MAY 22
FRIDAY
1:19 PM
HAZARD WASN’T UNCONSCIOUS THE whole time, but even awake, he lingered in a halfway place, his brain struggling to put together commands, his body refusing to follow them. Slowly, the world seemed to cohere, and then it was like waking up all over again.
The smell of cold concrete and stale urine filled his mouth, and the way his breath came back to him suggested walls and a closed space. It was too dark to see anything except a lighter half-moon of grey ahead of him. At first, he could hear nothing except the hammering headache; then, from a distance, voices. Too far off to make out the words, but definitely voices.
When he tried to move, he realized he was taped to a chair, ankles and wrists. He traced the frame of the chair with his fingers. Wood. The seat was hard and felt thin. And when he shifted his weight, the chair squeaked and shivered. So, old. And an old wooden chair might present an opportunity.
He planted his feet and raised himself up. Then he dropped back as hard as he could. The crack of the chair’s feet connecting with concrete went through his head like a shot, and he flinched, but he raised himself and did it again. On his third try, he felt something splinter. He eased himself up again into that half-bent crouch. Beneath his right hand, the chair’s leg was now slightly bent. He worried it back and forth as best he could with his hand still taped in place. Sweat built on his face, prickled across his back, bunched his shirt under his arm. In the cramped space, he could smell himself, his fear and frustration.
And then with the crack of old glue and varnish giving way, the leg came loose, and Hazard had to swallow a wild, ecstatic halloo. He dropped the chair leg. With one hand free, he was able to rid himself of the rest of the tape. The chair fell with a clatter that made him flinch again, and it was only partly his head this time. The sound of the voices continued unchanged, though. Luck. Maybe.
A quick check told him he had nothing: no phone, none of his everyday carry supplies, and of course not the Blackhawk. The headache was bad, but it wasn’t incapacitating yet. And, most importantly, he was free.
He examined his surroundings as best he could, relying mostly on touch. In front of him was a door and frame; the lighter patch against the darkness was where a handle had been removed, and his fingers found cold metal running through the opening—a chain securing a door that had been recently broken. That confirmed his suspicions: he was in the Ace in the Hole, being held where they had found Ashley.
Shelves lined the other three walls. He followed the outlines with his fingers: a bucket, what he thought was a commercially sized package of toilet paper, the wooden handle of a plunger, some sort of spray can, the steel body and rubber nozzle of a fire extinguisher, boxes full of plastic bags that squished under his hands, probably containing some kind of drink mix.
He went back to the door and retrieved the fallen chair leg from the floor. He inserted the narrow end into the opening where the door handle should have been, and the chain clinked. Then he applied force, using the leg like a lever. The hollow-core door groaned, layers of fiberboard and honeycomb cardboard protesting, but it didn’t give.
Hazard yanked the chair leg free, swearing under his breath. He closed his eyes against the darkness. He breathed in eight slow breaths. Then he reinserted the leg and left it hanging from the opening. From the shelf behind him, he grabbed the fire extinguisher. Then, by touch more than by sight, he lined up the base of the fire extinguisher with the flat foot on the chair leg, and he drove the fire extinguisher forward. Improvised hammer and chisel. Kind of. On the second blow, something gave with a loud pop. On the third blow, he felt the chair leg shudder forward. The fourth, fifth, and sixth blows forced the chair leg in further, and then, with a resistance almost like tearing paper, the section of door between the opening for the handle and the doorframe gave way. Without anything to hold it in place, the chain slid down, clinking and rattling, and the door swung open.
Fresh air made Hazard’s pulse kick up. On the other side of the door, the rest of the Ace in the Hole’s basement lay in thick shadow; the only light came from the stairwell leading up to the kitchen. The desk where they had found Derrick made a blocky shadow to Hazard’s left. He had a vague sense of the junk that had accumulated down here: stacks of cardboard boxes, old pallets, crates of empty bottles. The voices filtered down from the kitchen more clearly now, two women’s voices. Kirsta, he realized after a moment. And Joyce.
“—have any idea what you’ve done?” Joyce’s words sounded slurred, greased with whatever cocktail of alcohol and benzodiazepines she’d mixed up for herself today. “To this family? To me? Do you? Do you?”
Kirsta protest was too small to make out.
“I don’t care what I said!” Joyce screamed. “I didn’t want this, obviously! I was—I was just saying things. Those are things adults say! I never wanted this. What don’t you understand about that?”
This time, Kirsta’s words came to Hazard clearly, stiff with fresh hurt and resentment. “I did it for you. I thought you’d be proud.”
