Cody wrapped his arm tighter around Amande’s midsection, still holding a six-inch blade to her throat. The young woman’s eyes darted from Manny’s face to Joe’s, but they settled on Faye’s. There was terror in Amande’s eyes, but trust, too. Faye, who was fighting against the shock wrapping its cold blanket around her shoulders, knew that she would rather die than betray that trust.
If something happens to Amande…
She forced herself to fully acknowledge her fear.
If he kills Amande and leaves me alive, I’ll go to my grave remembering that look on her face.
Faye wasn’t going to let that happen. If this man took her daughter’s life, he was going to have to take Faye’s, too.
She took stock of the situation. The sheriff was behind her and he was certainly armed, but it would be almost impossible for him to shoot Cody without taking the risk that his knife would sink into her daughter’s throat. Besides, between the sheriff’s gun and Cody sat a room full of people who had been innocently enjoying their drinks just five seconds before. Shooting Cody was too risky.
Cody yelled, “Everybody stay right where you are.”
Faye watched the terrified eaters and drinkers weighing their next moves. Should they drop to the floor and hide under their tables? Should they run for the door? They didn’t know and so, for the moment, they were frozen in place.
Since Cody was armed with a knife, not a gun, running for the hills was a high probability proposition for everybody in the room who wasn’t Amande. Still, everyone knew that all bets were off if the sheriff opened fire. And they knew that sudden moves on their part could startle the man holding a knife to the delicate skin just below Amande’s mandible.
For now, they were motionless, but it wouldn’t take much to send them stampeding to safety. A few of them had toddlers and babies in their laps. Those people slowly, very slowly, folded forward, wrapping their arms and torsos around tender little bodies.
* * *
Amande was having trouble finding a place to focus her eyes. Cody had jerked her to him so roughly that her head had whiplashed hard, and she was dizzy. The sharp knife edge against her throat awakened something primal in her that wanted to scream, vomit, cry, collapse. The knife’s edge made her see dark spots floating through the darkened room, and it kept her from believing that a uniformed man wearing a badge could do anything to help her. The floating dark spots meant that she couldn’t see him, not really, not with a dark room between them and a dark night behind him.
The room was silent except for the hushed breath of dozens of people. No clothing rustled. No shoes scuffed.
Cody’s voice was deafening in her ear. “Nobody needs to get hurt, not even this little bitch.”
He took a step backward. The only way to keep the sharp edge from slicing her skin was to take a step with him, so Amande did.
She could feel the people who loved her more than she could see them. There was the shadow of her dad, standing near the door where the sheriff was. He was dim and far from her, but she held her gaze until the very sight of him pushed the dark spots out of her field of vision. Knowing he was there made her feel stronger than she really was. Amande knew that her dad was good all the way through. He believed the best of people until he just couldn’t. It took a lot to push a man like that to vengeance, but she knew in her bones that if Cody hurt her, her father would track him like an animal until he had nowhere left to hide.
She felt Cody dragging her toward the bar’s rear exit. Everything in her said that she shouldn’t pass through that door. She shouldn’t let him take her into the dark.
As they shuffled backward together, Manny came into view to her right, just inside her peripheral vision. She had known him all her life, but she’d never seen tears on his face before now. He stood at the open cash register, with shining glasses and liquor bottles arrayed behind him, just as she’d seen him stand since she was a little girl. Manny knew how to make people happy. Long ago, he had explained to her that what he did was very important. He helped people enjoy the great blue sea without a care, and he greeted them with a cold drink and a smile when they came home to a reality that often wasn’t very pleasant. If Cody took her out into the dark and she didn’t come back, she would be sad to leave Manny.
Amande’s grandmother had loved Manny in the special way that old women love charming young men who bring them daisies and bourbon. She had paid him the compliment of trusting him with her granddaughter. Amande missed her grandmother and she wondered what it meant to die. If Cody pressed harder on the knife handle, hard enough to slice her jugular vein, would she see her grandmother again? What about her mother, Justine, who had run away from baby Amande? Justine had kept running until cancer stopped her dead. If the knife did its job, would Amande finally meet the mother who gave birth to her?
She would rather stay with the mother she had, the one who cared about her so much that Amande sometimes chafed under her love, the one who was standing so nearby but not quite near enough to touch.
Amande’s eyes found Faye’s and she comforted herself with what she saw there. If she had to die, it would be in the company of someone who saw her and knew her and loved her anyway.
