Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
“You’re making a mistake,” Tom says, but he does slowly walk up the porch stairs and into the house backward, without taking
his eyes off me. I follow, and when I’m inside, I see a man I don’t recognize sitting in an armchair, bound to it with zip
ties. Then I hear banging.
“Regan!” I hear someone yell, and I quickly kick away the chair from under the doorknob and open the door where the noise is coming from. Sasha practically falls out of the bathroom, then freezes when she takes all of us in. I stare at her, taking it all in myself.
“Jesus,” I say. “Fuck.” I don’t know what I expected to see, but not this. “You’re part of this?” I ask her. Her face is pale,
and she just looks at me, blinking.
“No,” the man in the chair says.
“Who the fuck are you?” I ask, but before anyone can speak, Tom rushes toward me, and I don’t think. I just close my eyes.
And then I shoot.
“Fuck!” Tom yells, his face red and filled with fury as he looks at his shoulder. I’ve hit him, but it’s little more than
a graze. He’s bleeding a decent amount but he’s not badly hurt. I’ve only shot this gun once before, at the self-defense lessons
Jack forced me to take. I’m not a good shot, but the rage inside me fuels me to cock the gun again.
But before I can shoot, Tom has lunged at me again. This time so swiftly that he’s on top of me before I can move a muscle.
It’s like he’s an expert at taking down an enemy with a weapon or something—it’s so fast and seamless, he must have been trained
to do it. Whatever disarming maneuver he uses, it only takes an instant before my weapon has dropped to the ground and my
arm is painfully pinned behind me.
Sasha doesn’t go for the gun. She just sits there with her hand on her heart, watching. Is she in on this, or just in shock?
Tom snatches my shotgun from the wood floor and pushes me down onto the sofa, pointing the gun at me.
“Goddammit,” he screams. Sasha winces. I feel the panic rising inside me. I don’t know what’s happening here.
“Andi is out there, Sasha. What are you doing? Help her!”
“What?” Sasha says, her eyes flitting back and forth between me and Tom.
“We’re gonna get out of here, Sash. Okay?” he says.
I see the fear in her eyes and although I’m still trying to understand how the scene I find myself in came to be, I can tell
she’s afraid to go with him. I can tell she isn’t some monster letting Andi bleed out. She’s captive, too. Tom kneels in front
of her, but he keeps the gun in hand, knowing I won’t move—knowing he can take me down in seconds. He pleads with her.
“Listen,” he says softly. “I did everything I did for us—I made sure you weren’t hurt when they set out that order on you.
I saved your life. I got out of the mess my family put me in. All this—this is the shitstorm that happened because of them.
We can walk away,” he says, and I think about the cop sirens—how it hasn’t even been fifteen minutes since I called and we
are out in the middle of nowhere. Will they get here in time?
Tom’s leaving means he plans on running, which means there’s no reason to kill us, so even though there is a rush of relief
that surges through me, I can’t help worrying what would become of Sasha.
“We get Chloe and just drive. I have everything we need. New plates for the car, IDs—it would be easy. Just tell me that you
understand why this all had to happen, and let’s just go.”
“What about Drew?” she asks, and then I wonder if she is really considering this or if she’s just stalling.
I think about Andi outside and wonder how much time she has.
I watch Sasha as she looks at Tom intently.
He glances down to take her hand in his free hand and in that split second, Sasha quickly makes eye contact with me and then moves her eyes with a slight twitch of her head behind me and down, so that’s where I look.
There are two pizza boxes with empty Mountain Dew two-liters strewn on the floor. Empty beer cans and take-out menus and all
kinds of shit in the disaster of a front room. I don’t comprehend at first, but then, as I listen to him continue imploring
her to understand the carnage he’s left in his wake, I see it.
On a TV tray near the guy in the chair, there is a half-eaten TV dinner and a Bud Light, and next to it, cutlery. I see the
small steak knife and wonder if I can move the four or five feet and get a handle on it fast enough, but there’s no way. He’d
be on his feet and I’d probably be dead before I could even reach it.
The man in the chair meets my eyes. He holds my gaze like he’s trying to communicate something, and then I look down and see
that he’s stretched out one leg and hooked the side of his boot on the metal leg of the TV stand and he’s pulling it, inching
it in tiny increments toward me to reach. It’s so subtle that Tom doesn’t notice. He’s locked on Sasha—explaining to her what
their new life on a Mexican beach could look like. Cleaning up his misstep about Drew and including him in their grand plans—giving
the kid a fresh start at a new school.
Sasha is locked in on him. She doesn’t let her eyes flit over to us for one second at the risk of giving us away.
Once the TV tray is a couple of feet away, I start to lean, painfully slowly.
A cold sweat is forming across my back, and my heart is racing.
I keep my eyes on the side of Tom’s face as I lean the last inch and grab the knife, gripping it with my fist and leaping to my feet.
I hold it over my head and see the spot right between his shoulder blades.
I go for that spot, but he’s on his feet, and as he raises his hand up to stop me, the knife sinks into the flesh of his palm.
The blade pushes all the way through and the tip of it exits the back of his hand. He screams in pain.
“Fuck!” He drops the gun and stares at his hand in shock before pulling the blade out of the muscle and tissue with a guttural
sound that makes me shudder, and in this moment, Sasha gets up. She’s sobbing. I don’t know what she’ll do. The gun is between
me and Tom and as we clamber over one another to reach it, Sasha runs.
She gets up and fumbles with the front door for a second and then she sprints into the inky black night and disappears in
the trees. Tom tries to get a handle on the shotgun, but he has to make a choice, because the gun is too big to run after
her with and he can’t let her go.
Then he does something that shocks and baffles me. He takes the steak knife, cuts loose the zip ties from the guy in the chair,
and then . . . he runs.
And I finally hear the sound of sirens wailing in the distance.