“Proud? Of what? My dyke daughter shooting up a school?” Joyce see-sawed a laugh. “Were you thinking of making me proud when you ate out that lez you met at the bar? And I had to hear about it from Evan? Do you know what that was like for me, having that little queer threaten me? Good Lord, Kirsta, sit up straight; I told you, you’ve got rolls when you slouch. You are your father’s daughter; do you realize that? He was a loser and a fuck-up, and—God, ‘I did it for you.’ Do you have any idea how you sound? Do you even hear yourself?”
Hazard’s recollection of the basement was that it had only a single exit: the stairwell to the kitchen where Joyce and Kirsta were arguing. Until now, their conversation had masked the sounds of his escape, but Hazard wasn’t sure how much time he had left. He thought for a minute. Then he returned to the storage room. He found the spray can and tested it; a jet of something spattered the concrete near his feet, and a chemical smell wafted up to him; insecticide of some sort, he guessed. It stung his noise and made his head swim. He tried the extinguisher too, but that gave off nothing but a limp drizzle of foam; he strapped the hose down again and hooked it with a couple fingers. It was old too, and by the weight, he guessed steel rather than aluminum.
Improvised weapons in hand, he left the storage room and moved toward the stairwell. He kept his shoulder to the wall, using it to follow the perimeter of the room. He wanted to look up the stairwell without being seen himself, and the best way to do that was to keep as far back as he could and approach slowly. If the women were located farther back in the kitchen, and if they weren’t armed, he might be able to reach an exit before they could grab a gun. The Ace was surrounded by businesses and people; on a Friday afternoon, he could find someone and call for help.
Then he hit something with his shoulder, and it toppled toward the floor. Hazard tried to catch it, but he had the insecticide in one hand and the fire extinguisher in the other, and all he managed was to knock it around before it slapped against the concrete.
The voices about him cut off.
Fury—at himself, at his own stupidity—choked Hazard. He caught himself before he stepped on the acrylic cutout he had knocked down; a man he assumed was supposed to be Doc Holliday, in an old-fashioned vest and sleeve garters, stared up at him from the floor.
Then a step came. Soft. Meant to be silent. Hazard crouched and began to retrace his steps. He wouldn’t go back into the storage room; he didn’t want to corner himself. A part of him laughed at that. The basement was a box, so all he was doing was putting himself in a bigger corner.
Kirsta came down the steps slowly. She carried the hunting rifle again, and she swept it back and forth. Logic told Hazard that her eyes were still adjusting to the dark, that she couldn’t possibly see him. When her eyes passed over him, his whole body tightened, and logic didn’t mean shit. In ten steps, she’d reach the switch that controlled the lights overhead. On Hazard’s first visit, he and Somers hadn’t used the lights because they had been afraid to activate another lightbulb bomb. But Kirsta wouldn’t have to worry about that; by now, a team of law enforcement experts had disarmed everything. She would turn on the lights, and then it wouldn’t matter where Hazard ran in the concrete box. So, Hazard thought, trying to link up his thoughts. So, the obvious next step was to keep her from reaching the lights. Or, better yet, from seeing him even if she managed to turn them on.
He stopped his retreat. His heartbeat quickened, and the can of insecticide spray felt greasy as he tightened his fingers around it. Every breath was too loud. How could she not hear him? He slid his hand on the can. Hornet spray, he told himself. Hornet spray had a range of twenty feet. Jesus Christ, this wasn’t hornet spray. She came down another step, turning at the hips to sweep the gun across the room, her childlike face worried and frightened under a mask of what she must have thought adults were supposed to be: hard, determined, untouchable.
She brought her weight down on the next step, and Hazard raised the can of insecticide. When she scanned the darkness again and her gaze came toward him, he depressed the trigger, and a chemical spray jetted out.
It struck her in the mouth first, and he overcorrected; the spray ran up her face and then over her head, hitting the wall behind her. She screamed, releasing the gun with one hand to claw at her face. Hazard brought the spray back down, and this time, he got her dead on, coating her hand and whatever parts of her face weren’t covered. Her scream rose in pitch. She stumbled backward, thumped against the wall, and lost her balance. Upstairs, Joyce shouted questions. Keeping the spray focused on her as best he could, Hazard advanced a step.
