Then, when she still didn’t answer:
“We can work this out! But you have to come outside and talk to me! Let’s do this the civilized way! After all, we used to be friends, right?”
Bullshit,
she thought, when Apollo suddenly whirled back toward her at almost the exact time she heard the tell-tale
crack!
she had been waiting for. The sound came from one of many lightbulb fragments she had spread across the darkened top landing of the basement stairs behind her, crushing underneath a heavy boot.
She dropped to the floor and rolled over onto her back, debris crunching under her, a half-second before the basement doorknob started turning and the door flew open—
She saw only darkness on the other side, but she didn’t wait to see what came out before she put half a dozen rounds into the door, aiming high, exactly where an adult-size man’s chest would be.
The door kept opening as a black-clad figure collapsed through the doorframe, careening forward as if he had fallen asleep while standing up. Before the man even hit the floor, a second figure appeared behind him—except the man’s forward progress was impeded by his comrade, and he had to jump to get past. The man was partially in the air when Allie squeezed the trigger again, jerking her rifle up and from side to side until the man fell, landing comically on top of the first.
Allie didn’t wait to see if they were dead or if more came out of the darkness behind them. She rolled onto her stomach and looked out the hallway, and found Apollo with his mouth locked around another mercenary’s right arm. The sofa was on the floor, leaving the back door gaping open, morning sunlight pouring through in large swaths.
She had never seen the man before, though for just a brief second she thought it might have been Womack. But he was taller and skinnier, and he was struggling to free himself from Apollo’s teeth. When the man realized it wasn’t going to work, he reached for his sheathed knife with his free hand. He was wrapping his fingers around the weapon’s hilt when Allie shot him in the chest. The man fell, pulling Apollo down to the floor with him.
The dog let go as soon as the man stopped struggling and snapped back up on all fours, spinning toward the open back door, ready for more.
Allie scrambled up from the floor and dropped the Kalashnikov, pulling out the Colt 1911 and aiming it at the ajar basement door behind her. She would have preferred to use the AK-47, but she could tell by the weight that the magazine was almost drained, and the three to four seconds it would have taken to reload was likely three to four seconds more than she could afford.
She stopped moving completely and listened, but it was impossible to hear much of anything through the loud pounding of her heartbeat in her chest.
Click!
as the bathroom door opened to her right, causing her to swivel her head around.
“Jesus!” Allie snapped at the sight of Lucy peering out at her. “Get back inside!”
Lucy quickly closed the door and locked it back up.
Allie returned her stare to the basement door. She could sense Apollo prowling the living room behind her. She would have smiled if she could force the muscles around her mouth to form the gesture at that very moment, but she was almost paralyzed with anticipation.
How many men did Dan have with him? Five? Six? She recalled the four in the woods with them, then two more back at the house. Lucy had taken out Womack, and she’d disarmed (but not killed) one more back at the other house.
That left…four? Maybe four and a half, because she didn’t think the one she’d kicked in the face would stay down—
Crack!
as another pair of boots involuntarily crunched more pieces of lightbulb fragments sprinkled on the other side of the basement door. She fired and didn’t stop pulling the trigger until she had sent six rounds into the door, aiming for almost the exact same spot where she had put the first volley with the rifle.
She jerked her hand down and put two more holes into the bottom of the door, about three feet up from the floor, just in case the person on the other side was crouching.
The last gunshot echoed…then silence.
She waited to hear the sound of a body falling—or maybe it had already tumbled and she hadn’t heard because she was too busy shooting. That was the best-case scenario, anyway.
In the living room, Apollo remained silent, with only the soft
tap-tap
of his bare footsteps to interrupt the eerie silence as he continued to move around. That, more than anything, reassured her. A quiet Apollo meant no encroaching danger from behind.
Allie counted to five, then put the handgun away, picked up the rifle, ejected the magazine, and slapped in a new one. By the time the charging handle
clacked!
into place, she was breathing much easier, even with adrenaline still pulsing from her toes to the tips of her fingers.
The basement remained dead quiet as she approached it, the only sound coming from the
clinking
of brass casings as she kicked them out of her path. She peered forward at darkness within the room through the foot or so of space kept pried open by the two bodies lying in the doorframe.
The quiet unnerved her, and Allie stopped and stitched the door up and down with a new volley, then for good measure, side to side, until she had carved a jagged cross made up of bullet holes into the slab of wood.
As soon as the last
clink
of her spent shell casings stopped echoing in the corridor, Allie moved forward, jerked the door open, and aimed the rifle inside, sunlight from behind her glinting off the remaining glass shards she had spread across the landing as an early warning device. It was primitive, but highly effective, especially in the pitch darkness of the top staircase landing.
There was just enough morning sunlight coming through the open window at the back to give her a good look at a third man, also wearing black military fatigues, lying in the middle of the stairs. Blood dripped against the concrete steps under him, and his rifle had slid all the way down to the floor behind him.
The dead man in the basement made three that she had killed. Four, counting the one in the living room. Womack made five, and then there was the one she had kicked in the face. She couldn’t tell if the man on the stairs or the two collapsed in front of her was that man, and didn’t particularly care, either.
Allie grabbed one of the bodies and pulled it out of the door, then did the same to his friend. Despite all the holes she had put into it, the door still closed just fine. She rushed back to the other side of the hallway, reloading the AK-47 with the second and last spare from her back pocket as she went.
Apollo was already perched on the same couch, his coat of white fur covered in a fresh paint of red. Light from the back of the house flooded freely inside now that there wasn’t a sofa to blot it out. She leaned into the living room, glanced toward the back door and windows, and satisfied that no one was coming through, pulled back into the hallway and leaned heavily against the wall. Slowly, very slowly, she allowed her breathing to calm down.
