Page 4

CHAPTER 4

WETNESS ON MY FACE. The sound of the gunshot blasted through every living being in the room, even the tiniest ones. The dogs around us sank down in unison, cowering. The birds in the other room began to scream and thrash in their cages. My kid sister clung to me.

The taller gunman slumped on the hardwood floor. His partner, frighteningly calm, stared down at his lifeless friend.

“It’s not just a few thousand bucks,” he said. “There’s half a million in this room alone.”

I stifled a furious growl of regret. In my haste to focus on positive signs about the big man who’d abducted us, signs that pointed to our chances of surviving, I hadn’t paid much attention to the signs that his little partner was a cold-blooded psychopath: The icy, empty eyes. The scratched and beat-up gun. The expert way he handled it, like an artist with a brush.

“Listen,” I said. “Please, just listen.”

“No, you listen,” the gunman said. He pointed to his dead partner. “You see that? That’s the kind of mood I’m in. Eric and I have been working on this gig for three months. What happened to him just now is what happens when people push me and push me and push me.”

“Okay,” I said. “We get it. Nobody’s trying to push you.”

“Bringing you up here?” He shook his head. “He’s been doing dangerous stuff like that for days. It’s like he wanted us to get caught.”

A moment of opportunity. The gunman glanced around the apartment, trying to decide, I supposed, how he was going to hold us. Whether he would even bother. Baby used the precious seconds to shrink away from me. I wanted to grab at her and tuck her behind me, but I knew she was being smart. We shouldn’t stick together, make ourselves one target. It was two of us against one armed man, and we had to split his focus. I understood Baby’s strategic thinking. I edged sideways to put myself against the tanks. The gunman lifted his weapon and aimed at me.

“No, no, no,” he warned. “Step away from the tanks.”

It was exactly what I’d hoped he’d say. It confirmed my assessment of the man: He was a dealer in lives. Every creature in the place had a dollar sign attached to it — except me and Baby.

“Let’s talk. Let’s talk, okay? You just lost your partner,” I said. I put my hands up, rapped a knuckle against the glass behind me. “There’s no need to put everything else you have at risk.”

“Step away, ” the man repeated. “From the tanks .”

“How’s your aim?” I asked. “Can you drop me like you did your partner without getting one of these guys? Huh? He’s pretty.” I pointed to a big green lizard in a tank beside my head. “What’s he worth?”

Movement caught my eye. Baby was running with my idea. She picked up a woolly black puppy that had been cowering at her feet. The gunman swung around, pointed the gun at her, then immediately lowered it so the barrel pointed at her legs, away from the dog.

“Ooh.” Baby’s eyes widened. She was smiling, but her cheeks were hard and tight. “Did you see that, Rhonda? I think I might have one of the big-ticket items here.”

“Okay, don’t be stupid,” the man said. “That’s a twenty-thousand-dollar dog you’re holding. Put it down or I’ll shoot you in the foot.”

“You do that and I’ll throw the puppy to Cerberus over there,” Baby said. She edged closer to the big dog on the chain. “You hungry, boy? Yeah. You want an expensive snack?”

I let my eyes drift down to the tanks beside me. I saw a coiled-up snake. It was acid yellow and black, striped, too pretty to be harmless. The monster dog was almost choking itself trying to get at Baby and the puppy, its growls becoming strangled snorts, claws ripping at the carpet. The gunman was inching closer to them, corralling Baby into the beast’s bite range.

“Put it down.” The man tightened his grip on the gun. “Put the dog down!”

“You put the gun down!” Baby yelled.

“Hey!” I called. The gunman pivoted toward me. I pushed off the top of the tank next to me, grabbed the striped snake, and hurled it at him. The man dropped his gun, and in the microseconds during which he twisted, his instincts warring between catching the snake and cowering from it, Baby seized the chain connecting the dog to the wall and unhooked it.

They say you should never run from an attacking dog. When you act like prey, it sets off its killer instincts, the wolf inside. The man chose to flee from the snake; he turned, and in that single vulnerable motion, he lit a fire in the big dog’s brain. Baby dropped the puppy and grabbed the fallen weapon as the beast rushed at the gunman. The air was filled with human screams. I saw my sister aiming the gun and struggling to decide if she should take the animal’s life to save the life of the man who was trying to kill us. The girl full of bravado was gone, and a scared kid with a deadly weapon and an impossible choice was standing in her place.

I took the gun from her hands and shoved her out of the apartment.