“Detective Sullivan. Open up, Mrs. Parker. I’m alone.” She opened the door, and there he stood—drawn, tired, older than he had looked before.
He came into the kitchen, sat on a stool, and ran a finger through the white residue on the table. “Sulfur,” he said. Then he looked up at her, and there was no threat in his face. Only something like pleading.
“Mrs. Parker, I know. About Ellie. About the war hospital. About the stitches.” Antonia said nothing, her hand still tight around the knife in her apron pocket.
“You here to arrest me?” she asked evenly. “If I were, I wouldn’t have come alone,” Nick said. “I came to tell you to stop.”
“Rankin’s barricaded in. There’s an armed detail out there. They’ll kill you before you get close. You’ve already had your revenge.”
Antonia gave him a thin, dead smile. “You think this is revenge, Nick? It isn’t. It’s sanitation.”
“You don’t treat gangrene halfway. Leave one patch of rot behind and it comes back. Rankin is the infection.”
“As long as he’s whole, he’ll think he got away with it. He’ll come out of hiding and do it again to some other girl.”
She stepped close enough that he could smell bleach on her skin. “You’re a decent man, Nick. But your law is weak. It protects wolves and lectures sheep.”
“Go home. Forget you came here. You’ve got a family. Stay out of this.” Nick sat in silence for a full minute, then stood.
“I’ll have a unit posted outside your building in the morning. But right now…” He paused. “There’s a shift change. For two hours, nobody will be watching too closely.”
He set his hat on the table and ran a hand through his hair. “Victor’s in the house. Security’s in the yard. But the back gate…”
“The lock sticks. You can pop it with a knife.” He held her gaze. “I didn’t say that. You didn’t hear it.”
Then he turned and left. Antonia stood looking at the closed door. Maybe he had given her a chance. Maybe he had given one to his own conscience. “Thank you, son,” she said quietly.
There wasn’t much time. Operation Final began at two in the morning. The Rankin estate looked like a sleeping dragon that kept one eye open.
Searchlights swept the grounds, catching tree trunks and wet grass. At the front gate, police officers shifted from foot to foot, smoking and muttering about the assignment. None of them really believed a lone attacker would try to get in.
They were expecting armed men. Not one solitary figure slipping toward the back gate by the garage. Antonia moved fast. She found the old rusted lock.
The knife blade slid into the gap and pressed the latch. Click. The gate gave way. The path into the yard was open. But ahead of her was the first line of defense—the dogs…