* * *
Manny, standing at the bar, was the only person in the room who could see Cody’s back, so he was the only person who saw the bulge under his jacket. The bulge was the shape and size of a handgun, some kind of semiautomatic unless Manny missed his guess.
This bulge complicated Manny’s life considerably. His first priority was Amande, and it would always be Amande. He simply loved her, as much as if she were his own baby girl. More than that, he admired her. Nobody east of the Rockies would have expected that the abandoned child of two heroin addicts, raised by an old woman with no education and no money, could have grown into the vibrant, loving, dynamic person standing just out of his reach. Setting aside his own feelings, he owed it to Amande’s grandmother to save her precious baby.
But Manny had a second priority. He stood in a room full of people who trusted him to entertain them and, at a bare minimum, to keep them safe. If Cody reached around behind him and pulled that gun out of his waistband, Manny’s guests would be at risk, all of them, and he wouldn’t stand for that. He began plotting a way to get between Cody and Amande.
And between Cody and his gun.
* * *
Sheriff Rainey knew he was personally responsible for this hellish situation. All he’d done was walk through the door, but criminals knew that he was the law walking around on two legs. And they hated him for it.
When he’d made his entrance and unwittingly put all these people in danger, he hadn’t had a clue who killed the captain, nor did he understand what had happened to Nate Peterson. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth seemed to have some idea of what had been done to the captain and Nate, but he didn’t, not really. Cody’s current behavior made it obvious that he was guilty of something terrible, and it was most likely the murder and attempted murder.
Yes, he’d had his suspects and Cody was one of them, but he’d had no evidence pointing directly to him. Heck, poor Nate could have killed the captain, for all he’d been able to determine. Nate’s current condition, quite serious according to his doctors, didn’t mean that he hadn’t committed murder while he was still hale and hearty.
The sheriff reflected that he’d solved this crime simply by wearing his badge into a bar. This didn’t make him feel very good about himself as a top-flight investigator.
* * *
Cody was now within reach of the door that would take him out into the night, and Faye’s daughter with him. He hovered near it uncertainly, and Faye saw his problem. With his left arm around Amande’s body and his right hand holding a knife to her neck, he didn’t have any hands left to operate the door. He covered his hesitation with aggression, speaking to the crowd with a sneer.
“Here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m going out this door and I’m getting in my boat and I’m taking her with me. You people are going to let me go and you won’t come after me if you want her to stay alive. Maybe I’ll take her with me where I’m going. Or maybe, when I’m far enough away, I’ll give her a life jacket and leave her floating in the water to wait for you. You’re gonna wait four hours—no, five—before you come looking for her. If you don’t, the body you find floating in the water won’t be alive.”
Faye tried not to think of her daughter afloat as a living needle in a big, watery haystack. She tried not to think of sharks and hypothermia. She tried not to think.
Cody lowered his lips to Amande’s ear. “Need you to do something for me, honey. Reach over there and turn the doorknob for me, then open the door real slow. I’m a little twitchy, so be real careful not to upset me. Okay?”
Amande didn’t nod, because the knife’s big blade was in the way, so she whispered a barely audible, “Okay.”
Faye saw her reach for the doorknob, but her arm wasn’t long enough. Seeing this, Cody edged closer and the back of her hand brushed the knob, but her arm wouldn’t rotate enough for her to grasp it. She and Cody commenced an awkward dance as he tried to maneuver her into position without turning his back on anybody. This effort was not entirely successful.
When he turned and Faye saw him in profile, she saw a bulge above his rear waistband that put the taste of ashes in her mouth. Manny stood to her left and she could see that he had a clear view of the man’s back, too. He knew what Amande was up against.
Cody shifted his grip on Amande so that she could reach the doorknob. As he did this, his jacket shifted enough to reveal what was under the bulge. The handgun was small, matte-black, and terrifying. Faye let her gaze shift Manny’s way. Their eyes locked and it was obvious that he saw what she saw.
Without speaking a word, they understood each other. Something needed to be done before Amande passed through that doorway.
* * *
Amande had twisted herself into a position that let her reach the doorknob while still being physically restrained by a knife at her throat. Her hand lingered on its worn metal, unwilling to open the door and let the night in.
Cody used the fingers gripping her torso to pinch Amande’s side, hard. His breath was hot on her cheek as he said, “Any day now, bitch,” but the maneuver to let her reach the knob had put a few inches of spaces between them. If she was going to make a move, now was the time.
