distorted? Fighting frustration and terror, she felt along the top of the sash and found some kind of metal latch. She worked the keeper free and shoved the panel upward. This time is slid easily.
She climbed through the opening.
Having checked all four bedrooms, and not finding the thin blonde in any of them, Cleavon suspected she would be behind the last door on the right. What he discovered instead was a steep set of stairs leading to the main floor.
He took the steps three at a time and emerged in the kitchen.
A back door led outside.
Cursing, he hurried to the door and found the deadbolt engaged.
Which meant the girl couldn’t have left through it.
Jesse appeared in the hallway, eyeglasses busted, face a bloody mess.
“Where is she, man?” he asked. “Where’d she get to?”
“Go wait by the front staircase,” Cleavon told him, then returned upstairs.
Arms and legs spread wide, back pressed against the house’s weatherboards, Jenny inched away from the window along a thin horizontal strip of molding. Blinking rain from her eyes, she glanced to the fog-frosted ground twenty-five feet below and suffered a moment of vertigo. It was too far to jump. She’d break her legs. Fifteen feet to her right, though, a tall maple tree grew close to the house. She thought if she could reach the branches, she could climb safely down.
She continued inching sideways, her fingernails clawing the wet wood for a grip that didn’t exist. With each small step she half expected to lose her footing and plummet to the ground. Still, she pressed on. She didn’t have a choice.
“Well, fuck me blue!”
Jenny was so startled she pitched forward. For a sickening second she was convinced she was going to fall. But then she flattened her back against the weatherboards once more.
She turned her head to look the way she’d come. The man with the mutton chops and handlebar mustache was leaning out the window, leering at her.
“Come back inside, darlin’. You gonna kill yourself out there.”
“Leave me alone!”
“Come on back. I ain’t gonna hurt you.”
She resumed edging sideways.
“Shit, darling, I wanted you dead, I’d shoot you right now with this rifle. Now come on inside.”
That was true, she realized. He could shoot her easily. So why didn’t he?
Because he wants to rape your first.
Swallowing a moan, she continued her progress.
“Jess!” the man shouted.
“You find her?”
“Get outside! To the side of the house. She’s gone out the window.”
“Okay!”
Jenny glanced at the tree. She wouldn’t reach it in time. The other man would be down below her any moment, waiting for her.
She only had one option remaining.
She jumped.
Cleavon stared in disbelief as the stupid cunt jumped off the small ledge. She hit the ground with a hundred-pound thump. For what seemed like a long moment she didn’t move, didn’t make a sound, and he thought she was either unconscious or dead, and it served her right—
She began to scream, high pitched and glassy, like a stuck pig.
“What did you expect, darlin’?” he muttered, then went downstairs to see how badly she was hurt.
Jesse was bent over her when Cleavon got to them. She was still screaming and crying at the same time. It wasn’t doing his headache any good. But he didn’t think she’d quiet down no matter how nice he asked, and he didn’t have a sock to stuff in her mouth, so he ignored the noise the best he could.
“It ain’t pretty,” Jesse said, his owlish face frowning.
Cleavon studied the girl. She had large blue eyes and what would have been a pretty face when it wasn’t wet with tears and rain and twisted in pain.
“You see what you did?” Cleavon told her. “You went and broke your goddamn legs. I told you I wasn’t gonna hurt you.”
Jesse said, “What we gonna do, Cleave?”
“Give me a hand getting her to the car.”
“I mean, about all this.” He swallowed. “Lonnie’s dead, for fuck sake, Cleave. Both Lonnie and his boy. How we gonna cover this up?”
“Just give me a fuckin’ hand getting her to the car.” He crouched next to the girl and set Lonnie’s rifle and his machete in the mud. “You take her left arm. I’ll—”
“We gotta call Mr. Pratt.”
Cleavon paused, one hand on the girl’s shoulder. She was moaning now, which was better than screaming. “What the fuck is Spence gonna do?” he snapped. “He some sort of clean-up man, Jess? He gonna come out here and clean up this mess? What’s calling him gonna do?”
“He might think of a way to