Live to Tell (Detective D.D. Warren, #4)(119)

“The dark,” the kid insisted again. “You must learn to control the dark.”

“The dark? Is that how you refer to the negative energies?”

“They’re all around you.”

“Yes, the power is out.”

“No,” he said, “they’re all around you.”

It took me a second, then I finally got it. Evan wasn’t talking about the lack of overhead lighting. He was talking about me. Apparently, I was the source of negative energy, a walking, talking black hole.

Given how tired and scared I currently was, that made perfect sense.

“Evan, can you tell me how you fight the dark?”

“Call upon the angels,” he reported. “Close your eyes. Picture a white light. Call it to you. Seven hugs from seven angels. They will help you.”

“Can you do that for me? Call the angels? Then, when you feel the light, can you ask the angels a question?”

In the gloom, Evan blinked at me, curiously.

“Andrew has hidden a gun,” I said quietly. “The angels know where it is. We need to find that gun, Evan. Can you ask the angels to help us?”

“Guns are bad,” said Evan.

“So is Andrew. Help us, Evan. Your mommy and daddy need you.”

Evan’s chin came up. He regarded at me solemnly. “I will help you.”



I hid Evan, still bound, inside his closet, beneath a pile of pillows and clothes. Ten minutes had to be up. Andrew was coming. With the gun. Without the gun. I scoured Evan’s room for possible weapons. Maybe a lamp, clock radio, or a framed picture. Victoria ran a tight ship. No feasible weapons in her violent child’s room.

Think, think, think.

My heart was beating too hard. I felt a dull roaring in my ears, becoming hyperaware of too many things at once: Evan’s low whisper, “Breathe in, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven…. Exhale, one, two, three, four, five….” Myself, standing unarmed in the middle of his darkened bedroom.

Then another sound, farther down the hall. The creak of a floorboard.

Andrew, coming up the stairs.

My father, singing as he approached my room. My father, blood spattered across his cheeks—my mother’s, my sister’s, my brother’s.

I wouldn’t curl up under the covers this time. I wouldn’t hide in a bedroom.

I wanted to fight.

I needed to fight.

If I just had the damn gun …

Then, in the next heartbeat, it came to me. I didn’t need Evan. I didn’t need to visit the celestial superhighway. This was all about my father, right?

I knew exactly where the gun was.

I’d dumped my father into the damn sewer system, and the son of a bitch had been trying to escape ever since.



When Andrew topped the stairs, I was waiting for him in the hallway. I sat cross-legged on the floor, hands quiet on my lap. I had my eyes closed, listening to the low murmur of Evan’s voice from the neighboring bedroom. I could feel currents of air whispering against my cheeks. Cold and warm. Light and dark.

I felt different. Tingling. Flushed. Powerful. As if maybe I was in the company of angels. The memories, I realized. I’d finally opened my mind. Allowed myself to know everything that I knew, and now it was as if I were back in the house that night, except this time my mother and siblings were beside me. We were united. Four against one.

And the images that filled my mind were both violent and painful.

“You don’t have the gun,” Andrew stated. “You failed.”

He took the first step forward, and I finally opened my eyes.

“Sheriff Wayne saved me,” I said, my voice strong. “My father didn’t kill himself that night. Sheriff Wayne killed him.”

“You … you spoke to him?” Andrew sounded bewildered. He paused, six steps away, knife pressed against his pant leg.

“My mother loved him. Have you seen her on the interplanes? Have you asked her about that? Sheriff Wayne was a good man, and she cherished him for that.”

Andrew became immediately agitated. It proved what I was beginning to suspect.

“She called the sheriff after I spoke to her, after my father came home. She wanted to kick my father out. But my father refused to go. So she called your father—her lover, Sheriff Wayne—to assist.”

“He shouldn’t have left his family,” Andrew snapped.

“Even a good man can be tempted,” I answered. “Even a good man can want something he shouldn’t have. Wayne came over as a man, not an officer of the law. He hoped to reason with my father, convince him to leave the property. Bullies crack under pressure, right? And everyone knew my father was a first-class bully.”

More agitation. The whap whap of the blade against Andrew’s pant leg.

“It didn’t go the way anyone planned. My father refused to budge from the bedroom, so Sheriff Wayne went upstairs to fetch him. They started to yell. Then my father spotted his gun, resting on the nightstand. He grabbed it, pointed it at Sheriff Wayne, just as my mother got between them. She took the bullet meant for her lover, dead before she hit the floor.”

Pictures again, like an old home movie streaming through my head. Had I crept out of my room that night, seen more than I’d known I’d seen? Or were the images from something else? The warmth caressing my cheek. The feel again—my mother, Natalie, Johnny. Four against one. The way it should’ve been that night, twenty-five years ago.