Charlie sat in his Crown Vic listening to his voice mail before he went back to the office. He had to listen to the third message twice before he was finally able to pick out the hesitant words from some kind of annoying background whine.
“I’m at my house and I can’t get hold of my mom. The house alarm’s going off and I’m not sure what to do. I think it’s been going off for a while. So if you get this message in the next twenty minutes or so, could you call me back?”
It was Gabe Quinn. Mia’s kid. Fourteen years old. Charlie had been married three times, but he didn’t have any kids. Which was probably a good thing. He didn’t even have a cat.
Sometimes, though, he saw a little of himself in Gabe. He’d seen the kid put on an I-don’t-care face when he clearly did. Seen him be brave when it might have been better to be cautious. But at fourteen boys were all hormones, impulses, and bravado.
And since his dad had died, Gabe had been forced to grow up. To square his skinny shoulders and be the man of the house.
The kid answered on the first ring. “Hello?” His voice was barely audible, but only because he was speaking softly. The sound of the alarm was gone. Charlie relaxed and pulled the keys from the ignition.
“It’s Charlie Carlson. It sounds like you got the alarm taken care of. So is everything okay?”
“No!”
Charlie hadn’t known that a voice could be both soft and frantic. He slid the keys back in the ignition. “What’s wrong?”
“I turned off the alarm and went inside to check things out. But I think someone else is here in the house too. I can hear them moving around downstairs.”
Charlie sucked in a breath, his heart speeding up. “Get back outside! Now!”
“I can’t. I think they’re right by the stairs.” And then the kid put the cherry on the sundae. “And I left Brooke outside.”
Charlie started his car again, swearing under his breath. “I’m gonna scramble a unit out your way. Until then, is there someplace you can hide? Under a bed? In a closet?” He couldn’t remember what the top floor of Mia’s house looked like.
Silence.
“Gabe?”
The only answer was a muffled thump. As if the phone had fallen from the boy’s hand and onto the carpet.
“Gabe?”
Charlie could hear something in the background. A man yelling. He couldn’t make out the words. But he could hear the emotions fueling them. Anger and fear and a little bit of panic.
Hitting the buttons to activate his sirens and lights, he just prayed that the man in Mia’s house didn’t have a weapon.