Hold Tight
It was the mother.
She had jumped on his back. She bit down hard into his leg. Nash howled and kicked her away.
“Jill!” Nash called out. “Your mommy will be dead if you don’t come down here right now!”
The woman rolled away from him. “Run! Don’t listen to him!”
Nash rose and took out the knife. For the first time he was not sure what to do. The telephone box was across the room. He could knock it out, but the girl probably had a cell phone.
Time was running out.
He needed the computers. That was the key thing. So he would kill them, grab the computers, and get out. He would make sure that the hard drives were destroyed.
Nash looked toward Yasmin. She jumped behind her father. Guy tried to roll, tried to sit up, tried to do anything to make himself something of a protective wall for his daughter. The effort, what with him hog-tied with duct tape, was almost comical.
The woman got up too. She moved toward the little girl. Not even hers this time. Brave. But now all three were in one spot. Good. He could take care of them quickly. It would take very little time.
“Jill!” Nash called out again. “Last chance!”
Yasmin screamed again. Nash moved toward them, knife raised, but a voice made him pull up.
“Please don’t hurt my mommy.”
The voice came from behind him. He could hear her sobs.
Jill had come back.
Nash looked at the mother and smiled. The mother’s face collapsed in anguish.
“No!” screamed her mother. “Jill, no! Run!”
“Mommy?”
“Run! God, honey, please run!”
But Jill didn’t listen. She came down the stairs. Nash turned toward her and that was when he realized his mistake. He wondered for a second if he had intentionally let Jill make it to the stairway in the first place. He had let go of their necks, hadn’t he? Had he been careless or was there something more? He wondered if somehow he had been directed by someone, someone who had seen enough and wanted him at peace.
He thought that he saw her standing next to the girl.
“Cassandra,” he said out loud.
A minute or two earlier, Jill had felt the man’s hand press down on her neck.
The man was strong. He didn’t seem to be trying at all. His fingers found a spot and it really hurt. Then she saw her mom and the way Mr. Novak was tied up on the floor. Jill was so scared.
Her mom said, “Let them go.”
The way she said it calmed Jill a little. It was horrible and scary, but her mother was here. She would do anything to save Jill. And Jill knew that it was time to show that she would do anything for her.
The man’s grip tightened. Jill gasped a little and glanced up at his face. The man looked happy. Her eyes moved toward Yasmin. Yasmin was looking directly at Jill. She managed to tilt her head a little. That was what Yasmin did in class when the teacher was looking but she wanted to get Jill a message.
Jill didn’t get it. Yasmin started looking down at her own hand.
Puzzled, Jill followed her eyes and saw what Yasmin was doing.
She was making a gun with her forefinger and thumb.
“Girls?”
The man holding them by the neck squeezed and turned a little so that they would have to look at him.
“If you run away, I will kill Mommy and Daddy. Do you understand?”
They both nodded. Their eyes met again. Yasmin opened her mouth. Jill got the idea. The man released them. Jill waited for the diversion. It didn’t take long.
Yasmin screamed and Jill ran for her life. Not her life, actually. All their lives.
She felt the man’s fingertips on her ankle but she pulled away. She heard him howl, but she didn’t look back.
“Jill! Your mommy will be dead if you don’t come down here right now!”
No choice. Jill ran up the stairs. She thought about the anonymous e-mail she’d sent to Mr. Novak just earlier today:Please listen to me. You need to hide your gun better.
She prayed that he hadn’t read it or if he had, that he hadn’t had time to do anything about it. Jill dived into his bedroom and pulled the drawer all the way out. She dumped the contents on the floor.
The gun was gone.
Her heart fell. She heard screaming coming from downstairs. The man could be killing them all. She started tossing his things around when her hand hit something metallic.
The gun.
“Jill! Last chance!”
How did she get rid of the safety? Damn it. She didn’t know. But then Jill remembered something.
Yasmin had never put it back on. The safety was probably still off.
Yasmin screamed.
Jill scrambled back to her feet. She wasn’t even down the stairs when she called out in the littlest, baby-est voice she could muster: “Please don’t hurt my mommy.”
She hurried down to the basement level. She wondered if she would be able to apply enough pressure to make the gun fire. She figured that she’d hold the gun with both hands and use two fingers.
Turns out, that was pressure enough.
NASH heard the sirens.
He saw the gun and smiled. Part of him wanted to make a leap, but Cassandra shook her head. He didn’t want that either. The girl hesitated. So he moved a little closer to her and raised the knife over her head.
When Nash was ten, he asked his father what happens to us when we die. His father said that Shakespeare probably said it best, that death was “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
In sum, how can we know?
The first bullet hit him square in the chest.
He staggered closer to her, keeping the knife raised, waiting.
Nash didn’t know where the second bullet would take him, but he hoped it would be to Cassandra.
40
MIKE sat in the same interrogation room as before. This time he was with his son.
Special Agent Darryl LeCrue and U.S. Assistant Attorney Scott Duncan had been trying to put together the case. Mike knew that they were all here somewhere—Rosemary, Carson, DJ Huff and probably his father, the other goths. They separated them out, hoping to cut deals and file charges.
They’d been here for hours. Mike and Adam had yet to answer a single question. Hester Crimstein, their attorney, refused to let them speak. Right now Mike and Adam sat alone in the interrogation room.
Mike looked at his son, felt his heart break, and said, “It’s going to be okay,” for maybe the fifth or sixth time.
Adam had gone nonresponsive. Shock probably. Of course, there was a fine line between shock and teenage sullenness. Hester was in crazed mode and it was getting worse. You could see it. She kept bouncing in and out and asking questions. Adam just shook his head when she demanded details.