Six Feet Above Truth

The service corridor smelled of formaldehyde, concrete dust, and industrial bleach.

Richard dragged Ethan down the corridor, his heavy leather shoes squeaking against the wet linoleum floor.

“Let me go!” Ethan thrashed, digging his sneakers into the floor, but Richard was thirty pounds heavier and fueled by pure adrenaline.

“Shut up, you ungrateful little brat!” Richard hissed, shoving Ethan hard into the wall. The boy’s shoulder slammed into a stainless-steel tray, sending surgical tools clattering to the floor. “If you had just stayed in your seat like a good little boy, this would have been over! She would have been under six feet of dirt by four o’clock!”

“You’re a monster!” Ethan spat, wiping a smudge of grease from his cheek.

“I’m a businessman who isn't going to spend the rest of his life in prison!” Richard snapped. He pulled a heavy ring of brass keys from his pocket and jammed one into the reinforced lock of the mortuary’s cold-storage room—the place where bodies were kept prior to services.

He shoved Ethan inside the freezing, stainless-steel room. The air hit Ethan’s face like an icy slap, smelling faintly of frost and chemicals.

“Richard, please!” a raspy voice echoed from the end of the hall.

Claire appeared at the doorway of the corridor, limping heavily, her hands still bound in front of her. She looked tiny against the stark fluorescent lights, her hair wild, her dress torn, but her eyes burning with a fierce, unstoppable protection.

“Take me,” Claire gasped, stumbling forward. “Leave Ethan out of this. He’s just a child. Take me, Richard!”

Richard turned, pointing the gun straight at her chest. “You should have stayed in the box, Claire. It would have been so much easier. A quiet heart attack. A tragic death for a beloved philanthropist. Now I have to clean up a bloody mess.”

Claire didn't stop walking. “You won't get away with it. Miller knows. The whole town knows.”

“Miller doesn't have the key to the back alley,” Richard sneered, backing toward the loading bay doors at the rear of the room where his dark SUV was idling near the embalming dock. “And by the time they get through that steel fire door, I’ll be fifty miles away with the kid.”

Ethan’s blood ran cold. With me?

Richard wasn't just planning to escape. He was taking Ethan as a hostage—a human shield to guarantee his safe passage out of the country.

Ethan looked around the freezing metal room. Row after row of sliding metal drawers lined the walls. On a stainless-steel prep table near his knee sat an heavy glass bottle of industrial disinfectant and a box of long wooden matches used for lighting the water heaters.