It was a good thought that didn’t last. Someone was banging on the door.
“Jesus-”
Channing jumped so hard and fast she slammed her hand against the sink. It wasn’t a knock at the door, but a hard, brutal pounding.
“Shit, shit-”
She shoved a leg into her jeans, fabric sticking on wet skin, the other leg going in just as hard. The pounding got louder and more intense. Front door, she thought, over and over, and hard enough to shake the house. Channing pulled on the sweatshirt, thinking telephone, Liz, run. It was panic, pure instinct. She could barely breathe, and it took all her strength to open the bathroom door. The hall was dim, no movement. The pounding got even louder.
Creeping into the living room, she risked a glance through the window. Cops were in the yard-blue lights and guns and hard-faced men wearing Windbreakers that said SBI.
“This is the state police!” A loud voice at the door. “We have an arrest warrant for Elizabeth Black! Open up!”
Channing twitched away from the window, but not before someone saw her.
“Movement! Left side!”
Guns came up, squared on the widow.
“State police! Final warning!”
Channing ducked sideways, saw men on the porch. They wore helmets and body armor and black gloves. One of them had a sledgehammer.
“Break it.”
An older man pointed at the lock, and Channing screamed when the hammer hit. The sound was like a bomb, but the door held.
“Again!”
This time the frame buckled, and she saw bright metal. Six men stood behind the hammer, soldiers in a row with fingers tight above the triggers. The old man nodded, and the hammer struck a third time, the door breaking from its frame.
“Move! Move! Move!”
Channing felt the rush, but was already moving. She snatched up the phone and sprinted left.
“Movement! Back hall!”
Someone else yelled “Freeze!” but she didn’t. She hit the bathroom in a skid; slammed the door and locked it. They’d clear the house before they broke the door, but it was a small house, and she was already dialing.
One ring.
Two.
She sensed men, tight-packed in the narrow hall. It was the stillness, the silence.
Please, please…
The phone rang a third time, and Channing heard the click. She opened her mouth, but the door exploded, and the world was guns and men and screaming.
As hard as Elizabeth drove the car before, she pushed it to breaking now, turning off the crumbled road and onto a state highway, cars slashing past as the needle touched 105. The wind made so much noise she could barely think. But what could she think about anyway?
The girl wasn’t answering.
Screams. A dead phone. But, she’d heard other things, too. Hard voices and shouting and breaking wood.
Elizabeth dialed the house, but the line was off the hook. She tried the girl’s phone again, but that failed, too.
“Damn it!”
Three tries. Three fails.
Desperate, she called Beckett. “Charlie!”
“Liz, where the hell are you? What’s that noise?”
She could barely hear above the wind. “Charlie, what’s happening?”
“Thank God. Listen. Don’t go to your house!” He was yelling to be heard. “Don’t go home!”
“What? Why?”
“Hamilton and Marsh…” She lost a sentence or two, then he was back. “Word just hit the street. They have an indictment, Liz. Double homicide. We just found out.”
“What about Channing?”
“Liz…” Static. “Don’t…”
“What?”
“State police locked us out-”
“Charlie! Wait!”
“Don’t go to your fucking house!”
Elizabeth hung up in numb disbelief. It wasn’t the warrant or that she’d be arrested. State cops were at her house, and so was the girl who’d saved her life, Channing, who was eighteen and hollowed out and liable to confess anything. Already, five minutes had passed.
“Too much time.”
She pushed the old car until the needle touched 110, then 115. She watched for slow movers and cops; squeezed the wheel hard and said her first real prayer in a dozen years.
Please, God…
But, it was over by the time she got there. She saw it from a block out: no lights at the house, no cars or cops or movement. She came hard anyway, locking up the brakes and rocking into the drive.
“Channing!”
She took the yard at a run, saw tire tracks in the grass, and the door broken in its frame. On the porch she hit the door with a shoulder, felt it rock on a single hinge. Inside, she found out-of-place furniture, dirty footprints, and the bathroom door, blasted off the hinges, too.
She was too late.
That was real.
She checked the house, anyway. Bedrooms. Closets. She wanted to find the girl, hidden maybe, or tucked away. But she was kidding herself, and she knew it. The warrant wasn’t for Channing, but they had a subpoena, and Hamilton and Marsh would use it, were probably talking to her now.
What happened in the basement?
Who pulled the trigger?
In a fog, Elizabeth stepped outside and wedged the door shut behind her. They had the girl, and the girl would talk. Whether from guilt or naïveté or the desire to help Elizabeth, Channing would eventually break.
Elizabeth couldn’t let that happen.
The shooting was too political, too racial. They’d burn her down to make an example.
“I saw it happen.”
The voice came from beyond the hedge, and Elizabeth recognized the neighbor who lived to the right, an elderly man with a ’72 Pontiac station wagon he polished on weekends as if it were made of something more precious than steel and paint. “Mr. Goldman?”
“Must have been twenty cops. Assault rifles and body armor. Goddamn Nazis.” He pointed and ducked his head. “Sorry about your door.”
“There was a girl…”
“A small one, yes. Two tough old bastards hauled her out.”
“You saw her?”
“Hard to miss, really, hanging between them like she was, all bright-eyed and flushed and kicking like a mule.”
For a hard flat second Elizabeth didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t go to the station with a murder warrant on her head. It was beyond even Dyer to help her, now. Hamilton and Marsh had their indictment. That meant they’d pick her up and drop her in a hole. Even if she won at trial-which was doubtful-she’d be vilified by the national press, picked apart, and stripped to her bones. It was an angry nation and she was another white cop on the wrong side of a shooting. It couldn’t play otherwise, not with fourteen bullet holes in the floor.
And that was best-case scenario.
Worst case, Channing would talk. That meant time mattered, and not the kind that would be counted in days.
Hours, she thought. Minutes.
Would the girl even fight?
Elizabeth’s paralysis snapped like a glass rod. She started the car and had Channing’s father on the line before she reached the first turn. He would move heaven and earth, but his lawyers were in Charlotte. That would take time. So, she went the only place that made sense: around the city, across the river. Box bushes took paint off the car, but she found the old lawyer sitting in the same chair on the same porch. He offered pleasantries, but she shut him down before he could rise from the chair. “No time, Faircloth. Just listen, please.”
She started too fast, too shaky.
“Slow down, Elizabeth. Catch your breath. Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. Sit down. Tell me from the beginning.”
“It needs to be privileged.”
“Very well. Consider me your attorney.”
“You’re not licensed.”
“Then consider me a friend.” She hesitated, so he spoke carefully to make his point. “Anything you tell me I will take to my grave unless you instruct otherwise. You cannot shock me or dissuade me or make me anything less than your ally.”