Ted Dekker - Sanctuary

“Yes.”

My heart was already broken, but I saw myself in Jeremy’s shoes, and it was everything I could do to remain calm. I gave him a long hug and helped him out of the car a block from his house in a low-rent district on the east side of Pasadena. We followed him at distance until he entered a duplex, safe.

But really, he wasn’t safe. Neither was Danny.

Only two days had passed between the time we drove away from Jeremy’s house and the time we drove up to the large white house on Sunrise Street, but those two days felt like a week to me.

“This is it?” I asked, pulling the car to a stop twenty feet back from a stucco mailbox marked with the brass numbers 1227.

“That’s it.” Keith shoved the Google map into the car’s door pocket. “Kill the lights.”

I did.

“Turn the engine off.”

I looked at him, then up the driveway at the house, which was lit by an array of exterior lamps affixed to the stucco walls. Two white pillars bordered a tall arched ironwork door. Using Google’s satellite view, we’d zoomed in on the house, complete with red adobe tiles on a dozen roof lines. It was clear then that our target was wealthy. But we still didn’t know who owned the property or who we were supposed to kill, only that he lived here.

My palms on the wheel were clammy with sweat. “I think we should leave it running,” I said. “We might need to get out quick.”

“Saving the three seconds it takes to start the car isn’t worth the risk.”

“Risk of what? It’s Beverly Hills.”

“These are public streets. A cop comes by and wonders why the car’s running? No, turn it off.”

So I did. “What time is it?”

“Eleven fifty-one. We have nine minutes.”

“So I just go up and knock on the door, right?”

Keith reached back and grabbed my black kit. “Just like we agreed. You go to the front door, I hold back until the door’s open. Assuming you’re still good with that.”

Was I?

The plan was mine, dredged up from my better days with Danny. He would have insisted on a thorough surveillance, but the timing Sicko had given us didn’t allow for that. The home owner probably wouldn’t see any threat in a skinny girl like me dressed in Miss Me jeans and a bright blue blouse. Once he had the door open, Keith, who was dressed in black, would step in from the side with his gun and force the man back in the house.

Looking at the house, I was having second thoughts. We didn’t even know if the owner had a wife in there, or daughters, or guards, or dogs.

“What if he’s the wrong man?”

Keith pulled out his gun and chambered a round. “Whoever’s pulling our strings is too meticulous in his planning for that. The man they want is in that house, guaranteed.”

“And then what?” I asked.

“And then you leave it up to me.”

“I don’t like it.”

“I don’t either, but trust me, it’s the best way. Go in fast and hard and control the situation before he has a chance to react.”

Something about the look of that fortress struck me as odd. Maybe it was my frazzled nerves, maybe my suspicious nature, maybe my fear of bedbugs and rats—I don’t know. There was too much we didn’t know about our target. Too many things that could go wrong. I knew that as a cop Keith had been through his share of similar situations, but nothing had gone right for us so far. And we’d failed to follow the instructions on the last note. It was suddenly all happening too fast.

What would Danny do? I’d asked that question a hundred times in the last two days, but staring at the house, a part of me saw our present situation differently. My instinct to start out with deception was good, but the part about barging in with guns drawn wasn’t sitting right. We didn’t know enough!

Danny would already be on the perimeter circling the house. He would be patient. He would find a weakness first and then exploit it, right?

“You ready?” Keith asked.

“Read the note again,” I said.

He turned his head. “We’ve been over this.”

“I have OCD.”

He stared at me, then pulled the note out of his pocket, fished a penlight out of my kit, and read the note under its light.

“‘At midnight Monday night you will go to an address I will give you. You will force a full confession from the owner of the house and learn where he put the money. If he refuses, you will kill him and wait for my next instructions. If he confesses, you will have forty-eight hours to retrieve the money. Once you have the money, you will return and kill the man and wait for my instructions. Either way, you will kill the man. If he’s alive in four days, both Danny and that scumbag you’re with are dead.’”

He lowered the note.

“You know what I’m thinking?” I said, eyes still on the house. “This isn’t about the money. Whoever lives in that house has all the money Randell could want. He doesn’t need us to get it; he could find another way.”

“We’ve been over that too. Randell doesn’t know who he can trust on the outside anymore. His partners turned against him.”

“It’s not about the money,” I said. “He’s obsessed with us killing whoever’s in that house. That’s all that matters to him. But why us?”

“And we’ve been over that too. Revenge.”

“Against who?”

Keith looked up at the house. “Me. You. Danny.”

I nodded and looked at the side of his face. “Okay. But what about whoever’s in the house? What if he’s more than just a drug dealer? If it’s not really about the money, why does Sicko want him dead?”

“We don’t know.” His voice took on a frustrated bite. “We don’t know squat—you don’t think I know that?”

“That’s what I’m saying…we don’t know.”

“We know Sicko’s enraged about something Danny did. Revenge. You kill this man, you take the blame, you go to prison. It’s his way of messing with Danny.”

“I’m not going to kill him,” I said.

“You sure about that?”

I didn’t answer. It still didn’t make complete sense to me. There was something else we didn’t understand in play. Maybe that was what made me rethink the whole barging-in thing. Whoever was in the house might be our only real shot at getting to Sicko.

“Like you said, we need to know more,” I said.

“We don’t have time to know more!”

I glanced at my phone. Three minutes till midnight. My heart was racing. Danny’s first rule had always been to know your target, and the best way to do that now was on the inside of that house. Not with guns blazing.

“I’m going in first,” I said. I grabbed the kit off his lap. Pulled out my knife. Stuffed it and the Mace into my pockets. “Give me five minutes.”

“You can’t go in there alone and unarmed.”

“I’m not going in with a gun. We need to know who this guy is before we do anything. The second he sees a gun, he sees us as a threat. I need to know who he is before that.”

“Then let me go in first.”

“No, he’ll see you as a threat. Me, he sees as a lost girl looking for some help.”

“That’s your plan now? Go in looking for directions?”

I took a deep breath and opened my door. My desperation gave way to a kind of fatal hopelessness.

What would Danny do? He would do whatever was necessary to save me. I had to save Danny, and the only way was to know his enemy.

“I’m going in, Keith. I have to. Wait for me outside and be ready.”

“Ready for what? A smoke signal?”

“I don’t know.” I put my foot on the street and stepped outside. “I’ll think of something.”

“Renee—”

“Give me ten minutes.”

“Ten? Or five?”

“Ten. Wait for me.”