John Miller - Side by Side

When Dixie’s father arrived, Lucy hid the flashlight under the mattress and curled up on the bed to play possum when he looked into her room. She hoped she looked worse to him than she was. Buck had bruised her up good, but with scalp wounds, bleeding is often disproportional to severity. If she was going to get away, they had to believe she was incapable of escaping.

Lucy was certain her father had the authorities searching for her and Elijah, but she couldn’t depend on help arriving in time, and couldn’t hold out any hope for a rescue.

Seconds after the man closed the door, he and Dixie moved into the kitchen. Lucy slipped off the bed and put her ear close to the base of the door and listened to their conversation. It confirmed what Buck had said about her future prospects, but now she knew they were going to kill Elijah, too. Now she no longer had anything to lose.

She didn’t have until Monday. She had a few hours at best. If Dixie’s father got more of the drug they had used on her, she had to act before he returned with it. Once they dosed her with that again, she would never be able to do anything but lie there unconscious until they. . No. That wasn’t going to happen. At least not the way they planned. She wouldn’t go to her grave quietly or easily.

The makeshift dose that Dixie was going to use on her was a frightening thought, but she’d deal with that when the time came.

She waited for the door to the trailer to close before she sneaked the flashlight back out from under the mattress. Then she turned it on for a moment, slid the window carefully closed, put the flashlight back beneath the mattress, and lay on the bed. She had to make a plan, go through the options one by one.

She forced herself to concentrate, running through a mental list of what she had seen out in the warehouse, and how she could make use of those items for her and Eli’s flight.

She had no idea what was beyond the building’s walls, so once she was outside, she’d have to play it by ear.

Eleven-letter word for exiting hell.

DELIVERANCE

Winter Massey felt a visceral sense of relief as he watched Alexa drive off, her lights disappearing as she took the distant curve. The FBI agent part of Alexa was a wall standing between him and any information Click possessed. Winter’s gut told him that Click was the key to the Dockerys. Alexa the FBI agent saw the young man as a citizen wearing the cloak of constitutional rights, and he was protected by her allegiance to her pledge to uphold those laws. She could say she was “off the books” till the cows played cards, but she couldn’t actually be that way. Alexa saw the situation in shades of gray. Weighed against the Dockerys’ lives, Click’s rights didn’t figure into Winter’s formula. When it came to life-and-death situations, Winter saw in jet black lines on bright white paper.

Winter knew what he had to do, and if he succeeded, Alexa would have to learn to live with it. His reward would come when he saw Lucy’s and Elijah’s living faces, and if he had to make a deal with the devil, he would do it. When he looked at Ferny Ernest, he saw a cold-blooded willing participant in a double murder of a woman and her child.

Winter had spent a lot of time talking to a psychiatrist who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder. He had fully opened himself up to the therapy, unburdened himself as completely as he could, but despite that, he still saw every man and the one woman he had killed. They appeared with regularity in his dreams. All he had to do was close his eyes to see them. If Eleanor had lived, maybe he wouldn’t have taken the forks in the road that he had. If he had never gone to Rook Island on that WITSEC assignment, if he had never met Sean, if he had never felt the thirst for justice and retribution, if he hadn’t wandered into a world of CIA killers and mobsters to save her, things would certainly have worked out differently. He wondered if Alexa suspected that she didn’t know him because the years and experiences had altered the boy he had been with her into the man he had become without her. Their closeness had been a long time ago. Alexa knew it was true.

Alexa was somebody from the past who called once in a blue moon, when she felt nostalgic or got the big blue meanies. She was a Christmas card and a birthday card on Rush’s birthday.

Things change.

Life takes up all your time.

You put off making contact and that becomes emotional distance.

He and Alexa would never again be close friends. He had his heart heavily invested in a place that had no defined role for her.

Intentions not acted upon become regrets.

Intentions acted upon become regrets.

Winter checked the extra magazines, zipped his windbreaker halfway up so he could get to the SIG, put on a Gore-Tex ball cap, and climbed out of his truck.

After crossing the street, he circled the neighboring house and kept to the bushes until he arrived at Click’s house.

Showtime.

Serge Sarnov parked the BMW beside a dark SUV, which contained three of Max’s men. He knew real talent when he saw it, and Randall’s guys were bright boys who didn’t require rubber gloves to dive into wet work. Serge lit a cigarette and cut off the headlights. The wipers cleared the windshield at one-second intervals.

“That boy’s all right,” Serge said, meaning Click. In Serge’s opinion the young Smoot was a koi swimming in a sewer with a school of shit-sucking catfish.

“He’s going to tell his father,” Max said. “Soon as he gets over seeing the barrel of your gun, he’ll call Peanut. He doesn’t really believe you can take his old man out of play.”

Serge nodded. “You think I may have overestimated his sense of greed? I don’t think so, but. .” He tapped the wheel with his fingertips. “That boy has real potential.”

“A lot can happen to complicate this deal. Peanut is smart, vicious, and he could complicate things. That bunch doesn’t operate by any playbook but their own,” Max warned him.

“The Smoots are animals,” Serge said. “Click knows it. I think he will look into the future and make his decision based on that. He isn’t anything like the others.”

“Would you?” Max looked over at the SUV, the dark silhouettes of the killers inside. “Turn on your blood, turn down a known quantity for some money in the future he thinks he can get anyway?”

“He isn’t me,” Serge replied.

“Would you turn on your firm?” Max asked. “If someone came in out of the dark and said, ‘You’re too bright to work for Intermat for chump change. I’m going to take Intermat down. Join me or die.’?”

Serge didn’t answer. He was considering the value of Click weighed against the potential loss of this deal to his employers. The Smoot end of Laughlin’s empire accounted for huge profits. Tens of millions over the next couple of years. He wanted the Smoots’ action, needed it. Losing it now would put his life on the line, because his employers had already entered the figures into their projections. Laughlin had agreed to watch the Smoots be pushed aside, but the American probably wouldn’t be sorry to see Serge fail. Maybe he should get rid of Click just in case he misjudged the boy. A bird in the hand. .

“Let’s do this,” Max said. “We can keep Click under wraps until this operation is over. We can take him to the house and after Peanut and the others are done in, he’ll be easy to bring over.”

Serge said, “I was going to suggest the same course of action.” Randall was indeed a very smart man.

“After the Dockerys are dead, we can deal with Peanut and his family and let the trail end at their corpses.”

“I’m listening,” Serge said.