She looked for her mother. Faye was there, just an arm’s-length from Manny but farther from Amande. She was too far to reach, too far to touch, but Amande could look in her eyes. She saw comfort there.
Faye held her gaze and her face told Amande everything. No, not that. She didn’t want to see that.
Amande didn’t want to see self-sacrifice on her mother’s eyes. She saw it in the set of her jaw and in her ready-for-anything stance. Amande didn’t want Faye to give herself up for her. How could she signal the word “No” without shaking her head or moving the neck where a blade rested?
She couldn’t. She could only watch as her mother waited for her chance.
Cody nudged Amande to open the door and she had to move herself another inch away from him to get enough leverage to twist the knob. Her eyes were still on Faye as a bit more space opened up between her and Cody. It was even possible that the blade was one hair’s-breadth farther from her neck. Now was the time.
At that instant, Faye’s eyes dropped to the floor at her feet and rose again, telling Amande what she had to do. Amande was terrified, but if there was anything in the world that she trusted, it was her parents. Craning her neck back as far from the blade as she could manage, she did what her mother asked. She let her knees buckle, trying to slip between Cody’s arms and trying to let herself drop. He had the reflexes of a very young man, or she would have made it. As it was, he caught her under an armpit before her knees hit the floor.
* * *
Faye saw Manny’s eyes on the gun. They told her how he planned to make his move, and she let him do it. He went high. He went for the gun, knowing that this would leave him wide-open to the knife.
Faye went low, knocking Amande loose from Cody’s grip. They dropped to the floor, and Faye made herself as big as possible, sprawling over her much-larger daughter’s crumpled body. Then she waited for the slash of a blade or the stunning impact of a bullet.
* * *
Amande lay flat on the floor. Her flyweight mother was on top of her, using her tiny body as a human shield. Once the room stopped spinning, Amande planned to shake Faye off and pin her to the floor. After all, Amande was the one stupid enough to spend time with Cody-the-murderer. She should be the one exposed to blades and bullets. Unfortunately, her head had hit the floor pretty hard, so she was having trouble operating her arms and legs.
A pair of deck shoes blurred past her face and she wanted to be ill. Now Manny was risking everything for her, too, and that just wasn’t how things were supposed to be.
* * *
Manny saw Faye wrap both arms around Amande and drop her to the floor, away from the knife. It was time to gain control of the gun.
He grabbed a roll of quarters out of the cash register, holding them in his right hand where they would add heft to his punches. Then he broke a bourbon bottle on the side of the bar, crafting himself a wickedly sharp weapon for his left hand. He lunged at Cody with both the fist and the bottle swinging.
He resisted the overwhelming impulse to give the knife a wide radius. He had calculated his odds of snatching the handgun out of Cody’s pants, and they were best if he faced the knife and went straight for his target. If he lost a little blood in the process, so be it.
Manny saw the knife carve a slash into his arm more than he felt it. He would feel it later, if there was a later.
* * *
Ray Peterson threw a bar napkin on top of his tablet computer and dropped an expensive fountain pen on top of it.
He rose.
* * *
If he’d been navigating through an open space, Joe knew that he could have reached Amande and Faye in just a few long steps. In this crowded bar? It would take him a long time to get there. Too long.
He had just one option. He needed to go up and over.
Joe put his size fourteen foot on the seat of an empty chair and used it to leap onto the nearest table. Hopscotching from table to table, he launched himself from the last one, confident that his flying body would strike Cody dead-center.
There was a single problem as he took flight. Somebody was in his way.
* * *
Lieutenant Baker’s first indication of trouble came when she opened the door to the bar and grill and walked into a scenario that made no sense at all.
She saw Cody standing over Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her daughter. She saw Manny and his homemade weapons. She saw Joe’s face, nine feet above the floor, as he ran across a room full of tabletops. She saw Nate Peterson’s father put a gun to Cody’s chest.
And she saw how wrong she’d been.
* * *
The sound of a gunshot at close range deafened Faye, and presumably Amande, so they were both spared the sounds of Cody’s suffering, which didn’t last long. Shot through the heart, he died quickly.
They did, however, hear the words spoken as Ray Peterson yanked a snubnose .38 out of his pocket and pressed its muzzle against Cody’s chest.
“What kind of monster leaves his friend for the fishes to eat?”
Cody’s pleas for mercy were pathetic and Ray brushed them all away. He just said, “This is for Nate. You can tell Satan hello for me,” as he pulled the trigger.
And then all sound was blotted out for Faye by that single gunshot, even the screams of a roomful of people.