Page 83 of You Can Make Me

I put my hands on my hips and breathed out. Ryan was sitting at a control center, furiously pounding on keys.

“Can you bring up the camera feed?”

“Yeah, one sec.” Ryan kept working while Kal moved around the room, checking the temperature and the gauges for the generator. I’d interviewed folks about panic rooms, and even seen some while working on a piece about preparing for wildfires in California’s vulnerable places. I wasn’t worried about us. I was terrified for Denny.

Please let him be okay.

“This is from a few minutes before Denny got up to check the door.”

The screen popped up to show six different views from around the house. He sped up the feed and we watched as two cars pulled up. A familiar-looking guy stepped out of a silver SUV. He wore a polo and khakis, a badge and gun, and a scowl on his face.

“That’s Dax.” Dane’s voice shook when he spoke. “Why would he come here? Walter’s barely speaking to him.”

“And who the fuck isthatguy?” Ryan asked, when the second guy got out of a beat-up two-toned Chevy pickup, probably from the eighties. He wore a flannel buttoned up to the neck despite it being hot out, a white hardhat with no logo, baggy jeans and work boots.

“I don’t know.”

Dane sucked in a breath beside me as the two men talked to each other and Dax handed the guy with the hardhat a weapon.

Dax approached the front door and knocked, but the other guy disappeared from view of the camera. A minute later, Dax’s whole countenance changed. He leaned down to look in the doorbell camera. He spoke—I was frustrated that there was nosound—and then backed up a few steps with a friendly smile on his face, which brightened more as Denny stepped forward into view. He had a hand on his gun as he approached Dax. Then Dax’s smile fell, they both went to draw, and the hardhat guy stepped out of the bushes and Tased Denny.

“Shit,” Ryan said. “Tasers fucking hurt.”

I yelped as Denny hit the ground, but he was moving. He hadn’t blacked out.

The two men jumped, which must have been when the alarm sounded. It looked like they argued, neither noticing Denny slide something into the back of his pants before going completely still.

“That must be the panic button,” Ryan said.

“Walter texted. The alarm company has the footage and they’ve put out BOLOs on the cars and the two men.”

Dax grabbed Denny’s gun, then he helped hardhat guy load Denny into the truck, where they duct taped his hands and feet before slamming the door. I flinched, even though I couldn’t hear it. I felt it in my soul, being cut off from my love.

“This can’t be happening. This can’t…” I touched the screen as the car drove away, and the truck went the opposite direction.

“Come on, come on…there has to be a way,” I said, trying to control my ire. “Can you access the tracker in the panic button?”

Ryan turned his chair to face me. I didn’t want his sympathetic look. I wanted action. “I think Walter can do that with his app.”

“I can’t sit in here and do nothing while they take Denny away. I have to do something!”

“Dane,” Kal said, but I wasn’t done fighting.

“Letmeout, then. You stay here if you want, but?—”

“Cooper, I know you’re worried?—”

“Dane—”

“They left, you saw them! Let me out?—”

“Dane!”

I turned to give Kal a piece of my mind for interrupting…but then I looked at the coffee table next to him.

The Ouija board sat there, the planchette sitting in the middle of the board.

The four of us stared at it in the amplified silence of the room.