Chapter Seventeen #2
Livvy definitely wanted Vernice to pay, and there could be charges brought against her for not reporting a murder that she’d personally witnessed. But Vernice might have been responsible for a whole lot more than that.
“Did you help Chloe kill my mother?” Livvy demanded. And while she wanted to know the answer to that, she also didn’t want to get shot by the person who’d fired at them, so she kept watch.
“No.” Vernice sobbed again, and it blended with the sounds of pain that Sunny was making.
The approaching sirens, too. “I was having an affair with Paul, and Chloe confronted me. She was going to kill me, so I told her it wasn’t me sleeping with her husband but rather Belinda. I didn’t know she would kill her.”
Livvy got a too-clear picture of that. “But you must have known Chloe was going to do something bad because you followed her to the house where my mother had taken me.”
Vernice was crying now, the tears streaming down her cheeks. And she eventually nodded. “It was too late for me to stop Chloe. I swear it was too late. Chloe didn’t see,” she added, her breath hiccupping with the sobs. “Chloe left, and I went in to check on Belinda and you.”
There was some movement in the cornfield, just to Vernice’s left, and Livvy and Ethan took aim there. She couldn’t spot the shooter, but he was possibly moving into position to start firing again.
“You were catatonic or something,” Vernice went on.
“Not moving, not responding to anything. You were holding the knife, but I took it from you. I figured if Chloe tried to come after me, I could use it as leverage since I believed it would have her prints on it. The knife would be a way of implicating Chloe without me having to admit that I’d seen her murder someone. ”
Since Chloe’s prints hadn’t been on the knife, she had likely worn gloves as Franklin had said.
Did that mean the rest of what the man had said was also true?
If so, where had Hank been when Chloe was murdering Belinda?
Vernice hadn’t mentioned him, and Livvy wasn’t going to question Vernice about that.
Not now anyway.
Because it occurred to her that Vernice could be talking to try to distract them. She could be working with someone who planned to try to kill them all.
There was more movement in the field, but Livvy couldn’t be sure if a shift of wind was responsible or if a would-be killer was actually there.
“Let’s go with our plan to fire and aim low,” she suggested.
This time Grace didn’t even hesitate. “Do it. Sunny needs that ambulance now.”
Ethan and Livvy adjusted their weapons again. And both fired. The shots were deafening, and they kicked up a spray of dirt at the base of the cornstalks. What they didn’t do was cause anyone to run out of there.
However, someone fired back at them.
They dropped lower again, but the bullet hadn’t even come close to them. It’d smacked into the exterior wall up near the roof. At first Livvy thought that was because the shooter had been scrambling away.
But no.
More shots came, nonstop now, all of them tearing into the eaves of the roof. And when Livvy looked up, her heart dropped. Because the bullets had weakened a huge chunk of the wood beam, and it was ready to fall right on Ethan and her.
Ethan no doubt saw it, too, because cursing, he pushed her out of the way, moving her closer toward Grace. But their attacker adjusted his shots, and the gunfire began to slam all around them. He was trying to kill them.
And he just might succeed.
“Get under the house,” Ethan ordered her.
Livvy wanted to argue. She wanted to stand her ground and help Ethan catch this SOB, but she had to think of the baby. Plus, an argument could play right into their attacker’s hands. It could give him the window of opportunity that he needed to finish them off.
She rolled into the narrow opening beneath the house where she was out of the line of fire and also protected if the chunk of roof did indeed fall.
But Ethan wasn’t safe.
Neither was Grace.
They had both moved out from their meager cover and had taken aim at the spot in the field where they’d seen that movement.
Both of them fired. And fired. They sent two more rounds of bullets into the ground, and at least one of the shots must have hit the roots because one of the stalks toppled to the side.
And that was when Livvy saw him.
A man wearing dark pants, a black shirt and a ski mask. He seemed to freeze for a moment, and then he must have realized he was exposed. He bolted out, darting toward the cruiser, no doubt to use it for cover so he could continue his attack.
He ran fast, leaping across the ditch, and he was only a couple of inches from cover when Ethan fired again.
The man howled in pain, and still moving toward the cruiser, he slapped his left hand over the side of his head.
Ethan had obviously hit him, but it wasn’t enough to stop him.
He dived behind the front end of the cruiser.
The moment he landed, he yanked off the ski mask, and Livvy saw the blood dripping from the side of his head. Part of his ear was missing.
And she also saw his face.
Anthony.
He saw Ethan, too. With a feral sound of pain and fury ripping from his throat, Anthony took aim at Ethan and started firing.