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Chapter 3
Fox
Inudge the door open and step into the farmhouse, carefully balancing several grocery bags in my arms as I go.
“Is that you, Fox?”
“Yeah, Mrs. Clark,” I answer. “It’s me.” I walk into the kitchen and set the bags on the counter.
Mrs. Clark sits in her recliner across the room, staring at the television in the corner. The sound is at full blast, the only volume she can hear it at anymore and her eyes aren’t great for reading subtitles. I don’t mind it much. It’s the perfect volume for action movies and Mrs. Clark loves her action movies. She invites me over several times a week to watch whatever new movies have come out. It’s really the closest thing I have to fun anymore.
She quickly grabs the remote to turn it down before spinning around in her chair to look at me. “Thanks again for running my errands,” she says. “Would have done it myself if it weren’t for this damn hip. Can’t wait for the warm weather to come back…”
I flash her a smile. “You know I don’t mind. Everything still goes in the same place?” I grab the bread from the top of a bag and spin around to stick it in the bread box on the counter.
“You don’t have to do that. I can put it away.” She pushes herself out of the chair slowly and walks into the kitchen. “But if you got a minute to spare, the light in the bathroom went out.”
“Again?”
“Must be a bad wire or something.”
“I’ll take a look at it.”
I place the gallon of milk in the fridge and head down the hallway toward the bathroom.
“Thank you, Fox!” she calls after me with a sweet voice. “What would I do without you?”
“Fall and die, I suppose,” I joke.
I step up onto the toilet seat and unscrew the crème-colored globe to get at the bulb.
“Well, you’re not wrong about that,” she says. “Hey, you see the news today?”
“Nope.” I twist the bulb and the light comes back on. “Looks like it was just loose.”
“That girl you like is all over it.”
“What girl?”
“That Rocky girl.”
I pause. “Roxie Roberts?”
“Yeah, that one!” she says. “From those Trial movies we watched.”
I step off the toilet and walk back into the kitchen. “What happened?”
“See for yourself.” She points at the television. “It’s on every channel.”
I grab the remote and put the volume back up. Correspondents sit around a table, barking theories back and forth over snippets of news footage. Ticker tape scrolls along the bottom, warning that the footage might be disturbing to some viewers. After what I’ve seen, I tend to ignore warnings like that.
The footage starts with Senator Ronnie Lamb standing at a podium with his arm wrapped around a young woman.
Dani.
The ends of my lips twitch, just like they always do when I see her. Lamb quickly casts her aside and she takes a step back, her face shining with a polite expression, although I can tell how tortured she is.
I spot the black ropes falling down in the windows behind them and the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. I focus on them until two black bodies swing down and crash through the glass.
