Bitter Falls

by Caine, Rachel

  There’s a Norton police cruiser parked in our driveway with its red and blue lights flashing, and two uniformed officers standing there on the porch. I can’t see their faces; the brims of their caps throw dark shadows. But the uniforms look authentic.

  “False alarm,” I say to Sam, and put my gun away. I hear Lanny still pressing buttons. She’s trying too hard; she’s erroring out the code. “Lanny, it’s okay. Never mind. Kezia sent a cruiser. I’m going to send them away, and then we’re out of here.”

  “Kezia was pretty firm that she wanted her statement immediately,” Sam warns.

  “And I’m going to tell them, very politely, to fuck off.”

  I disarm the system and open the door.

  That’s my mistake, but I don’t know it for a few long seconds. All I see is uniforms . . . and then I see the faces. One of them has a beard.

  There are no Norton cops with beards. It’s a rule. And their uniforms don’t fit.

  They’ve taken out the cops.

  I go for my gun, but I’m already too late; the first man started moving the second the door opened, and now he stiff-arms it and forces me back, and his gun is in his hand while mine is still holstered. He puts the barrel to my forehead and drives me backward. Shock blows through me like an explosion, but it leaves something else: rage and fear, tearing along my nerves and pooling cold in my stomach.

  I back away. He follows and keeps the gun to my head. One slight pressure on that trigger and I’m gone. I want to look for my kids, but I don’t dare. I can only pray they’re getting into that safe room.

  Oh God, Sam . . . “Sam!” I say sharply. I raise my hands. It’s a gesture of surrender.

  It also shows him the gun clipped on the back of my belt. I’m between the incoming intruders and him. If he’s fast . . .

  He’s fast.

  I feel the tug on the back of my jeans, and then Sam is stepping sideways and aiming my gun. “Drop it,” he tells the fake cop. I can feel the menace in his voice like a heat wave shivering the air.

  But then the man’s partner also steps in, and he’s holding a shotgun. He racks and raises it, and I can almost sense the moment that Sam does the bloody calculus. If he fires, the shotgun blast takes us both out. He’s outgunned, and I’m the hostage.

  I hear beeps. Lanny’s at the safe room door, and she’s going to get it open. My kids are going to be okay.

  “Hey,” the second fake cop says. “You. Girl. Stop. Get over here now, or I blow both their heads off. You. Asshole. Put the gun on the floor and kick it to me.”

  “Lanny, get in the goddamn safe room!” Sam snaps. I can hear my daughter crying. She’s trying. I hear the rapid beeping of the locking mechanism refusing the code she’s entered. I used to drill them on this stuff, made sure they could enter the code at a moment’s notice. We’d made it a game.

  But this is my fault. I stopped drilling them. I stopped insisting that we be that ready, that careful, that paranoid.

  I hear the beeps stop.

  I see Lanny shuffle slowly forward out of my peripheral vision, and I risk a quick glance toward her. She’s crying. Trembling as she holds up her hands. Sam makes a growling sound in the back of his throat, pure frustration, and when the second fake cop points the shotgun at Lanny, Sam crouches down and puts his gun on the floor. He kicks it across, too hard, and it smacks the far wall behind the man with the shotgun. But if Sam meant it for a distraction, it doesn’t quite work. The man doesn’t go for it. He just leaves it where it stops.

  I can’t see Connor. I’m praying that he had time to get down the hall, that maybe, maybe, he’s getting out of the house. Go, baby. Run.

  I’m flooded with panic-flavored adrenaline and shaking, and every cell of my body is screaming with rage. “What do you want?” Oh God. I turned the alarm off. I let them in. All this is my fault.

  “I want the girl,” the man facing me says. At first I think he’s talking about Lanny, or even Vee, but then I know what he means.

  “Carol isn’t here,” I say. I’m lowering my hands, but he doesn’t like that. He presses the barrel of the gun so hard against my forehead it feels like being branded, and I lean back and put my hands up again. “I don’t know where she is!”

  “You have ten seconds to tell me the truth, or I blow the back of your head off. Understand me?” he snaps. “I want her, and I want the child. You tell me where they are, and you all live. Fuck with me, and you all die.”

