Which didn’t really matter, because he’d left his own gun in the car. Fucking hell. It didn’t matter and he couldn’t just stand there waffling. He didn’t have any time to waste.

Her laugh was shrill. “I don’t want to kill you either, but I will. Drop the stuff and put your hands up.”

He shoved the stolen items beneath his shirt and tucked its hem into his pants so the disguises wouldn’t fall out. Then he calmly pulled Regina’s gun from his pocket and pointed it at her. “Drop the gun.” He began walking toward her, shaking his head when she clutched the gun tighter and backed up, matching him step for step.

“Hurry!” she cried into her phone. “Please hurry. He’s got a gun!”

When he reached her, he took the gun from her shaking hand, pocketed it, then grabbed her head in both hands and gave a quick twist. Dropping her to the floor, he turned and ran.

He’d parked his car a few feet from the back door and, luckily, had left the engine running because his hot-wiring skills were a bit rusty. It had taken him a few tries to steal the thing to begin with. At least now he didn’t need to fumble with it.

He slid behind the wheel and was around the next block when he heard sirens. Hands gripping the steering wheel until they hurt, he kept driving, obeying the speed limit, until he was in the next town, his heart still beating so hard that he was dizzy.

He pulled onto a side street and leaned against the headrest until his heartbeat returned to normal.

Too close. Too fucking close. Another thirty seconds and his ass would have been toast. I should have just shot her and run. But he hadn’t wanted to leave a bullet behind and there was no way he’d have had time to dig a bullet out of the wall, much less out of her body if the wound wasn’t a through-and-through.

At least he had a disguise now. And he had a few addresses for empty houses.

But he needed to find another car without GPS before he went house hunting, in case there had been security cameras behind the store. Last thing he needed was to have this piece-of-shit clunker added to the BOLO. “Pain in the fucking ass,” he muttered.

But it could have been much worse. He could have gotten caught. And then he’d never be able to show Mercy the error of her ways, and that wouldn’t do at all.

He rubbed his hands over his face, then checked the abandoned-house addresses he’d noted. He’d just put the address into Maps when his phone vibrated in his hand, making him yelp.

And then swear. It’s Pastor. Again. He considered letting the call go to voice mail, but reconsidered. He wouldn’t tell Pastor what he was up to, because he didn’t want to give DJ Belmont any opportunity to cause trouble for him—or to come up with an explanation for why he’d lied about Mercy’s death. He wanted Pastor to see the shock and the guilt on DJ’s face when he hauled Mercy through the gates of Eden by her hair.