Then Kirsta stopped trying to wipe her eyes, and she grabbed the rifle again. The first shot went into the wall somewhere near Hazard; concrete popped, and grit peppered his arm and the side of his face. The sound, trapped in the concrete box of the basement, was enormous; it was like having someone clap both hands over his ears. In contrast, the next shot sounded muffled. It was too high, and the bullet must have struck metal because something sparked and then went dark. A moment later, though, water began to mist down from the sprinklers overhead, and a siren boomed somewhere upstairs. After the gunshots, it all but covered up the sound of Kirsta’s screams.
Hazard dropped the empty can and wiped his face; water soaked him, flattening his hair against his scalp, pasting his shirt to his skin. It had worked, kind of. And she’d triggered the goddamn fire suppression system, which—if there were a merciful God—meant that somewhere, the alarm was being coded, and the fire department was being notified.
Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, the siren cut off. The sprinklers slowed, the water becoming a gentle shower, and then trickles. Joyce had turned it off. A swear built in his throat, followed by a knotted helplessness that made him want to squeeze his eyes shut. Instead, he wiped his face and adjusted his grip on the fire extinguisher.
The gunshots’ thunder lingered in Hazard’s ears, but he could hear Kirsta sobbing as she tried to wipe her face with her shirt. She still held the rifle with one hand. He could try it; he could rush her, see if he could get in a blow with the fire extinguisher. He’d have to be lucky enough that she wouldn’t react faster than he expected, and he’d have to be lucky enough that, if she got off a shot, she’d miss. But he could try.
A shadow moved at the top of the steps, and the helplessness lodged in Hazard’s throat made it hard to take the next breath. He could try, he could risk it. Except Joyce was up there. And he didn’t know if she was armed. He didn’t know the first damn thing.
“Are you kidding me?” Joyce’s voice had a well-worn tone, disappointment with sixteen years to take the edges off. She came down a step, her boutique sneakers coming into view. “This is perfect. This is just perfect. I swear to God, in this family, I have to do everything.” She punctuated the sentences by coming down another step. By the time she’d finished feeling sorry for herself, Hazard could see the pistol in her hand. A semiautomatic. Likely a nine-millimeter. Likely between eleven and thirteen cartridges. In this concrete shooting gallery, that would be enough. “Kirsta, I swear to God, you cannot do one thing right.”
“Joyce, she’s a kid who has made a lot of bad decisions, and she needs help. If you’ll put down the gun, I’ll tell the county attorney that you tried to stop—”
Before he could finish, Joyce snapped the little pistol around and fired. The shot winged him. He thought, for a moment, that it had been a drop of water—the sudden sensation on his upper arm of something cool, and the coolness making him think it was wet, a stray trickle of water from the sprinklers. Then the heat came, and the pain ran on bright copper wires. She squeezed off another shot. The muzzle flare seemed bigger this time, the rush of hormones as his body reacted to the injury making his eyes respond differently to the flash. The clap of the shots rang in his ears. He stumbled back, out of sync, too slow, his uninjured shoulder scraping along concrete.
Then, just as quickly, the shooting stopped. Hazard could hear his own breathing—panting, doggy breaths that weren’t getting him enough air. He had been places like this before. He had been the target. He tried to bring himself back, focusing on the water gathering at the nape of his neck, focusing on the smell of blood and gunpowder and insecticide, focusing on the rough texture of the cement against his shoulder and elbow as he bumped a backward path.
It cost him precious seconds. By the time he was in control again, Joyce was stepping over Kirsta, coming down the rest of the steps.
How bad? He couldn’t tell in the weak light that came from upstairs, but he didn’t think it was terrible. He could move his arm, and although the pain wasn’t negligible, it wasn’t overwhelming. The next question was how many shots. At least three, but he couldn’t be sure if there had been more. She could have eight rounds left. Or ten. Or eighteen if she had one of those extended magazines. Hell, you could get one that held up to a hundred cartridges, although he would have seen it if she’d been using something like that.
He lassoed the thoughts, drew them back. He could hear those doggy breaths, and he made himself take a deep one, then another. Nothing had changed, he told himself. Nothing was different. There was a batshit woman with a gun hunting him in the basement, which was about as close as it got to shooting fish in a barrel. Nothing had changed, all he had to do was—
She hit the lights. A fluorescent panel blazed to life overhead.
—keep her from seeing him. The thought crystallized in the sudden blaze of illumination. Hazard took the fire extinguisher in both hands and did an awkward, shotput-style hurl that made his injured arm scream. Joyce was still turning around, the pistol lazy in one hand, when the stainless-steel cylinder connected with the fluorescent tubes. They shattered, something sparked once, and then the basement plunged into darkness again.
