Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Roach lined up the beer can with the sight on his handgun and pulled the trigger.
It exploded like a geyser, spraying beer in a wide arc, then landed on its side and spun until its contents joined the growing puddle on the floor.
Fourteen other cans and several ruptured tubes of Pringles made up the snack graveyard.
He picked up the half-empty bottle of Dewars and took a long pull. He’d found it in a drawer in the back office after he’d finished prying the safe from the wall.
Placing his gun on the ground, he slipped the gold phone out of his pocket.
It had only taken him a few minutes back in Florida to bypass Julia’s passcode with some firmware he’d downloaded onto his old laptop. The one that was probably now bobbing in the Catera’s backseat.
Now he accessed her device tracking app and saw where her synced Garmin smartwatch was. Less than nine miles away. Which, presuming it was still attached to her pretty little wrist, meant she hadn’t gone far.
He looked out the shattered front door, beyond the state trooper’s SUV, to where the rain was near horizontal.
The road had become a river, and the gas station forecourt was half a foot submerged.
Water was everywhere; it dripped from between cracks in the ceiling tiles; it trickled down the walls; it crept in from under the SUVs tires like a slow tide.
He took another hit from the bottle, thinking about what was awaiting Julia in her immediate future. Wondering if she had any inkling of it. He wondered if she could sense the fear that would soon be emanating from every pore in her body, the way that cats could detect a coming earthquake.
Fear.
In his opinion, it ruled the world. It dictated nearly every decision a person made.
Fear of missing out. Fear of failure, fear of success.
Fear of getting old. Fear of death. Fear of pain.
The latter being the most powerful fear of all.
He knew of places you could put a razor blade in a person that would make death feel like a kindness.
Roach had learned that himself the hardest way possible.
But he was getting ahead of himself. He had to play this right, and that meant taking it one step at a time.
After all, good things came to those who wait. He smiled around the mouth of the bottle.
Bad things, too.
* * *
Jessica jolted awake, sitting bolt upright in bed.
The house shuddered as a gust of wind slammed into it with the force of a wrecking ball. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She wasn’t sure if it was the storm or the nightmare that had wrenched her from sleep.
In the dream, she’d been lying on an old mattress—one disturbingly similar to this one—in a dark, damp room. Metal chains shackled her wrists to the wall, a cruel detail where, thankfully, dream and reality diverged.
Then Daniel had appeared, stepping out of the darkness.
That familiar jolt hit her—pain and happiness tangled into something unbearable. She’d strained against the chains, desperate to reach him. She’d tried to speak, to tell him again how sorry she was, but the words had choked into ragged sobs.
He’d knelt beside her, fingers tracing the metal cuffs. Then he’d smiled—that same sad, beautiful smile that haunted her—and said, “You better run, baby.”
Then Inglis had walked in, holding out her gun. His voice was calm, steady. “Shoot him where you have to, ma’am.”
And then, mercifully, she’d woken up.
Jessica let out a shaky breath and rubbed her arms, the cold seeping deeper than skin. The fear still clung to her, that creeping terror that lingers at the edges of sleep, threatening to spill into the waking world. The memory left a hollow ache in its wake, a yawning emptiness she couldn’t shake.
On the other side of the bed, the sheets were rumpled. Inglis must have come back after she finally passed out.
She checked her watch. The screen lit up in the gloom. Nearly seven in the evening. She’d slept longer than she thought. But her mind ached, as if it had been running at full speed while her body lay still.
She slid out of bed and padded to the bathroom, then wandered through the darkened living room.
Outside, fingers of rain tapped against the bare windowpane.
The wind howled through the trees, bending them violently.
It rattled the roller door on the shed like something was trying to claw its way in.
The house felt eerie. Empty. Like she was the last person left alive.
Light glowed from the kitchen.
She went in, finding Inglis sitting at the table, nursing a glass of whiskey. His shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, his sleeves rolled up, forearms flexing as he swirled the liquid.
Jessica grabbed a second glass. “You drinking alone?”
He glanced up, studying her face like he could still see the remnants of her nightmare. “Didn’t think you’d be up.”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
The silence stretched. Outside, the storm howled, rattling the walls.
She poured herself a drink, sliding into the chair across from him. “I dreamed about you.”
Inglis stilled, his grip tightening on the glass. “That so?”
She tilted her head, watching him. “You were telling me to pull the trigger.”
His jaw clenched, something flickering behind his eyes. “Did you?”
