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Back Deception Cove Save as PDF
Chapters (78)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Epigraph
  6. Prologue
  7. One
  8. Two
  9. Three
  10. Four
  11. Five
  12. Six
  13. Seven
  14. Eight
  15. Nine
  16. Ten
  17. Eleven
  18. Twelve
  19. Thirteen
  20. Fourteen
  21. Fifteen
  22. Sixteen
  23. Seventeen
  24. Eighteen
  25. Nineteen
  26. Twenty
  27. Twenty-One
  28. Twenty-Two
  29. Twenty-Three
  30. Twenty-Four
  31. Twenty-Five
  32. Twenty-Six
  33. Twenty-Seven
  34. Twenty-Eight
  35. Twenty-Nine
  36. Thirty
  37. Thirty-One
  38. Thirty-Two
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. Thirty-Eight
  45. Thirty-Nine
  46. Forty
  47. Forty-One
  48. Forty-Two
  49. Forty-Three
  50. Forty-Four
  51. Forty-Five
  52. Forty-Six
  53. Forty-Seven
  54. Forty-Eight
  55. Forty-Nine
  56. Fifty
  57. Fifty-One
  58. Fifty-Two
  59. Fifty-Three
  60. Fifty-Four
  61. Fifty-Five
  62. Fifty-Six
  63. Fifty-Seven
  64. Fifty-Eight
  65. Fifty-Nine
  66. Sixty
  67. Sixty-One
  68. Sixty-Two
  69. Sixty-Three
  70. Sixty-Four
  71. Sixty-Five
  72. Sixty-Six
  73. Sixty-Seven
  74. Sixty-Eight
  75. Acknowledgments
  76. Discover More
  77. About the Author
  78. Also by Owen Laukkanen

She breathed, anyway. She sipped juice from a sippy cup, and she swallowed the warm soup that Shelby spooned into her mouth. She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t exactly move, but her eyes followed Shelby around the room sometimes, and when Shelby squeezed on her hand, her mama sometimes squeezed back.

A door swung open, somewhere out in the main part of the house. Shelby sensed movement.

“I’ll be right back,” she told her mama. Then she stole out of the bedroom and crept down the dark hall toward the living room. She could see darkness out the wreckage of the front door, the Makah County cruiser parked on the street beyond. This was not good.

There were two ways out of the house. Harwood and his boyfriends had the front door covered. That left the kitchen door, and that wasn’t going to work either. Because as Shelby got to the end of the hall, she looked through the living room into the kitchen and saw the man there, the black man with the white scar on his face, the man she’d never seen before in her life. The man had a gun, and Shelby knew when she saw him she was in deeper shit than she’d realized.

This guy wasn’t Kirby Harwood, or Dale Dumb-Ass Whitmer. This guy was on another level. And Shelby knew just from looking at him that she couldn’t outwit him so easy as she could the Deception Cove deputies. He wasn’t going to be scared off by a couple of potshots and a few angry words.

She leveled her rifle. Took aim at the man. He hadn’t seen her yet. A couple of steps farther and he’d be clear in her line of sight. She tensed her finger on the trigger, waited, prepared to fire.

Never got the chance.

Before she could shoot the man, someone else shot first. Someone from the front door, Kirby or Dale, the shot catching her in the stomach and sending her staggering back. Now the man saw her, and he was firing too, backing her down the hall and out of firing position, backing her toward her mama’s bedroom again, Shelby swearing and stumbling and bleeding all over.

And when she got to the bedroom, Shelby knew she was done.

One of the dimwits—whoever wasn’t shooting at her—had come around the side of the house. Put a hole in her mama’s bedroom window, poured gas through. There was a fire starting to burn beneath the windowsill; as Shelby backed into the room, it had already caught on the curtains and was climbing its way up the wall. There was no killing this fire. No getting out through the window. Even if she could, there was nowhere to go.