“Ready,” I say.

My breath is coming fast as I push the door open and she stalks through ahead of me. We’re greeted anticlimactically with another set of double doors, and our breathing fills the small space as we psych ourselves up to walk into danger again.

Just as Sydney takes a step forward toward the door, someone pulls it open slowly from the other side, and the sound of benign chatter precedes whoever it is.

“Shit, they need to fix these doors already; the other one is jammed. Anyway, yeah, they said I could have the Perkins place, then they went and gave it to that shithead Charlie,” a familiar voice says. William Bilford’s voice. “Like fuck that, I’ve been doing all the legwork for months and I told them I wanted those fireplaces. At the Jones place, I’ll have to get the fireplaces rebricked and get rid of all the cement over the backyard.”

The front end of a rolling gurney pushes through the doors into the vestibule, followed by an unfamiliar woman’s voice. “At least you got to call dibs, I just have to wait, even though I’ve put up with—”

A brunette with her dark curls pulled back, wearing a blouse and slacks, stares at me, leaving her sentence unfinished.

“Who’s this? Is he one of the researchers?” She squints, trying to place my face.

“Did you change your mind?” William asks me, clearly amused. “Once shit started going down? I told you to get in early.”

“Ms. Gianetti?”

It’s only when Sydney speaks that they even seem to notice her presence. The woman startles.

“Ms. Green.” The woman looks dismayed. “What are you—?”

“I guess this is why you couldn’t help my mother get her house back?” Sydney’s voice is low and vicious, angrier than I’ve ever heard her.

“No, it’s not like that,” the woman says, her eyes darting between me and William. “I tried my best, but there was nothing to be done.”

“Of course there was nothing to be done!” Sydney points the gun at her. “Tell me the truth. You helped cheat a sick older woman out of the home she’d poured her life into.”

“She isn’t that old,” Gianetti says. “And nothing we did was illegal. You can try finding another lawyer, but the responsibility to read the fine print and think through the sale falls onto the homeowner.”

“How could you do this to people?”

I’ve seen Sydney freak out, but right now her voice is flat. I want to reach out to her, but these people hurt her, not me. And she’s so out of it that she’s not watching their movements.

The woman doesn’t answer her and Sydney pushes. “How do you do some shit like this and think you can just get away with it? Don’t you care that you’re hurting people? Don’t you care that you’re ruining lives, taking from people when you already have enough for yourself?”

Gianetti suddenly looks annoyed when she should be frightened. “I’m tired of you people. You’re saying all this now when you weren’t even responsible enough to make your appointment on Thursday! Just like your mother, crying after the fact and expecting special treatment. If your mother wanted to keep her house she should have paid her taxes and not been so ignorant she fell for—”

The woman’s words are cut off again, but not by surprise or by a question—this time it’s by the bullet currently lodged in the area of her brain located behind her palate.

The blast of the gunshot reverberates in the vestibule and the woman keels forward onto the gurney, eyes wide.

“Christ, Sydney,” I yell, jumping back, but she ignores me, her focus laser sharp on William.

“Bill Bil.” She turns her gun toward him. Her voice is loud, like her ears are still ringing. “Got anything to say about my mother?”

“Didn’t know her, but she was a very fine woman, I’m sure.” His expression is smooth like an oil slick even though bits of his colleague’s brains have splattered on him.

“Good. Then you can answer some of the many questions we have.” Sydney’s gaze drops down to Gianetti and then moves back up to William. “What is this gurney for? Why are you talking about having dibs on Mr. Perkins’s house?”

He shrugs, glances back over his shoulder. From where I’m standing, I can follow his line of sight to the red emergency alarm lever on the wall a little more than an arm’s length away from him.

“I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.” William takes a step back and Sydney closes the space between them.

“If there was a misunderstanding, you’d be a little more concerned by the fact I just blew a hole in homegirl’s head. Talk.”

“I’m just doing my job, right? They told me I could choose from one of the houses on the street if everything went well.” His hand reaches behind him and I take aim for his shoulder.

“Stop moving,” I say.

His hand stills.

“How did you think you would get that house? Magic?” she presses. “How can you lay claim to something that belongs to somebody else?”

“I didn’t know they were hurting people,” William continues, tears springing up in his eyes. “They said they were paying people for the houses.”

“Then what’s the gurney for?” Sydney asks.

“Oh. This? Um.” His eyes dart back and forth between us. “Well . . .”

The gurney suddenly surges toward Sydney—I’ve been watching his hands, not his feet, and he’s kicked it toward her. It hits her in the thighs before rebounding off her, and she stumbles back into the door. William leans back, his fingers grasping toward the alarm.

My gun is already aimed. The element of surprise is all we have and if he alerts people to our presence we’re dead. I squeeze off one silent shot.

The reverberation of the Glock’s blast jangles through me, and William Bilford slumps forward onto the gurney over his friend, a spray of blood misting out of his chest. His chest and not his arm. There’s a gaping hole where a heart is usually located.

Shit.

“Why did you kill him?” Sydney’s eyes are wide. She wipes frantically at her cheeks, where droplets of blood spattered. “I was trying to get him to tell us what’s going on here.”

I scrunch my face contritely and exhale sharply through my nose.

“That was supposed to be an arm shot to stop him from pulling the alarm, but apparently my aim isn’t as good as yours. I’m more of a fists or knives kind of guy.”

“It’s okay. I killed one, you killed one.” She looks down at the two bodies. “All right. They’re dead. They’re dead.”

“Sydney?”

She bends and starts pushing the gurney, struggling with the weight of it. “We can’t leave them here in case someone comes through. And we don’t know if the people ahead will be armed. We can use this for cover.”

I move beside her and we push the gurney through the door.

“She’s the lawyer who said she could help me get the house back,” she says as we enter what seems to be another hallway, nodding her chin toward the woman’s body. “She strung me along for almost a year, acting so concerned and enraged on my mother’s behalf. I’m starting to wonder if all of you are evil.”

“Nothing I say right now will put you at ease about that.” I inhale and the smell of blood fills my nostrils. “I hope we make it out of here alive. Because I like you a lot. I want to spend some time with you that isn’t us actively caught up in a web of conspiracy. I know I probably shouldn’t be saying this while we’re pushing dead bodies around, but life is short.”

“Nothing wrong with shooting your shot in the middle of a bloodbath. If not now, when?” she asks sardonically, but doesn’t reciprocate the sentiment.

We reach a bend in the hallway and turn right, slowly maneuvering the gurney and its horrific payload. We move through another set of double doors—automatic ones that haven’t closed all the way.

The hallway ahead is a little dimmer, the walls painted a dull gray and many of the light sconces bulbless. We’ve passed into a different wing.

It’s the smell that hits me first. Feces. Bodily odor.

Despair.

Large windows line the walls of the corridor up ahead—not glass, something less easy to break. Something good for keeping people confined. This looks like a lockup—it shouldn’t be in the basement of an old shut-down hospital.

There’s no sound except our labored breathing and the creak of the gurney wheels. The silence around us feels heavy, foreboding.

As we approach the first window, a hand slaps against it hard, and Sydney stops short and presses into me—William Bilford’s body slides off the gurney to the floor with a heavy thud.

“Mrs. Payne?” She rushes past the body on the floor and presses her hand to the window.

“No, no, no. This is too much. This is too—”

Her words break off, and she just shakes her head, staring into the room.

When I walk up behind her, an older woman with matted hair and cheeks caved in from missing teeth is staring at Sydney through the plexiglass. The whites of her eyes are yellow and swimming with tears. I stare at those eyes for a long moment.

I recognize them.