The voice was muffled. It could have been a neighbor. Thedoorman. The police. Blake.Please,please…“Help!” I shrieked again. “Help me!”
Teddy grew closer. The gun was heavy in my hand, my head light. I shot at him and missed. Shot again and connected. He grasped his shoulder but kept moving. He was indestructible, like a tank. He was moving faster now, his shoulder bleeding, the knife sticking out of his side a minor hindrance. A trifle.
I shot at him again. The gun clicked.Seriously?I pulled the trigger again. Clicked. Pulled the trigger. Clicked. “Unbelievable,” I whispered. Was it confidence that had made Teddy Piro come at me with an almost-empty chamber? Or stupidity? I was leaning toward the latter. I’d seen his report cards.
I made my way to the end of the hall with Piro close behind, twinkling dots of light all around me, a ringing in my ears like chimes. Church chimes. He must have hit an artery or something. I was starting to get delirious.
“Help.” I said it again in a faint, small voice as I made it into the living room. Blackness flooded my field of vision. I fell to the carpeted floor, at the feet of the man in Piro’s apartment. Not a cop. Not Blake. For a second, I thought I might be hallucinating, but I was not. It was Greg Scepter. “What the actual fuck, Teddy?” he said.
Scepter was still talking as the room went black.
Fifty-three
The first thing I was aware of was the stiffness in my leg. The next was Teddy Piro’s voice, muffled and insistent. “…sick of being the only one getting my hands dirty,” he was saying. “It’s your turn, asshole.”
Scepter’s voice countered: “I didn’t ask for what you did.”
“Oh, fuck you, buddy. I helped you. Now it’s your…”
My eyelids fluttered open. I was on a metal folding chair in a bright room with no windows, my hands zip-tied behind my back. I was still wearing my bloody skirt, but the blood had dried—a huge, rust-colored stain. I looked closer at my leg. The tightness around my thigh. My wound had been bandaged. I was alone, Scepter and Piro arguing just outside the door. What did they want from me? Why hadn’t they killed me? What was going on?
“I am so unbelievably sick of you,” Scepter was saying. “Twenty-five years. We’re like your dad in the other room. We just keep going, Teddy. It’s time to pull the plug.”
“I’m sick of you, too,” said Piro.
“Then why do you keep calling me?”
“Why do you keep coming?”
“You’re ruining everything. Do you not fucking get it? Are you stupider than you look? Is that even possible?People are going to come looking for her.”
There were metal shelves in this room. Blinking lights. My eyes adjusted. The blinking was coming from computers. Laptops. Dozens of them lined the shelves, their screens alive with activity.
“That’s why you’ve got to do it,” Piro said.
“Jesus Christ, Teddy.”
The computers were all active, text scrolling on their screens. At the top of each screen was an embossed label. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t read the text, but I could read the labels. They were all different names.Roberta Adams, one said.Graham Wilson, said another. One of the others readLeila Donnelly.
I scooched my chair closer. I still couldn’t make out Leila Donnelly’s text. Graham Wilson’s was legible, though. It looked like an action scene, being written in hyperdrive.
…knew I’d never come back to Logan County unarmed…the screen read. Two seconds and probably fifty paragraphs later, I saw the wordsTHE END.
What was this room? What was going on?
Scepter and Piro were still arguing, but they’d moved. I could hear them clearly now. They were just outside the door.
“I took the fall for the burglary. My dad never forgave me for that. You robbed from your mom and I took the fall.”
“Dude, let it go. We split the fuckin’ money. And we were seventeen!”
“Okay, well, what about Lee, then? I didn’t want to kill her.”
“I didn’t ask you to.”
“She was going to tell. She was going to the press. Your whole life. Everything you’ve worked for. Your dream would have been destroyed—”
“You honestly think Iwantedyou to do that, Teddy?”
