Chapter 14 - The Hostage Exchange“Mom!” I screamed, attempting to rip my hand out of David’s grip to run back into the smoke-filled living room.
David held onto my wrist with desperate, protective strength, dragging me down the first three steps of the concrete basement stairwell.
“You can't go out there, Sarah! You’ll walk right into his hands!” David choked out, coughing violently as the stinging CS gas burned our lungs and eyes.
Through the dense, swirling white vapor above us, the gunfire abruptly ceased, replaced by the ominous, mechanical click of a shotgun being racked.
“Lower your weapons right now, FBI, or I blow her head off where she sits!” Gregory Miller’s deep, gravelly voice roared through the smoke.
Agent Harrison held his fire, his tactical flashlight cutting a bright yellow beam through the chemical fog toward the brick fireplace.
When the smoke shifted slightly in the draft from the blown-out door, the horrific scene in the living room was revealed in terrifying detail.
My mother was kneeling on the rug by the hearth, her face bruised and bleeding where she had been struck with the butt of a weapon.
Standing directly behind her, dressed in a white winter camouflage suit, was Gregory Alan Miller.
He was holding a sawed-off twelve-gauge tactical shotgun pressed firmly against the back of my mother’s skull, his finger resting lightly on the trigger.
At his feet lay my father, unconscious and bleeding from a nasty gash above his forehead where he had tried to defend his wife.
“Nobody moves a muscle, or the mother dies before the daughter even gets to say goodbye,” Miller snarled, his eyes wild and bloodshot under his woolen cap.
He looked older than he did in my childhood photographs, his face lined with deep, weather-beaten wrinkles, but his physical grip was rock-steady and terrifying.
“You’re surrounded by federal agents and U.S. Marshals, Miller,” Agent Harrison said calmly, keeping his Glock aimed at the floor to avoid provoking a trigger pull.
“There is no vehicle waiting for you outside, and the blizzard has closed every mountain pass within fifty miles; you have nowhere to run.”
“I don't need to run anywhere, Agent,” Miller laughed coldly, pressing the steel barrel harder into my mother's graying hair.
“I didn't come here to escape into the woods; I came here to collect my little bird and finish what we started twenty years ago in Boulder.”
He looked directly across the smoke-filled room toward the dark stairwell where David and I were crouched in the shadows.
“Sarah!” Miller called out, his voice taking on that sickening, gentle, proprietary tone he had used on the satellite phone.
“Come up those stairs and walk out that front door with me right now, and I let your mommy and daddy live to see another Christmas.”
“If you make me wait even ten seconds... I will paint this brick fireplace with your mother's brains, and then I will hunt your fiancé down in that cellar.”
“Don't do it, Sarah! Let them shoot him!” my mother cried out bravely before Miller jerked her head backward by her hair, silencing her with pain.
I looked at David, tears of agonizing defeat streaming down my face as the stinging chemical smoke burned my eyes.
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If I stayed hidden in the safety of the basement stairwell, my mother would die on that floor within seconds.
I pulled my hand out of David’s loosened grip, stood up straight on the wooden steps, and walked out into the light of the tactical flashlights.
