39
Lisa had long known that Anthony was stubborn about doing things his way. It was one of the traits of his that she loved, though sometimes it drove her nuts. He was a man of purpose and action and let nothing deter him from what he thought was right.
But she was stubborn, too. He hadn’t married some docile little wifey. Like it or not, she had a mind of her own and a willingness to use it.
For maybe ten minutes after he ventured out into the storm, she waited on the sofa, purse clasped at her side, top unzipped to give quick access to the gun. Then, she couldn’t tolerate sitting still any longer. She got up and went to the front windows.
Stay away from the windows . . .
She peeked through the curtains. Outside, the storm raged as if a colossal battle were taking place in the firmament, rivulets of rain hitting the glass like expended shells.
She didn’t see Anthony, but the light was still off in Mike’s rental house. Anthony had lamely tried to convince her that he believed it was due to a mere power outage. As if she had a big “G” tattooed on her forehead that stood for “Gullible.”
Both of them knew that, somehow, the church crazies had found them. If they had learned about Mike’s rental—and God knows she didn’t want to speculate how—then why couldn’t they discover that she and Anthony were hiding in this place, too?
Her lips drawing into a taut line, she spun away from the window. Quickly, she gathered all of their things. She hurried into the garage and loaded everything into the jeep.
Although she worried about how long they’d have to live this paranoid, nomadic lifestyle, it no longer felt as disconcerting as it had earlier. When your survival hung in the balance, you could adapt to anything.
But being on the run, constantly looking over their shoulders, would make it difficult to go back to the comfortable world of live, work, and play, make it hard to immerse herself in the minutiae of mundane affairs, and make it impossible to believe that life was as simple and orderly as she had once thought. She finally understood how delicate the fabric of their world really was, how one unexpected event could rip out a patch that forever altered your existence.
Most of all, she finally understood, at a heart-deep level, how Anthony had become the man that he was. This descent into strangeness and terror might result in them actually becoming closer than ever.
Gun at her side, she hit the button to open the garage door. The door clambered up, and the thunderstorm charged in.
She moved to the edge of the doorway and looked toward Mike’s rental again. What she saw robbed the breath from her lungs.
The troll-like crazy man, wearing a rain slicker, was going inside the house.
Anthony’s in there. I can feel it. The nut is going in after him.
She hustled behind the wheel, fired up the engine, and reversed out of the garage. Rain crashed onto the truck so violently she felt as if she were inside a steel drum being pelted by gunfire.
She hadn’t intended to close the garage door—she wanted Anthony to know that she had gone—but when she saw a metallic object in the grass that looked suspiciously like one of his revolvers, she halted in the driveway and hopped out of the truck.
Instantly, she was drenched. She raced across the lawn, almost lost her balance on the slick grass, plucked the handgun off the ground, and scrambled back to the dry comfort of the jeep. She placed the revolver on the seat beside her.
He had armed himself with two firearms before leaving, but he wouldn’t have dropped the revolver in the grass and left it there unless he’d had no choice, unless he’d been on the run.
She glanced at the rental house.
Now what? How could she help Anthony if he were in a tight spot? What if he didn’t make it out of the house alive?
No, he will make it. Don’t you dare to think otherwise.
An idea came to her. She whispered a prayer, and pulled out of the driveway.