Chapter 24
TWENTY-FOUR
Rain popped loudly against the roof of the car. The wind had picked up, too. Ryan could feel it buffeting the car. He had to drive at a crawl, his eyes glued to the white line, just to avoid driving off the side of the road. Visibility must have been ten feet at most. Beyond that was guesswork.
He calculated in his head how much further it was to their destination.
The Louisiana line couldn’t be far off. He guessed it was sixty-odd miles to New Orleans.
Given that they were averaging twenty miles an hour right now, that was still hours of driving ahead.
And they were heading straight into the storm.
They would never make it. He should’ve reversed course twenty miles back, when the trooper had flagged them down.
He could feel Meek’s eyes on him as he drove. He realized he was still gripping the steering wheel tightly, that his back and shoulders were stiff. Forcing himself to relax, he glanced at her in the rearview.
The rain got even heavier, filling the car with a roar so loud it made it impossible to think straight.
Suddenly, he felt the car lift as they hit a patch of surface flooding. He de-accelerated to avoid hydroplaning, but the car had already lost traction. It slid across the pavement with a wet hiss. He corrected the spin and let the car come to a complete stop.
Meeks was shouting something from the backseat. He kept his eyes straight ahead, his focus on the short stretch of road he could still make out.
There was a movement over his right shoulder. She was climbing between the seats. “Ma’am, you really can’t—”
Too late. She had angled herself over the center console and neatly into the passenger seat. “I said,” she yelled, “should we be driving in this?”
Unless you’d prefer swimming, he thought. He knew they shouldn’t be driving in this. Less than two feet of water could float a vehicle. Only one foot if it was flowing fast. And if even a tablespoon got into the electrics, this car was going nowhere fast. With them in it.
She said, “Shouldn’t we find somewhere to shelter in place?” Her voice was raised against the sounds of the storm. “There was a turnoff a few miles back.”
He looked around. They were on a stretch of interstate in the middle of nowhere. The view ahead and behind was an opaque curtain of rain. The slash pines that lined the road shook, like they possessed no more rigidity than blades of grass.
“We’re not turning around, ma’am,” he shouted back.
“Why not?”
“Because,” he yelled, “we’re being followed.”
* * *
Jessica stared at him. “Are you sure?”
The marshal nodded. “Definitely since the truck stop. Possibly since Panama City.”
“And you’re only just telling me this now?”
He didn’t respond, just restarted the car and put it back into gear.
She turned in the seat, craning to get a look out the back window. There was nothing out there but water. There was nothing anywhere but water.
“I’m sure,” he said, taking his foot off the brake and edging forward. “It’s a nineties silver sedan.”
She faced him again, recalling the silver sedan at the truck stop. “A Cadillac.”
His eyes connected with hers for the first time since they’d met. The glance was brief, and he broke it off almost immediately. But in it, she saw the same knowledge that must have been showing on her face.
It was the silver sedan she’d been about to hitch a ride from. That she’d literally been about to climb into.
She reached into the backseat and grabbed her shoulder bag. She settled it in her lap and put her seatbelt on over the top of it.
Inglis glanced at her lap, then looked back out the windshield. “I take it you know how to use that thing?”
When she didn’t answer, he glanced at her again. “The weapon in your bag, ma’am.”
The only sound in the car was the drill of the rain, the thump of the wiper blades. “How did you know I had one?” she said finally.
“You’ve been hanging onto that bag like your life depended on it. So, I figured you probably thought it did.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out, so she closed it again.
He said, “It’s not legal, I’m assuming. Is it loaded?”
She looked down at her bag. He was correct that it hadn’t been acquired legally. An ex- boyfriend had hooked her up with it. The guy had been something of a gun aficionado. He’d also been a meth aficionado and a not-working or paying-taxes aficionado.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s loaded.”
He looked at her again, right in the eyes, and this time didn’t look away. “And do you know how to use it?”
She paused, then said, “I’ve fired it a few times at a range.”
He said nothing, but she could tell from his face that he wasn’t happy with her answer.
As he drove slowly forward, she could hear the water sloshing under the wheel wells. She imagined it wouldn’t be long before this whole stretch of road was submerged. “But surely, we can’t keep going in this? The storm is to the southwest, right? We can’t keep just driving straight into it.”
