I nside the trunk – for the second time in a night, and he hoped for the last in his life – Evan felt the BMW come to a stop. He heard his father get out of the car. No call of greeting broke the still quiet, and he heard his father go up stairs onto a porch, a door open. Then he heard a murmur of cautious hellos, his dad’s voice sounding actor-pitch perfect in its weariness and fear, and then the door shut.
He eased the trunk open, rolled out the back. The night air was cool and moist, but his palms were drenched in sweat. He held the Beretta that Frame had given him a few hours ago. No spill of lights glowed in the night to show him his way. He lay flat for a moment on the concrete, waiting for a door to fly open, shots to fire. Nothing.
He ran, keeping the cars between him and the lodge’s back porch.
Blackness. He didn’t have a flashlight; his dad said not to risk using one. He ran into the pitch-dark and hoped that he wouldn’t trip and plunge into wet or a hole or a stack of trash cans that would set off a din. He stumbled against the garage, eased around its corner. Evan stayed still. Every rustle sounded like a snake or a gator – he did not want to see alligators again – slithering closer.
He thought he heard a click: probably an alarm system, reactivating after his dad was inside. He stayed still as stone, the sweat oozing down his ribs, his breath sounding huge in the silence. He had a gun. He had Khan’s PDA, with its fancy alarm deactivator, which he had no idea how to use. Now he needed patience.
Five minutes. Ten minutes. No blast of shots. No creak of a footfall on the back porch. He peeked past the corner of the garage, past his father’s parked car, up to the lodge. Only the sound of his breath, of the ocean of life around him.
Then he heard the slightest crush of a heel on tall grass. Fifteen feet away. He froze.
‘I… see… you,’ a voice called in singsong. Dezz. ‘Sitting so still…’
A bullet smacked into the brick wall ten feet to his right. Evan lurched backward. Another shot hit the corner, well above his head. Shards of brick pelted his face.
Evan pointed the gun in the direction of the shots. He’d seen a moment of flash, but he was shaken and he hesitated.
‘I see you sitting on your ass, pointing a gun. You’re not even close,’ Dezz said. ‘Put the gun down. Come inside. Or I’ll march back inside and I’ll break your father’s spine. He won’t die; it’ll be worse than death, because when we roll out, we’ll just dump his quadriplegic ass in the swamp. The choice is yours. It’s over, Evan. You decide how nasty it gets for your dad and the bitch.’
Evan dropped the gun. The clouds parted for a moment and he saw, in the dim moonlight, Dezz hurrying toward him, gun stretched out. Then a savage kick hammered him into the wall. Brick cut the back of his head.
Dezz drove the heel of his boot into Evan’s cheek.
‘You took me away from my game with Carrie,’ Dezz said, bending to retrieve Evan’s gun from the grass. ‘And I was just getting warmed up.’