[Georgia 03] Fallen Read Free Page B

sure she could move on.
    The first door was to her old bedroom. Someone had searched here, too. The drawers in Faith’s old bureau stuck out like tongues. The mattress was ripped open. Emma’s crib had been busted to pieces. Her blanket was ripped in two. The mobile that had hung above her head every month of her life had been ground into the carpet like a pile of dirt. Faith swallowed the burning rage this ignited inside of her. She forced herself to keep moving.
    Quickly, she cleared the closets, under the bed. She did the same in Zeke’s room, which had been turned into her mother’s office. Papers were scattered on the floor. The desk drawers had been thrown against the wall. She glanced into the bathroom. The shower curtain was pulled back. The linen closet gaped open. Towels and sheets spilled onto the floor.
    Faith was standing to the left of her mother’s bedroom door when she heard the first siren. It was distant, but clear. She should wait for it, wait for backup.
    Faith kicked open the door and swung around in a crouch. Her finger went to the trigger. Two men were at the foot of the bed. One was on his knees. He was Hispanic, dressed only in a pair of jeans. The skin across his chest was shredded as if he’d been whipped with barbed wire. Sweat glistened on every part of his body. Black and red bruises punched along his ribs. He had tattoos all over his arms and torso, the largest of which was on his chest: a green and red Texas star with a rattlesnake wrapped around it. He was a member of Los Texicanos, a Mexican gang that had controlled the Atlanta drug trade for twenty years.
    The second man was Asian. No tattoos. Bright red Hawaiian shirt and tan chinos. He stood with the Texicano in front of him, holding a gun to the man’s head. A cherry-handled Smith and Wesson five-shot. Her mother’s revolver.
    Faith kept the shotgun trained on the Asian’s chest. The cold, hard metal felt like an extension of her body. Adrenaline had pumped her heart into a frenzy. Every muscle inside of her wanted to pull the trigger.
    Her words were clipped. “Where’s my mother?”
    He spoke in a twangy southern drawl. “You shoot me, you’re gonna hit him.”
    He was right. Faith was standing in the hallway, less than six feet away. The men were too close together. Even a headshot carried the risk that a pellet would stray, hitting—possibly killing—the hostage. Still, she kept her finger on the trigger, the shotgun steady. “Tell me where she is.”
    He pressed the muzzle harder against the man’s head. “Drop the gun.”
    The sirens were getting louder. They were coming from Zone 5, on the Peachtree side of the neighborhood. Faith said, “You hear that sound?” She mapped their path down Nottingham, calculating the cruisers would be here in less than a minute. “Tell me where my mother is or I swear to God I’ll kill you before they hit the door.”
    He smiled again, his hand tightening around the gun. “You know what we’re here for. Hand it over and we’ll let her go.”
    Faith didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Her mother was a sixty-three-year-old widow. The most valuable thing in the house was the land they were standing on.
    He took her silence for equivocation. “You really wanna lose your mommy over Chico here?”
    Faith pretended to understand. “It’s that simple? You’ll trade?”
    He shrugged. “Only way we’ll both walk outta here.”
    “Bullshit.”
    “No bullshit. Even trade.” The sirens got louder. Tires screeched in the street. “Come on, bitch. Tick-tock. Deal or no deal?”
    He was lying. He’d already killed one person. He was threatening another. As soon as he figured out Faith was bluffing, the only thing he’d give her was a bullet in the chest.
    “Deal,” she agreed, using her left hand to toss the shotgun out in front of her.
    The firearms instructor at the shooting range carried a stopwatch that counted every tenth of a second, which was why Faith knew