  The front door is still open, and stripes of red and blue light cascade through the doorway behind him; the glow makes him look like angel and devil in fast strobes. But then that color washes out, and I realize headlights are coming up the driveway. Bright, high headlights.

  I draw my breath to scream for help, but I stop, panic trickling down my backbone in ice-cold drops. There’s no point in screaming for help.

  It’s a big, old recreational vehicle. Boxy and faded from age.

  It’s brought reinforcements.

  A third man, the driver, steps out of the RV and heads inside. He shuts the front door and stands against it.

  “Hey,” says the man holding me at gunpoint. As if I could have possibly forgotten him. “Focus. I’m still counting down from ten. Where’s Carol? Where’s the kid?”

  “I don’t know anything about a kid!” I say. And that’s true. I don’t. “Carol vanished after I was arrested. I don’t have any idea where she’d go.”

  “Four seconds,” he says.

  “I don’t know!” I shout it at him, hopeless now, furious that after all that I’ve survived it comes to this, this. “Don’t hurt my family!” It’s all I can do in those last few seconds, beg for their lives. I feel like my skin’s too tight, too cold, like it might split open like a drum and let all the darkness inside spill out.

  Time’s up. I get ready to die.

  He doesn’t shoot.

  He stares at me with dead, dark eyes and then turns to look at the man with the shotgun. “There’s supposed to be a boy here too,” he says. “Go find him. You, bitch. Down. On your knees.” He holsters my sidearm and takes the shotgun from the man who passes. He aims it right at me. “Down.”

  If he was intending to kill me, he’d have done it by now. I risk a question. “Are you from the Assembly?”

  It’s like I hit each of them with an electric cattle prod. They stiffen their posture and exchange looks. “Carol tell you that?” the man holding the shotgun asks. He sounds angry. “Get on your knees, woman. Pray. All of you! Down! Now!”

  I lower myself down to my knees, hands still raised. Sam manages to move up so he’s next to me; I can feel the vibrating tension in him, the need to do something. But we are doing something. We’re buying time for Connor to get away and get help.

  “Just let my daughter go,” I say. “Please. She’s a child. She doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “She’s old enough,” he says, and I don’t like the way he looks at her, like she’s a piece of meat in a market. If I have to go out fighting, I will, and one move toward my daughter . . . My whole body is trembling in time with the heavy, racing thud of my heartbeat. I’m coiled like a watch spring and ready to explode.

  “Carol took a bus to Pennsylvania.” The lie comes out of me in a rush, and the words feel like they cut my tongue, they’re so sharp.

  “A false witness shall not be unpunished, and he that speaketh lies shall perish,” the man with the shotgun says. “Proverbs.” He aims at me, and I draw in a sharp breath. Fear is like a knife down my spine. “You’re lying.”

  There are only two men now. The one with the shotgun, and the one who came from the RV and is blocking the front door. The third is looking through the house for Connor. I hear him opening doors down the hall.

  I need to play for time.

  “Check my phone,” I say. “I have a text.”

  “God is watching you, woman,” the man with the shotgun says. I can tell he’s chewing it over, and I see a flash of frustration in his
eyes. “Phone. Now.”

  “It’s in the other room,” I lie. “The office. On my desk.” If I can split them up even more, maybe we’ll have a chance. If nothing else, it delays them.

  The man who went in search of Connor comes back. “Not here,” he says. “Maybe went out a window.”

  “Go find him,” the man with the shotgun says. He’s in charge, no doubt about it. I watch as the man opens the door and rushes outside. Run, baby. Just run. “You. You’re stalling.” He’s talking to me again. There’s real confidence in him, and that scares me. “I studied up on you, Gwen Proctor. Gina Royal. And your phone ain’t in your office.”

  “It is.”

  “You sure about that? Because liars get punished.” He takes a phone out of the pocket of his police uniform and dials.

  I clearly hear the low buzz from the purse that sits on the coffee table. I don’t say anything. I can’t.

  He hangs up the call, and my phone stops buzzing. He raises the shotgun to his shoulder, and I feel him aiming. It’s like a spotlight on my face.

  The front door opens, and his friend is back. Strong and lean and merciless.

