Chapter 14: The Shed

Levi's POV

I told Hallie I was going to sleep in the truck outside her mother's house.

That was a lie, and she had made me promise not to lie to her.

At one in the morning I sat in the cab with the engine off and watched the kitchen light go out in Lorna Fisk's window.

Then I started the truck and drove four hours east in the dark.

My chief had called me that afternoon.

He said I was suspended without pay.

The county had taken my badge off the hood of that car.

My sidearm could be collected at the office whenever I felt like acting my age.

I had no gun and no badge.

I was driving to a place I had pulled out of the tax records the day before they shut off my login.

Open Door Fellowship owned forty acres on Brushy Creek, down a county road that nobody had graded in years.

Church retreat land, the filing said.

I left the truck at the end of the road and walked in with a flashlight pointed at my feet.

I kept thinking about her wrist.

I had thrown her own rule back at her with a smirk, because I was afraid.

I don't think she knows that.

I'd rather she didn't, until I've earned it.

The shed stood at the back of the property, a low metal building with no windows and a hasp on the door.

The padlock was new.

I had a bolt cutter from my toolbox, and it took two tries.

Inside, my flashlight found shelves.

They ran down both walls to the ceiling, and on every shelf stood shoes.

Small ones, in pairs.

Sandals and sneakers and one pair of rubber boots with ducks on them, a hundred pairs or more, each with a strip of masking tape across the toe.

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