It wasn’t a very complicated plan.
“We don’t have time for complicated,” Jack explained. “I know people all over the country we could go to for help, but we don’t have time for that. We have to get Shelley out of there now.”
I didn’t disagree with that. Only with the rest of the plan. Or, at least the part that required me to lie to Hank Kowalski and get away with it.
“You don’t understand. He’ll know immediately that I’m lying,” I protested.
Jack ignored me, just like he had the first two times I’d said it. “You’ll be fine. They’ll expect you to be scared, so it will all make sense to them.”
It made sense to me too, but I still didn’t like it.
Jack and his squad of swamp commandos had already scouted the site. Olga was so arrogant, or so powerful, that she wasn’t even trying to hide. She was conducting the ritual in a big open field behind her house. The witches in her coven were already there, chanting. Since the ritual was meant to be conducted at midnight, according to the book, it was going to be a long day for them. Not that I had a lot of sympathy.
“Delia’s there,” Jack said, his voice gentle. “I’m sorry.”
I said nothing. We’d tried to help her, but she’d chosen her path. There was nothing else we could do. All that mattered now was Shelley.
“Let’s go over this one more time,” Jack began.
“We’ve been over it enough. I know my part. I drive up in Lucky’s truck and act like I have no idea that they’re the ones after me. I pretend to be nervous, which won’t actually be pretending at all, and I tell Hank or Walt—whichever one is on guard duty—that I’m going out of town to be with Uncle Mike and Aunt Ruby, and I wanted to give Shelley her two hundred dollars before I left town.”
Jack nodded encouragingly, but he didn’t look happy. “I spent all night trying to come up with a different way to do this. I reached out to people I know, and I talked to the guys here. The problem is Olga’s proximity to Shelley. Anything overt that we try gives her the chance to kill Shelley before we can get to her.”
I paced back and forth in the small room that made up the entirety of the wooden shack, avoiding the small table, couch, and wood burning stove that were its only contents.
“But the ritual says she has to do it at midnight in order to gain all that power,” I said, pointing at the page from the book I had unfolded and put on the table. “Won’t she wait until then?”
“We can’t know that. A witch friend of mine told me that Olga will get some power from the sacrifice if she kills Shelley any time today. Midnight would be better, but if we’re attacking her with an army of soldiers and helicopters, she’s going to improvise.”
I squared my shoulders. “We can’t take that chance. I’ll just have to lie like I’ve never lied before. Let’s go.”
Jack looked at his watch. “Twenty minutes. Then my team will be in place, so they can cover the ordinary witches while I go after the Kowalskis.”
“While we go after the Kowalskis,” I said, texting Susan the bare bones of the plan in a cryptic way that wouldn’t make sense to anybody else who read her phone.
Jack’s voice took on that steely tone of command that he mistakenly thought would work on me as well as it had worked on his rebels. “Don’t even think about it. And you have the most important job of all. You have to find Shelley and get her out of there. If you can’t find a way out while the fight is on, then you dig in somewhere and protect her.”
I grinned, which completely startled him. “You’re cute when you’re all ‘I’m in charge.’”
He flashed that wicked smile of his. “You have no idea, beautiful. Just wait till this is over.”
I closed my eyes and wished very, very hard that we would all live, so I could take him up on that.
There is some old saying Uncle Mike likes to repeat, about God laughing when men make plans, and it kept running through my head while I made the five-mile drive to the Kowalski house. Why hadn’t I learned to be a better liar early in life? It was practically a survival skill for teenagers and online daters, after all. Molly had tried to teach me. She was a champion liar. You had to be, when both of your parents were lawyers. But the lessons had never taken with me. My face showed everything I thought about while I was thinking about it. I was absolutely sure that Hank or Walt Kowalski would know immediately that I was lying.
As it turned out, I was worrying about entirely the wrong thing.
When I turned off onto the gravel road that led to Olga Kowalski’s old, faded, mansion, I almost expected to see a small army of hired guns blocking my way. But Jack’s scouting team had been correct. The only person out in front of the house was Hank, sitting on an old, busted-up lawn chair, with a beer in one hand and a shotgun in the other.
Lunch of champions.
It was all I could do to keep from running him down with the truck, knowing that he was almost certainly the one who’d murdered Jeremiah. But Shelley’s life was at stake. I had to stick to the plan.
Hank stood up when he saw the truck, and I slowed to a stop, rolling down the window. Thinking of all the ways I could possibly screw this up.
“Tess, what the hell are you doing out here?”
Oh boy. He was already drunk and belligerent, even this early in the day. What would he be like when his mother was the queen of the dark side? A total nightmare, that was what.
I pasted a bright smile on my face and beamed at him like he was my new best friend.
He scowled at me. “Do you have a toothache or something?”
When this was all over, if I survived it, I really needed to work on my fake smiles.
“Nope. No toothache,” I said, cheerfully and way too loud.
Crap. I was supposed to be terrified, not manic. I let a little of my actual fear seep through into my expression. “Actually, I’m pretty stressed out. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s some guy threatening me. Last night, he took a shot at me, but he got away from the sheriff. I’m headed out of town to go join my family until this guy is caught,” I babbled.
“Do I look like I give a shit about your problems?” He turned his head to the side and spat on the ground. “What are you doing here, then?”
“I have Shelley’s money. I wanted to drop by and give it to her on my way out of town,” I said, knowing he wouldn’t believe me.
He believed me.
“You can just give the money to me,” he said. He drained his beer and tossed the can in the general direction of the porch. Then he held out his grubby hand and waggled his fingers. “I’ll be sure she gets it.”
From the nasty smile on his ugly face, I knew perfectly well that he was in on his mother’s plan. He was actually standing there expecting me to give him the money that belonged to the little girl his mother was preparing to murder. I wanted my shotgun right then and there almost more than I’d ever wanted anything.
But it was in the backseat, covered with an old blanket, and I had to save Shelley.
“Oh sure. Let me just park the truck, so I can get the money out of my wallet,” I said brightly. Before he could protest, I yanked the steering wheel to the side, pulled the truck over, and parked it at a crazy diagonal in what was probably the worst parking job of my soon-to-be-drastically-shortened life. Then I hopped out, holding my purse and walking toward the house.
“You don’t mind if I use your bathroom, do you? I have a long drive in front of me.”
“Oh hell,” he said. “I didn’t want to do this, even though my mother has a wild hair up her ass about you. I already had to shoot your boss. Now, I guess I’ll have to shoot you too.”
I froze and threw my hands up in the air like a captured bank robber on TV. As Uncle Mike’s stupid saying had predicted, our plan was going wrong already, but I comforted myself that at least I’d managed to pull off the lie.
Yeah. Because that was the important thing.
Score: Tess=1, Evil murderers=3,000.