Page 71 of Vanishing Point
He carefully moved up the front steps, trying to avoid rotting wood and places that would creak. It wasn’t as quiet as he had hoped, but no one stormed out, and nothing seemed to be going on inside.
His heart sank for a moment. What if no one was inside? What if they’d gotten another car and gone to a second location? What if—
He didn’t let his mind finish that what-if. He reached out for the front door and turned the handle. It gave, surprisingly, but when he tried to ease the door open, the door didn’t budge. Something was blocking it.
He swore inwardly, then moved back off the porch. But he didn’t go back to his hiding place like Laurel would have no doubt preferred. Instead, he began creeping around the side of the house.
There were no windows here, so he wasn’t quite as worried about being caught. He paused as he reached the back of the house, being careful to come around the corner without stepping into an ambush.
But the backyard—overgrown and full of trash—seemed to be empty. Wind rustled in the towering grasses. Thomas could make out a back porch and a back door. The porch was covered in wild vines, but the door itself looked cleared, like it had been used recently.
Thomas took a breath, shoved everyemotionout of his mind, and focused on what needed to be done. Finding out who or what was inside that house.
Using as much cover as possible, he moved around the porch to a place that looked like he could enter. He studied the back door again—it had a small window, but it was covered by a curtain, so Thomas couldn’t see inside. As silently as possible, he moved up the warped, splintered stairs of the porch to the door.
He was about to reach out, test the knob, when something flashed in the sunlight right at his foot.
A dime.
It seemed like the world around him went completely silent. And he did what he’d done all those years ago when he’d narrowly avoided a head shot.
Slower, this time, with more awareness, he bent down to pick it up—and almost immediately the glass of the door exploded. A bullet slammed into the post of the porch.
Just behind where his head had once been.
Thomas looked at the door. He couldn’t shoot back. He didn’t know what was going on inside. Where Vi might be if she was in there. And he could hardly stay where he was, because if the shooter had shot out through the glass, they were only going to keep shooting.
As if to prove his point, another shot went off echoing in the yard around them.
“Come any closer and she’s dead,” a man’s voice called out. “You shoot, she’s dead.”
“Drop your weapon,” Thomas called out, ignoring the ice that centered in his gut. He could hear everyone else coming closer. “You’re surrounded. Drop your weapon and—”
The man’s gun went off again, and this time Thomas knew he hadn’t been quite so lucky. Pain sliced into his left arm andknocked him back a step or two, but he didn’t let it knock him down.
He gritted his teeth, and against everyone yelling at him not to, charged forward.
AFTER THE SECOND SHOT, Vi figured it was now or never. Eric had to be shooting atsomething, and maybe it was dangerous to jump into a situation without being able to see what was going on, but Vi couldn’t take it anymore.
She flung the pantry door open, hoping it would cause enough of a surprise that she could dosomething.
And since Eric was essentiallyright there, the barrel of his gun poised in the broken glass of the back door’s window, shecouldin fact, do something.
She bashed the heavy can of food as hard as she could against his head—it would have been the back of his head, but he’d turned at the sound of the pantry door opening and it hit him right in the temple.
He crumpled, the gun clattering on top of him and then the can too, when she dropped it. For a second, she just stood there frozen while Eric groaned. It was when he began to move that she scrambled into action.
Gun first, was all she could think. She grabbed it, but so did Eric. He had a hand on the grip, and she had a hand on the barrel, which was terrible positioning. So she jerked it as hard as she could, and nearly toppled backward when it came as easily as it did.
She scurried to turn the gun around, to get her fingers on the trigger, to point it athim. She was shaking, damn it, she was shaking so hard. But she would shoot him if she had to. Shewould.
“Youwouldn’t,” Eric seethed. He’d gotten onto all fours. Blood poured out of a gash on his head. But he was alert. He was moving. She hadn’t won yet.
She checked the gun to make sure if she pulled the trigger it would shoot. She didn’t know much about shotguns, but she thought she had it right.
The back door splintered open at the same time the front door did. For a moment, Vi wasalmostdistracted enough to look away, but Eric sort of lunged.
She pulled the trigger without any thought to aim or anything other than stopping that lunge. The gun exploded as his body barreled into her legs and she fell backward, narrowly missing hitting her head on the floor.
