Page 81 of The Chain

“You’re going down there to tell them to pay the ransom and do everything you did?”

“Yes.”

“What if you…what if you don’t come back?”

“If we’re not back by morning, call your father to come and get you. Stay in this house. Don’t go home. When he gets here, tell him everything. Keep your phone turned off until then.”

Kylie nods solemnly. “What time in the morning?”

“If you haven’t heard from either of us by, say, eleven, it probably means we’ve been compromised,” Pete says.

“Dead?” Kylie asks, her lip trembling.

“Not necessarily. Just that something’s going wrong,” Rachel says, although she thinksdeadis the most likely scenario.

Kylie hugs her mom and Pete. “I’ll be OK,” she says. “And I’ll keep an eye on her.”

Her daughter is now co-opted into a kidnapping scheme. Rachel feels mortified and angry. But she can’t indulge these feelings for very long. The clock is ticking. She wipes the tears from her cheeks. “Let’s get this show on the road, then,” she says to Pete. “I’ll drive.”

39

Sunday, 11:27 p.m.

Swamp to the left, marsh to the right. High beam on the headlights. Smell of gun oil, sweat, fear. Nobody talking. Rachel driving. Pete literally riding shotgun.

Beverly, Mass.

Old wooden houses. Oak trees. The occasional apartment building. Quiet. Blue light from TVs and burglar alarms.

Suburban-nighttime ennui. Which is good. Fewer busybodies on the sidewalks.

Poseidon Street.

The lights are off in the Dunleavy house.

“Drive around the block,” Pete says. “Don’t stop.”

Rachel does and then parks one street over.

Quiet town. No one around. Only one question: Why won’t Helen Dunleavy answer her goddamn phone?

Rachel has an image of the entire family tied to chairs in the kitchen with their throats cut.

“We can go in through those little scrubby woods next door to their house,” Pete says. “And then in through the back door.”

“How?” Rachel asks.

Pete holds up a wrench and a lock-pick kit. “If we’re definitely going to do this,” he says.

“Yeah. We’re pot committed,” she replies.

Pot committedis the polite way of putting it. She’s going to have to go full-on Lady Macbeth now. Act it. Believe it. Be it. For Pete, for herself, for Kylie—the lives of her family are at stake.

“I’ve got an EM-pulse kit to baffle the alarm system if there is an alarm system. Once we’re in, we use handguns,” he says, handing her his glove-compartment .38 revolver. He’s also got a .45 and a 9-millimeter.

The guns. The scrubby wood.

Pete struggles to get over the Dunleavys’ north fence. Rachel stares at him. What is the matter with him? She wonders again if he’s on something or if he’s had an injury he hasn’t told her about. She needs him to be 100 percent.