Chapter 7 - THE WOMAN IN THE CULVERT
The blue house became a gunfight.
Cole had been in many.
He had caused most of them.
This one felt different because an eleven-year-old and a baby were hiding in the bathroom while bullets punched through walls meant for ordinary lives.
June fired first.
The man outside the window dropped before he could climb through.
Cole moved right, using the hallway wall for cover, and put two shots into the dark kitchen doorway. Someone screamed. Another man returned fire through the front room, driving splinters from the doorframe.
“Back exit!” he shouted.
June grabbed Emma and shoved the shotgun into Cole’s hands while she took Noah.
“Move!”
They ran through the laundry room and out into the alley behind the house just as the front room lit up with muzzle flashes.
A black pickup swung around to cut them off.
Cole fired through the windshield.
The truck swerved into a mailbox.
June dragged Emma toward a flood culvert beyond the alley.
They slid down a dirt embankment under a bridge of concrete shadow and crouched among trash, weeds, and stale runoff water while engines roared overhead.
Emma was sobbing silently now, one hand over her own mouth so Noah wouldn’t start crying again.
Cole listened.
Vehicles above.
Men shouting.
One set of footsteps coming lower.
He raised the shotgun.
A voice came from the darkness.
“Emma?”
Emma jerked upright.
June whispered, “No—”
Then the woman stepped into the moonlit concrete tunnel.
Rachel Morgan.
She looked thinner than the photograph, harder, more exhausted, but unmistakably alive. Her dark hair was tied back. Her clothes were dirty. A pistol was in one hand and a duffel bag in the other.
Emma ran to her.
“Mom!”
Rachel dropped to her knees and caught both children as if she’d been holding herself together by force alone.
Noah woke crying.
Rachel kissed his hair, then Emma’s forehead.
Cole watched without lowering the shotgun.
Rachel looked up at him.
“You.”
He almost laughed.
“That’s all I get?”
Rachel’s eyes moved over his suit, his stance, the weapon, the children, and finally June.
Then she said quietly, “You were on the contract list.”
June answered for him.
“He still is.”
Rachel stood, one arm around Emma.
“Then why are my children alive?”
He stared back at her.
“Because your daughter jumped in front of my car.”
Rachel’s face changed.
Not gratitude.
Suspicion.
Maybe grief.
Then, from above them, a voice boomed down the culvert.
“Rachel Morgan! Hand over the drive and maybe the kids live!”
Rachel went pale.
Cole looked at her.
“The drive?”
She met his eyes.
May you like
“There’s another one.”
Of course there was.
