Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

that. It feels like I’ve been gone for years. The fridge and the freezer are empty, except for some cash hidden inside a block of ice. The old TV is still there, but it might not have been worth stealing.

I sit on the battered couch and wait for Reese Thistle to come and arrest me.

But she doesn’t.

No one does.

CHAPTER 43

What do you deep-fry to open a door?

Down in the editing room, screens were flickering. FBI agents appeared on more and more rectangles, bulked up by bulletproof vests and helmets. But the room was empty. No one was watching the feeds.

Six agents surrounded the slaughterhouse. Eight more crept around the outside of the main house. They saw the dog run, but no sign of any dogs.

The slaughterhouse door was still unlocked. Cautiously, one of the agents pulled it open. Inside she saw the sets, the chains, the cameras, the grinder. No people, just bad smells.

The front and back doors of the main house were locked. From a distance, the agent in charge counted to three. Others used battering tubes to smash in both doors at the same instant. The team swept through every room of the ground floor with flashlights, checking in closets and behind doorways for hostiles. There was no one.

Upstairs, they found a woman in her early sixties, holding a gun.

Fred had given it to her. Once he was clear, she was supposed to shoot it into the floor, igniting the ammonal and setting off the massive explosion that I had expected earlier. The fire would have consumed her and destroyed all the evidence of Fred’s crimes.

She didn’t, though. She kept the gun pointed at the floor as the agents shouted at her. She waited three, four, five seconds. Then, just as the FBI agents were about to open fire, she dropped the gun, having held it for long enough to prove that she could have killed everyone in the building. The agents wrestled her to the ground and dragged her downstairs so roughly that they didn’t find out she couldn’t walk until much later.

It was unclear why Fred expected her to die for him. Maybe he thought she owed him for all that time he spent growing up without her. Perhaps he thought she’d want to protect her son, despite everything he had done. Maybe he thought she would rather die than go back to prison. Or maybe he was just a bully, used to women doing what he told them. No one will ever know.

Penny was freed within days. She’d already served her time for Swaize’s murder and had committed no crimes since then. She refused all interviews, and the media eventually lost interest in her. She couldn’t be neatly categorised as a villain, a victim, a hero or a bystander, so there wasn’t much reason to keep pursuing her.

Thistle also avoided the media. Ivy, too. The priest announced that he wanted to return to his congregation, but it turned out he had already been replaced. He had to fight to get his parish back, and even after he succeeded, his congregation shrank. Most people didn’t really believe the accusations of paedophilia, but they left anyway. Better to be safe than sorry.

Hailey’s show became the most downloaded podcast in America, a spot it held for almost a week.

Amar and his family had to move house because of all the harassment from people who believed he really was a terrorist.

Emily, being young, thin and blonde, was the one I saw on TV most often. It was always the same scrap of footage, her standing next to her father in front of their McMansion, dabbing a tear away from her mascara. The soundbite: ‘It was like a nightmare.’ Thousands of subscribers had watched her suffer in that slaughterhouse. Now she was on national television, where millions could enjoy it. Somehow, she’s become the hero of the story, rather than Thistle. There’s talk of Margot Robbie playing her in a Netflix series.

Donnie was later found crawling around the streets of Houston with a broken thigh from the crash. He had a knife, and slashed at anyone who came near him—the police subdued him with a taser. His prints matched those all over the house and the slaughterhouse. He’s serving ninety-nine years in Huntsville, but his attorney is appealing. The judge sentenced Donnie as though he were a psychopath, the lawyer says. She failed to consider provocation—yes, the victims were innocent, but Donnie believed they were rapists and murderers. He has expressed remorse and can be rehabilitated. Legal experts say this defence is a long shot, but many columnists are on Donnie’s side.

After Cedric was identified as one of the Guards, his book of poetry was reprinted and became a bestseller, popular among those who normally only read books like Mein

Kampf, On Guerrilla Warfare by Mao Tse-Tung and that romance novel by Saddam Hussein. Some avant-garde band put some of the poems to music. They were immediately condemned for profiting from Cedric’s crimes. Protesters stormed a bar where the band was supposed to perform, trashing it. Nowhere else would book them after that, but the protest made them so famous that their streaming revenue went through the roof, and they were briefly rich before the publisher of the book sued them. The world kept turning.

Kyle was identified, too. I saw his mom crying on the TV. She said she didn’t understand how this could have happened. She claimed he was a sweet boy, with a kind smile and a big laugh. She has his dimpled chin, his flat ears. He looked more like her than he did like me.

I could call her. But what would I say? Hi, I’m a stranger, and no, her boy wasn’t sweet, he was an asshole—but I loved him anyway. I could have saved him, if I’d done a few things differently.