Page 64 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
I’m fifteen feet from the hallway when I hear it.
Footsteps.
Not mine. Not Cole’s. Heavy. Methodical. Echoing out ahead.
I dart toward the nearest doorway, one of the few with real doors, and press my back flat against the icy glass. I reach over, looking for Cole.
Nothing.
I reach again. Wall. Door. Empty air. He’s not here. Across the dead zone—twelve feet of total blackness—I hear breathing. Ragged. Too fast. Coming from the wrong side of the corridor entirely.
That idiot went the other way.
The thug’s footsteps turn the corner.
Through the black, his flashlight sweeps in a systematic arc, low to high.
His arc carries the beam left.
Toward Cole.
I can’t see Cole from here, but I know he’s running out of time. The thug is six feet from the doorway, five, his flashlight pouring through the next window over, lazy, unhurried. In complete contrast to my racing heart.
And in that moment, the thought arrives again:
I don’t have to do anything. The thug’s already looking that direction. One sound—one—and it’s over. Cole gets found. I stay flat against this door until they’ve got him and they’re gone, and then I get to Everly and we hide out until morning, walk out of this building, and my name stays clean. Six months of watching my career burn while this man smiled at press conferences gets balanced out in about thirty seconds.
I don’t even have to choose it. I just have to stop choosing against it.
The thug’s flashlight is getting closer. And I don’t have to see Cole to know what’s going through his head. He’s telling himself to run.
A terrible idea.
My hand finds my jacket pocket. The keychain. The tiny flashlight I carried earlier, before Everly and I raided the hardware store. I wrap my hand around it, pull it out.
I don’t think.
My mind’s already made up, a split-second decision born from years of reading the play.
I throw it.
Down the corridor. Hard. Left-handed, sidearm, low to the ground—the keychain skips off tile with a sharp metallic tick and skitters away into the dark.
It’s a small sound. Tiny, really.
The thug stops.
Turns.
His flashlight swings east—toward the sound, away from Cole—and he takes three steps down the corridor, beam searching the tile. Three more steps.
I don’t wait. I step out of my hiding place, placing my trust in the dark.
Four seconds. Maybe five.
I cross the open concourse, my heartbeat ringing in my ears, and reach into the dark until my hand finds Cole’s sleeve. I yank him out of the doorway, and we’re moving, fast and low, toward the dead-end hall.
We clear the corner.