  He’s got my son.

  He’s holding a knife to Connor’s throat. And I feel all my fragile plans come apart, and now there’s nothing but fear, waves of it.

  “Put him in the RV,” the man in charge says without looking away from me. I let out a little cry and lean forward, reaching out. “We want Carol. If you want your boy back, you find him. You, her, and the child. You’ve got two days.” He tosses a small disposable phone on the carpet next to me, but I can’t look away from Connor as he’s yanked away. The stark look on his face, the pleading in his eyes . . . I let out a sound that’s half-scream, but before I can launch myself up and fight, the man in charge shuts the door, and Connor’s just . . . gone. “There’s a number programmed in. Call when you have her. Better be fast.”

  “She’s gone!” I yell it at him, hopeless and furious and hating myself. “Carol’s gone, and I don’t know how to find her!”

  “If you don’t, then your son joins the saints,” he tells me. “You should be honored. As Exodus says, the males belong to the Lord.”

  “Amen,” the other man says solemnly.

  I’m going to fucking kill them all.

  I hear a sound erupt outside, a shrieking howl that splits the night, and in an instant I know what it is. My son’s hit the panic button on his key chain.

  “Mel!” the man in charge snaps. “Go shut that racket up!” The man who’s been on the door opens it and moves out. There’s a split second where the noise ramps up as the door swings, and the man with the shotgun glances that direction.

  Lanny’s slipping her own key chain out of her pocket, and I see it. Sam sees it too. We have one shot. Just one. And we have to do this together.

  Lanny hits the panic button on her own key chain, and the noise is explosive, like a sonic grenade; it feels like being hit in the head with a hammer, but I’m braced for that.

  The man in charge is not.

  Sam and I launch as one, while Lanny rolls away to take shelter at the end of the couch. I’m screaming, but I can’t hear it, the noise is a red blur pulsing through my brain. I’m moving fast, but I don’t know if I’m fast enough. Sam and I hit him with all our weight and momentum. The shotgun goes off with a boom, but it’s only blown a ragged hole in the ceiling.

  The leader slams the butt of the shotgun into Sam’s head, and Sam staggers back. He’s wide open, off balance; I kick out wildly at our enemy, and connect. It spoils his shot at Sam, and the buckshot rips a hole in the wall instead.

  Sam hits the coffee table and topples drunkenly sideways. He’s half-out, struggling to stay in the fight.

  I see my gun still lying by the wall, and I scramble for it. I get it and roll over and take aim at the leader just as he swings the shotgun toward me, and we both freeze. The shriek of Lanny’s panic alarm is so loud it drowns out anything I could say.

  But we both know that even if I get him, he’s going to get me, too, and that shotgun will rip me to ribbons.

  I’m sitting up on the carpet. My back’s to the door. I don’t feel movement behind me until the last second, and then it’s too late.

  Something hits me in the back of the head with such force everything explodes into a flash of white, and I feel myself falling, losing the gun. The world is a long, loud smear.

  When I blink again, I’m down. My whole head is pulsing with red-hot pain, and I’m struggling to make sense of things. My gun’s beside me, and I grope for it. A boot kicks it away.

  He’s getting away. The man with the shotgun. He’s leaving. I crawl toward the gun but things go gray. I’m lying on the carpet. My gun isn’t where it was.

  I see Sam, bloody and stark with fury, lunging out the door. He’s got my gun. He’s going after Connor.

  Lanny’s next to me. I can see her terrified face, but I can’t hear her over the scream of the panic siren. I can’t turn my head; my body feels heavy and cold. The sound of the siren gets dimmer, slower, and then . . .

  . . . then, despite the racing of my heart, the desperate need to get up and go after my son, everything fades to black.

  17

  GWEN

  I wake up in a red mist of pain, and the first thing I try to do is touch the throbbing spot on my head.

  Someone pushes my hand down. I open my eyes, but all I can see is a blur of shapes and shadows, and then slowly I focus on a face looming over me. It isn’t Lanny.

  It’s Vee Crockett. She’s holding a cold cloth to my head, and when I try to get up, she shakes her head and presses me back. “Nope,” she says. “You need to rest, Ms. Proctor.”

