2 Sisters Detective Agency(51)

All at once the dogs fell silent.

A female voice called out from the hall. “Who’s in there?”

“Nobody speak.” Vera’s whisper was hard, urgent. Ashton was glad he couldn’t see her face. If she was as scared as he was, they were all dead. They needed their leader to be an unshakable pillar of certainty. But as he waited for Vera to give them a course of action, she simply didn’t. She stood there, frozen, her arm stiff when he grabbed it.

“Tell us what to do! What the fuck do we do? We’re trapped!”

“Shut up.” She pushed him off.

“Who’s in there? Answer me!” the voice called from beyond the door.

Ashton heard a sound that made his throat constrict and his stomach lurch. A loud double crunch, metal grinding on metal.

Sean recognized the sound as well.

“That was a shotgun,” Sean said. His voice steadily rose in pitch. “She just pumped a fucking shotgun. There are three attack dogs and a chick with a shotgun out there, Vera! What do we—”

“I’m calling the police!” the voice said.

“You don’t want to do that!” Vera shouted back.

“We’re dead.” Penny was at the window, looking down over the drop to the concrete below. “We’re all dead. We’re all dead. We’re all dead.”

Sean grabbed Vera’s shoulder. “Vera, we—”

“I’m thinking!” Vera ripped Sean’s hand off her, bending it backward so that his fingers cracked as the boy howled. “Get your filthy fucking hands off me!”

Ashton looked at the walls, the shelves by the door, searching in his insane panic for an escape hidden somewhere, anywhere, even in the books standing in neat rows. The Handbook of Guard Dog Training. Canine Behavior for the High-Stress Environment. The Other End of the Leash. He saw nothing that made him feel any better.

“I’m dialing now!” the voice called. “You assholes move a muscle and I’ll fire through the door!”

“Put the phone down, lady!” Vera shouted. She was fishing in her pocket. As Ashton watched, she took out a small gold lighter and held it up to the door, flipped it open and ground the wheel.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She ignored him. “You hear that, bitch?” Vera asked, flicking the lighter open and shut. “You hear that?”

Ashton, Sean, and Penny stood back as Vera went to the drapes, held the lighter to the bottom of one.

“Vera!” Penny cried.

“I’m lighting this place up!” Vera called. “You smell the smoke yet? I’m lighting the curtains! I’m lighting the papers on the desk!”

“You’re going to kill us!” Sean said.

“Listen, woman!” Vera went to the door, put her ear to it. Yellow flame was creeping up the curtain, rippling slowly across the surface of the desk. “You better think about your priorities. You leave us in here and the room will burn. By the time the cops and the fire department get here, you’ll have four dead kids on your hands. You want to try to explain that? Smart thing to do is call off the dogs, let us go now, and try to save your house before everything you own is toast and your ass is in jail. Up to you.”

Silence. The only sound was the crackling of the growing flames, the occasional whimpering of one of the dogs behind the door. Ashton watched black smoke coiling against the ceiling. Penny started coughing.

“It’s getting hot in here!” Vera called, gripping the door handle.

The door opened. Ashton felt relief rush over him. Until he saw Vera reaching for the gun hidden in the waistband of her jeans.





Chapter 67



I jumped.

Freeze-frame.

Time locked into place.

The wind rushed, warm and loud, past my ears. The impossibly bright blue surface of the pool soared up at me. For a long time it felt like I hung in midair, falling and yet not falling, a floating balloon suspended just above the unbroken surface of the water. A sound came up from the crowd, the sharp intake of three hundred gasps. My arms and legs were flung out and my eyes were bulging as I descended.

Later, I would see footage of the fall. Kids can do all kinds of things with videos on their phones these days. Like a great, round star, I descended in slow motion over the pool, floated down frame by frame, my belly rippling, my thighs jiggling, my pudgy fingers gripping at nothing, struggling for purchase. My stomach hit the surface of the water first, sent an undulating wave out in a perfect circle from the center of the pool. Then the rest of me hit. Asteroid slamming into Earth. Water balloon hitting concrete. The pool spewed water in return, walls surging ten feet high, directly upward, a display reminiscent of the Fountains of Bellagio in Las Vegas. The water sucked toward me and then rose and bellowed outward, soaking the first three rows of people completely and everyone behind them to the waist. The giant wave rolled out over the rooftop and flooded through the door to the house and down the stairs. I was swallowed whole beneath the surface of the pool.

Under the water, I heard nothing, saw nothing. When I righted and broke the surface, my ear canals cleared, but there was no sound. I stood and wiped the water from my eyes, looking around. The silence seemed to hang. Then three hundred kids all raised their arms and let out the greatest, loudest cheer I had ever heard.