Free The Last Time I Saw Her by Karen Robards

situation.
    Her training had taught her that eye contact was important, as was giving him respect and personalizing their interaction. Turning her head so that she could see him, she said, “Mr. Fleenor, you don’t want to—”
    “Shut up and keep walking or I’ll shoot you right here and now.” Jamming the gun harder into her side, Fleenor shoved her onward as he growled the threat. Charlie’s lips clamped together even as her feet continued to move. She had no doubt that if she gave him cause he would do exactly what he said. He could kill her, kill as many people as he had bullets in the gun, and nothing would change for him.
    As Michael had once told her, a man on death row has nothing to lose.
    Fear dried her mouth.
    Fleenor’s grip on her arm felt unbreakable. His fingers dug painfully into her flesh. He ground the gun harder into her side, and that hurt, too.
    How could this have happened? How did he get loose?
    Another quick look around confirmed that she’d been horseshoed in by a tight group of four orange-uniformed prisoners flanked by four blue-uniformed guards, all of whom were moving across the parking lot—moving
her
across the parking lot—at a brisk pace. The guards apparently hadn’t noticed that Fleenor had grabbed her and was forcing her at gunpoint to go with them.
    How can they not see this?
That was the astonished thought that ran through her mind as the guards continued to hustle them along through the rain like she was supposed to be right in there with the prisoners. She tried, futilely, to signal one of them with her eyes. That’s when she got a good look at the man’s face and realized that the guard she was trying to signal wasn’t a guard at all: she was looking at Wayne Sayers, convicted serial killer. Six feet tall, pudgy, bald, with squashed-looking features and protuberant brown eyes. Known as the Eyeball Killer because he liked to gouge his victims’ eyes out before killing them, he was a death row resident and her research subject. Sayers wore a guard’s uniform, complete with badge and, yes, gun.
    The hair stood up on the back of her neck.
    Her eyes met his. Sayers smiled at her, his tobacco-stained teeth as repulsive as the rest of him, and her stomach did a death drop toward the ground.
    “Hello, blue eyes,” he said, mouthing the words at her. Her insides twisted. Charlie jerked her gaze away.
    Oh, my God, it’s a prison break. That’s what’s happening here.
The realization hit her with a thrill of horror even as a fast, comprehensive look around at the rest of the group identified the other uniformed “guards” escorting them: Terence Ware, Alberto Torres, and Paul Abell. They were all serial killers, death row residents, and her research subjects.
    They all had guns.
    She was suddenly freezing cold, the kind of cold that had nothing to do with the temperature or the rain. The kind of cold when your blood turns to ice in your veins.
    The uniforms—to get them, they almost certainly had to have jumped the guards who’d been wearing them. But where did they get the guns? Prison guards don’t carry guns, precisely to prevent something like this from happening.
    Speculating was useless. How it was happening she had no idea, but it
was
happening. It was fact. Her heart started pounding like she’d just run a marathon as she faced it.
    At that point Charlie would have screamed, would have tried to run, would have taken her chances on breaking away from the gun and Fleenor’s hand on her arm and the group hemming her in, but given all the chaos with the fire trucks and the sirens and the evacuation and the rain, there was already so much activity, so much noise, that she feared not being seen, not being heard. She would get only one chance to scream and make a run for it, she knew.
    If Fleenor shot me, right here, right now, would anybody even notice?
    Because of the rain, people were scattering, darting in different directions, seeking cover. The rain blunted