  “Connor,” I whisper, and this time I don’t let her stop me from sitting up. The whole world does a greasy slide around me, and I gag from the pain of the headache. I sit, shaking, until it subsides a little. “Where’s Connor?”

  “I got help,” Vee tells me. “I heard the sirens, but I thought it was the cops at first. There was a cop car here. But then I saw them assholes dragging Connor to their RV, and I knew it was trouble.”

  “Where’s my son?”

  Vee sits back and looks up, and I realize that Lanny’s put her hand on Vee’s shoulder. My daughter looks pale but steady, and she crouches down and takes my hand. “Mom, I need you to be calm,” she says. “Okay?”

  “Are you all right?” It bursts out of me in a blind panic, because if she’s been hurt . . . but she looks okay. I think she’s okay.

  “I’m not hurt,” she says. “Mom . . . I’m sorry.” Her reluctance to tell me what she has to say makes me shake, and tears burn like acid, boiling up in a hot, melting rush.

  “They took Connor,” she says. And I immediately, irrationally react, trying to move, to stand, to find him. “Mom. Mom! He’s going to be okay. They won’t hurt him, they’re just—they’re holding on to him until you get this Carol person, right? And we’ll do that. We’ll get her.”

  She’s trying so hard to be the adult right now. She’s scared to death, and she’s holding on to Vee for support. “You said you found help?” I say to Vee, and I realize I’m still not myself; I didn’t mean to say that out loud. “Who—”

  She points, and I turn my head. I’m expecting Kezia, a full contingent of Norton police, but instead I see an old man with a thick white beard and cold blue eyes.

  It’s Jasper Belldene. The pill-pushing Santa of Norton. I’m hallucinating. I have to be. But the blinding headache I’m fighting off, the taste of metallic blood—that’s all too real.

  “Easy,” Jasper is saying, and holds up steady when I try to scramble up to my feet. “Hold on, there, woman, take it easy!”

  The effort makes my head go gray and throb even harder, and I need all their help to get me upright and standing. “Sam,” I say. “Where’s Sam?”

  I’m still in my own living room. The silence is as deafening as the panic alarms I remember before I passed out. The
damage to the ceiling and the wall looks raw. Spots of blood on the rug, but I think it’s mine, or maybe Sam’s. Where is he?

  Jasper Belldene looks at me with a mix of dispassion and keen focus. “Best I can tell, your man tried to take on two out there,” he says. “Signs read that there was a hell of a fight. Looks like he made it into the RV, but the RV done took off. So I guess they’ve got him and your son too.”

  It’s like an icy stab to my chest. I have trouble getting my breath. Focus! I scream at myself inside. Think! I can’t. I pull free of Lanny’s hands and stagger to the front window. It’s still dark outside. The police car is there, but someone’s turned the flashing lights off. My SUV and Sam’s truck are still parked. “Where are the police?” I ask. “You called them?”

  “No,” Jasper says. “And neither will you, if you want those boys back.”

  It isn’t that I forget the headache, or the pain; it’s that they cease to matter. I shove it aside, along with the fear. Fear will only slow me down. I turn my face toward Jasper and say, “You’re part of this. You said you’d come after us.” He’s an old man, and I’m barely standing, but I’m about to lunge for him anyway.

  He must see it, because he holds up both hands. “Ain’t saying we don’t have issues,” he says. “But you agreed you’d move, and I think you mean to keep that promise. I wouldn’t have nothing to do with kidnapping your boy. Whoever these people are, they ain’t mine.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  He points at Vee. “Girl there called,” he says. “She’s a friend of my boy Olly. She said there was trouble here. Ms. Proctor, we ain’t got time for this. Your neighbors might be hunkering down, but I guarantee they’re on 911 right now—”

  “Why would you help me?”

  “Fact is, you live ’round here, Ms. Proctor. You’re our neighbor. They’re strangers come in to do you harm.” He smiles. It’s cold, and I see the predator under the friendly disguise. “Besides, this is a chance for us to horse-trade a little. I help you find these bastards, you get your girl to say my son didn’t have nothing to do with that girl getting hurt up at Killing Rock.”