"Listen," he said gently. "I know you think trying to walk out of here is hopeless, or you would have done it yourselves. Hell, there's a bunch of boys out there with automatics; that's enough to intimidate anyone. I understand that. But you have to know they're not supermen. There has to be a way past them; you just haven't found it yet. I need to go look. It's my job."
Sharon took a step away from him and tried to keep her voice from shaking. "What do you think you're dealing with here? A bunch of simpering women in long dresses waving white hankies, waiting to be rescued? I had the same training you did; I'm a deputy sheriff and an FBI agent to boot, and as far as the other two go, they're just plain scary. I get the serve-and-protect impulse. I know what you think you have to do and why you think you have to do it. But we did not veto trying to walk out of here because we're intimidated. We vetoed it because it's suicide.
Lee waited a moment before he spoke, responding to that singular male sense that instinctively retreats from the murky, unspoken undercurrents that sometimes pass between women when they've decided that men are idiots. Once they got to this point, trying to talk some sense into them was like beating yourself over the head with a hammer. It was better to just slip away and do what needed to be done, and let them see the right of it later. "I'm going to need my gun," he said quietly.
Grace took a step closer so he could see her eyes. "That's too bad, because we could use another weapon after they kill you."
Lee actually smiled, although no one could see it very well. "Tough lady," he said, then held out his right hand. "Deputy Douglas Lee, Missaqua County Sheriffs Department. I didn't catch your name."
The hand hung there alone for a moment while Grace tried to process the gesture. Tough, maybe. Rude, never. She shifted the Sig to her left hand and gave him the other one. "Grace MacBride."
"Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride." His face searched the darkness in the basement. "And the woman I met in the bushes?"
A drawl answered him. "Annie Belinsky. The womanyou attacked in the bushes."
Lee dropped his eyes. "I do need to apologize for that. Never once in my life did I think I would lay violent hands on a lady."
Grace handed him his gun, butt-first, and he slid it into his holster in a smooth, powerful movement. Then he moved toward the door, his gait growing more steady with every stride.
He's huge, Grace thought as his shadowed form passed her. And he seems stronger now, almost whole. Rationally, she knew that just because they were bigger and stronger didn't automatically make men more competent, more capable of accomplishing what a smaller person could not-but sometimes it was a comfort to wish it were thatway. It was part of the male mystique so deeply ingrained in women that you grew up wanting to believe it, even though it didn't make any sense at all. Or maybe there was a God and miracles and truth in biology, and Deputy Lee would find a way out and come back and save them all. Wouldn't that be lovely. Grace closed her eyes.Youthinks of Magozzi that way, too. Even you, with all you've seen and all you know, still want desperately to believe the lie of fairy tales.
Deputy Lee opened the wooden door that led to the concrete stairs, then turned and looked at them, standing there in a pathetic little semicircle, watching him leave. It occurred to him then that he hadn't really seen their faces, not clearly; that he wouldn't recognize one of them on the street; that if he didn't make it back in time and, God forbid, they disappeared forever in this town, he wouldn't even be able to give a description. At least he'd gotten their names.
He gave them a bleak smile. "Well, I guess I'll see you later."
The three women watched in desolate silence as he crept up the steps and slowly raised the slanted storm door on the outside. A slice of fading moonlight came down the stairs and lay a lighter stripe on the black dirt floor in front of their feet. They all stared down at it, listening to the storm door's soft thump as it was closed.
Lee straightened, releasing a long exhale, then looked around carefully. Shadows. Nothing but black, silent shadows everywhere. He had his 9mm back in his hand, safety off, and he could smell the sweat of his own fear. Still, it felt better out here than it had in the clammy basement-better to be moving, to be taking action, than to be hiding and waiting for the bogeyman to come.
And it felt better to be alone again. There was a small twinge of guilt as he realized how glad he was to be away from the women.
He was a short distance into the trees when a small yellow fireburst bloomed in the woods directly ahead. His brain never had time to process the sound or the image that his senses recorded, or even the great pressure of the projectiles that drilled into his body.
For an instant that imitated life, he remained erect, then he toppled backward slowly, his body rigid, like a giant redwood severed from its trunk, reluctantly yielding to gravity.
Back in the basement, all three women closed their eyes at the same time. "Ml6, triple burst," Sharon murmured. "No nine millimeter. He didn't have a chance to shoot back."
GRACE, ANNIE, and Sharon stood immobile in the dark basement for a full minute after they heard the triple burst from the Ml6.
Grace's eyes were fixed on some distant point in the blackness as she remembered how ready she'd been to kill Deputy Lee when he'd been holding Annie in the lilac hedge. Not a quiver of guilt, not a single thought of hesitation, finger tight against the trigger. And then she remembered the big man stretching out his hand to her less than an hour later, and the way that hand had felt in hers."Pleased to meet you, Ms. MacBride." She gave herself that full minute to think of these things. It was all she had to give.
Sharon was scowling at the floor, damning her mother, her upbringing, the religion that had pounded the mantra into her head day after day, year after year, because for the second time this terrible day she was hearing it pop to lite inside her brain and she didn't know how to make it stop.Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen. And once again, holy Mary was just sitting up there, watching the innocent and maybe the foolishly brave get killed, and it was such a lie. It was such a goddamned fucking lie, and oh, Lord, she'd never said that word before, never even let it form fully in her thoughts, because that was a sin, and there was no confession for little Sharon Mueller, not now or ever again, and they were innocent, and now they were about to do something foolishly brave, and did that mean they would die, too, with the sin for thinking the f-word so fresh and unforgiven.
Annie was just plain furious, because that was the one emotion she really had a handle on. They told him flat out that he was going to die if he went out there, and the stubborn fool went on ahead and got himself killed anyhow. Sure, she'd been thinking about killing him herself in the lilac hedge, and she'd thought about it again when he'd fluffed out his strutting ruff like some randy grouse hell-bent on beating the shit out of some other randy grouse, but then the bastard had shown his true colors as a good and decent man and apologized. It was a purely mean thing to do. Annie didn't know what to do with sadness.
Grace was the one to break the silence. "We're down to six hours
and ten minutes. We've got to hurry."
The three of them felt their way to a workbench on the stairway wall. Grace and Sharon stooped to pull out the filthy wooden crate under the bench they'd seen earlier, the first time they'd been in this basement. While they were dragging the thing out into the open, Annie found treasure on top of the workbench and flicked the switch. The old flashlight shot a beam across the floor and startled them all.