Darting glances all around, she made an instant, panicked assessment. The night was dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t see and be seen. The full moon was already riding up the sky, and numerous stars were out, bathing the scene in an otherworldly glow. The street was wide. The buildings across the street looked to be made of one solid piece of plywood, with no alleys or gaps of any kind between the facades of various shops. To the left and right were long expanses of empty street: no cover there. No cover anywhere.
There was nowhere to go if she ran.
“Dick!” a boy cried. She shot a look in the direction of the voice and saw the shadowy figures of a man and boy close together, emerging from beneath the overhang. Even as she spotted them the boy somehow got free from the man who’d obviously just brought him out of the black hole that was the entrance to the theater and bolted toward them. He was a young teen, thin, dark haired. He ran like a sprinter with the finish line in sight.
“You! Stop!” the man yelled. Caroline’s heart leaped into her throat as she watched his gun snap up.
“No!” she screamed, and jerked away from the driver’s grip to spring toward the kid, who streaked past her like she wasn’t even there. Reed was just stepping down from the vehicle with SUV guy at his back. At the same time DeBlassis emerged from the passenger door to keep Reed covered. They all pivoted toward the oncoming kid.
“Don’t any of you fucking move!” the driver screamed, dancing back a couple of steps, then everybody converged and Caroline found herself, Reed, and the kid who could be no one but Ant hemmed in by four men with guns.
Oblivious, Ant threw himself against Reed, wrapping his arms around his waist, making him stagger back a step. The fact that Reed was handcuffed and that multiple guns were pointing at them didn’t seem to deter him one bit.
“Hey, Ant,” Reed said to him, very low key under the circumstances.
“They’re gonna kill us,” Ant cried. He was so scared his teeth were chattering. “I heard ’em talking. They were just waiting for you to get here and—”
“Shut the fuck up.” SUV guy slammed the rear door and shoved Reed, with Ant still attached, toward the center of the street. Her chance to run lost, Caroline gravitated toward Reed, too, so that the three of them stood together in a wary little knot.
Looking at DeBlassis, Reed said furiously, “Kid’s fricking thirteen years old and—”
Gunfire cracked, the sound a loud
pop pop
in the night. The driver screamed and fell to the street. Time seemed to suspend for a split second. Even as Caroline realized what had happened everyone was crying out and jumping and scattering, and she was, too, falling back toward Reed and Ant as a voice bellowed, “Get your hands up! Federal police!”
A jumble of thoughts exploded through Caroline’s brain at once: a jubilant
we’re saved,
followed by
where are they?
and finally, a questioning
federal police?
DeBlassis and the others were just starting to put their hands in the air. Growling,
“Run,”
in her ear, Reed nudged her into movement with a shove from his shoulder. Pulse leaping, awash with the icy conviction that
all was not well,
she ran, bolting after Ant, who was streaking back toward the theater, with Reed maybe a step behind her saying,
“Go, go, go.”
“Federal police! Keep your hands up!” the voice yelled again. An instant later more gunfire cracked, an
exchange
of gunfire now, Caroline realized even as she pounded after Ant into a sliver of space that ran along the side of the theater. It was an alley, a tiny, dark alley. The gunfire was coming from a sheltered position nearby. She could see the dark silhouette of a man rising above a large concrete planter to snap off shots. A glance back showed her that DeBlassis and the others no longer had their hands in the air, that they had taken cover and were returning fire. A bullet zinged past, so close she could hear the sound of it whistling by her ear. With a little gasping cry she cringed and dodged and kept running. At the same time, out of the corner of her eye she saw a dark shadow run into the alley behind Reed. She saw bright flashes as this newcomer snapped off shots, too, not toward them but the other way, toward DeBlassis and crew. She heard Reed bellow,
“Move your ass,”
and on the wall saw a shadow of a figure in a hoodie and jeans and finally understood:
Holly.
Holly with a gun, yelling
Federal police.
Oh my God. It was a bluff.
Steps behind Ant, she reached the end of the alley and was just bursting out into a landscape littered with toppled fiberglass statues and derelict rides and what looked like an entire roller coaster lying flat on the ground when a scream behind her made her look back.
