Chapter 8 - The Ultimatum
Aunt Caroline let out a terrified, guttural scream when she heard her ten-year-old daughter's life being threatened.
She lunged across the center console and frantically slammed her hand onto the cruiser's brake pedal.
The heavy police car skidded violently across the wet highway, coming to a screeching halt on the muddy shoulder.
"Tyler, please do not hurt Mia, I will do whatever you want!" Caroline sobbed into the radio microphone.
Tyler laughed cruelly, clearly enjoying the absolute power he held over his desperate aunt.
"Bring the evidence folder to the old family lake house in exactly thirty minutes," Tyler commanded.
He warned them that if he saw a single police siren, he would throw the little girl into the deep water with a weighted vest.
The radio clicked off, leaving the two women sitting in terrified, heavy silence.
Caroline buried her face in her hands, weeping uncontrollably for her innocent child.
"We have to give him the papers, Olivia, I cannot lose my baby," Caroline pleaded with broken, desperate eyes.
Olivia stared at the dark road ahead, her mind racing through the horrific options laid out before them.
She knew Tyler and Robert would never leave any witnesses alive, even if they handed over the documents.
Going to the lake house was a guaranteed death sentence for all three of them.
Olivia looked down at the complex array of buttons on the police cruiser's communication dashboard.
She formulated a desperate, highly dangerous plan using the technology right in front of them.
"We are going to the lake house, but we are playing this exactly by my rules," Olivia declared with absolute determination.
She activated the cruiser's dashcam system and linked the live audio feed directly to the open, unencrypted police scanner frequency.
Every single word spoken near the car would now be broadcast to every active police radio in the entire county.
She unclipped the wireless lapel microphone from the dashboard and hid it carefully inside her jacket pocket.
They drove the rest of the way in silence, pulling onto the gravel driveway of the massive, dark lake house.
Tyler was standing on the front porch, holding a terrified, crying Mia by her hair with a gun pressed to her back.
Jennifer, Olivia's fake mother, stepped out of the shadows holding a heavy, wooden baseball bat.
"Hand over the folder, Caroline, and we can all walk away from this unfortunate mess," Jennifer demanded coldly.
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Caroline stepped forward with the folder, but Jennifer suddenly raised the bat and pointed it directly at Tyler's head.
"Shoot the brat, Tyler, and then give me the gun," Jennifer ordered her son with a wicked, greedy smile.