The silence had a brittle, frustrated quality that—maybe because of the blood loss—Hazard read as uniquely parental. “Well,” Joyce said in a kids-will-be-kids-I’m-going-to-take-his-ass-off-when-we-get-home tone he’d heard from the playground mommies. She laughed. “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
He’d learned his lesson; he slid backward, trying to keep his steps smooth and even, the puddles and the concrete threatening to betray every movement.
“Do you have any idea what I’m trying to do, Mr. Hazard?”
Kill me, you bitch. You’re trying to murder me.
Water splashed as she came forward. “I’m trying to keep our children safe. You can’t understand that, of course. But protecting my children is the single most important thing in the universe. Making sure they grow up safe and healthy and happy. That’s what matters.”
He remembered, from the flashlight inspection he’d done on their last visit, the stacks of cardboard boxes. He pushed off from the concrete wall, one hand outstretched, groping through the darkness.
“It’s bad enough that I have to worry that there are too many people in this country today, that they’ll be competing with all these new kids who are here, that they won’t be able to get scholarships and jobs because all that money goes to diversity and equity and inclusion. That’s bad enough. But now, Mr. Hazard, now I have to worry about what they’re learning at school. Learning to hate themselves because they’re white. Learning to hate their culture and their past. And now I have to worry about them being sexualized, being exposed to the filthy, degenerate things that adults do. I have to worry about people grooming them for pedophiles.”
His fingers brushed something, and Hazard recoiled automatically. Then he reached out again and found the damp, feathery corner of old cardboard. He traced the outline and moved around the stack, putting a barrier—however flimsy—between himself and Joyce.
“I wasn’t careful enough with Kirsta, obviously. I thought Evan was a nice, normal boy. He turned out to be a pervert, and while I understand that it isn’t entirely his fault, I can’t forgive what he did to my little girl. I tried so hard to raise her the right way.”
Kirsta let out a broken, “Mom?”
“She really is such a disappointment.”
A choked wail came from the stairs.
“Where in God’s name—” Joyce let out a frustrated hiss. “Will you come out here, please? This is silly.”
Silly. A slippery laugh tried to escape him. He had to clench his teeth, fighting the bucking sensation in his chest, the wild unreality of this moment. He touched something again, cold concrete, and he stopped. The wall. He’d reached the far side of the basement. This tiny fucking box, and he’d already found its limit. He squeezed his eyes shut until he saw colors in the darkness. Then, releasing his breath slowly, he forced himself to start moving again, following the wall. Which would lead to another wall. And then, yes, he knew it, but he didn’t know what else to do: then he would have cornered himself.
His ghosting fingers caught something propped against the wall, something hard, and he stopped. Not the old, damp cardboard. And not a pallet, either. He followed it with his fingers, and his heart began to beat faster: another of those fucking cut-outs. Wyatt Earp, maybe. Or Billy the Kid. Hell, it could be Tango and Cash for all he cared. Gently, he eased it away from the concrete, trying not to make any noise.
His bad arm made maneuvering the cut-out harder than it should have been, and he was aware that Joyce had been silent for too long. He tried to remember what the maze of boxes had looked like on his last visit. It was useless. He moved slowly backward, lugging the cut-out with him, his injured arm setting off a klaxon in his head. He bumped into something, and a stack of boxes rocked softly. The rustle of cardboard was unmistakable in the silence. So was Joyce’s eager intake of breath.
Hazard propped the cut-out against the boxes, and then he dropped into a crouch and wedged himself between two of the towers. It wasn’t a silent process, but that part of the game was over, anyway. He was aware of how cold he was, everything except for the injury in his arm. One hand was slick in a way that felt different from water. Blood. Suddenly he felt tired, adrenaline guttering, the tanks on empty. He had barely gotten himself settled when he heard Joyce splash through water, and then the gun went off.
Above him, the acrylic head of the cut-out exploded; shards of plastic rained down on Hazard. He surged up, crashing into the stacked boxes with his shoulder, sending them falling. Joyce squawked, and the gun went off again, but Hazard didn’t pay any attention. He was running, forcing a path through the clutter: clipping another tower of boxes and sending them flying, one foot connecting with a box of empty vodka bottles, which clinked and spun and tumbled and shattered, his hip connecting with the chair where Derrick had died, the crack of it hitting the floor almost silenced by the ringing in Hazard’s ears.
The stairs swelled ahead of him, the weak light from the kitchen growing brighter, his goal filling his vision. He was so caught up in everything that he saw Kirsta too late, the girl red eyed and snot faced as she jack-in-the-boxed out of the darkness, the rifle scything toward Hazard.
