She tugs at a loose thread on her blouse.
Her phone dings with another photo of Kylie—here she’s sitting on a mattress in a basement—and a message from Unknown Caller: Further instructions coming. Remember: it’s not about the money, it’s about The Chain. Move on to part 2.
Move on to part 2? Did that mean they received the money? She hopes she hasn’t screwed it up.
But of course, that was the easy part.
She closes the Mac and goes outside to the car.
What now? Back to the house? No, not back to the house. Now she has to get the burner phones and a gun, and the best place to do that is far from neighbors and prying eyes and the Massachusetts gun laws, over the state line in New Hampshire.
She runs to her Volvo, gets in, turns the ignition, and, with a growl of clutch and a squeal of brakes, heads north again.
10
Thursday, 10:57 a.m.
Everyone on the radio is talking about the shooting of a state trooper near Plaistow. There are only about four or five murders a year in New Hampshire, so this is big news and it’s on every station.
The reports unnerve her, so she turns the radio off.
Just over the state line in Hampton, New Hampshire, she finds the place she’s been looking for: Fred’s Firearms and Indoor Tactical Range. She’d driven by Fred’s a thousand times and never dreamed about stopping.
Until today. She parks the Volvo and goes inside. Her stomach still hurts from the punch in the gut and she winces a little as she walks.
Fred is a tall, heavy, amiable-looking sixty-year-old wearing a John Deere cap, a denim shirt, and jeans. His face is badly pockmarked but he’s still a handsome old geezer. The most distinctive thing about him, perhaps, is the gun belt he wears low on his waist. There are two semiautomatics in open holsters, which, Rachel assumes, are there to deter potential thieves. “Morning, ma’am,” he says. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m here for a gun. Something I could keep in my room for, you know, personal protection. We’ve had reports of burglars in our neighborhood.”
“You from Boston?” he asks with a look that seems to add That city of Noam Chomsky, the Harvard debating society, and Ted Kennedy?
“Newburyport,” she says and then wonders if perhaps she should have given a fake hometown.
“You’re looking for a pistol? A thirty-eight, something like that? Something simple?”
“Yes, exactly. I’ve brought my driver’s license.”
“I’ll put your name in the system. There’s a two-day waiting period while we check you out.”
“What? No, I’ll need something sooner than that,” she says, trying not to sound suspicious.
“Well, ma’am, today I can sell you a rifle or a shotgun, any of these,” Fred says, pointing at a row of guns. Rachel is five foot nine but they all look too big for her and too ungainly to hide under a coat while she’s sidling up to some poor kid.
“Do you have anything more compact?”
Fred rubs his chin and gives her an odd, penetrating look. She wishes then that she looked prettier. Attractive women didn’t get that sort of look…or not as much, anyway. In her twenties, Rachel had looked like Jennifer Connelly in Ang Lee’s Hulk, according to Marty, but all that was gone now, of course. Her eyes were hollow and ringed, and the bloom was permanently missing from her cheeks.
“The law puts a lower limit on barrel length, but what about one of these?” Fred says, and from under the counter he pulls out what he says is a Remington Model 870 Express Synthetic Tactical pump-action shotgun.
“This might do,” she replies.
“It’s a 2015, used. I could let you have it for three hundred fifty.”
“I’ll take it.”
Fred winces. Clearly he was expecting her to haggle him down but Rachel is so desperate she’s willing to pay the asking price. She sees him look out into the parking lot and note that her car is a beat-up orange Volvo 240. “Tell you what,” he says. “I’ll throw in a box of shells and a little lesson. Do you want me to show you how to use it?”
“Yes, please.”
Fred walks her to the indoor range.
“You ever fire a gun before?” he asks.
“No. I’ve held one. A rifle, in Guatemala. But I never fired it.”
“Guatemala?”
“Peace Corps. We were making wells. Me and Marty—my ex—were liberal arts majors, so of course they sent us to the jungle to work on an irrigation project. We had no clue. We had our baby girl with us. Kylie. Crazy, really, when you think about it. Marty said he saw a jaguar stalking the camp. No one really believed him. He hurt his arm when he fired the rifle.”
“Well, I’m going to teach you how to do it right,” Fred says and he gives her ear protectors and shows her how to load the weapon. “Tight against your shoulder. There will be a kick, it’s a twenty-gauge. No, no, much tighter. Brace it with your body. If there’s a gap, the weapon will drive itself into your collarbone. Remember Newton’s third law. Every force results in an equal and opposite force.”
Fred pushes a button and a paper target comes up on a roof runner and stops twenty-five feet away from them. There’s a claustrophobic smell in here of grease and gunpowder. The target is a scary-looking man also carrying a weapon; it’s not a terrified little kid.
“Pull the trigger, that’s it, go on, easy does it.”
She squeezes the trigger, there’s an enormous bang, and Fred is right about Newton’s third law. The barrel pounds into her shoulder. When she opens her eyes and looks at the paper target, she finds that it has been obliterated. “Twenty-five feet or closer and you should be OK. If they’re farther away and they’re running, let them run. You get my drift?”
“Let them run toward you so you can kill them or let them run away and call the police.”
He winks at her. “You catch on quick.”
She takes the shells and pays with her flood money. She thanks Fred and goes out to the car and puts the shotgun on the passenger seat next to her. If they’re monitoring her through her phone somehow, hopefully they will see that she’s serious and that she’s getting things done.
11
Thursday, 11:18 a.m.
The Hampton Mall is the perfect place to buy burner phones. She slides the car into a spot in the parking lot, opens up the trunk, and rummages around looking for Kylie’s Red Sox cap. Her own Yankees hat sometimes attracts attention; a Sox or a Pats cap never gets a second look. She finds the cap, puts it on, and pulls it low over her face.
Her phone rings and her stomach lurches. “Hello?” she says automatically without waiting to see who it is.
“Hi, Rachel, this is Jenny Montcrief, Kylie’s homeroom teacher.”
“Oh, Jenny, um, hi.”
“We were wondering where Kylie was today?”
“Yes, she’s sick. I meant to call the office.”
“You have to call before nine.”
“I will next time, I promise. I’m sorry. She won’t be in today, she’s not feeling well.”
“What’s the matter? Anything serious?”
“Just a cold. I hope. Oh and, um, vomiting.”