When Mia turned onto their block, the house was completely dark. Not even the porch light on. Her heart contracted. She turned off the car and pinched the house key between her fingers before she unbuckled Brooke from her booster seat. Should she have raced out of the hospital, let the charges pile up at Rocking Horse, and hurried home? What if her son was lying dead somewhere inside the house and these last few minutes could have made all the difference?
Brooke must have picked up on her anxiety. “Where’s Gabe, Mommy?” she asked as Mia carried her up the front porch.
“I’m not quite sure,” she said, hoping the answer wasn’t going to prove to be too awful to bear.
Unlocking the door, she went inside. “Gabe?” she called out, then held her breath. Did she hear a faint thumping noise? Or was it just the beating of her own heart? Before she turned on the light, she bent over to set Brooke down. Just as a shot split the darkness and sang just overhead.
Charlie followed Eli out. There was no point in trying to argue him out of going. The man was stubborn. Stubborn as a mule.
He had to admit that maybe they had that in common. That and their affection for Mia. Once in the hospital’s parking structure, he lost sight of Eli when the other man kept climbing the stairs to a different level. Charlie hurried to his car, dialing Mia’s cell phone as he went. No answer.
It was against department policy, but that didn’t stop him from putting on lights and sirens as soon as he pulled out of the lot. Charlie flew down the highway, past all the other cars, which were forced to pull over to the shoulder. But then he picked up another vehicle, drafting in his wake.
He squinted at his rearview mirror. Eli Hall. Doing what he wasn’t supposed to be doing either.
Maybe they had more in common than Charlie thought.
Once he hit Mia’s neighborhood, he cut the sirens. Sometimes if a person was on the verge, the sound of sirens could make a bad situation infinitely worse.
Mia’s house was dark, without even the porch light on. But the front door gaped open, as wrong as a missing tooth in a mouth.
Charlie got out of his car and hurried to Eli’s. “I need you to stay back,” he whispered. His hand was on the butt of his gun. “You can’t just go running in there. You don’t know what you’ll find. And you’re not armed.”
From the house came the sound of a gunshot.
And then they both went running.
Moving faster than thought, Mia put her mouth close to her daughter’s tiny ear. “Stay right here, baby. Don’t move. And don’t make a sound.” Then she half opened the hall closet door and shoved Brooke inside.
Her ears still roaring from the sound of the gun, Mia was reacting on pure instinct. On hands and knees, she scuttled toward the kitchen. She needed a weapon. Something to fight back with. She mentally rehearsed how she would lunge for the knife block while praying that the knives were actually in the block and not, say, scattered all over the counter.
She had just put one knee on the tiled floor when Eli, shouting her name, ran in the still-open front door. Mia turned to call out a warning.
A thousand things happened at once. The lights flared on overhead. Charlie was standing in the doorway in a half crouch, his gun drawn and held out before him in both hands. Kenny Zhong had one hand fisted in Eli’s dress shirt, yanking the taller man down to his level. And he was holding a gun to Eli’s head, pressing hard enough that Eli’s forehead had turned white where the barrel pressed against his skin.
Eli himself was standing very, very still.
Into the sudden silence, Brooke’s small voice came from the closet. “Can I come out now, Mama?”
And at that moment Gabe, pantless and silent in his stocking feet, slipped up behind Kenny Zhong, looped his handcuffed arms around the man’s neck, and jerked backward.