I look over my shoulder, but in my head I’m running through the logistics. One more step toward the stairs and he’ll lose sight of my right arm. One more suitcase and I’ll be standing in reach of the workbench.

“I’m pretty sure that’s an old wives’ tale,” I say, creeping closer to the bench. “And it’s too late anyway. My Terminix guy told me by the time I see one roach, there are a million more crawling around behind the walls.” It’s why I pay him to spray the shit out of this place every other month, so we don’t have bugs. I shove a box away from the wall and stomp on the empty floor. “Bax, go get the broom, will you? I think I saw it at the bottom of the stairs.”

Baxter shakes his head. His feet stay rooted to the floor, his gaze to the spot where I just stomped on empty air.

The man doesn’t move, either. “What? Why?”

I whirl around, positioning myself one more step to the right. Two feet, no more, the line of tools within arm’s reach. I pick my target in my periphery, a blue-handled screwdriver at the end of the board, thin and six inches long. One unwatched second, that’s all I need.

“So I can sweep it out before it disappears behind the wall.”

“Just leave it and let’s go. Did you hear that, Beatrix?” He leans his upper body back into the hall, craning his neck to holler into the empty rooms. “We’re going back upstairs, so that leaves just you down here with about a million cockroaches.”

He turns back, rounding us up with his gun and marching us back toward the stairs. Baxter whines for me to carry him again, and I hoist him onto a hip and drag us both up the stairs.

But as we’re coming up to the main level, I tug my right sleeve over my hand and prick the pad of my thumb with the screwdriver, and a thrill travels up my spine. It’s a Phillips-head, the point sharp enough to break the skin.

Bring it on, asshole.

I’m ready.

C A M

5:24 p.m.

I sit in my truck in the bank parking lot, traffic drumming on the other side of the bushes at my bumper, and scroll through the messages on my phone. Missed calls from my mother, a buttload of bills and marketing emails, a flurry of texts from Flavio and a local Housewife hounding me to cater a dinner for the cast and a hundred of their closest friends. I ignore them all, searching for the one I need, but it’s not there.