He threw himself sideways, stumbled, and had to pivot to keep his balance. He hit the wall face first and felt his nose break. The shock cost him, and his next step hit an uneven patch of floor, wet from the sprinklers, and he landed hard on his back. The pain was starting to crank up, and his nose felt like a balloon. He had to turn his head to the side and spit blood to breathe through his mouth.
Kirsta loomed over him first, the rifle aimed at his belly. And then Joyce was there. She had, of all things, a Yosemite Sam coaster tangled in her hair. What the hell was in all those boxes, Hazard wanted to know in that moment of surreal clarity.
A door crashed open upstairs, and a voice shouted, “Police!”
“Down here!” Hazard shouted, the words catching on the blood in his throat. “John, they’re armed!”
“Be quiet,” Kirsta whispered fiercely.
“Kirsta,” Somers called. He sounded closer, and then a joist squeaked, and Hazard could track his movement through the kitchen above them. “I know that a lot of bad things have happened today, but you don’t want them to get any worse.” He was silent a moment; he must have been processing Hazard’s use of they. “Joyce, are you down there? Kirsta?”
Kirsta opened her mouth, but Joyce whispered, “Don’t you dare.”
“Joyce,” Somers said. He must have been near the top of the stairs. His voice was clear, tight with worry and, banked but still hot, rage. “There’s only one good way out of this. Let Emery go, surrender, and do your best to deal with the consequences.”
It might have been from crashing into a wall face first. It might have been the water and the ruined makeup. It might have been the half-light. Joyce looked, for a moment, like she was melting, the contoured lines and striking accents dissolving, leaving her face doughy and flat, her eyes like Pillsbury-man holes. Then she shook her head.
“Mom,” Kirsta whispered. “Mom, I don’t want to do this. I want to go home. Why can’t we just go home?”
“You want to go home?” Joyce’s head came up, and her volume rose with each word. “You don’t want to do this, and you want to go home? What in the name of God is wrong with you? Are you stupid? Did I raise a stupid child? You got us into this. You.”
Each word was a lash; Kirsta cowered under them. “But you told me—”
“It doesn’t matter what I told you!” Joyce shrieked. “Don’t you have any goddamn sense?”
Somers’s shadow drifted at the top of the stairs. “Joyce, we can still figure this out.”
Hazard saw the answer in the dark holes of her eyes, even if she hadn’t said it yet. Maybe she hadn’t even reached it yet, not at a conscious level. The answer was no. She wasn’t going to work this out. Not now. He didn’t know why, not entirely, but he knew it had to do with years of self-administering a cocktail of poison and fear and impotent rage.
“Why do you let her talk to you like that?” Hazard said to Kirsta.
“Be quiet!” Joyce snapped.
Hazard spat blood. He met Kirsta’s eyes. “You’re smarter than she is. You’re braver. She’s all talk; you’re the brave one.”
“I said be quiet!” Joyce kicked him, and Hazard rolled, so that it was a glancing blow instead of a rib-breaker. “Don’t talk to her.”
“You think if you do what she wants, if you try hard enough to be like her, she’ll accept you and love you and give you what you’ve always wanted. But that’s not how people like her are, and that’s not how life works. Parents are supposed to help you be the best version of yourself you can be, not break you down and rebuild you as their clone—”
“Stop it!”
This time, Hazard wasn’t fast enough, and the blow connected. He let out a whooshing gasp, and for a paralyzed moment, he couldn’t get any air.
“Don’t talk to her,” Joyce shouted down at him.
“You weren’t a person to her,” Hazard said. “You were a tool. A weapon. She doesn’t care—”
Joyce kicked him again, and the pain had a crackle like fireworks—or like someone snapping kindling with both hands. Hazard tried to breathe in, and the pain was so sharp that he arched his back, heels scraping along wet cement.
“I will not allow—” Joyce began.
Kirsta swung like she was going for a grand slam, and the rifle stock connected with the back of Joyce’s head. Joyce made a garbled noise, took a half-step to the side, and then went down. Kirsta took savage, gasping breaths for a moment, staring wide eyed at her mother. Then she dropped the rifle. “I surrender! We surrender!”
Somers appeared on the stairs a moment later, the Glock covering first Joyce and then Kirsta, his face drawn with a fear that laid bare everything. He only relaxed slightly when he met Hazard’s eyes.
Then Hazard curled up on his side and tried to breathe again as he listened to Kirsta sob.