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Dahlia stood in the entryway, gaping at the open front door.
“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
She tore her eyes from the entry, looked at me, and then leveled a shaking finger to the front door. I followed the direction of her finger, eyes landing on the horrific display. The dead cat’s glassy eyes, the bloody word written with a finger. A child’s finger-painted greeting: Hello.
“Dear god,” I breathed. “He’s found us.”
I didn’t see how it was possible. We’d been so careful, so meticulous. How had Sam found us? And there was no doubt in my mind this was Sam’s doing. The odds of some shitty area kids doing this was far too coincidental. This was a message.
“Close the fucking door. Lock it,” I ordered. “Get a bag packed. Now. We’re leaving.”
“It’s Sam isn’t it,” Dahlia asked, staring at me with terror filled eyes.
I hated seeing her like that. She was so powerful and strong now. A force of nature. Seeing those old fears come creeping back into her eyes filled me with rage. I wanted to wrap my hands around Sam’s throat, and choke the life from him. Preferably while a horse fucked his asshole bloody.
“It is,” I said. Then I gestured toward the stairs. “Get a bag ready. Essentials only, Whatever we need for two or three days of travel. Go. Hurry.”
Dahlia nodded and ran up the stairs. While she went, I double checked all the entrances. Everything was locked. No broken windows, nothing. Outside the huge front windows, I did find something that made my skin crawl. In the sand dunes beside our porch, a pair of footprints, clearly visible, led from the front of the house to the back. I could almost picture Sam standing there, gazing into our house while we lay asleep upstairs.
I had to see if he’d left any trace. I went back upstairs and pulled out my laptop, trying to figure out why the perimeter alarm hadn’t gone off. When I pulled up the app and tried to watch the camera feeds, I was met with nothing but black screens. I had four cameras installed all around the exterior of the house, each with a motion sensitive activation sensor. Nothing.
“What the fuck?” I muttered.
“What’s wrong?” Dahlia asked as she stuffed clothes, underwear, and toiletries into a duffel bag.
“Cameras are down.” They were supposed to maintain up to twenty-four hours of footage on the cloud I had set up, uploading a fresh video every ten minutes, but when I checked, there was a gap from two in the morning until three. Nothing from that hour had been saved. “Fuck,” I hissed, knowing what he must have done.
I was stupid to think he wouldn’t have thought of it. It was exactly what I would have done. Especially given the type of system I’d installed. He had to have used a Wi-Fi jammer. It would have blocked it from communicating with the rest of the system. He was getting smarter, and that terrified me. In all our time working together, I’d been the brains and the wallet. Sam had been the muscle, the dark and menacing tool that assisted me. Had I misjudged him even more than I thought I had? Had he been playing me all this time? The thought sent a trickle of dread coursing through my stomach, and I cursed myself for settling for such a cheap system, but there was no other option at the time. If I’d had something not based on Wi-Fi, something hardwired, perhaps I could have caught the fuck, and ended all this last night. Now? Now we had to run and regroup.
I threw some clothes on and grabbed a backpack in front of the closet, stuffing it full of money. I’d hidden nearly fifty thousand dollars in Euros and American dollars in a small safe that came with the rental house. Now that money was tucked safely away. I’d keep fifty percent in my bag, another twenty-five percent in Dahlia’s, and the rest split up and kept in mine and Dahlia’s pockets and wallets. I didn’t want either of us stuck with nothing. Money was life. Money meant you could run, hide, and bribe your way out of danger.
“Are we taking the car?” Dahlia asked as I divided the cash between our bags.
I imagined Sam outside last night, walking around the Porsche. God only knew what he could have done to it. A single image filled my mind of me starting the car and the whole damned thing exploding into a fireball, my skin and Dahlia’s burning and spitting grease as we were rendered down by the heat.
“No,” I said. “Rideshare. I’ve got an exit plan. We go to the other side of Corfu, take the ferry there. Then we get into Italy. Once there, we can regroup. Do you have the passports?”
Dahlia handed me mine. I opened it and saw the fake name. Daniel Smith. Canadian. Dahlia’s had the name Suzanne Smith. Neither would be flagged as fake. I’d spent a pretty penny getting these made the day after our flight from the playhouse. We’d put them to good work the last few months, and now we’d end up with even more stamps in them.
“Is the ferry safe?” Dahlia asked.
“As safe as can be. I don’t want to get on another airplane. We’re tempting fate as it is. Eventually our luck may run out. We need to stay away from airports unless absolutely necessary.”
Dahlia gestured to the door. “Doesn’t that seem like a warning? Don’t you think it’s necessary?”
“We have options. Only when we have no other options do we take to the air.”
I trusted the fake documents, but if those videos Sam had sent us really had been sent to the law enforcement agencies that he’d copied on the email, then we ran the risk of being spotted at any time. The FBI and Interpol probably had our pictures. All it would take was one security guard, one police officer recognizing us and it was all over. Ferries, buses, trains? They all had lower security than airports.
After putting in the request for a ride share to pick us up, I took a trash bag from under the sink and dumped the dead cat and the wreath inside it, tying the top and throwing it in the outdoor trash bin. Even that filled me with trepidation, though. I scanned the street around us as I ventured out to the bin. If Sam was there watching, he was doing a good job of hiding.
Dahlia had just finished scrubbing the bloody words of the door when the small Peugeot sedan pulled up to take us to the ferry. I slipped my laptop and a few research files into the backpack and led Dahlia out of the house. She didn’t look terrified, only worried. That strength deep inside her had begun to take hold. A strength that might, in time, make her even more formidable than me.
“I hate leaving,” Dahlia admitted as we settled into the back seat. “That was really starting to feel like home.”
I took her hand and nodded, still scanning the surrounding area for any sign of Sam. “It’s okay. We’ll figure this out,” I said, and wondered how I would go about that.
Chapter 5
