She felt a tremor setting in everywhere—her jaw, her shoulders, her hands.

The top of the stairs creaked. She sucked in a gasp and swung her head back around, raising the pistol again.

The shaking was worst in her hands. It was hard to keep the gunsights lined up with each other—harder still to keep them steady on a target spot.

Another creak—the next step down from the top, still unseen from where she knelt.

She took another breath and forced herself to hold it. She counted to three, then let the breath out slowly, under control. It helped with the shaking.

She put the gunsights on the highest stair tread she could see. It was probably the fourth or fifth down from the top.

She waited for the next creaking step.

Ten seconds passed.

Fifteen.

She felt her grip on the gun going slick with sweat.

Twenty seconds.

Then came a new sound—not the creak of a wooden stair. A metallic squeak instead. Hinges. The sound ended with the click of a latch. The man on the staircase had just closed the basement door behind him.

Cold bloomed over Danica’s skin, a gut-level dread that her brain caught up to a second later.

Then the light at the bottom of the stairs clicked off, plunging the basement into perfect darkness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

For a terrible few seconds she tried to keep the gun aimed anyway. Tried to lock her arms and hands exactly as they were.

It was hopeless. Everything still shook. In the pitch-black it was impossible to tell if she had the weapon held straight at all, much less pointed at the stairs. Even her body swayed where she knelt. There was no reference point by which to keep her bearings.

She made her breathing as quiet as she could, letting it flow in and out through her mouth instead of her nose.

She waited.

Maybe the next creaking step would give her something to aim at. Maybe—

An avalanche of sound cut off her thinking: rapid footsteps descending the staircase in a flurry of motion, then the scrape of a shoe on concrete, the slap of a palm on the basement floor, the scuff of elbows and knees scrambling in some direction over the surface—the whole sound, from start to finish, lasting no more than a second or two.

Then nothing.

Just silence and darkness—in which she was no longer alone.

Stay still. Stay quiet. He doesn’t know where you are. He doesn’t have much time to look for you, either.

Which was true. Had to be true. Because other cops would be coming. The neighbors would have called. Dispatch might even know that the first cop had been killed—they would at least know he wasn’t responding.

How much longer could it be before backup arrived? How long had it been, already, since the deputy had been shot?