Prologue
Through the door, we heard a woman scream.
I stood up from where I’d fallen and used my flashlight to reveal a set of descending stairs leading to a second, open doorway. I brushed the heavily falling snow off my face and walked down a couple of steps before pausing. I yelled her name, but the sound was immediately muffled by the storm, like someone pushing a pillow over my head.
I took a few more steps down the stairs. I hesitated again. Despite how far we’d come, how close we were to ending the hunt, I didn’t want to go through that door. Not yet. The man on the other side had a gun and nothing to lose. All bets were off. One decent shot at us and everything we’d worked for was over. I’d already walked straight into one trap this Christmas season. Why repeat history, with the bruises from that mistake still healing?
“Let’s go,” Theresa hissed, behind me.
“Wait.”
Focus, Andy. Focus.
Why repeat history, but why bank on second chances either? I’d already used up enough for a lifetime. Why gamble on somebody else’s life?
Focus . . .
“We don’t have time,” Theresa said.
“Hold on,” I said, listening.
“He’s going to get—”
She screamed again.
“Now,” I said, charging down the stairs and through the door.
1
I WAS HAVING ONE OF THOSE DECEMBERS. Which seemed to happen to me more and more these days.
I sat up straight, trying to ease my aching back, which hurt because of course I’d forgotten to bring stadium seats. It was a couple of weeks earlier, with not that many shopping days left before Christmas. I took a long pull on my beer to compensate, which would have made for a satisfying moment except for the conversation I was having on the phone just then with my ex-wife. I glanced over at Anne and she frowned back, but not in the way that communicates your girlfriend’s concern for your well-being. In a way that suggests she’s wondering what the hell she and her daughter have been dragged into and is really starting to resent it.
“Stop shouting,” my ex-wife said.
“I’m not shouting. It’s just that it’s loud in here.”
“Where’s here?”
“I’m at a roller derby match.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Listen—I told you I’d talk to him.”
She’d called about our son, Mike. And it hadn’t been to discuss which wrapping paper to use this year.
“But when?” Kym demanded. “You said that last week. And the week before. And then when you went to the hockey game Mike said you spent most of it on the phone and when you weren’t on the phone you were complaining about the jumbotron.”
“Jumbotrons ruin the experience. People don’t watch the actual game anymore—”
“Nobody gives a shit about jumbotrons, Andy. They care about grades. And success that comes from good grades. And right now your son has neither because he’s failing three classes. All he cares about is sports. Like his father. Which is pretty damned ironic. Which is why you need to talk to him.”
“I got that part, believe it or not. I’ll speak to him tomorrow afternoon.”
“No, you won’t,” she said angrily. “You aren’t coming tomorrow because you were supposed to come last week and you forgot and tomorrow he’s going to the movies with his friends. Which puts us at Wednesday, and who knows whether that’s too late at this point. What is it with you and remembering shit?”
“I didn’t forget,” I snapped. I knew it was pointless to explain why I’d missed last week’s custody visit. To point out that I’d been offered a last-minute job doing backstage security for a second-tier boy band that unexpectedly sold out an Arena District club. A club whose owners were nervous about the liability posed by a thousand drunken twenty-somethings hoping to relive the band’s glory days from a decade earlier when the now not-so-young squires could actually sing. When the club manager offered me five hundred dollars and I told him to double it or get lost and he accepted, I knew I had no choice. Because I had no money, as usual. I’d told Kym I couldn’t make it, but she said she never got the voice mail.
At least I was pretty sure I’d told her.
“Wednesday, then,” I said. “Promise.”
“Don’t screw this up, Andy. If he has to repeat a grade, it’s on you.”
“I said I’d be there—”
“Heard it before,” she said, and hung up.
“Everything OK?” Anne said, frowning as I pocketed my phone and fumed over the retorts caught in my throat. Which is where they needed to stay, since my ex-wife’s complaints weren’t misplaced. My first ex-wife. I hadn’t heard from my second so far today. But it was barely 6 p.m. Plenty of time.
“Peachy. Fine and dandy.”
“Great,” she said. “So, I don’t know how much longer I can stay. My back is killing me.”
“Stadium seats. Yes, I know.”
Roller derby is not usually a winter sport. The flat-track season starts