Karin Slaughter - Skin Privilege

Instinctively, she ran toward him but Jeffrey caught her hand, yanking her to the ground.

'Go into the bathroom,' he ordered, reaching under the mattress and pulling out his gun. 'Now.'

Sara ran in a crouch as Jeffrey moved toward the door. He put his hand on the knob, tried the door, but it wouldn't budge.

He pressed his back to the door, then the wall, making his way to the window. Quickly, he looked out the window, scanning the parking lot, then kneeling back down under the ledge. He did this twice, and Sara held her breath each time, waiting for his head to be blown off.

Jeffrey glanced back at Sara. 'Stay here,' he told her, then jumped through the broken window.

Sara held her breath, ears straining for the sound of gunshot. She crawled on her knees toward the man, trying to see if he was alive. Glass was everywhere, and she picked around it, trying not to cut herself. She kept her head down as she pressed her fingers to his neck, but wasn't sure if what she felt was a pulse or her own shaking hands.

'Sara.'

She screamed, ducking down at the same moment that she realized it was only Jeffrey.

'Whoever it was is gone.' He used the butt of his gun to knock away some glass before climbing back through the window. 'Is he dead?'

She finally looked at the man. He was on his left side facing the window. The white pearl handle of an expensive-looking folding knife stuck out of his back. A large shard of glass was fixed in his neck but there was only a trickle of blood, not the expected spurt generated from a beating heart. Still, she pressed her fingers to his carotid just to make sure.

She told Jeffrey, 'Nothing.'

He seemed almost relieved. 'The door's been nailed shut.'

Sara sat back on her knees, said a silent prayer of thanks that it was just a man thrown through the window and not a flaming ball of fire.

Jeffrey tilted the man's head, looked at his face. I think it's the guy from the bar.'

'It has to be,' she told him. The man had obviously recently been in a fire. His eyes were open but the lashes were singed off. His close-cropped hair was covered in soot. His shirt was burned away in large patches, the flesh underneath showing first- and second-degree burns.

Jeffrey started to tear open the man's shirtsleeve.

'Don't,' Sara told him, thinking there might be evidence on the shirt, but she saw Jeffrey's reason soon enough.

Tattooed onto the dead man's arm was a large red swastika.

Lena sat at Hank's kitchen table, her back against the wall, waiting for him to come home. The clock over the stove ticked loudly, and Lena had to force herself not to match her breathing to the noise. The Mercedes was in the driveway, so he must have come home at some point, but he was nowhere to be found now. The house was empty, the shed and beat-up old pickup in the backyard were both vacant. She'd driven by the bar, called the hospital, even talked to some old coot at the sheriff's office who gave her the standard line about waiting twenty-four hours, but Hank had pretty much disappeared. His cell phone was on the kitchen table, the battery dead. The answering machine showed no messages. The blue metal box, his drug kit, was gone. There was no way Hank would go anywhere without his kit. He must have taken it with him, which meant he'd left the house of his own accord – but that didn't tell her where he had gone.

Lena didn't even know what she would do if and when he turned up. What would she say if he walked through the door right now? What could she possibly ask him? Four hours had passed since she'd talked to Charlotte at the school, but the passage of time had done nothing to give Lena any clarity.

Hank had not been driving the car.

Angela Adams had blinded her own daughter, then – what? Driven away? Left Hank to deal with the fallout, to shoulder the blame?

The one thing Lena had sworn she'd never forgive him for and the bastard hadn't even done it. All that anger she'd held against him for most of her life was still boiling up inside her, only now she had nowhere to direct it. Should she be mad at her mother, a woman she couldn't even remember meeting? What was so bad about Angela Adams that Hank would let people assume he blinded his own niece rather than let the girls know that she was alive? What had she done to all of them?

The fluorescent light over the kitchen sink bathed the room in a blue cast as the sun started to go down. Hank's AA pamphlets were still scattered on the table, strewn across the floor, stacked hundreds deep on the gas stove. The clock kept ticking, marking away the minutes, then another hour.

After the accident, Sibyl hadn't been able to remember running into the driveway, or even the fact that she'd been playing ball with Lena in the first place. At the time, the doctor said this was fairly normal with severe head trauma, that sometimes the memories never came back. The sisters had never really talked about it afterward. Maybe they had as children, but as time passed, Sibyl's blindness and the cause of it had just become an accepted thing between them. Talking about the accident would have been like talking about the sun rising every morning: a foregone conclusion.

Meanwhile, Lena had blamed Hank and Hank sure as hell hadn't done anything to disabuse her of the notion. Whenever she threw it in his face, he'd just tighten his jaw, stare somewhere over her shoulder, and wait for her to finish.

Charlotte Warren had to know more about this than she was letting on; she was three years older than Lena and Sibyl. Her memory was better, her shock less traumatic. Still, all the woman had revealed were the bare facts: the car had hit Sibyl, Hank had come running, and Angela had bolted, not stopping to see if Sibyl was okay, not bothering to explain what had happened. The police had arrived within minutes, then the ambulance. Charlotte 's mother had taken her daughter home and told her to forget what had happened, that no good would come from talking about it.

According to Charlotte, she had taken her mother's words to heart. Even as her relationship with Sibyl developed into something more serious, Charlotte had assumed that there were some things that were just too awful, too painful, to talk about.

Had it been that simple, though? Had Charlotte and Sibyl really never talked about that day? Lena supposed it was feasible that if Sibyl wouldn't discuss the subject with her own sister, she wouldn't bring it up with Charlotte Warren, either. Sibyl had bristled at the thought of having anyone's pity. She had devoted her life to being as self-sufficient as a seeing person. She'd never given in to her disability or used it for personal gain. Maybe she hadn't talked about the accident because she hadn't wanted anyone to feel sorry for her.

So many secrets, so many people protecting Angela Adams, and no one willing to explain why.

Lena reached back over her head to the phone on the wall. The receiver was sticky in her hand, the buttons stuck with grime. She dialed Nan Thomas's number, thinking she'd ask Sibyl's lover exactly what her sister had known about that horrible day. Her heart was pounding by the time Nan 's phone started to ring. Lena waited, counting off the rings until voice mail picked up.

She hung up, not leaving a message.

What if Sibyl had known it was their mother? No. She would have said something to Lena. There was no way she could have gone all those years without telling Lena that their mother had been alive years after Hank had told them she'd died, that they had been lied to.

Unless Sibyl was trying to protect Lena, too.

'Shit,' Lena cursed, rubbing her eyes. She was tired, and sitting in Hank's house was somehow worse than being in her crappy motel room. It was certainly dirtier.