Rachel lay awake, unable to sleep as Felix snored beside her. It was not his snoring that kept her awake. It was every other noise. Each tick of the radiator, rattle of wind at the window, or footstep outside in the hallway made her suck in her breath in the dark, afraid to move, certain she and Felix were not alone, that the sound of her very next heartbeat would incite an intruder to leap from the shadows and prey on her.
It was insane, of course. The door was locked. She had a gun. They were safe. That’s what she told herself over and over, her new mantra: You are safe. You have a gun.
Rachel sneaked out of bed and sat perched at the edge of a chair at the window table, feet lightly drumming on the floor and fingernails tapping on the track pad of her laptop as the laptop warmed up.
She opened her Internet browser. She checked the site she’d checked a hundred times in two days.
There. There it was. Finally.
She exhaled with the kind of relief she had not felt since receiving her acceptance from Johnson State the previous spring. In fact, it was a kind of relief she had never known. It left her exhilarated and washed out all at once.
Preacher’s picture and rap sheet were up on the sex offenders website.
Preacher. And his address.
Her skin itched as she considered what she was going to do now that she had his address.
She wanted a look at his location. She used Google Earth to zoom in the satellite image. Preacher had chosen a remote, private spot to live. The house was barely visible through the screen of trees at the end of a trickle of a dirt road in the woods. Mud now, with this rain. She had no car, and even if her Civic were running, she’d need four-wheel drive to get up there in these conditions.
Rachel took the revolver out of her backpack, checked that it was loaded. It was. She’d known it was; she’d loaded it herself and checked it at least a dozen times already since breakfast yesterday.
She zoomed in on Preacher’s residence.
She did not know what she was going to do, exactly. But she was going to confront him. She had to do that, at least. Blindside him.
If she were able to disarm him with surprise, and was literally armed herself, she felt confident whatever needed to happen, whatever was destined to happen between them, would. She could not just hunker and hide. Wait it out. Expect Felix or her father to do something.
Why should everyone else act on her behalf?
She looked at the satellite map of Preacher’s lair once more. The nearest house was two miles away.
Rachel tucked herself back under the bedcovers and fell asleep wondering if a gunshot could be heard from that distance.