search the passenger side of the car for anything that might help us. But there’s not much I can look through without drawing attention to myself.
Tabitha’s shivering uncontrollably. We both are. We need to go somewhere warm, or else we’ll be popsicles before we have a chance to get the hell out of here.
Once Tabitha and I have finished hunting through the car, I glance at the house, mentally inventorying everything I noticed in the living room during the short time I was in there.
“There’s a phone in the living room,” I tell her, keeping my voice low. “But I don’t know if the landline actually works.”
“Are we talking about the same place where those two men are currently holed up?” She flashes me an irritated, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me scowl.
“That’d be the one. All we need to do is take them out of commission. Even for a short time. And tie them up.”
Right—that sounds easy enough.
The execution? That might be a whole different hockey game.
For the next few minutes, we brainstorm ideas until we narrow it to one strong possibility.
All right, it’s the only possibility we come up with. It’s getting too damn cold to think. And if we don’t act now, we might never have another chance. Our hands are turning into icicles.
Great, if we were Elsa from Frozen.
This situation is made worse because part of our plan involves making snowballs. We work as quickly as possible, doing our best to ignore the cold.
I imagine I’m in Hawaii, building a sandcastle with the hot sand.
I’m sorry to say that visualization exercise is a bust.
“How’s your throwing arm?” I ask Tabitha once we’re finished.
“Pretty good. I used to be a pitcher on my high school softball team. I wasn’t the star pitcher, but I could hold my own.”
That’s good enough for me.
I can’t throw a baseball to save my life, and right now, that’s precisely not what we need.
She sets up in position, and I pick up a large branch from the ground. It’s thick with smaller branches and twigs poking in all directions.
I let out a hard breath. “Okay, you ready?”
“Ready.”
Cautiously, I creep through the deep snow to the porch, praying the men don’t spot me. I slowly mount the steps, hoping they don’t creak.
I listen for a brief moment to the sounds from inside, then channel my inner-Ninja-slash-world-series-winning-baseball-player self.
I nod at Tabitha, who gathers a snowball and hurls it at the living room window.
Splat!
I listen to see if that got the evil duo’s attention. Nothing. I nod at Tabitha to throw another one.
Splat! Splat!
“What the fuck?” a muffled voice grumbles from inside the house. The sounds of heavy boots clunking across the hardwood floor follow it. Both are barely heard over the rushing of the pulse in my ears.
I adjust my grip on the branch and take a slow, steadying breath.
You can do this.
The door opens, and Evil Asshole steps through the doorway, his gun in his hand.
Before he has a chance to spot me, I swing the branch with all my might. Like our lives depend on it.
Which they do.
Twigs and sharp branches hit his face, rendering him off-balance.
A loud bang splits the air, but I don’t have time to check where the bullet went. The follow-through of the branch causes him to fall backward, and his head hits the stone part of the wall, hard.
Hard enough to knock him out cold.
I don’t have time to appreciate my handiwork, though. Eric comes out to see what the heck is going on.
And gets a snowball in the face.
There’s an old saying that warns never to poke a grumpy bear with a stick.
I ignore it and jab at Eric in his side.
This buys Tabitha enough time to dive for evil sidekick’s gun.
With shaky hands, she aims it at Eric. “Drop your weapon.” She says it with the same authority I’ve seen her wield during a PTA meeting.
But alas, it doesn’t have the same impact on him that it does with everyone else.
“Hmm. What do you think, Chloe,” she says, “if I turn him into an eunuch?”
Eric makes a scoffing noise and steps forward.
Tabitha’s innocent expression twists into a smug smile, and she lowers the gun, aiming it at his groin. “My ex-husband was a louse. We can all agree on that. But do you know the one thing that he did right?”
Eric doesn’t answer.
“He used to take me to the shooting range. He thought it was romantic. I figured it might come in handy one day. Looks like one of us