Page 51 of Collin: Episodes 13-15
“Near that place Dad used to take us, not the camping but the city where we’d get ice cream before heading up into the mountains for camping.”
“I remember.” Collin was nearly to Ash’s tech dungeon.
“Ash told me he was having trouble finding Dana. I said I’d walk around the neighborhood with a camera in my sunhat and let him look, see if it helped. But…I found something.”
“I’m so sorry,” Ash muttered.
Collin reached Ash’s door. Ash had it open, as promised. The hacker had a line between his eyebrows and a headset tangled in his red hair. One of his hands was in his hair pulling on it, and he was bouncing from foot to foot, not even sitting on his stool. On his secondary main screen was a blown-up still of a video frame: a small, white, wood-paneled house, the kind that you could find in thousands of Californian neighborhoods. It had a tiny front yard, more of a garden bed with a mailbox under the front window. Scratched in the paint behind the mailbox was Mikhail’s signature—a sunflower on a stem with two wilted leaves, like downward-pointing akimbo arms.
A live feed of the same house was on the main monitor. It looked like something you would see from a headset camera. There were fuzzy things around the edges as if the camera was hidden inside something. Maybe flowers.
“This is you. You’re streaming this?” Collin said to Alice.
“Yes.” Alice’s voice was tight. “Why the fuck would he be back here? I thought he was gone for good.”
“Problem for another day. Just get out. Now.” Collin’s voice tightened down to almost nothing. His hand curled around the phone at his ear. He darted a look to Ash. “Where is she, exactly?”
Ash pointed to another monitor with a map application open and a moving dot.
On Alice’s end of the phone, a child screamed.
“Shit.” Alice’s feet pounded on the ground, and the headset feed bobbed up and down on Ash’s screen.
Collin’s eyes darted over Ash’s desk. “Got another line? Call 9-1-1.”
Ash’s eyes were big. He scrambled through his desk, grabbing a smartphone but not the one he usually used.
In the live feed, Alice ran around the corner of a privacy fence to a gravel parking lot right beside the house. There was only a narrow gate in and out. Trees and a wall hid most of it.
“Help, please! Mama!” That was definitely a child in complete terror.
Alice raced around the wall. In a gravel parking lot between two houses, partially closed off with trees, was Barker, dragging Dana Reevesworth out of the side door of the house by her arm. A woman raced out after them, screaming.
She lifted her arms, both hands wrapped around a gun. “Let her go. She’s my daughter!”
Barker turned back, struggling with Dana. “That wasn’t the deal, you stupid…”
The woman fired. The shot went wide. The woman screamed at the girl to move.
Dana tried.
Barker snapped off a shot.
The woman swayed, and her hands went slack. The gun crashed to the gravel.
“Mama!” the girl screamed.
Ash pressed his phone to his ear. It was ringing.
Barker swung his gun toward Alice. On the live feed, it felt like he was pointing straight at Collin and Ash. “Stop right there.”
Alice’s hands appeared on either side of the video feed as if she had raised them. “Just let me check to see if she’s alive. Please.”
“She better hope she’s dead. Get in the car.”
Alice moved sideways, both toward the woman and toward Barker. “I saw that she was threatening you. I get it. Self-defense. But the little girl is scared, and that gun could go off. Just let me help.”
Barker’s chest heaved as he sucked in air. “Yeah, well, I’m down a nursemaid and you’ll do. Saves me from leaving two bodies here. I’m sure as fuck not leaving a witness.”
