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Lethal injection.
No way.
No fuckin’ way!
Not as long as she had a breath of life in her.
And a clip of fifteen rounds.
Moving briskly in the dark, she hurried back into the “nursery” and found the kid on his back staring up at her, but at least he was no longer screaming. “That’s a good boy,” she said in this cold room with its forgotten machinery and covered windows. With one hand on her pistol, she touched the top of his head with her other, fingers smoothing his crown of dark hair. So like his father’s. “You keep quiet now.”
He followed her with his eyes, again so like his father’s, and Padgett felt a little chill of apprehension climb up her scalp, like the tiny legs of a dozen spiders crawling through her hair. She slipped out of the room, the heebie-jeebies lifting the hair on her arms.
Of course the kid started bawling again.
At the top of his damned lungs.
She double-checked, making certain the gun was loaded.
“Hush!” she screamed at the baby, and that only sent him into a louder wail. “You have to shut up!”
For the first time since losing her own son she thought that maybe she wasn’t cut out for motherhood after all.
* * *
“I know where Tucker is,” Santana said.
“What? Where?” Pescoli turned to face her husband. How could he have suddenly come up with the answer to their son’s location? They were still standing in the attic, Garrett Mays packing up his things, the police on their way. Not only had Pescoli texted Alvarez, but she’d called her ex-partner once she’d discovered Mays and the key ring, and connected Lucky to the kidnapping. Alvarez was sending the cavalry.
Her insides were cold as an arctic storm when she thought of her ex. How could Lucky be so heartless to be a part of a kidnapping? She wanted to wring his neck over and over again. Her fingers itched to surround his long neck.
“The Long Museum.”
“What? How?”
“What better place to hide out than in plain sight.”
“But people go in there all the time.”
“It’s closed now, though. For the winter.”
“Let’s go,” she said, her heart a stone. If Padgett hurt her son . . . If she so much as touched a hair on his little head—
“I’ll drive,” Santana said as a county vehicle, siren blaring, approached.
“Let me handle this.”
They walked outside just as the SUV stopped, and with the engine idling, Pete Watershed stepped onto the snow-covered parking area. Night was falling fast, the sky dark, the snow, no longer falling. Watershed was wearing his perpetual scowl, his eyebro
ws drawn together under the bill of his cap. “Sorry, I’m late. Holdup on the highway.”
“It’s fine. We’ve got to go,” Pescoli said. “But Garrett Mays, here, was trespassing, camping out in the attic over the garage. The Long estate may or may not want to press charges, but you need to secure the property and take him down to the station for a full statement, let him cool his jets.”
“Okay. But you’re leaving?”
“We’ll meet you there.”
“Alvarez is heading this way,” Watershed said. “She got hung up with the detectives from San Francisco.”
