Free The Face of Death by Cody McFadyen

like this.
    “Please, Sarah. Talk to me. Make me understand.”
    The words work: The anger leaves her eyes. Her trigger finger relaxes and she looks away.
    Thank God, I think, fighting down a bubble of semi-hysteria, a bout of the
    (clangy-jitters)
    When she looks back, anguish has replaced the rage.
    “You’re my last hope,” she says. Her voice is small and hollow.
    “I’m listening, Sarah,” I urge her. “Tell me. Last hope for what?”
    “Last hope…” She sighs, and it rattles in her throat. “Of finding someone that’ll believe I’m not just bad luck,” she whispers. “That’ll believe The Stranger is real.”
    I stare at her, incredulous.
    “
Believe
you?” I blurt. I yank a thumb behind me, indicating the bedroom and what’s inside. “Sarah, I know something happened here that you didn’t have anything to do with. And I’m willing to listen to whatever you have to say.”
    I think she’s caught off guard by the fact that my response comes as such a reflex action and that I seem so genuinely astonished at the idea of
not
taking her seriously. Hope lights up her eyes and wars with that terrible cynicism. Her face twists, her mouth wrenches. She looks like a fish drowning in the air.
    “Really?”
she asks in an agonized whisper.
    “Really.”
I pause. “Sarah, I don’t understand what’s happened to you up to this point. But from what I’ve seen so far, the person responsible for this had to be strong. Stronger than you. Or me, for that matter.”
    A kind of fearful wonder runs through her eyes. “Did he…” Her lower lip trembles. “Do you mean that you can
tell
he was here?”
    “Yep.”
    Is that so?
    But there’s another possibility, yes? Maybe she made the father do all the heavy lifting at gunpoint. She could still be the one.
    I dismiss the thought with an imaginary wave of my hand.
    Too advanced, too dark. She’s too young to have honed her tastes to that degree.
    “Maybe,” Sarah whispers, more to herself than me. “Maybe he screwed up this time.”
    Her face crumples, then smoothes back out, crumples, then smoothes back out. Hope and despair battle for the steering wheel. She drops the gun. She brings her hands to her face. A moment later, that raw, naked anguish again. It bursts from her, piercing, primal, terrible, pure. The sound of a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf.
    I grab the gun from the carpet, say “Thank God” to myself once, safety it, and stuff it into the waist of my jeans. I grab Sarah as she shrieks, and stuff her into the space between my arms and my chest.
    Her grief is a hurricane. It pounds against me.
    I hold her tight, and we ride out the storm.
    I rock and croon and say wordless things and feel helpless and miserable and yet relieved.
    Better crying than dead.
    When it’s over, I’m soaked with tears. Sarah clings to me, semi-boneless. She’s exhausted.
    In spite of this, she struggles and pushes away from me. Her face is swollen from crying, and pale.
    “Smoky?” she says. Her voice is faint.
    “Yes, Sarah?”
    She looks at me, and I’m surprised at the strength I see, swimming up through the exhaustion that’s pulling her down.
    “I need you to promise me you’ll do something.”
    “What?”
    She points down the hall. “My bedroom is back there. In a drawer by the bed is my diary. Everything is in it, everything about The Stranger.” She grips my arms. “
Promise
me you’ll read it.
You
—not someone else.” Her voice is fierce.
“Promise me.”
    “I promise,” I say without hesitation.
    At this point, you couldn’t keep me from it.
    “Thanks,” she whispers.
    Her eyes roll up into her head and she passes out in my arms.
    I shiver once, an after-reaction. I unclip the radio from my belt and turn it on.
    “All clear in here,” I say into it, my voice steadier than I feel. “Send in a medic for the girl.”

10
    NIGHT HAS OFFICIALLY FALLEN IN CANOGA PARK. THE HOUSE IS lit up by patrol cars and streetlamps, but SWAT is getting