Jax looked at the metal rings joining their hands. If he transitioned to Grunsday with everything on his body—and meanwhile, Terrance went to Thursday with everything on his body—they couldn’t both take the cuffs with them. It took Jax about one second to picture the possible result. Then he started screaming. He grabbed the handcuff and yanked on it, trying to wriggle his hand loose. Terrance let him do it. In fact, he threw back his head and laughed.
At the instant Jax had planned to meet Evangeline, he transitioned into Grunsday handcuffed to a madman.
When Terrance was tired of laughing, he grabbed Jax and shook him into silence. “That’s enough, kid.”
Terrance led Jax away from the van to a shopping-cart return. He didn’t seem to care that the rain had turned to mist, hanging in the air. He didn’t look at the sports car frozen in transit on the street. Jax realized Terrance had been to Grunsday before and already knew the handcuff trick would work.
He’d frightened Jax for fun.
Terrance removed the key from his shirt pocket and unlocked his own cuff and closed it around a railing in the shopping cart return. “Wait here, kid.”
When Terrance climbed into the van and drove across the parking lot, Jax thought it was over. Terrance was going to leave him now that he’d gotten what he wanted. Then Jax saw the reverse lights come on, and the van hurtled backward, tires squealing on the wet pavement—straight into the glass windows of one of the stores.
“Holy crap!”
Jax looked up at the building front. It wasn’t a store. It was a bank. Terrance was a freaking bank robber.
Terrance drove the van out of the broken glass and off the sidewalk, then emerged from the driver’s seat whistling happily. He went around to the back of the vehicle and opened the rear door. Jax couldn’t see what he did next but assumed he was unloading the toolbox and the garbage bags.
When Terrance vanished inside the bank, Jax turned his attention to the shopping-cart return. It was rusted and, with any luck, flimsily made. He grabbed the railing with both hands, braced his feet, and whaled on it. The handcuffs clanged against the steel, and the shopping carts rattled, and Jax never heard footsteps behind him until Terrance pressed the Taser into his back.
Jax flinched. “Trying to leave me, kid?” Terrance asked pleasantly.
“Let me go,” Jax begged. “You got what you wanted. Go rob your bank and let me go. It’s not like I can call the police.”
“Our partnership’s not over yet. Take the key and unlock that other cuff. I don’t have to tell you not to run, do I?”
He didn’t.
Inside the bank, emergency lights dimly illuminated the main room, and glass crunched underfoot. “Do you know what I do for a living?” Terrance asked. “I build vault locks. Do you know what I think about while I build ’em? How to break into them.”
He nudged Jax with the Taser, steering him toward the teller windows. Jax understood what Terrance wanted and fastened the open cuff to the steel security grate.
“Nobody knows how to beat a lock better than a lock maker. The only problem is the alarms and the sensors and the pesky police.” Terrance nodded toward the ceiling. “And the cameras.”
Jax looked at the security cameras on the ceiling. He could see dim red lights, but he knew they weren’t working.
Terrance dismantled the lock on the steel door beyond the teller windows and, cackling with self-satisfaction, disappeared, presumably to crack the vault. As soon as he was out of sight, Jax grabbed the security grate and shook it in frustration, ashamed of himself for being so afraid of the Taser that he cuffed himself wherever he was told to.
He was painfully aware that Evangeline would’ve reappeared a few minutes ago. Was she okay? Terrance didn’t seem to know anything about her. That was the only good thing in this situation at all. Terrance had wanted a way into Grunsday; he didn’t know he’d blundered into the business of Riley Pendare and his vassals. Jax forgot for the moment that he wasn’t one of those vassals and imagined Riley and the gang coming for him. He wished Terrance and his Taser could come face-to-face with Mr. Crandall and Deidre’s really big gun. That would wipe the grin off Terrance’s face.
Jax spent a few seconds picturing that scene, unlikely as it was, and when he saw movement outside the broken glass front of the building, his heart leaped with hope. Somehow, they’d tracked him here. They were going to bust in here, just like in the movies, and rescue him.
A figure slipped through the broken window. It was too small to be Riley or any of the Crandalls, and when the person pulled down the hood of his sweatshirt, Jax gasped out loud.
Thomas Donovan put a finger to his lips. Shhhh.
23
JAX’S KNEES WOBBLED. His perception of the world as he knew it had taken another blow. Thomas Donovan. Here. On a Grunsday. Which meant . . .
From the back of the bank, Terrance cackled loudly, and then Jax heard the sound of a drill. Thomas pointed toward the open doorway and made a gun with his hand—sticking his forefinger straight out and his thumb up. He raised his eyebrows questioningly.
Jax wondered how to answer that. He copied the gesture and shook his head. Then he curled two joints of his forefinger to make a snub-nosed weapon, touched his own chest with it, and mimed a convulsion.
Thomas nodded and darted outside.
“Wait,” Jax whispered desperately. Had Thomas just stopped by to take a survey of bank robbers’ weapons?
Finally, to Jax’s relief, he reappeared. He entered the building and crept around the edge of the room. Terrance’s drill stopped, and Thomas hastened his steps. When he reached the corner of the room closest to the steel door, he sank down beneath an ornamental potted tree and disappeared from sight.
Movement in the bank entrance caught Jax’s attention, and somebody else walked in. This time it was a grown man with the same carroty shade of hair as Thomas. The man nodded a greeting at Jax, swung a baseball bat onto his shoulder, then looked back at the entrance and made a “come here” gesture.
Tegan darted in through the broken window. She spared Jax only a brief glance before pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and taking position behind the man, who must’ve been her father.
The senior Donovan faced the open steel door. He positioned the bat like a baseball player—even took a couple of practice swings—then called out loudly, “Terrance Hodd, are you havin’ a bank party without your good friend Michael?”
At the word friend, Jax’s heart sank. The Donovans knew Terrance. They were probably his accomplices.
Terrance’s voice from the back room confirmed it. “How’d you find me, Michael?”
“Smelled you out. I figured you were planning to strike out on your own, but you forgot—I know which banks carry your locks. It was just a matter of findin’ the one that reeks of you casing it.” Donovan looked at Jax. “Looks like you got yourself another way in and out of the eighth day. Were you thinkin’ of cuttin’ me out of my share?”
“Your share?” Terrance appeared. He looked at Jax, then at Donovan and Tegan standing beside him—as if marking everyone’s position—and held up a gun. Not a Taser. A small black revolver with a nasty, oversized hole in the barrel.
Jax’s mouth went dry. Terrance had a real gun after all.
“You never earned your share, Michael,” said Terrance. “I’m the one who knows how to break into vaults. All you and your kid ever did was get me in and out of this crazy world—”