by Becky Durfee
“I am telling the truth, I promise.” He chose the recliner across the room. “John was recommended for outpatient treatment, and he goes faithfully without argument.”
Jenny looked at him sternly for a moment before breaking into a smile. “Good,” she said, “I’m glad to hear it.”
An adorable, petite woman came down the stairs, gasping when she saw the baby in Jenny’s lap. This must have been Mick’s girlfriend—the woman Jenny approved of, in theory, but was jealous of nonetheless.
“Oh my goodness, your baby is so cute,” she gushed.
“You can hold him, if you’d like.”
“Really?” Her face grew even more endearing than it had been before. She held out her hands, wriggling her fingers, eagerly approaching Steve. After carefully taking him from Jenny, she hugged him tightly into her body, sniffing his scent. Jenny could see—and feel—the love pouring out of this woman, who let out a sound that could only be described as a squeal. “Mick…couldn’t you just eat him up?”
Mick laughed again, replying, “I agree he’s cute, but I don’t know about eating him.”
“Oh, you’re no fun,” the woman said. “I’m Samantha, by the way.”
Even her name was cute.
“Hi, I’m Jenny.”
“I’ve heard all about you, and I can’t thank you enough. You’ve helped both Mick and my brother.” Settling the baby on one of her hips, she placed her free hand on her heart. “I mean it. I feel like I owe you so much.”
“Well, just make sure this guy doesn’t drink and we’ll be even.” She gestured to Mick with her thumb. “Oh, and treat him well, too. There’s that.”
Samantha and Mick exchanged a loving glance. “No worries there,” she assured Jenny.
Oh, dear.
The front door opened, and in walked John. He greeted everyone with a smile, looking back and forth between Samantha and Mick. “Is there something you guys haven’t told me?”
“What, that I’ve spontaneously given birth to a four-month-old?” Samantha asked.
“Just kidding,” John assured her. He walked over to Jenny, who stood when he approached. While hugging her, he said, “It’s good to see you.”
“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” she said genuinely. “I thought you might hate me.” Releasing the embrace, she added, “Mick, here, has told me that you’re doing well.”
Smiling sheepishly, he said, “Yeah, I’m okay…now. I’m not exactly proud of the way I acted before, though.”
Jenny shooed away the comment with her hand. “Don’t worry about that. We ambushed you, and you reacted the way anybody would have under those circumstances. It’s no big deal.”
Still looking embarrassed, he said, “Treatment is going well, though. I have to go in for meetings every other day. It helps—I am in sessions with other people who are in my stage of the game. Most of them have relapsed a time or two, and it’s good to know that it’s normal.”
“I’m sure it is,” Jenny said. “If drugs were easy to kick, there wouldn’t be any treatment facilities.”
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”
The topic of conversation went to their work with the Wounded Warrior Project. They told stories about making house modifications for people who came home from the war with disabilities, lining up contractors and making sure the work was done properly. Both men commented on how rewarding the work was and that it gave them a reason to stay clean.
After a while, Jenny took the baby, who was now sleeping, out of Samantha’s arms and put him back in his car seat. A short drive later, she was back at the house, still feeling exhausted from her schedule-altering trip to Missouri. She managed to stay awake until the baby went to sleep for the evening, but she hit the sheets right after he did at seven-thirty.
Her sleep was sound until the middle of the night, when she heard Baxter barking softly under his breath. The sound was little more than a muffled oof.
“Bax, shhh.”
She had just about dozed off again when he let out another subdued woof.
“Oh, God, are you serious?” she muttered, rolling over onto her back.
The process repeated enough times for Jenny to become wide awake and aware of the fact that she was hungry. “Seriously, dog,” she whispered as her feet hit the floor, “if I didn’t need to eat, you’d be out on your ear.”
She shuffled groggily toward the kitchen, working her way through the dark hallway, Baxter at her feet. The dog ran ahead of her, his chain jingling as he went into the living room.
She turned the kitchen light on, but something didn’t seem right. The dog’s chain continued to jingle from the other room. Peeking around the doorway, she saw Baxter eagerly receiving love from a man she immediately recognized to be Leo Pryzbyck.
