Heaven Should Fall - By Rebecca Coleman Page 0,125

with tape, and his shoes were gone. Above his head the metal cord of the lightbulb swung slowly, like a pendulum marking time with great cans of milk powder and freeze-dried meats.

I screamed and, by instinct, jerked the tape from his mouth. He spit out a wadded paper towel and gasped in a deep breath of air. “Jill,” he said, “get me out of here.”

Already I could hear the rapid footsteps of the men returning to the house. “That had to be Jill,” I heard Cade saying. At the sound of his voice Drew strained his shoulders toward me, bumping his head against my arm, and I skittered back from his desperate touch. Cade’s boots and Dodge’s were quick and hollow against the stairs. Before I could turn I backed into Cade, who clapped his hand over my mouth when I startled, whispering a shushing noise like the one he used with TJ.

“Goddamn it,” Dodge muttered, coming down the stairs behind Cade. “You better not scream, boy. We don’t got neighbors anyhow.”

“Cade,” Drew said. “What the fuck, man.”

Cade let me go, and I turned to him with a look of mute shock. “Don’t, Jill,” he said. “The guy’s had it coming for three years now. He’s alive, so chill.”

“Call the cops, Jill,” Drew said.

Dodge pointed at him. “You, shut up.”

“You better pick your loyalties wisely right now,” Drew told me. “They’ll be here by tonight, busting down his door.”

“In your dreams,” said Cade.

Drew looked him in the eye. “Watch and wait. You’re already on the shit list, man. You made a bad, bad move.”

Dodge grabbed the chair by its sides and dragged it backward toward the wall, tipping Drew back. The legs scraped the concrete with a broken and dissonant squeal before Dodge roughly righted it again and set to work securing it to the wall with a length of chain. I turned to Cade, who was moving his baseball cap up and down with a nervousness that belied his glowering expression. This wasn’t his idea, I knew all at once, knowing from that gesture that he was on the edge of a panic he couldn’t reveal. “Will one of you tell me what’s going on?” I demanded.

“We’re on plan C,” he informed me in a curt voice. Dodge tossed him a pack of zip ties pulled from his back pocket, and as Cade caught it I saw Elias suddenly clear in my mind’s eye, the way he was in the woods that day—the bulk of his curled shoulders, the sweat on his temples, the dreadful distance in his gaze. Cade pocketed the bag as if it meant nothing to him, and said to Drew, “I’m not on any shit list anywhere. So sit tight.”

“The hell you aren’t. Why do you think you didn’t get my job?” Cade looked at him sharply, his hand stilled for a moment on the brim of his cap. To Dodge, Drew said, “Are you the Powell guy? Richard or something? Yeah, he’s the guy on the watch list. The antigovernment nut job. No chance Bylina’s guys were ever going to clear you for my job when your family runs with this guy.”

“Shut up,” he said, but Dodge fixed the chain against a second hook and rose grinning. I stopped at the base of the stairs and looked at Drew, momentarily halting my effort to leave. If Drew already knew about Cade’s family, we were all in more trouble than I could have imagined. For all these months I had written off Dodge’s claims as paranoia, but if they were true, then I was already an accessory. I had known so much and said so little, and whatever agency knew Dodge’s name might also know about me and my silence. The fact that I had reasons for it wouldn’t matter. People always did.

“They got me on a watch list, huh?” he said, ignoring Cade’s scowl.

“Gag that asshole back up,” said Cade.

“Why? Let him talk. I’m interested.”

Cade gave a shake of his head and moved toward Drew, but the sharpness of my voice stopped him. “This matters, Cade. Let him say what he knows.”

The way Drew’s arms were fixed behind his back made it impossible to fully raise his head, but he looked up as best he could and trained his glance on me. “Call them, Jill. They’re coming anyway, and you’ve got a lot to lose.”

“She’s not on your side, little buddy,” said Dodge.

“Is that true, Jill?” asked Drew. His voice was plaintive. “You really