Page 116 of Statler

He yelped and the gun dropped from his deadened hand.

“You shot me!” he cried out. “You… You shot me!”

He clutched at his upper arm.

“What did you expect,” Eliza returned, keeping her weapon trained on him. “You were going to rape and kill me.”

“But you shot me!” he rebutted in a totally inane way.

Eliza spared him not an ounce of sympathy, but got on to business.

“I only need to know one thing from you now, Jeremy. Where’s my father?”

“I’m not telling you anything,” he snarled, and…

Like the idiot he was, Jeremy rushed her.

Eliza had been expecting him to make another stupid move, so she’d remained poised.

Without even thinking, she shot him dead-on in the kneecap.

He went down hard, with a piercing scream.

“Fucking bitch! I’ll…kill you for this.”

“Your days of killing are over,” she told him calmly, keeping her gaze focused on him but stepping back carefully to shuffle across the path until her foot nudged up against her phone.

With her Sig still trained on Jeremy, she cautiously bent to pick it up.

Not that she thought Jeremy could do anything to stop her with two bullets in him, but she was taking no chances.

“Statler? Are you there?” she asked, putting the phone to her ear.

“Jesus Christ, Eliza. You just took years off my life.”

She could hear the residual terror in his tone as he continued.

“Are you okay?”

“I am,” she assured him. “But Jeremy has one bullet in his arm, and another in his knee. And… I’m not sorry.”

Statler actually chuckled as he sighed out the last of his tension. “Exactly right. You’re really something, you know that?”

“Thanks.”

That was the perfect thing for Statler to say. It was just the affirmation she needed.

“And FYI, Granny is with us and she’s safe,” he hurried to tell her.

Eliza felt instant relief.

“I’m so glad. Once I found out that Jeremy didn’t have her, I feared my father might be the one who was actually holding her.”

“Nope,” he reiterated. “All’s good.”

“Are you headed this way?” Eliza asked, her confidence growing by the second.

She needed to leave to take care of more business, but only if Statler would be here soon. Given enough time, Jeremy could probably manage to get away, and she wasn’t having any of that.