He nodded. “You’re willing to leave Haya and the baby behind?”
“We could call the police. Haya doesn’t know anything. She can easily claim ignorance.”
“If the police show up, what’s to stop the guys inside from shooting Haya and the baby? Or shooting the cops? Or entering into a standoff with hostages?”
“Nothing,” she admitted.
“So do you still want to hit the road? Leave them behind?”
“Do you?”
“Asked you first.” He shot her the tiniest of smiles. “What’s it that asshole said to you in Haiti?”
“‘Would you like to be good? Or would you like to live?’”
Brian nodded.
“Can you get us out of here?” she asked.
“I can get you out of here. Can’t get myself out of here the way you’ve fixed it, but I can get you out, honey bunch.”
She ignored the dig. “Right this second?”
He nodded. “Right this second.”
“What’re our chances?”
“Our chances?”
“My chances,” she said.
“About fifty-fifty. Every hour, they drop five percent in Cotter-McCann’s favor. We add a terrified woman and a baby—that’s if we can extricate them from guys who know how to use firearms a lot better than we do—your odds of success drop even further.”
“So right now the odds are about even. But if we go up to that house”—she pointed at the other end of the mill—“it’s more likely we die.”
His eyes widened a little more and he nodded repeatedly. “Way more likely, yeah.”
“And if I say I want to run, you’ll just take me out of here now?”
“I didn’t say that. I said it was an option.”
She looked up through the blackened rafters and the shredded roof at the blue sky. “There’s no option.”
He waited.
“All four of us go.” She took several quick breaths and it made her light-headed. “Or none of us do.”
“Okay,” he whispered and she could see he was as terrified as she was. “Okay.”
She dropped the hammer. “Haya speaks perfect English.”
He squinted at her.
“She grew up in California. She was gaming Caleb.”
He let loose a high chuckle of disbelief. “Why?”
“So he’d rescue her from a shitty life, it sounds like.”
Brian shook his head so many times he resembled a dog after a bath. Then he smiled. The old Brian smile—surprised to be surprised by the turns of the world and somehow tickled at the same time.
“Well, shit,” he said, “I finally like her.” He nodded once. “She told you?”
Rachel nodded.
“Why?”
“So we’d know not to abandon her.”
“I’m not above leaving her behind,” he said simply. “Never was. But I wouldn’t leave Caleb’s kid up there to die. Not even for seventy million.”
He lifted the cover over the tire jack compartment in the Rover and came back with a short ugly shotgun with a pistol grip.
“How many guns do you need?” she asked.
He looked off in the direction of the house as he loaded shells into the gun. “You’ve seen me shoot—I suck. A shotgun levels the playing field a bit.” He shut the hatchback.
Whatever he’d just claimed about being unable to leave Caleb’s daughter behind, it didn’t alter the fact that he could kill her right now with that ugly weapon. It wouldn’t be the rational choice necessarily, but at this point rational choice was a luxury in the rearview mirror.
It didn’t seem to be the first thing on his mind, though, so she opened the driver’s door of the truck. The floor mat was caked with dried mud. She craned her head over the seat and saw the floor mat on the passenger seat was crusted with the same. Wherever they’d been searching for her or Brian lately, they’d walked through some dirt to do it. She opened the rear driver’s-side door—the mats back there were pristine. She could still smell the showroom in the rubber.
She showed it to Brian. “There are only two of them.”
“Unless the other car’s parked somewhere else.”
She hadn’t considered that. “I thought you were Mr. Positive Thinking.”
“We’ll call this an off fucking day then.”
“I mean—” She started but couldn’t finish the thought. Her hand dropped back to her side. She felt closer to vomiting than she had in a while. She mentioned this to Brian.
“Where’s a Scientologist when you need one, uh?” He pointed the shotgun down the end of the building, past mounds of dirt and trash and all the pieces of wall that had been torn out when the scavengers came for the copper wire. “Right at the end there’s a set of stairs. You go down them and you find a really small tunnel.”
“A tunnel?”
He nodded. “Caleb and me dug it over the last couple months. When you thought I was out of the country.”
“Lovely.”
“Figured if we were ever in that house and we had time to see the opposition coming for us, we’d scoot out, get over here, and make a run for it pretty much from where we’re standing now. You can go down—”
“I can?”
“We can, yeah. We’ll crawl over there and—”
“How tight is this tunnel?”
“Oh, it’s bad,” he said. “It’s more like a trough. If I ate a pizza right now, I’d probably get stuck in there.”
“I’m not doing that,” she said.
“You’d rather die?” He waved the shotgun like it was an extension of his arm.
“I’d rather die above ground than below it, yes.”
“You got a better idea?” It came out sharply.
“I haven’t even heard yours. All I’ve heard is the word ‘tunnel.’ And point that fucking thing at the ground, would you?”
He considered the shotgun. He shrugged an apology and pointed it at the ground.
“My plan,” he said calmly, “is that we take the tunnel under the house. We come up in the back bedroom on the first floor. We come out into the house, while they’re peeking out the windows for us.”
“And what’s to stop them from shooting us then?”
“We’ll have the drop on them?”
“The drop?” she said.
“Yes.”
“They’re professionals. A good man with a gun can’t defeat a bad man with a gun if the bad man is at ease in violent confrontation and the good man is not.”
“Fine,” he said, “your turn.”
“What?”
“Your turn,” he repeated. “Give me a better idea.”
She took a minute. It was hard to think over the terror. Hard for any word to find space in her brain besides Run.
She told him her idea.
When she finished, he chewed his lower lip and then the inside of his mouth and then his upper lip. “It’s good.”
“You think?”
He stared at her, as if judging how honest he could afford to be. “No,” he eventually admitted, “it’s not. But it’s better than mine.”
She stepped up close to him. “There’s one big problem with it.”
“Which is?”
“If you don’t do your part, I’m dead within a minute.”
He said, “Maybe even less.”