“There wasn’t anything I could do for her,” Tripple said softly. “I was going to leave, but then I remembered the hammer. She was supposed to get rid of it, but what if she hadn’t? I’d left my key in the room, so I had to force the door. I didn’t have much time. I tore that place apart as quickly as I could. And there it was. She’d kept it. She told me she was going to get rid of it, and shekeptit.” He fell silent once more. “I took the hammer, and I left.”
“But it wasn’t over,” I said.
“No.” His voice was rough, but an edge came into it. “Because you couldn’t leave things alone.”
“That’s why you came to the house. The night I followed Keme out into the woods, the night you tried to kill me—you were waiting for me. You wanted to make sure I didn’t figure out the truth.”
He laughed again, and it sounded harsher this time. “I was there because I was going to take the tracker off Bobby’s SUV. I thought, with the kid off the hook, you might give it a rest. Then I saw you two run out of the house, and I thought maybe I’d makesureyou gave it a rest, just in case.”
The casual way he said it, the tone that bordered on amused disappointment that he hadn’tquitemanaged to kill me, left me without words for several seconds. Finally, I managed to say, “That’s how you found us tonight.”
“Geofencing is a nifty thing, isn’t it? Anytime the Pilot left Hemlock House, I got a little ping. Of course, that meant I spent a lot of time following Bobby around the other night instead of you. But nothing’s perfect.”
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “We’re standing in the secure lot of the sheriff’s station. There are cameras. There’s somebody inside on dispatch. People hereknowyou; you won’tget away with this. Things are going to go better for you if you turn yourself in. You can call the sheriff right now and tell her you need to talk.”
He stared back at me. From somewhere beyond the fenced lot came the sound of an animal moving in the brush. It made me think of the strawberry tree and the squirrels, when Bobby and I had stood out here after my pathetic attempt at interviewing Keme. That felt like years ago. And it made me unexpectedly relieved, loosening the tightness across my shoulders, in my chest, down my back. Keme was safe now. And Millie and Indira and Fox. And maybe, I could hope, Bobby too. That was all that mattered. If there was a way to keep Bobby safe. I remembered the peeling bark. I could still see the bright red berries, and feel the weight of the sunlight. It was strange to look back fondly on a time when I’d been hurt so badly. But I remembered it. And it had been beautiful.
“You know, I never understood how you did it,” Tripple said with a little bark of a laugh. “All these people spilling their guts. I mean, my God, some of them even turned themselves in. But you’re good. You’re real good. You had me going there for a second. But it’s not going to work, smart guy. I turned the cameras off when I was cleaning the cruiser earlier today. So, we’re all alone. Nobody’s going to bother us. Nobody’ll ever know we were here.”
“That doesn’t change anything. The sheriff will—”
“Here’s what we’re going to do.” Tripple’s voice was a cop’s voice: flat, sure, squashing my words without even trying. “We’re going to go for a ride.”
I knew what that meant. We’d drive somewhere, and he’d shoot me. Or he’d push me off a cliff. Or he’d find a way to run the car off the road with me in it. If anyone ever found me, it’d look like a terrible accident.
My tongue was numb, and it didn’t seem to work right as I said, “What about Bobby?”
“Bobby’ll be fine.”
But I knew what that meant, too. I knew it in a way that was like ice in the marrow of my bones. He couldn’t leave Bobby alive. Bobby would look for me. Bobby would want to know what happened. If I thought there was a chance—
There wasn’t, though.
There hadn’t been, not from the moment Tripple got the drop on us.
He was waiting for me. His expression was as close to friendly as it ever got. What went on inside someone’s head, I wanted to know, when they could hold a gun on you, plan to kill you, and still look like that weird uncle who’s trying a little too hard to be social?
Think, I told myself. Use your brain and think. For Bobby.
The lights and siren. But the car was off.
The shotgun. No, it was locked in its mount.
If he got close enough, I could club him with the flashlight. It was heavy enough that my muscles burned from holding it over my head throughout this conversation. But he wouldn’t make a mistake like that—
The flashlight.
Something gave me away. My face. Or a change in my body language. Blankness came down on Tripple’s face like a visor, and his gun hand steadied.
I flipped the flashlight toward him and blasted him in the face with the beam. Then I threw myself down.
Tripple shouted. Then the clap of gunfire ripped open the night. Distantly, I was aware of the sound of glass shattering, and I felt shards rain down on me, plinking against my back as I scrambled away from Tripple.
My plan was simple: put as many cars, trucks, and SUVs as possible between me and Tripple, and hope whoever was on dispatch called a deputy back here before he flushed me out and killed me.
It wasn’t a great plan.
I made my way to the back of the cruiser, crawled around the sheriff’s office SUV parked next to it, and got to my feet. Tripple was still screaming, and a lot of the words were ones you won’t find in the deputy’s handbook, but he hadn’t fired again—Bobby hadn’t been joking about the flashlight. I risked a glance at the gate, but there was no way I’d make it. I’d have to run right past Tripple and then across twenty feet of open ground. Tripple’s sight might be impaired from the flashlight, but he only had to hit me once.
