“Only needed one,” Magnum muttered.
A car drove past the house at normal speed.
The neighborhood came alive.
Doors opened.People shouted.Someone yelled to call 911.
Twister turned immediately.“We’re gone.”
Hodge looked toward the house.“We leaving him?”
“He’s dead.”
Nobody argued.
Twister came back inside, and his face was carved from stone.“Everybody move.”
Goldie slowly stood from behind the couch.She stared at Gene, and the color had drained from her face.
“He...”Her voice cracked.“He was going to tell us.”
I stepped beside her.“He was.”
She swallowed hard.“They killed him.”
“They silenced him.”Those weren’t the same thing.Killing Gene wasn’t the goal.Stopping him from talking was.
Goldie looked at the blood running across the hardwood floor.“He looked...”She stopped.“Tired.”
I nodded.“He knew.”
She looked at me.“He knew they were coming.”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes drifted back to Gene.“He opened the door anyway.”
Neither of us said anything after that, because what was there to say?The man had spent years helping build the thing that was now hunting him.
Maybe he’d decided this morning he was done running.Maybe he’d known he’d never get another chance to tell somebody the truth.
Twister crouched beside the body.He didn’t touch anything, just looked.Then he stood again.
Goldie wrapped both arms around herself.“He was trying to tell us something.”
Swift looked toward the broken window.“The question is...”He paused.“...what?”
Sirens sounded faintly in the distance.
“We gotta move,” Twister said.“We’re not hanging around for the cops to ask us a ton of questions.We don’t have the answers they are going to want.”
We all moved out of the house and onto our bikes.
Goldie climbed onto the back of my bike without a word.She wrapped both arms around my waist because she needed something solid to hold onto.
I reached back and squeezed her hand once.Then I looked toward Twister.
He met my eyes, and the same thought sat between us.
