The red numbers on the alarm clock read 2:03 in the morning when the phone vibrated against the nightstand. I was awake before my hand touched it. Thirty years in uniform teaches you that sleep is a position, not a state.
You occupy it, and you leave it, and the transition can be total in under a second if the situation requires it. I expected a wrong number. What I heard instead was a child trying not to cry.
“Grandpa.”
The voice was barely above a whisper, shaking so hard the syllables seemed to vibrate against the phone speaker. Mia. My eight-year-old granddaughter.
“Mia. Why are you whispering? Is everything okay?”
“Grandpa, I’m thirsty.”
Confusion arrived first.
She was thirsty? Her bedroom was forty feet from her parents’ room. Austin and Monica were heavy sleepers, but they were not deaf.
“Honey, go ask your dad for water. It’s late.”
“I can’t.”
Her voice cracked. A tiny splintering sound.
“The big door is locked, Grandpa. The front door and the back door and the garage. I knocked on Mom and Dad’s room and nobody answered.
I think they’re gone. It’s really dark, and I heard something in the basement and I’m scared.”
My blood went cold. I do not mean that as a figure of speech.
It is a physical sensation, a genuine temperature drop that moves from the chest outward, and I had felt it before, under circumstances where it meant that something was genuinely wrong and that every second of hesitation had a cost. I did not ask her to check again. I did not suggest she might be mistaken.
“Listen to me. Go to your closet, take your blanket, close the door, and sit there. Do not come out until you hear my voice.”
I was already out of bed with one hand holding the phone and the other pulling on my trousers.
I shoved my feet into my boots without socks. I opened the nightstand drawer and took out my Sig Sauer, checked the chamber, and put it in my pocket. I drove the twenty-minute route in twelve.
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