Her Last Choice by Blake Pierce

Author:Blake Pierce [Pierce, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blake Pierce
Published: 2022-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

***

The Freemont Street address was just fifteen minutes away from the Life Fulfilled offices. It was just off of one of the monument-lined cobblestone streets that etched their way through parts of Richmond’s Fan District. Elms and sycamores lined the sidewalks, and the houses were almost all brick. When they parked on the opposite side of the street, Rachel spotted a small sedan with a Life Fulfilled decal on the driver’s side door.

They walked up the little flagstone path to the front porch, which had several strands of ivy running up the brick posts. When Jack stepped forward to knock on the door, he made a very intentional effort to move in front of Rachel before she could do it. She understood it but couldn’t deny that it stung a bit. Jack knocked and he got a response right away—though it wasn’t quite the response either of them had been expecting.

It was a woman, presumably Vicki Freemont, screaming out in what sounded like a mix of pain and surprise. Rachel’s instinct was to go inside even without anyone answering the door to make sure everything was okay. Jack, on the other hand, hammered on the door once more, calling out this time.

“Mrs. Freemont! Are you okay?”

There was no answer, but Rachel could hear the sound of something skidding across a floor, the sound of wood on wood, one of the objects falling over.

“Jack…” Rachel pleaded.

“Yeah, yeah.”

He tried the doorknob and found it open. They rushed inside, Jack in the front and drawing his Glock as they went. Again, Rachel felt sorely out of place. No gun, no badge; she really was just a spectator at this point.

The front door opened up onto a foyer that instantly merged into a hallway. A den area lay to the right and a few other rooms interrupted the wall on the left. But it was at the end of the hall, in what looked to be a living room as they rushed to it, that the noise was coming from. Again, they heard a woman shout and this time, a man’s murmuring voice behind it.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Freemont,” said a soothing male voice. “That’s the worst of it. No more.”

Rachel and Jack came to the living room and saw a woman of about fifty-five or sixty stretched out on a couch. An older man, easily seventy or so, sat on a small footstool beside the couch, checking the woman’s blood pressure with the typical Velcro wrap and pump.

The older man saw them first, his eyes growing large when he saw Jack’s gun. The woman saw his look of alarm and sat up.

“FBI agents,” Jack said, slowly putting the Glock away. “We knocked in the door and no one answered.”

The woman seemed very irritated, her thin lips creating a deep, intense frown. It made her look about twenty years older. “So you decided to barge on in with a gun drawn?”

“Ma’am,” Rachel said, “we heard you screaming from the front porch.”

“I’d say so. I’ve got a kidney that’s barely functioning, and Dr.

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