The Little Grave (Detective Amanda Steele)

Amanda held up her hands to thwart her attack when there was a thunderous crack, and Elise’s body collapsed against her—her head had a gaping crater where her brain had been.

Amanda’s ears were ringing, and her vision was hazy, but she still made out Jonah standing across the room with a smoking shotgun.

Amanda reached for the gun in her ankle holster. If she had to, she’d use Elise’s body as a shield.

“Stop fucking moving or you’re next!” Jonah yelled.

He hadn’t even hesitated to kill his girlfriend; she would be less than nothing to him. She could scream at the top of her lungs, but it wouldn’t matter. Even the shotgun firing wouldn’t have been heard by anyone. They were in relative isolation.

“That bitch cost me far more trouble than she was worth!” he spat.

“Wh-Who?” Amanda asked, not sure if she’d heard him correctly.

“Little Miss Colonial!” He advanced on her and her body became lead.

“Did you kill her?” She tried to articulate the revelation as a shock.

“What the hell do you think?” He stopped moving, and Amanda took a deep breath, still paralyzed by fear.

Fear—a feeling. She had to survive, if only to bring this shit down and free those poor girls!

“I think you did,” she said defiantly. “I also think that you killed Jackson Webb.”

“Ding, ding, tell her what she’s won, Bob. None of this was supposed to track back to me, so how the fu—”

“You’re not the smart and glamorous man you think you are, you piece of shit!” She scrambled to her feet, managing to get her Beretta free of the ankle holster in the process. She held her gun behind her back. “You sell young girls for a payday, probably play with the merchandise yourself.”

“You don’t know anything,” he bellowed, but her talking to him, challenging him, and his enormous ego seemed to be keeping him from pulling the trigger on her.

“I do, actually. You took Phoebe Baldwin from a park in Williamsburg. Ah— nah, that was probably Elise who did that for you right? Little girls would be far more trusting of a woman than a man. Though maybe Rhonda, the babysitter, was in on this thing you’ve got going too. Or should I say had going.”

“Shut up!”

“You couldn’t have gotten the little girl to go with you.”

The man snarled and he raised the shotgun on her.

“Go ahead. Shoot.” She stared down the man with the gun, her hand holding hers still behind her back. “Take the coward’s way out, but know that if you kill me, you’ll never live another day of your life without looking over a shoulder. If I found you, someone else will too.”

“I’ve been looking over it all my life,” he hissed.

“It must have been worse when Phoebe stole your bracelet. You know, the one with all your organization’s players on it.” She smiled smugly at him.

His eyes bored through her.

“But you killed her, and you still didn’t recover your property, so you tried to torture it out of Jackson Webb, only he didn’t have it either. You must have been shittin’ your pants.” She gave a forced laugh. “But see, if you had found it, then I wouldn’t be here now. We never would have met.”

“What a tragedy that would have been,” he said drily.

“You killed Chad Palmer too—just changed up your MO.”

“No,” he pushed out, the shotgun lowering slightly.

“You’re really not too bright. He had your bracelet all these years—well, the county did. He was wearing it when he was arrested.”

Jonah’s eye twitched—

She raised her gun and fired off two consecutive rounds just as Jonah was raising the shotgun again.