Unseen by Karin Slaughter

all to hear. They’d found a pile of cash and weren’t joking about how they were going to spend it?
    Something wasn’t right.
    Lena’s hand wrapped around her Glock. She turned off the flashlight, then waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness.
    She strained to pick up sounds, trying to block out the noise from the television set upstairs.
    Nothing.
    She made her way into the next room. As carefully as Lena moved, it was impossible to not make a sound. There was too much trash on the floor—empty beer cans, glass crack pipes, aluminum foil. The carpet was thick and wet, like a suction cup against the soles of her boots. Every sound was amplified in the crowded space. She might as well start singing.
    No.
    What she really should do is go upstairs and get backup. You never went into a room alone. You always worked in pairs. Lena was breaking her own cardinal rule.
    But she’d already fallen on her ass, cut open her head, and spent a fortune capturing three dead men and securing a crime scene that probably contained more DNA than a men’s toilet atthe local truck stop. She wasn’t going to risk what was left of her reputation based on feeling some bad juju.
    Still, Lena felt for the loose strap around her Kevlar vest and pulled it tight against her waist. She moved forward, her knees bent, her center of gravity low in case she had to dive to the ground or fight off an attacker. The closer she got to the last room, the more certain she was that something had gone horribly wrong.
    Twenty feet. Fifteen. Lena was approximately ten feet away when she saw the tip of a boot. Black leather. Steel toe. It was just like the one she was wearing, only three sizes larger.
    And pointing up toward the ceiling.
    Lena froze. She blinked her eyes. Her vision doubled. Blood was pooling up around the collar of her vest. Her mouth was bone-dry.
    She took another step. Lena could just make out the floor in front of her. The flashlights from the other room were walleyed, one pointing toward the door, the other toward the wall. There was a suitcase opposite the door. Money spilled out onto the floor. Hundreds, just like she’d prayed for.
    Lena two-handed the Glock. She wasn’t sweating anymore. She didn’t feel any fear. All extraneous thought left her mind. She counted out her steps—one, then two, then she was in the last room and pointing her gun at Sid Waller.
    He had Keith in a choke hold, the muzzle of a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter jammed into the man’s neck. Mitch was flat on his back. His scalp was ripped open. Blood covered his face.
    From the moment they put a gun in your hand at the academy, they taught you to always rest your finger on the trigger guard, never on the trigger. This gave your brain a few extra milliseconds to process what you were looking at, to tell whether or not you were drawing down on friend or foe. You never put your finger on the trigger unless you were ready to shoot someone.
    Lena put her finger on the trigger.
    “Get back,” Sid Waller ordered.
    Lena shook her head. “No.”
    He made a show of tightening his grip on the Sig. “I want a car. I want the road cleared.”
    “You’re not getting anything.” Keith’s eyes went wide as Lena took another step closer. “Let him go.”
    “Get a negotiator.”
    “I’m your negotiator,” she told him. “Let him go or die.”
    “Back up.” Waller jammed the Sig harder into Keith’s neck.
    “I’ll do it.”
    “Do it.” She took another step forward. There was no way in hell she was letting him take Keith out of this basement. “You’re gonna kill him either way. Do it now so I can go ahead and kill you.”
    “I mean it.”
    “So do I.”
    Waller’s eyes turned jittery. This wasn’t the first time he’d stared down Lena, but it was the first time he’d done it with a gun pointed at his head. “You’re fucking crazy.”
    “You’re fucking right.” Lena took another step forward. She felt numb, like she was watching someone else do