Chapter 9 - The Witness in the Woods
The voice was weak, raspy, and shaking with cold, but it carried across the clearing with absolute clarity.
A woman stepped out from behind the stacks of firewood near the rear shed.
She wore a dark green oilskin coat that was covered in mud and pine needles. Her left arm was bound tightly to her chest with a strip of white bedsheet that was soaked in dark red blood near the forearm. Her face was pale, thin, her cheekbones sharp against her skin, but her dark eyes burned with a fierce, unyielding light that matched her daughter's.
"Sarah," Sterling whispered.
Victor turned his head slowly, his revolver wavering between Sterling and his wife. "You... you were supposed to be in the well-house."
"I crawled out three hours ago, Victor," Sarah Vance said, stepping slowly into the yellow glare of the truck’s high beams. She was shivering uncontrollably from shock and hypothermia, but her posture was rigid, erect. "While you were waiting down at the gas station for Daniel’s car to pass."
"Sarah, stay back!" the trooper yelled.
"He doesn't have any bullets left in that cylinder, Officer," Sarah said, stopping five feet from her husband. "He shot the lock off the back shed two hours ago. He has three rounds left."
Victor’s hand trembled violently around the revolver’s rubber grip. "Sarah... give me the child. We can go to Montreal. We can clear the Cayman accounts before Sterling files the injunction."
"There are no Cayman accounts, Victor," Sarah said, her voice dropping into a quiet, pitying whisper. "Daniel liquidated those accounts four years ago to pay for Nicole’s heart treatments and your federal restitution fines. The ledgers in that box aren't bank codes. They’re the full evidence files I gave to the United States Attorney’s Office."
Victor stared at her, his jaw dropping open, his bloodshot eyes darting from his wife to Daniel Sterling. "What?"
"I kept a duplicate set," Sarah continued, taking one more step forward into the mud. "I hid them under the floorboards six years ago. I knew the moment you left prison, you’d come looking for something that didn't exist."
A long, agonizing silence fell over the driveway. The rain drummed against the metal roof of the truck: patter-patter-patter.
Victor looked down at his shoes—the worn, mud-stained loafers that had replaced his custom Italian leather shoes. He looked at his wife, whose blood was dripping slowly off her bandaged arm into the wet clay. He looked at the black steel box in Sterling’s hands.
He realized, with a sudden, absolute clarity, that the kingdom he had spent eight years in prison dreaming of recapturing was nothing more than ash, paper, and rain.
"Drop it, Victor," Sterling said softly. "It’s over."
Victor’s fingers slowly loosened around the heavy steel frame of the revolver.
May you like
The gun dropped into the dark mud with a dull, wet thud.
Two troopers lunged forward instantly, driving Victor to his knees in the rain, pulling his arms behind his back as the steel handcuffs clicked shut with two sharp, final snaps.