He kept his eyes on the road ahead. It was easier talking to him now that she was sitting right next to him, but he still left a lot to be desired in the conversation department.
She’d met a few U.S. marshals in her life, and they all struck her as varying degrees of standoffish.
Unapproachable. Arrogant, even. She sometimes wondered if they taught courses in it at Glynco.
If so, this guy would have been top of his class.
“Hello?” she prompted.
He flicked her an irritated look, and she got the feeling he was wishing she’d decamp to the back seat.
“There’s a turnoff up ahead,” he said, nodding at the map app on the screen in the dash.
It was one of many devices fitted into the car, including a laptop on a swivel mount, a head-up display on the windshield and a police radio built into the center console.
“We’ll find somewhere to stop and wait out the worst of it. ”
Outside, the rain kept smashing down around them.
Inglis was forced to drive at a snail’s pace, the wipers blades sluicing water as fast as it was falling.
Up ahead, the interstate veered off onto a ramp with a forty mile per hour speed limit.
They weren’t doing anything near that. He took the turn onto another dead-straight road that ran due north.
From what she could make out of the view, the landscape ahead was flat, the trees scrubbed away to almost nothing from storms past. The sky was as dark as dusk, illuminated from time to time by brief flares of lightning on the horizon.
They drove several miles on the state road until a narrow track opened to the right. A mailbox sat off to the side, rocking from side to side with each wind gust. Inglis navigated the turn, inching along a lane already awash with water.
To the left, bordered by a shelterbelt of scraggly pines, was a house.
It was an old clapboard bungalow, standing up on concrete piles.
She peered at it through the fogged windshield.
The place already looked like the after photo of storm damage: broken windows boarded up with plywood, rusted roofing with iron missing in sections.
Near the house stood a corrugated iron shed.
Parked at one end was an old Massey Ferguson tractor, but there was space for another vehicle.
The marshal pulled the car in and quit the engine.
They sat there for a long moment, neither of them speaking. Just enjoying not being under aerial assault anymore. But it was far from quiet. The sound of the rain on the iron roof was like a hail of stones.
She glanced at him, to find him staring straight ahead. At the feel of her eyes on him, he gave her a quick glance and undid his seatbelt. “Stay here,” he shouted, opening his door.
He got out and went around to the trunk. She swiveled in her seat to watch out the rear windows as he pulled out a heavy parka, with U.S. MARSHAL emblazoned on the back in yellow. He pulled the hood up, then disappeared into the volley of rain.
As soon as he was gone, she got out of the car and looked around.
A workbench ran along one side of the shed.
It was crammed with boxes and plastic crates.
She peered into a couple. They were each carefully packed with dozens of the same item.
Rolls of toilet paper. Bottles of hand sanitizer.
Blister packs of AA batteries. Boxes of N95 masks.
There were several crates of canned food, too, but their lids were rusty, and the labels gone.
Clearly, whoever lived here was either a prepper or a hoarder.
Everything else in the shed was junk. Broken appliances. Old paint cans. Rusted tools. Sacks of rotting potatoes. An ancient outboard motor. Suspended from the ceiling from hooks was a tiny aluminum-hulled boat.
She went to the door and looked out. The rain was coming in at a steep angle from the east. Nearly a foot had flooded the drive and parts of the front yard already.
Rising out of the puddles were strange objects: upturned shopping trolleys, orange buoys tangled in fishing net, misshapen lawn furniture.
The shed’s raised concrete foundation kept it safe from the water. But not the wind. It sailed in, flinging stinging needles of rain into her face.
Lightning licked the sky with its sharp tongue. She could smell salt and ozone.
Right on cue, thunder boomed overhead, so loud she involuntarily dropped to a crouch, hands over her ears. The air moved around her, and the ground tremored under her feet.
She straightened, her pulse pounding in her ears. From here, the house was just a vague shape through the curtain of rain.
She wished the marshal would come back. Maybe he’d drowned before he made it to the porch. Or maybe he’d knocked on the door of a family of serial killers, who were at this very moment tying him in the basement next to the body of the last guy who’d been stupid enough to knock on their front door.
She dithered for another few minutes, then took a deep breath and held her bag over her head like a makeshift umbrella.
And then she ran through the storm to the creepy old house built up on stilts, trying not to think about how this was like the start of nearly every horror movie ever made.