“We can’t,” Evan said, pointing toward the white Civic. “There’s someone still sitting in that car. Look.”
Through the tinted windshield of the Civic, I could see the silhouette of a man. He was holding a glowing cell phone to his ear, his head turning slowly back and forth, watching the perimeter of the house. One of Dad’s associates. Or worse—someone from the syndicate.
Suddenly, my phone—still in Evan’s hand—began to vibrate violently. The screen lit up the darkness of the blackberry bushes.
It was an incoming video call.
Evan and I stared at the screen in horror. The caller ID didn’t say ‘Dad’. It didn’t say an unknown number.
It said: “MOM”
Evan’s thumb hovered over the screen, trembling. Against his better judgment, he swiped to accept the call and held the screen between the two of us.
The video connected, but the feed was shaky and dark. The camera seemed to be resting on a coffee table, angled upward. It was our living room back home. The familiar floral couch, the framed family photos on the wall.
Sitting on the couch was my mother. Her hands were tied behind her back with heavy zip-ties. A thick piece of gray duct tape was slapped across her mouth. Her eyes were red, swollen, and wide with sheer panic as she stared into the camera, muffled sobs escaping from behind the tape.
A shadow moved into the frame. A man clad entirely in black, wearing a tactical vest, stepped into view. He didn’t look at the camera. Instead, he calmly pulled a heavy, black semi-automatic pistol from his holster, racked the slide with a terrifying, metallic CLACK, and pressed the cold barrel directly against my mother’s temple.
A cold, dead voice spoke from the phone’s speaker, chilling me to the absolute bone:
“Richard, you have exactly ten minutes to bring us the ledger and the boy. If you don’t show up at the warehouse, we start with your wife. And if your daughter gets in the way… we’ll make her watch.”
The call instantly disconnected, leaving the screen completely black.
Before I could even scream, a hand tightly gripped my ankle from behind the blackberry bushes, dragging me backward into the dirt with a violent jerk. I looked up in horror into the cold, remorseless eyes of my father.
“Found you,” Dad whispered.
