Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
PRESENT
Jessica Meeks stood in a square of light spilling from the windows of the diner behind her and took a hit off her vape. It was four in the morning, in a truck stop west of Mobile, and the air felt like hot soup.
She surveyed the gas station forecourt, but the marshal’s car was no longer parked at the pumps where she’d last seen it.
In its place was an old silver sedan. Its headlights were on, engine idling.
She blew out a stream of smoke and stared at the car. She fantasized about running across the forecourt and jumping into its passenger seat. Then going wherever it was going. North, east or west.
As she stared, a plan took shape in her mind.
She’d hitch a ride to the nearest city, then change her identity the old-fashioned way, by dumping her wallet in a bin and picking out a new name at random.
She’d find work at another strip club easily enough.
Those places were filled with girls running away from something.
There’d be no Baton Rouge safe house. No isolation rooms, no psychologists. No marshals following her around for the rest of her life. The thought was so tempting she felt her legs twitch in anticipation of a sprint across the forecourt.
The sedan hadn’t moved. It sat gleaming under the LED canopy lights. Its driver was a silhouette behind the wheel. As if he were waiting for her.
A heavy hand gripped her shoulder. “Ma’am,” said a voice in a thick Southern accent.
She spun around, heart pounding.
Inglis was standing right behind her. He looked in the silver sedan’s direction, then back at her. His expression indicated he knew exactly what she’d been on the brink of doing.
She exhaled a thick cloud of vape that drifted around his face. He grimaced, waving it away with one hand.
“Sorry,” she said. Then, to make sure he didn’t think she was apologizing for the aborted escape attempt, she held up her vape pen and clicked it off.
A distant rumble of thunder came from the south, like a far-off battle beginning. She looked up and saw the stars had vanished.
As if taking its cue from the sound of the coming storm, the sedan suddenly reversed away from the pumps. She watched it speed out of the truck stop, taking with it any last-minute bid for freedom.
“We should get back on the road.” Inglis turned and started towards his car, which she saw was now parked around the side of the diner.
She trotted after him. “They’re saying on the news this storm is gonna be real bad.”
Inglis didn’t look back. “They say that about all of them.”
“They say they’re closing all the Waffle Houses.”
He paused by the driver’s door, one foot in the car. “Well,” he said. “I guess it’s time to panic.”
* * *
The silver sedan sat in a shadowy layby, its sole occupant gripping a SIG pistol in his palm like he was holding hands with a loved one.
In his side mirror, he saw a car’s headlights cut through the night and swing in a wide arc towards him. It was the marshal’s Charger, pulling out of the truck stop and heading back toward the interstate.
He let them pass, then sat there for a full minute longer in the syrupy darkness. His heart was still beating a steady stream of adrenaline through his veins.
She’d been so close. She’d looked right at him and for a hot second he’d thought she was going to actually run across the gas station forecourt and get into his car.
What were the chances of that? He hadn’t even known what he would have done. Killed her right there and then?
That wasn’t the plan, and he knew it. The plan came from people way higher up the food chain than him. From people whose plans you simply didn’t fuck around with.
He picked up a phone from the passenger seat. The metal was cool in his hand. Thirteen hours earlier, he’d taken it from a little bungalow in The Pines neighborhood of Panama City Beach. A souvenir, right before he’d left a souvenir of his own, in red spray-paint.
Then he’d sat across the street from her house, watching the chaos that had ensued. Watching as she realized just how weak the walls were that she’d built around her world.
Just the sight of her had made every muscle in his body tighten. She looked good. Real good. And that pissed him off more than anything. He’d gotten seven years in a federal prison. She’d gotten eleven years in the Florida sunshine.
Would she even recognize him anymore? These days, he barely recognized himself. Prison had stripped him of everything. His possessions, his dreams, even his own name. Nowadays, everyone just called him Roach. When he thought of his old name—his old identity—it felt like it belonged to a ghost.
Far to the south, lightning licked the horizon with its forked tongue. Roach placed the pistol on the front seat beside the phone and started the engine.
As he turned west onto the interstate, he saw banks of thick clouds, darker than the night sky and steadily rolling north.