Her heart clutched.
Reed had been right behind her. He was no longer there.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
C
AROLINE FELT LIKE
she was dying inside, bleeding to death from a thousand tiny cuts.
Reed and Holly were on the street in front of the theater. Reed lay on his side on the broken pavement. It was too dark to reveal much about his condition, but from the restless movements of his legs Caroline knew that he was still alive. Holly knelt near his head. His very posture conveyed abject fear. DeBlassis and one of the other men—he was clasping his shoulder, so Caroline assumed he was the driver, whom Holly had shot—stood over them. Moonlight glinted on the barrel of DeBlassis’ gun. She had no idea where the other two men were, although she was as sure as it was possible to be of anything that they were hunting her and Ant.
At the thought, her heart shivered with fear.
“We got to do something,” Ant whispered. Crouched beside her, he sounded as anguished as she felt. They were hiding behind the half wall of the bumper car ride at the far end of the street. With the roof and three walls enclosing them, they were enfolded by darkness, sheltered and protected by it. Derelict bumper cars dotted the space behind them, providing plenty of camouflage, or at least so Caroline hoped, for their own shapes. The smell of damp, of mildew, was unmistakable. The smooth metal floor felt slightly slimy beneath her feet.
“There’s nothing we can do except go for help,” Caroline whispered back, ignoring her own nearly irresistible need to rush to Reed. He was wounded, and she had no way of knowing how badly, no way of knowing if he was still bleeding, no way of knowing anything, and it was tearing her up inside, but the hard truth was there was nothing she could do. She was handcuffed and weaponless. To allow herself and Ant to be taken would only ensure that they all died. She had to place her faith in the thought that they wouldn’t kill Reed and Holly until they had her and Ant, and continue hiding as they made their way toward the fence in hopes that they would find some way to get through.
Please, God, keep them safe,
was the prayer she sent winging skyward, and prepared to move.
“Come on,” she whispered to Ant. “We’re going now.”
“He’s my brother.” Ant sounded on the verge of tears. “I can’t just leave him.”
“If we don’t, they don’t have a chance,” Caroline replied, knowing it was true.
With another long look at the captives, Ant nodded, and they cautiously started to move. Bent almost double, they were hurrying along the wall toward the opening that permitted access to the ride when a big black car rolled past with a sound scarcely louder than a whisper. Caroline heard it before she saw it. Freezing so fast that Ant bumped into her, she watched its progress over the top of the wall with her heart in her throat.
Its headlights lit up the scene at the end of the street: she was able to clearly see Reed and Holly, and the men standing over them.
She was so riveted, and she guessed Ant was, too, that the first inkling she had that anyone was behind them was when she heard a gloating, “Got you, bitch,” and her heart leaped and she turned her head to find herself looking into the mouth of a gun.
SUV guy was taking no chances this time: he marched her down the street toward the others with a fist in her hair and his gun nestled below her ear. She was so frightened she was dizzy with it. Her heart pounded. Her pulse raced. Ant was being towed along behind her. She couldn’t really see him, but she could hear the ragged gasp of his breathing, feel his fear.
Her mind worked feverishly to find some way out, but there didn’t seem to be any. Bottom line was, they were caught.
As horrible as the corollary thought was, as much as she shied away from facing it, that meant they were all four probably going to die.
The black car had stopped and cut its headlights. Whoever was inside the car had gotten out. Three people walked toward where Reed and Holly lay on the ground.
Moonlight touched a man’s white hair. Caroline’s eyes widened. Her heart leaped.
With hope? With dread?
Whatever else he was, he was her father.
“Dad,”
Caroline cried even as SUV guy pushed her past the car so she and Ant and their captors became part of the group around Reed, too.
Martin Wallace’s head whipped around so fast that she knew he hadn’t been aware of her presence until she had called to him.
“Caroline.”
His tone made her go cold all over. It was—full of pain.
What had DeBlassis said?
He’ll do what he has to do.
