Cherry Bomb

She turns it off and lugs everything back into the hotel. It’s with much amusement, and some disappointment, that she sees Alan is still tied to the bed. Unlike Lance, who butchered his wrists trying to get free, the duct tape securing Jack’s husband still looks freshly applied. The poor dear must have actually believed that BS about the motion sensor. Maybe that’s Jack’s secret to finding men: She picks the really gullible ones.

“Did you miss me?” Alex asks.

He mumbles something around the gag that sounds like bathroom. Alex shakes her head.

“You don’t want to go in there. Trust me. Single women can be sloppy.” She holds up her new satchel, posing with it. “Do you like my new bag? Marc Jacobs. It was a steal.”

His eyes are pained, tired. Alex sits next to him, gives him a gentle pat on the cheek. Then she examines the defibrillator. It has a battery pack and an AC cord. The back opens up, and Alex pulls out the battery. Since it isn’t plugged in, the unit goes dead. She flips one of the switches to manual override, then presses the big green button with a hotel pen and squeezes on enough superglue for it to stay in the on position. Theoretically, once she plugs it into the wall, it will shock Alan. And will probably keep shocking him, over and over.

The outlet timer has settings that are pretty self-explanatory. It’s made to turn on lights, or a coffee machine, or anything plugged into it, at a preset hour. Alex programs in the current time.

“How long should we give Jack to save you? Let’s make this one exciting. She’s probably in Wisconsin, but she’ll assume you’re still in Iowa, which gives her an advantage. It took me three hours to get here, but I was stopped by the police. Let’s give her two.”

Alex sets the gadget, allowing for extra time to run some necessary errands. When she calls Jack, the lieutenant will have 120 minutes before Alan gets a jump start.

She tapes an extra cell phone to the wall, switches on the camera, and checks her laptop to make sure the live feed is working. Then she uses her main cell phone to snap a picture of Alan. He looks suitably pathetic.

She gathers up her things, then plugs in the outlet timer and defibrillator.

“Thanks for the sex,” she tells Alan. “For what it’s worth, I won’t mind too much if Jack saves your life. And if you do live, I wouldn’t worry about the scars. I think they’ll heal up nicely.”

Before she leaves, Alex takes thirty seconds to jerry-rig the door latch. It’s a standard privacy lock; on the door, at eye level, is a brass knob on a plate. It fits into a U-shaped bar, which is attached to the jamb. When the bar is swung over the knob, the knob slides into the groove, preventing the door from being opened more than an inch or two.

Alex twists a screw eye into the door just behind the brass plate. She feeds the floss through the eyelet and ties it to the U-bar. She plays out a few feet of floss-enough to open the door-and leaves the room, shutting the door behind her. The floss is still in her hand, caught between the door and the jamb. Alex pulls the floss, taking up the slack until she hears a soft clink: the sound of the U-bar swinging over the knob.

She uses the key card, tries to open the door. The latch prevents it. Alex tugs on the floss, snapping it off at the knot, and then closes the door.

The lock isn’t really an effective deterrent, and won’t stop a determined criminal, or in this case a determined cop. But it will stop a maid.

Alex takes the Do Not Disturb sign off the knob, places it on a room across the hall, and heads down to her new Prius to do some hotel hopping.

CHAPTER 37

“SQUEEZE IT,” I told Phin. “But be soft and gentle.”

He looked up and gri

“Focus on the target, not me. And squeeze the trigger until you feel it break.”

“It’s going to break?”

“That’s what it’s called when the trigger gives. The.377 is going to kick, hard, and sound like you stuck your head in a thundercloud. But don’t hesitate with the second shot. Relax and fire another round as fast as you can.”

Phin was in a sniping position, on his belly, legs splayed out behind him, the big H-S Precision rifle resting on a tree stump. We were in a fallow field, a few miles west of I-94. Phin had taken a dirt road to get here, and there wasn’t another soul as far as the eye could see.

We’d spent twenty minutes attaching our scopes, configuring the crosshairs. Now we needed to zero them out, a task that had to be individually configured for each shooter. I’d already zeroed out my scope to about two hundred yards, and put four rounds into a target the size of a grape.

Phin had no experience with long arms. I set up his target-a Realtor’s For Sale sign we’d liberated from the front of an old farmhouse-thirty yards away, its iron legs stuck in the dirt.

“Aim for the letter O.” I’d shot through the E. “Line it up and squeeze. And do it after you exhale.”

“Who taught you how to shoot?”

“My mother.”

“My mom taught me how to make fried chicken.”

“Focus. Soft and gentle.”

“Soft and gentle.” Phin blew out a breath, pulled the trigger.

The rifle crack was loud enough to scare crows two counties over. The target twitched back, then righted itself.

“Again!” I yelled over the ringing in my ears.

He pulled back the bolt, ejected the brass, and pushed another round into the chamber. Then he fired again, but Phin did what every newbie did when anticipating the sound and recoil: He flinched and jerked the trigger, missing the target completely.

Without prompting he loaded the final round from the internal magazine, aimed, and fired more carefully, getting another hit. I waited for him to eject the round, told him to leave the breach open, and went to check his target.

The two bullets that struck were an inch lower than the E, and slightly to the right. I’d given Phin a pe

This time the bullets all hit the E. I marched the sign back another fifty yards, wet dirt clinging to my new shoes, then got clear and yelled at him to try again. Phin put another three into the sign, faster this time. Only one hit the sign. He’d probably turned one of the screws too far.

My phone rang before I had a chance to tell him. I fished it out of my pocket, my mind blanking when I saw who the call was from.

555-5555.

Alex.

The text message came first.

THIS IS ALAN. HE’S YOUR HUSBAND.

Oh God. Oh no. She was lying. She had to be.

Please, be lying.

Then the picture. Alan, tied to a bed. His bare stomach sliced up, the blood dry, but the cuts on it forming unmistakable words:

TILL DEATH DO US PART

My legs stopped supporting me and I fell onto my ass. I kept staring at Alan-poor Alan-and thinking about that last awful argument I’d had with him. It was my fault he’d been grabbed by the monster. My fault he was in this mess. The very thing he’d been preaching at me all these years had come true.

Another text came. I opened it, trembling hands barely able to hold on to the phone.

HE DIES IN TWO HOURS.

Two? That wasn’t right. That had to be a mistake. Alan lived in Iowa. A three-hour drive from here. Alex wasn’t playing fair.

“That’s not fair,” I said, but it didn’t sound like me. “Two hours isn’t enough time. It’s not fair.”

“Jack?” Phin was standing over me, breathing hard, his hand on my head.

“Not fair.”

“What’s not fair?” He took the phone from me.

“I can’t save him in two hours. It’s not enough time.”

Phin looked at the text, pressed a few buttons. I stared beyond him, past the For Sale sign, past the field, to the horizon-that faint line where the brown earth met the gray sky, the great divider between heaven and earth. Except that there was no heaven. No hell either. But there didn’t need to be.