Trent tried again, “Mr. Pantalone? Why don’t you come with us.” By Trent’s tone, it wasn’t a suggestion.
Then all hell broke loose.
Chapter 51
November 20, 2014
It happened in seconds. Maybe less than seconds. It was all lightning fast, like every action was being delivered in the flash of a strobe light. Pantalone reached behind him, beneath his shirt, and pulled a handgun out of his waistband. He fired as he swung it toward them. His bringing it up and around seemed to happen at the same time as the muzzle flash. The gunshot was so loud, it rattled Jocelyn’s teeth. Trent shouted something. Both of them reached for their guns. Hers wasn’t there, of course. Then a hot spray of blood arced through the air and landed across Jocelyn’s face. Trent dropped on top of her feet. She half stumbled, half fell, pulling her feet out from under Trent’s body and going to her knees. Her hands raked across his clothes, digging frantically for his gun.
He hadn’t even gotten it out of the holster. She pushed him from his side onto his back, registering his groan with relief, and wrenched his Glock from the holster at his waist. She brought it up, prepared to empty the magazine into Davey Pantalone’s fat ass. She’d had just about all she could take of assholes pointing guns at her.
But then the barrel of Pantalone’s gun was pressed into her forehead. It seared a hot circle into her flesh, still hot from the shot he’d fired at Trent. She flinched. Then her body froze. At first, her heartbeat thundered so loudly in her head it sounded like a jet taking off right there in the room. Then the calm came over her. A detachment of sorts. Everything went quiet and slow, as though she had plunged into the depths of a deep pool. She was in the room with Trent bleeding at her feet and Pantalone pressing a gun to her forehead, and the woman who was so fraught with hysteria that she could not even form words was somewhere else, pushed down somewhere inside Jocelyn where her screams would not be heard and her panic would not be felt. That woman had been walled off, compartmentalized, and silenced by the part of Jocelyn that had saved herself from a sadistic home invader the year before. What existed now, in the room with Pantalone, was the part of Jocelyn that vowed she would return home to her daughter that night, no matter who she had to kill. She tasted Trent’s blood on her lips.
“Gimme that,” Pantalone said.
Jocelyn made some calculations. She had Trent’s gun pointed at Pantalone’s crotch. She could definitely get a shot off but so could he, and his gun dug into the skin of her head. She couldn’t take the chance of him firing. The man had no hesitation, and that made him extremely dangerous. He could easily blow her head off in the same amount of time it would take her to shoot his dick off.
It physically hurt her—like a skewer through her chest—to relinquish the gun. But she had to. There was Olivia to think of, Caleb, Camille, Kevin, Inez, and Anita. Her people. There was Trent dying at her feet. She had to give up the gun and back down, regroup. She took her right hand away from the hand grip and put it in the air, a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay. Take it.”
His breathing was labored as he reached for the gun. He gripped the barrel and turned the gun so the top of her left hand was visible. “What happened to your hand?” he asked.
She didn’t answer. As he stepped backward, away from her, she felt a measure of relief flood her body. With a gun no longer pressed to her forehead, she turned her attention to Trent. His eyes were open, his face lined with pain and graying with shock. The bullet had hit him in the chest, but high and to the right. Blood bloomed from the hole in his jacket, pooling below his shoulder already. Pantalone stood a few feet away, watching Jocelyn, his gun loose in his hand but still pointed in her general direction. He tucked Trent’s gun into his waistband. Jocelyn pressed her palms over Trent’s wound, but it didn’t help. The blood found the seams between her fingers and spilled over.
“Jesus Christ, Trent. Hold on.” She pulled off her coat, folded it, and haphazardly pressed it to his wound. His eyelids fluttered. “Trent,” Jocelyn said. “Stay with me.”
“That . . . that fucker shot me,” he said, his voice low and weak.
“I know.”
With all of her attention focused on Trent and Pantalone’s attention on her, neither one of them heard the man from the floor below come up the steps. But then he was in the doorway at the top of the steps, his eyes bulging out of his head as he took in the scene. “What the fuck, Davey?”
Without warning, Pantalone swung his gun toward the man and fired once again. The boom was deafening. The bullet punctured the drywall next to the man’s head. He jumped and yelped like an injured animal. Then he was gone.
Jocelyn took off her suit jacket and used it to cover Trent. Then she pressed her coat against his wound again, praying like hell he wouldn’t bleed out before they got out of this. She looked up at Pantalone. “What’s your plan, Davey?”
He paced back and forth before them, his free hand on the top of his head like he was trying to keep his hat from blowing off in the wind. Jocelyn heard shouts from elsewhere in the house, although she couldn’t be sure if they were coming from above or below.
“I knew it. As soon as I saw on the news that bitch was dead, I knew you’d be coming for me. She used to threaten me. She said if anyone ever tried to kill her, a letter would be mailed to the police telling them. I always had the tape, but it don’t mean shit if she’s dead. That crazy fucking bitch.”
A tape? A damning letter triggered by Francine’s death? Jocelyn didn’t know where to start. It sounded like the stuff of a B-grade crime-thriller movie. Did those things happen in real life? No wonder Francine had chosen Davey to do her bidding. If he still believed such outlandish things as a grown man, Jocelyn could only imagine how easy it had been for Francine to manipulate him as a teenager.
“Davey,” Jocelyn said. “My friend needs help. He needs medical care. What is your plan?”
“Like I give a shit about your friend.”
“You should. If he doesn’t get to a hospital soon, he could die. Killing teenage girls is one thing, but killing a cop? In Philadelphia? You do not want to be a cop killer in this city.”
“Shut up,” he said. He made a noise deep in his throat and shook his head. “Teenage girls.” He pointed a finger at her. “It wasn’t my fault. She made me do those things. You don’t understand what she was like.”
If she wasn’t dealing with someone so unstable, with such a hair trigger, she might have pointed out to him that ultimately, he was responsible for his own choices, but nothing she said would get through. Francine had indoctrinated him early, and she’d done a good enough job that now, as a thirty-two-year-old man, Pantalone was still living under the specter of the delusions she’d created in his mind.
That was where Jocelyn needed to go.
“I do know what she was like,” she said calmly. “She poisoned us. We had another friend, his name was Knox. She killed him.”
Again, Pantalone stopped pacing and stared right at her. In spite of the cold in the house, sweat ran down his face. At that moment, his cell phone rang. At first, Jocelyn didn’t recognize the noise. It was faint, a digitized beat, like the kind old keyboards made. Then Pantalone pulled a cell phone from his hoodie pocket and looked at it. “It’s Norm,” he said. “My boss.”