding some kind of submachine gun, though it looked longer than the ones she was used to because of the smooth silencer attached to the barrel. She cycled through her memory, back to the days when guns were a daily part of her life.

There: MP5SD. Heckler & Koch. 9mm Parabellum. Thirty rounds in the magazine.

None of that knowledge was of any use to her at the moment, as the man strode across the living room and snatched the bag she had been carrying from her. It hadn’t occurred to her that she still had it, and had since climbing out of Walter’s car. Was that why she had lagged behind him as they dashed through the house earlier? Because of the extra baggage?

It definitely wasn’t because you’ve gotten slow and out of shape.

Yeah, let’s go with that.

The gunman tossed her carry-on onto a nearby loveseat and took a step back, dark black eyes squinting behind the visible wide part of his mask. “Take a picture, toots; it’ll last longer,” the man said, chuckling.

As she turned back around, she saw a second corridor, this one toward the back of the house. The angle was all wrong, and she couldn’t see what was inside it. She didn’t spend another second thinking about it, because right now her eyes were focused on what was happening behind the man pointing the gun at Walter’s temple: A third masked figure, much larger than the first two, was bringing Lucy out of the bedroom hallway. The man’s gloved fingers had a vicious grip on Lucy’s hair, and the teenager stumbled, fighting back tears the entire time. She struggled against the man, unaware that the more she fought, the stronger the man’s hold and the pain that resulted.

“Lucy, stop it, stop fighting him,” Allie said.

Maybe it was the measured tone in her voice, but it got through to the fifteen-year-old, and Lucy finally stopped struggling.

“Ask and it shall be done,” the man in front of Walter said. Then, to the one behind her, “Check the car. Make sure they didn’t bring anyone extra along with them.”

The second man left without a word.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Walter said, trying to catch Lucy’s eyes as she was led past him. “It’ll all be okay. I promise. Go to Allie.”

Lucy was losing the battle to hold in her tears when the man mercifully let go of her hair and Lucy ran toward her. Allie grabbed the girl in a hug, realizing with some irony that this was the first time she and the teenager had ever done more than just shake hands or exchange brief nods with all the sincerity of strangers passing on the street.

But right now that young girl, who never gave her the time of day, was trembling uncontrollably against her, thin arms wrapped so tightly around Allie’s waist that she would have felt the uncomfortable pressure if she weren’t too preoccupied with other things — like the two heavily-armed masked men in the house with them at the moment, and the third one somewhere outside.

“What do you want?” Allie asked the one in front of Walter, the one who had been giving all the orders.

The man grabbed Walter by the shirt collar and pulled him up, then gave a slight push. Walter stumbled back toward her, off balance, and Allie had to reach out for his hand to steady him. She pulled him over to her, keeping her other arm around Lucy.

“You can call me Jack,” the man said.

Jack. Riiiight.

She gave the gun “Jack” was holstering a second look. It was a Sig Sauer 9mm, either a P220 or a P226. Sometimes she got the two mixed up because they looked similar. Not that the model mattered. A gun was a gun was a gun. The fact that he had one and she didn’t was the important takeaway.

“What do you want?” she asked again.

“From you? Nothing.” He nodded at Walter, standing next to her. “From him? Everything.”

Allie looked over at Walter, but there was only confusion on his face.

“Relax,” the man named Jack said. “This will all be over by morning—” He stopped in mid-sentence and tilted his head slightly to one side, listening to something that she couldn’t hear.

The other black-clad man standing next to him did the same thing.

“Is it dead?” Jack asked. Then, at the other man, “Go help him find it.”

“Then what?” the man asked.

“I don’t know, throw it Frisbees and play catch. What do you think?”

“It’s a dog.”

“And your point?”

“My point is, it’s a dog. What’s it gonna do, run and tell the cops someone’s stuck in a well?”

Jack sighed and pointed across the room, past her and Walter and his daughter. “Go help him find it, then put it out of its misery. If I have to say it again, we’re going to have a problem. Are we going to have a problem?”

The other man didn’t so much surrender as he decided it wasn’t worth arguing about and walked around them, saying to no one in particular, “Are you foaming at the mouth yet? You want me to take you to the hospital for rabies shots?” The man chuckled, his heavy, booted footsteps echoing along the foyer behind them.

She put all of her focus on Jack, on the holstered sidearm at his hip. It had been a while since she had touched a gun, but you never forgot how to use one. The last time she had one in her hand, she had taken a life at close range. She would have been perfectly happy if she never had to repeat that harrowing moment ever again. That might have been possible, if she had only stayed out of the goddamned woods.

Then the man did something she had been hoping against hope that he wouldn’t do: He began pulling the balaclava off his head.

Oh, dammit.

The man ran gloved fingers through short blond hair. He was square-jawed, and though she couldn’t tell earlier when Walter was kneeling in front of him, he had a few inches on Walter’s five-ten, but a smaller frame than the man who had brought Lucy out of the back hallway.

“Don’t be a hero, and you’ll all get out of this alive,” Jack said.

He had stared at her as he said it. That shouldn’t have happened. People were supposed to look past her, especially when she was holding a sobbing teenager in her arms and a taller and stronger man was standing next to her. Between the two of them, Walter was the potential troublemaker, not her. That was how it was supposed to work.

So why was “Jack” staring at her as he made his promise, as if he knew she was the threat and not Walter?

“We don’t want to hurt anyone,” Jack continued. “Stay cool and do as you’re told, and this will all be over by morning. We’ll be out of your hair, and you folks can go back to your vacation. Sound good?”

She didn’t say anything, because she was too busy crunching the numbers in her head. She remembered glancing at her watch when they finally reached the house after a five-hour drive from the city.

“Stay cool and do as you’re told, and this will all be over by morning.”

Morning was nine hours away, which meant she had that long to get them out of here alive, because regardless of what “Jack” had promised them, they weren’t going to be able to just go back to their vacation after this. Because Jack had done the one thing she was hoping he wouldn’t do: He had shown them his face, which meant he didn’t expect them to leave the house alive now that they could identify him.