Leo Pryzbyck, the man who had brutally killed a woman back in the eighties but remained free due to the neighbor’s wrongful conviction.
Leo Pryzbyck, the man who had threatened both Jenny and her then-unborn baby when she figured out he had been the actual killer.
Leo Pryzbyck, the man who had left town before the authorities could catch him.
Leo Pryzbyck.
She let out a gasp and a shriek at the same time, covering her mouth with both hands. The last thing she wanted to do was wake anyone else in the house and put them in danger. Leo was a violent man—he had killed before—and Jenny had made the police aware of that. He had managed to leave town before the police could catch him, and he’d been on the run ever since.
And now he was in her living room with a gun in his hand.
“Jenny Larrabee,” he said softly. “We meet again.” His free hand continued to scratch Baxter’s head.
Frozen with fear, she simply looked at him, saying nothing.
“It was so nice to see you in my neck of the woods the past few days. I even left you some nice little notes. Did you get them?” His voice had a friendly quality to it, which made him that much more frightening.
Jenny remained silent.
“It was a shame you left so quickly,” he went on, taking a few steps toward her. “We didn’t have the chance to meet in person.”
She backed up, returning to the kitchen. He followed her, stepping into the brightness, looking just as haggard as she had remembered. The one quality she hadn’t noticed before was his stockiness, but that was painfully obvious to her now.
“Where are you going, Jenny? Do you think you can outrun me?” He walked a little closer. With a smile, he added, “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s nowhere for you to run.”
Her mind immediately went to her baby, wondering if he had been in the house long enough to do something horrible to Steve. She didn’t know what to do—she would have been willing to stand there and take a bullet if it meant he’d leave the baby alone…but what if he had already hurt him? Or what if he killed Jenny and then went to the baby’s room and did something awful afterward? If only she knew what she could do to keep her son safe, she would have been willing to do it, no matter what it was.
A loud sound permeated the room, causing Jenny to jump three feet in the air. It was only Baxter, barking at the pantry, looking for a treat. She closed her eyes and sucked in a shaky breath, taking a moment to realize that sound hadn’t been a gunshot and she was, for the time being, very much alive.
The dog barked again. “Bax, hush!” she commanded. Please do not wake everyone up, she silently implored. If they didn’t come out of bed, perhaps they’d survive this.
Even if she didn’t.
“That’s a cute dog you have there,” Leo said softly. “I’ve always wanted a dog.”
Don’t hurt Baxter. She thought it but didn’t say it, fearful that her worlds would have backfired if she said them out loud.
“Maybe I’ll take him with me back to Bennett…” Leo’s eyes looked crazed as they focused on Jenny. “You know, that place where—thanks to you—I can’t even use my own name.” He took another step closer,
now only a few feet from Jenny. “Everything had been fine in my life, you know that? Nobody had mentioned Stella’s name in years.” He spoke through gritted teeth, his hate for Jenny palpable. “And you had to go and fuck everything up. My life is ruined now. Do you understand that? It’s ruined!”
Jenny’s eyes flitted back and forth between Leo’s face and his gun, which, for the time being, was still by his side. She hoped he would come just a little bit closer—within striking distance. If she was going to be killed in this kitchen, fine, but she wasn’t going down without a fight.
“How is killing me going to make anything better?” she asked. “It would only make matters worse for you. Then you’d be faced with two counts of murder.”
He smiled, sending a chill down Jenny’s spine. “Not if people don’t know it was me. Why would they suspect Michael Smith from Bennett, Missouri in the shooting death of a woman in Tennessee? I’m sure you’ve messed with enough people’s lives that there are a whole slew of people who want to kill you. Besides…they haven’t been able to find me yet, and I doubt they’ll find me now.”
“Don’t you have a car parked outside? Somebody might have seen it.”
“Yeah, I do.” He smiled before adding, “A stolen one.”
Jenny wanted to keep him talking, hoping he would move in closer. “You never answered my question. How will killing me make it better?”
Edging just a tiny bit closer, he muttered, “I have done nothing but think about you and what you’ve done to me since the day I left Ed’s house. You took my life from me. And now I want to take your life from…”
BAM!
