Finding Kyle(60)

“What do you want?” I manage to push the words out past my throat, which is constricted tightly in fear.

“I want your boyfriend,” he says simply with a nod of his head toward Kyle’s house.

“What?” I ask, dumbfounded.

“Call him,” Steve—if that’s his real name—says as he waves the gun toward my front door, beyond which lies Kyle’s house across the street.

“What for?” I ask.

Stalling maybe, I don’t know.

“Call him,” he barks at me. He swings the gun back my way, the hole of the barrel looking ominously big as it sits less than a foot away from my nose.

“I don’t understand. What do you want him for?”

“I want him to come over here, and I don’t want him to suspect a fucking thing. I want him walking in here unprepared and unarmed, and you’re going to call him right fucking now and get him over here.”

“I can’t,” I say on a sob, my life literally flashing before my eyes.

Steve moves faster than I could have ever imagined, and he lunges at me. Grabbing a handful of my hair, he viciously yanks my head back and pushes the barrel of the gun to my forehead. “I’m not going to fucking tell you again… call him.”

“I don’t know his phone number,” I cry out. This is absolutely true. I only found out he had a cell phone yesterday morning, and I never did get a chance to ask for his number. And the jerk never offered it to me either, I think bitterly, but even if I knew it, I wouldn’t ever call him. I would never ask Kyle to come over here into unsuspected danger.

And oh, Kyle… what have you gotten yourself, and now me, into?

“How can you not know his fucking phone number?” he snarls at me, yanking my head back further. I can feel hair ripping from my scalp.

I cry out in pain, but I manage to stammer, “He just got the phone. I hadn’t had a chance to get his number.”

This doesn’t enrage him as I suspected it would, but it doesn’t pacify him either. With his fist still gripping a hunk of my hair, he shoves me viciously away from him, causing me to go crashing to my floor.

“Fuck,” he curses in frustration, and, for once, his gun points downward and away from me as he seems to be thinking up an alternate plan.

I suppose I’ll never know how Kyle knew what was going on or how to capitalize on the fact that the gun was no longer on me, but to both my astonishment and Steve’s, Kyle comes bursting through the door, bellowing in rage and charging at my attacker.

I watch, horrified, as Steve swings his hand with the gun toward Kyle, but he’s not quick enough. Kyle barrels into him—his shoulder to Steve’s chest—with one hand locking around Steve’s wrist. They go crashing backward over my couch in a tangle of limbs, and Kyle actually yells out to me, “Get out of here, Jane.”

But I’m frozen in place as they disappear from my sight, hitting the floor with such force the house seems to shake. I hear grunting, cursing, a scuffling sound, and then the crack of a gun going off.

I scream and push myself off the floor, disregarding Kyle’s order to run and scrambling around the couch instead. I’m immediately relieved to see Kyle pushing up to his knees, the gun now in his hand with a dark red stain of blood spreading across Steve’s chest. His eyes are closed, and he’s not moving at all.

Kyle stands. His eyes roam over me, head to toe, before he asks, “You okay?”

“No,” I say in a shaky voice.

“Are you hurt?” he asks with concerned eyes as he steps toward me.

I hold my hands out to fend him off and take a step back. Shaking my head, I tell him, “Not hurt.”

Kyle gives a sad smile of acknowledgment and tells me, “Dial 9-1-1. Tell them you had an intruder who has been shot and killed. Tell them there’s an armed ATF agent in the house when they arrive.”

“An armed what?” I gasp in surprise, but Kyle ignores me, instead pulling his phone out of his pocket.

I watch as he dials a number and puts the phone to his ear, completely shocked by what has occurred and not understanding a damn thing. He walks to the window, gun still in his hand, and looks out into the darkness. When someone answers on the other side of the phone, he says, “I’ve been found. I need you to get here now.”

Kyle’s eyes cut to me, and then he covers the mouthpiece of his phone. In a firm voice, he says, “Call the police, Jane. Now.”

This jolts me somewhat… the businesslike calm he’s exhibiting despite the fact I think he just killed a man. I pull my own phone out of my pocket with a shaking hand and call the police like he asked me to do.

?

“I don’t give a shit what you say,” I growl at the cop who’s been sitting with me for the past hour. “I’m done. I’m going home, and you can’t stop me.”

“Miss Cresson,” the man says patiently. “Your house is still being processed. You can’t go home.”

I have no clue who this guy is with. I’ve got local police, state patrol, FBI, and ATF. I swear I even saw people walking around with jackets that said Homeland Security.

I give the man a sarcastically sweet smile and tell him, “Well, I guess it’s a good fucking thing my parents live within walking distance of me, huh?”

I push up from the table, the chair scraping on the tile floor. I’ve been in this room longer than the hour this man has been talking to me. I was brought here in the back of one our local police cruisers, driven by Chance Dawson, a total goober I went to school with who I’m sure had never seen a dead body before. He acted like he was driving a celebrity or something to the station when he was told to bring me there by an FBI agent who showed up on the scene not long after I called the police and Kyle had finished talking to whoever was on the phone.