“Go find Jannie’s laptop. It’s in her room.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m not sure yet,” I admitted. “Just get the computer.”
While she went upstairs to look for the computer, I got a bag of clothes and my backup weapon, an old .45-caliber Colt 1911. The pistol was bigger and heavier than the nine-millimeter Glock I had turned over to Quintus, but it had excellent balance, and I shot it well. At short range with the 230-grain bullets and the hot loads, it could drop a charging rhino in its tracks.
“I’ve got it,” Ava said, looking at the gun as I tugged on a jacket.
“Good,” I said. “Let’s go.”
“Do I need one of those?” Ava asked.
“One of what?”
“A gun?”
At first I dismissed it out of hand. Bringing her along was bad enough. Arming her was crazy, but I asked, “You ever shot a gun?”
She shook her head. “Seen it on TV.”
“Little bit different in reality,” I said, but I went into Bree’s closet and reached under her nightgowns for the small Ruger nine-millimeter she sometimes kept in her purse when we went out somewhere fancy.
Ava reached for it, but I put it in my pocket, along with a box of bullets. “I’ll see how you do along the way before I let you anywhere near it.”
“But Alex—” she began.
“Follow orders,” I said. I picked up the bag and left the house with her trailing. Locking the door, I realized that if I was to have any hope of catching up with Mulch before he killed the rest of my family, I was going to have to divorce myself from what had already happened. I was going to have to compartmentalize, focus on the task, and deal with my grief later. I was going to have to act as if I were on a case where I had zero emotional involvement.
We left with Ava driving and me riding shotgun with Jannie’s computer in my lap. I never looked back. I couldn’t bear the thought of it.
Ava was no polished driver, but she had grit and settled into the task with every bit of her little being. “Where are we going?” she asked again after I’d seen she could follow basic directions and not hit oncoming cars.
“Get across the bridge,” I replied. “Head south until I tell you different.”
Soon we were on I-95 in the far right lane heading toward Richmond, Virginia. My mind no longer felt fried. It had a purpose and began
to click off the things I needed: money, lots of it, and a new phone, and a new car, and I had to tell someone about Damon.
Though I did not want to, I turned my phone back on. Rather than give in to my first impulse and dial Sampson, I called Detective Tess Aaliyah.
“It’s Cross,” I said when she answered.
“Where the hell are you?” Aaliyah demanded. “You need to be in a hospital. Everyone’s looking for—”
“There’s a male body in my backyard,” I said. “I believe it’s my son Damon.”
Ava almost went off the road.
“My God,” the detective gasped. “Are you there now?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever go back there, Detective,” I said.
“Where are you?”
“Mulch has us heading in the general direction of hell,” I replied, before lowering the window and hurling my iPhone onto the highway while going sixty miles an hour.
CHAPTER