She could see the glint of Reed’s eyes, see that he was looking at her, and one tiny part of her brain rejoiced that he was in good enough shape to be awake and aware. She was being marched over to stand beside him and Holly. Ant was, too. Her father watched, but made no move to interfere.
“You can’t just let them kill us,” she begged him, shattered that it appeared he was willing to do just that.
“Dad.”
His stony face and lack of reply sent her stomach plunging clear to her toes.
“Please,” she begged, and then SUV guy said, “Shut up,” and, with his gun still pointed at her, shoved her down to the pavement so her knees scraped painfully against the concrete. Kneeling beside Reed now, she heard him say something to her, but she was still focusing so intently on her father that she didn’t understand the words.
“You don’t have to be here for this, Martin,” said the man at her father’s side. Caroline really looked at him for the first time and recognized the man as the mayor, and finally felt like the world as she knew it had truly spun out of control. She had known Harlan Guthrie for years, had liked and respected and supported him. And now—the cold truth was that he was a murderer. The mayor put a comforting hand on her father’s arm. “I’ll handle it. You go on home.”
“You ever thought that maybe we should end this?” Her father’s voice grated on Caroline’s heart. It was heavy, sad—and resigned. “Maybe this has gone far enough. Maybe we never should have started it. Maybe we were wrong.”
“Hell, Martin, it’s a damned war and you know it. The scumbags are taking over our city. Putting ’em in jail is a waste of time—they just get right back out. They prey on innocent citizens. The tourist industry—it’s our lifeblood, and we’re going to lose it. What we’re doing here may be outside the law, but it’s not wrong. We put our own private team together, and we pay ’em to take out the people who need to be taken out. It’s either that, or let them have the city and run everybody else out.” He looked at SUV guy and gestured. “Get these folks on out of here, Purnell. Then get the place cleaned up.”
“Yes, sir,” Purnell replied. Reaching down, he grabbed Caroline by the arm and jerked her up. Holly was being pulled to his feet, too, while Ant was already upright and DeBlassis was leaning over Reed. Caroline realized that what she had just heard was Mayor Guthrie giving the order for them to be killed.
The taste of fear was sour in her mouth.
“Dad.”
A whole lifetime’s worth of feeling was in that cry. Caroline jerked free, ran toward the man whom she had both loved and hated, admired and feared in equal measure, in one last desperate appeal. Her eyes widened as his gun hand came up and he aimed. She heard Reed yell a hoarse, “Caroline,” and her father fired his gun and she screamed, all at the same time.
But she wasn’t shot, it wasn’t her whom he had hit, and there was another scream behind her. As she collided with her father’s chest she realized it was Purnell who had been shot, that he must have been targeting her as she ran, and then her father was taking her to the pavement with him as gunfire erupted around them and what seemed like dozens of men swarmed out of the darkness with weapons at the ready screaming, “Freeze! FBI!”
HALF AN HOUR LATER,
having been given rudimentary treatment at the scene, Reed was being loaded into an ambulance. He’d been shot in the leg, nothing life threatening, although the EMTs had described it as a serious enough wound, and was being taken to the hospital. Ant was being taken to the hospital, too, for observation after his ordeal. Holly, who refused to be separated from Ant, was already in the ambulance with him. Caroline, who refused to be separated from Reed, was going, too.
Having just released Reed’s hand, she was standing by the ambulance’s wide back doors as Reed’s stretcher was lifted through them when her father came up to her. She hadn’t spoken to him since he had gotten up from the pavement and been engulfed by the onrushing tide of FBI agents. She’d been shocked to learn from the FBI agent who’d asked some questions of her and Reed shortly thereafter that her father had been wearing a wire and that the FBI had been using him to take down the mayor and the whole Rescue New Orleans operation even as they had stealthily infiltrated the amusement park’s grounds to rescue her and Reed and Holly and Ant.
Looking at her father, she realized that she didn’t know what to say. Their relationship had always been so fraught with tension and mixed emotions. But in the end, when it counted, at least he hadn’t been prepared to let her die.
On the whole scale of father-daughter relationships, it probably didn’t count for a lot. But it counted for something.