She stopped breathing, stopped thinking. All she could do was stare. The cops were there. She’d barely gotten the kids to their new home, and she’d already failed them. Her knees went watery and her vision was strange, putting a gray film over everything, including the officer’s nightmarish face, distorted by the peephole glass.
The world rocked a little, and she had to take a step back to catch her balance, cutting off her view of the cop.
This is it, she thought. Nausea flooded her and she swallowed hard. Her brain spun with images of jail and the kids going back to Courtney.
No. The complete unacceptability of the idea cleared Jules’s mind. There was no way she was going to allow that.
A heavy fist landed on the wood of the door, pounding several times, startling Jules and sending her skittering backward. Her heels hit the bottom stair, knocking her off balance so that she sat heavily on one of the steps. As her heart pounded in her ears, Jules gripped the banister spools and tried to think.
Should she reveal herself, walk outside and accept her fate, allowing Sam and the kids time to escape? Or should she not answer, delaying the inevitable? If she was arrested, Jules doubted that the kids would run. Well, they probably would run—right toward her, trying to defend their sister.
She’d keep quiet then, ignoring the knocking and the doorbell. It might not give them much time, but maybe Dennis could find them somewhere else, somewhere that was actually safe, somewhere the cops weren’t at her door within minutes of her and the kids’ arrival.
The thumps on the door stopped, and Jules held her breath. Was the cop leaving, or was he just going to get reinforcements? The shadow behind the glass shrank and then disappeared altogether. Jules stayed frozen, waiting for the next step—more footsteps on the porch, a voice from a megaphone telling her to surrender, the door splintering after a hit from a battering ram.
Instead, there was silence. For several long, long moments, all Jules could hear was the rasp of her anxious breaths. Then, there was the rough roar of a diesel engine turning over.
Confusion knotted her eyebrows. That didn’t sound like a squad car, or even a squad SUV. That was a truck—a big one. Pushing off the stairs, she took quiet, cautious steps to the door. The figure was gone, but a large object remained on the porch. Squinting, she tried to make it out, but the peephole didn’t give her a good enough view.
Biting the inside of her lip, she slowly, soundlessly turned the lock and opened the door a crack. Jules peered out just in time to see the rear of a florist’s box truck trundling down the driveway. Her gaze dropped to the object on the porch. It was a potted plant, wrapped in a bow with a card attached.
Her laugh rang out, and she clapped her hand over her mouth to mute the sound. Flowers. What she’d thought was a cop had actually been a delivery driver, complete with dark-blue uniform. Her heart drummed against her ribs with residual adrenaline, and she couldn’t stop laughing into her muffling hand.
The delivery truck rounded a bend and disappeared from view. Still feeling spooked, Jules opened the door just wide enough to grab the pot. Once she’d secured the front door behind her, she brought the plant into the kitchen and opened the attached card with shaking fingers. Irrationally, she half-expected the flowers to be from Courtney, a sort of I’ve-got-you kind of mind game. When she saw the inscription, Jules’s lungs finally relaxed enough for her to take a breath.
Welcome to your new life. —Dennis
Chapter 9
Present Day
Theo was staring at his bedroom ceiling when the howling started.
It was a low whine at first, barely catching his notice. As usual, Theo was spending the hour between two and three a.m. rerunning the last few days before Don’s death. Sometimes he’d play the what-if game—what if Theo had said this? Or what if he’d done that? Tonight, though, he was just replaying the hours and minutes, catching every single clue he’d missed now that it was too late to do any good.
The high-pitched sound increased in volume, and Theo raised his head before letting it thump back onto the pillow.
“Stupid dog. Useless dog,” he muttered, but guilt and his innate sense of fairness wouldn’t let that stand. “Stupid me. Fucking useless me.” As galling as it had been to hear, his LT had been right. Viggy had been a great dog and a great officer when he’d worked with Don. Theo was ruining him. He wasn’t just useless; he was destructive. It was sheer luck that no one had been seriously injured in the explosion at Gordon Schwartz’s house. Everyone would be better off if Officer Theodore Bosco wasn’t around.
The whine amped up to a full howl, as if Viggy was providing a soundtrack to Theo’s self-loathing. The neighbors would be calling dispatch soon, and then Otto would be making a house call. Before, Theo would’ve just gotten a cranky phone call, but the guys had been worried about him since Don died. Although the rational part of Theo’s brain understood why Hugh and Otto had been acting like anxious mother hens for the past couple of months, he still felt smothered. Every “Are you okay?” made him want to punch someone…hard and repeatedly.