Two minutes to go.
“I-I’m a good person,” Wojo insisted. “This wasn’t— My daughter—”
“Down! Now!” the Grouch shouted, his finger on the trigger.
Wojo dropped to his knees, keeping his head toward the floor. “I didn’t take anything. Just let me—”
“Stop talking!”
Wojo lowered his head farther, practically curling into himself.
When bombs go off and horrors happen in the real world, people say that time seems to slow down. That’s not true. It actually seems to go faster, but it’s happening at such an accelerated rate, the human brain can barely register everything it’s experiencing. At this moment, that’s where Wojo was.
The Grouch was shouting now—“You know what you did!”—but Wojo didn’t hear it. As the Grouch came closer, Wojo noticed a noise, a deep . . .
Ka—klaak.
The hammer on the pistol. The Grouch had pulled it back, and now, all Wojo could see was his daughter, crying, sobbing . . . her birthday . . . she’d forever link his death with her birthday.
Ninety seconds to go.
“Look at me!” the Grouch shouted.
Wojo refused, his brain catapulting back to his ex-wife, to their first apartment, to Gabriella being born, to standing outside the steak house and the burst of ego and anger that brought him to this r— Wait. In his pocket . . . the stun gun. He still had the . . .
The Grouch was close now, so close that Wojo could smell the latex of the mask . . . could smell the way the man’s jeans reeked of sawdust and—
“Pick your head up!”
Wojo still didn’t pick his head up. He was curled tight, his hand snaking down to his own pocket. Seventy-two seconds.
“You do realize this is your doing?” the Grouch added, pressing the barrel into the crown of Wojo’s head. A plump vein swelled on the Grouch’s hand as his finger tightened on the trigger. “You understand that?” he asked, like he was waiting for an answer.
In one minute, Wojo would be dead.
But he still had a minute.
“I asked you a ques—”
Wojo pulled the Taser from his pocket, squeezing the trigger so fast, he felt an electric snakebite in his own leg as he whipped out the weapon. The stun gun had two metal fangs at the end of it, which Wojo stabbed straight into the Grouch’s left thigh.
The Taser’s blue light crackled like a mini lightning storm.
“Guuh . . .” the Grouch shouted, his leg going limp, his whole body falling sideways, like a cleaved tree.
Forty seconds to—
Go, go, go, Wojo thought, scrambling to his feet. The stun gun would buy him a moment.
Wojo ran from the room and darted through the house, back toward the front door. As he ran, he was still squeezing the trigger, the blue electricity crackling as it lit his way.
In seconds, Wojo was outside, the summer air licking his face. Until that moment, he didn’t realize how hard he was sweating. His heart punched in his chest. Up the block, he spotted the red rear lights of a car leaving, though he barely registered it.
He looked around, panicked, lost, like he’d awoken in a strange hotel and couldn’t quite figure out where he was. There. The car he came in. The BMW!
Sprinting for the car, Wojo ripped open the door and slid inside. He pulled the keys from his pocket and threw the stun gun aside. But just as he went to start the car, from the back seat . . .
A thick forearm wrapped around Wojo’s neck. Behind him . . . in the back seat . . . someone was already in the car, waiting for him. Wojo caught a glimpse in the rearview. That buzzed blond hair . . .