The sound was deafening, and Leo suddenly fell to the ground. She looked at him in shock as he lay on her floor, motionless and bleeding. Glancing up, she saw her mother in her nightgown with one hand holding a gun and the other covering her mouth.
“Ma!” Jenny exclaimed in surprise.
“Is he dead?” Isabelle asked with fear. “Did I kill him?”
Jenny couldn’t answer. She didn’t even care to check. Stepping over Leo on the floor, she ran down the hall into the baby’s room, turning on the light and rushing to the crib. Steve lay still on his back, arms overhead. He was a beautiful pink color, but to be sure, Jenny put her hand in front of his mouth, where she felt the subtle, warm hint of baby breath. Her knees immediately buckled, and she collapsed to the floor with relief.
Zack rounded the corner of the bedroom. “Jenny, what the hell happened?”
She lowered herself to her back, lying on the floor, tears streaming from her eyes. “The baby’s fine. Go check on my mom.”
“Are you hurt?” he demanded.
“No. Go to the kitchen. My mom shot Leo Pryzbyck.”
“What?” After a pause from apparent confusion, Zack disappeared from the doorway. Jenny knew that she, too, needed to go check on her mother, but for the moment she couldn’t get up. The thought that she may have just lost her baby was too much for her to bear, leaving her without an ounce of strength in her body.
Breathing deeply a few times, she managed to flip over onto her hands and knees, willing herself into a standing position. Her steps were wobbly as she went back out to the kitchen, seeing her mother seated on a chair, pale as a ghost, with the gun on the table. Zack was on the phone, giving the address.
She looked at Leo, who remained in the same position on the floor. His eyes were open, but glossy. His stare was blank. “Is he alive?” Jenny asked her mother.
Robotically, Isabelle replied, “I don’t think so. Is the baby okay?”
Jenny walked over to her mother, standing behind her chair, bending over and wrapping her arms around Isabelle’s neck. “Yes, the baby’s fine. You saved us, Mom,” she whispered. “All of us.”
Isabelle reached up her hand, placing it on Jenny’s arm. She patted it a few times, but didn’t say anything.
“How did you know?” Jenny asked.
“I heard the dog bark.” Her voice was distant. “I’d never heard Baxter bark in the middle of the night, so I thought something might have been going on. I came upstairs and saw him cornering you. I couldn’t have that.”
Jenny sympathized with her mother. The thought of losing a baby was horrifying, no matter what age the child was.
Zack’s voice became clear to Jenny. “No, he doesn’t appear to be,” he told the dispatcher. “He’s not moving.”
“I just killed a man,” Isabelle whispered. “Somebody’s son.”
“It was him or me,” Jenny assured her. “He’d killed before; I’m sure he would have done it again.”
Isabelle released a breath, her cheeks puffing out with the force. “I don’t know if I can live with this.”
“You did the right thing. I’m positive he would have killed me, and then I don’t know what he would have done with Steve.” She shuddered at the thought. “You’re a hero, Ma.”
“The baby’s really okay?”
With a smile gracing her lips for the first time since this all began, Jenny said, “He didn’t even wake up.”
Zack lowered the phone from his mouth, speaking over it to Jenny and Isabelle. “Can you two wait by the front door for the cops to come? I’ll stay here and guard him.” He gestured his head toward Leo.
“You okay to get up, Ma?” Jenny asked.
She nodded, although she accepted Jenny’s offer to help her get out of the chair. “I’d rather not look at him anymore, anyway.”
Leading her mother toward the front door, Jenny asked, “When, exactly, did you get a gun?”
“Back when I told you that you should get one and you didn’t.”
Jenny smiled. “How did you learn how to shoot it?”
“I go to target practice every Tuesday.” When Jenny only responded with a laugh, Isabelle added, “What? Do you think I sit down there all day and do nothing?”
Six weeks later
“Jenny? Are you ready?” Isabelle knocked on the door to the upstairs as she opened it.
“Almost,” Jenny replied, putting the finishing touches on a diaper change, which wasn’t easy since Steve spent the whole time trying to roll over. She grabbed his leg and flipped him onto his back—again—and said, “Stay still, squiggly butt.”
Once the diaper was on and the handoff to Zack was complete, both women grabbed their guns, walked out the door and headed for the shooting range.
To be continued in Cold…
