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He pulls out his phone and dials a number I can’t see. Then, I’m not the only one acting. “Beck, it’s Anton.” He pauses and draws in a ragged breath. “Sloan’s here, at my place. She was attacked.” I hear the crackle of Beck speaking, but I can’t make out the words. “… I don’t know. I didn’t get a look. I was trying to protect her, but she needs a doctor.”
He speaks with a fake urgency that sounds terrifyingly real. It’s haunting how good he is at this. How much he must have practiced every word.
I look at the door again, but it seems to have moved farther from me. He hangs up after a couple more seconds and then he looks down with a soft smile playing across his lips. I see his hand stray toward his hip and I see the glint of a gun there.
He’s trying to lure Beck here to hurt him. Toendhim.
I can’t let that happen.
“Anton, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to hurt Beck.”
“I don’t?” He shakes his head. “Oh, sweetheart. If I know anything at all, it’s that the kid is like his old man. One rat begets another. He isn’t going to just let you go; he’ll try to hang on. So one way or the other, I’m going to have to end him. Might as well just get it over with now.”
He keeps smiling that sickly, disgusting smile and comes to sit beside me. It takes everything I have not to cringe away from him as he cups my hand in his, gives it a squeeze, then pulls his gun out and sets it on the coffee table.
“Now, we just have to sit and wait. It’ll all be over soon.”
52
BECK
Anton’s house is quiet when I get here. I barely have the car stopped when I jump out, engine still running.
Sloan is inside, hurt in any number of ways, and my thoughts are spinning in all the worst directions. I don’t know if she’s okay or if the baby is okay.
Focus, Beck.One thing at a time.
I don’t bother knocking. But when I walk inside, all is quiet.
“Sloan?”
Nothing.
“Anton?”
Still nothing.
The house would fit in my walk-in closet and isn’t much to look out. The walls are almost as smoke-stained as the ceiling and the carpet should’ve been replaced about two or three hundred spills ago. Every inch of this shithole is scented with stale beer, smoke, and piss.
“Sloan! Are you here?” I want to think Anton took her to get checked, but my gut says that there’s something sinister at play here.
I walk further into the living room. I’m peering into the tiny little kitchen when I hear a muffled sort of shuffling from deeper in the house.
My skin prickles and all the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Instead of barreling straight through walls like the Kool Aid Man, I take it slow. One room at a time. One step at a time.
The first room I check is empty but for a few dozen motorcycle parts strewn across the floor. Across the hall is a bathroom, as decrepit and disgusting as the rest of this place.
I re-emerge and tiptoe down the hall, to the last door. I push it open with the flat of my hand. Then—slowly, slowly— I look inside.
Sloan.
She is tied to a chair, gagged, and struggling to get free.
If that weren’t bad enough, I’m repulsed to see that the room is filled with baby furniture. A crib, a rocking horse, a solar system mobile hanging from the ceiling.
It all clicks at once.Anton.He’s the missing piece. My father’s thief. Sloan’s stalker.
And now, he’s a man about to meet his fucking maker.