She slid to the floor, when the bathroom door across from her
clicked
open a second time and Lucy peered outside.
“Are you okay?” the girl whispered.
Allie wanted to be mad at the teenager, but she couldn’t summon the strength. “I’m okay. Are
you
okay?”
Lucy nodded. “Are they gone?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happens now?”
“I guess that’s up to Dan.”
“I thought he was Dad’s friend,” the girl said, frowning.
“Me too.”
“I guess you can’t trust anyone these days.”
“You can trust me.”
Lucy smiled at her. “I do.”
“Good. Now go back inside, and
do not
come out again until I tell you to.”
The girl nodded and closed the bathroom door. That was followed by the familiar
clacking
of the lock moving into place.
Allie leaned back against the wall and sighed, allowing herself to close her eyes for the first time in…all night? She didn’t remember the last time she’d had such a long night. Well, that wasn’t entirely true…
She opened her eyes back up and waited for Dan to shout something. Another smug comment, maybe.
But there was just silence.
She looked over at Apollo, perched unmoving on the couch. His head snapped toward the front door when they both heard the sound of a car starting up, then seconds later, fading into the distance.
It’s a trick,
she thought, and didn’t move.
An hour later, it was still ghostly quiet outside except for the chirping of birds and the calm beating of her heartbeat.
“Hey,” she said, getting Apollo’s attention. When the dog looked over, “Go outside and see if they’re still out there.”
Apollo stared back at her, but didn’t move.
“Go outside. Now.”
He lay down on the couch and licked himself.
“Stupid dog,” she smiled.
Apollo bounded off the sofa and walked over to her, then slid down onto his stomach. She checked his bandaged leg and saw a little bit of blood had seeped through the gauze, but overall her handiwork wasn’t too bad.
“You deserve a treat after this, boy. Or a dozen.”
She scratched his head, prompting Apollo to roll over onto his side to present his belly.
“What am I, your personal scratcher?”
He let out a pitiful whine.
“Okay, but just this once.”
She scratched his belly.
“Never again, Apollo. We are never, ever going into the woods ever again. Agreed?”
He closed his eyes and began tapping one of his legs against the floor.
“I’ll take that as a hell yeah.”
She laid the AK-47 across her lap and continued scratching his belly, the only sound coming from the birds outside and the soft
tap-tap-tap
of Apollo’s leg against the debris and bullet casing-covered floor.
It had been a hell of a night, but she was still alive. She didn’t know how, or why, but she was, and that was all that mattered.
For now, anyway.
It took seven
months and a lot of digging, a lot of patient research, recalling every single thing she knew—or thought she knew—about the man, and spotting patterns that no one else saw. Fortunately, she had spent a lot of time learning how to hunt down people who didn’t want to be found, and two years of inactivity hadn’t dulled that knowledge completely.
She didn’t bother trying to get his room number at the five-star Croatian resort hotel where he was staying. It wouldn’t have worked anyway. There was a reason clients paid a lot of money to stay here, and privacy was a big part of it. It cost her a good bit of her savings just to reserve a room, then for the plane ticket and everything else that came with a “last-minute vacation.”
It took half the day, alternating between lounging at the pool, walking around on the beach scanning faces, and turning down drinks from men in the resort’s three separate bars before she finally spotted him coming back to the hotel with, predictably, a tall blonde on his arm. He always did prefer blondes. The taller and skinnier, the better. She followed them up to his room, memorized the number, then returned to hers.
He was still groggy from last night’s activity when she knocked on the door the next morning. She had a blonde wig on, contacts, and almost the exact same black cocktail dress that his date was wearing on the night prior—not that she expected him to notice all the minor differences—so when he peered through the peephole and saw her, he didn’t even question her identity.
He opened the door, still wearing his robe, and flashed that smug grin that had been haunting her dreams for the last seven months. “Forgot something? Because I have to tell you, I think we were pretty thorough last night.”
“Charming,” she said, and showed him the small Sig Sauer P220 with the suppressor she had been hiding behind her purse.
His eyes went wide.
“Step back,” she said.
The surprise gave way to confusion as he backpedaled into the room. She closed the door, and with one hand extending backward, locked it, all the while keeping both eyes on him. She didn’t expect him to try something, but you could never be too careful when dealing with a fugitive who knew that there were worse things than being captured by the law.
“Who—” he started to say, when his eyes got big. “Oh, shit.”
“Now that’s the reaction I was hoping for,” she said. “Do I even need to say how this is going to work?” When he didn’t answer, “Scream, and I shoot you. If you have any doubts, remember what happened back at Walter’s.”
He sighed, then turned around and walked into the living room where he sat down on the couch. The open patio window let in a cool breeze, and she could see the sandy beaches and smell the blue waters all the way from up here.
She sat down across from him and took off the wig, then placed it on the table between them. “I want it.”
“Want what?”
“The money. All of it. Or whatever’s left,” she said, gesturing at the room, “after this.”
“Five million or so.”
“Bullshit.”
“I had a lot of people to pay off. Womack survived, you know. Mostly brain dead, but alive—”
“I don’t give a shit,” she said.
“Harsh.” He sighed and leaned back against the furniture, then crossed his legs. He wasn’t wearing anything under the robe. “I read about Lucy. Living with her aunt now?”
She didn’t reply.
“I thought you would adopt her,” he continued.
“I had other things to do.”
“Such as?”
She pointed the gun at him.
He smirked. “Looking for me.”
“Uh huh.”
“How did you do that, by the way?”
“I wasn’t always your secretary.”
“I guess not.”
They stared silently across at each other for a moment. She wondered what was going through his mind at the moment, and if he was scared of her—scared of the gun in her hand—or of all those people he didn’t “pay off” when he fled.
“Well, shit,” he said finally. “How do you want it?”
“Show me how to access it.”