She took a slow sip of whiskey, letting the burn settle in her chest. “Guess I woke up too soon.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth, just for a second, before he looked away. “Lucky for me.”
Jessica smiled. “Lucky for both of us.”
The air between them felt thick, humming with a tension neither of them acknowledged.
Inglis took another sip of whiskey, then made a face like he wished he hadn’t.
Jessica swiveled the bottle to face her. “Says here it’s Tennessee’s finest.”
Inglis eyed the off-brand logo. Raised an eyebrow.
She poured another glass. “You know what they say about people from Tennessee, right?”
“I’m sure I do,” he drawled.
“They make other Southerners look like they’re in a hurry.”
That half-smile again. “See, now, I heard the exact same thing about people from Arkansas.”
She nodded at the bottles of water lined neatly on the counter, alongside matches, candles and their remaining tins of food. “Why do I get the feeling you were a Boy Scout?”
This time, he actually smiled, if only for a second. Some of the tension unwound from his frame.
Jessica studied him. She still couldn’t get a read on him.
Unavailable? Uninterested? Just plain shy?
Probably not the first, and not just because he wasn’t wearing a ring.
She’d worked in a strip club for years. She could spot the taken ones from ten feet.
And she hated them most of all— hated knowing she was scratching some itch for a guy, giving him something he wasn’t getting at home, but which he didn’t have the goddamn balls to do anything about. Except ogle her and drool.
Inglis pulled his hand from his pocket, set his phone on the table.
She glanced at it. “I’m guessing no service, right?”
“Satellite calls only.”
Another violent gust slammed into the house. The roller door groaned under the strain.
A second later, the kitchen lights flickered, plunging them into semi-darkness before surging back to life.
“Whew.” Jessica exhaled. “That was close.” She unscrewed the whiskey bottle and topped off both their glasses. Then she leaned back in her chair, tilting her head at him.
“So, Ryan. What’s your story, then?”
* * *
Ryan had a problem. Well, he had a lot of problems, but the main one facing him right now was, in fact, facing right now.
He shouldn’t be sitting here drinking with her. He wasn’t exactly sure how many ethics codes he was violating, but it had to be a few.
And there were other reasons, too.
This house could come down around them at any moment. If that were to happen, at least one of them should be sober. Plus, tomorrow they’d both be better off without hangovers.
So, yeah, that was a bunch of reasons. And yet, he couldn’t make himself get up and leave this damn table.
The more he looked at her, the more his impression of her seemed to shift in front of his eyes. He was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain his earlier conviction about there being no innocent witnesses in the program. About her deserving this transient, fear-filled life.
And he was becoming more and more convinced that he was a judgmental prick for ever having thought that.
She was still waiting for an answer to her question, so he cleared his throat and said, “My story?”
She shrugged. “Tell me about yourself.”
He swallowed and stared down at his glass, mystified how to go about doing such a thing. Small talk wasn’t his strong suit. “Uh, what do you want to know?”
She shrugged, “Tell me about your job. You work for the…Violent Fugitive…something, right?”
“Two Rivers Violent Fugitive Task Force.”
She snapped her fingers like that had been on the tip of her tongue. Then took another sip of her drink. “Hunting down violent fugitives. That sounds terrifying.”
He tilted his head. “Sometimes.” He took a sip of his own. “Most of the time, though, it’s as boring as any other job.”
She smiled and raised her eyebrows like she didn’t believe that.
But he wasn’t just trying to sound modest. His job really was about ten percent beating down doors and ninety percent reading tedious case files and chasing down dead-end leads.
Some fugitives he’d hunted had been on the run for over twenty years.
They were living quiet lives in small towns, thinking the law had forgotten about them.
But the USMS never forgot. It was a long game for them, not an all guns blazing kinda thing.
And that was the secret of their success: keeping their successes a secret. It was a company motto. If they did their jobs right, no one would even know they’d been there.
Overhead, the light flickered again, and they both cast their eyes ceiling-ward as if in prayer to the electricity gods.
“What’s the worst case you ever had?”
Ryan chewed his bottom lip for a moment, not looking at her.
Then he exhaled and said, “Well, the first runner-up would have to be the angel-dusted Neo Nazi with enough homemade explosives strapped to him to blow us both to Jesus.” He shook his head at the memory.
“Guy had more swastikas on him than brain cells, that was for damn sure.
“But the actual worst one was this house we raided in Jackson. This guy was up on a bunch of sex crime charges across multiple states. We finally tracked him down to this old shack on the outskirts of town. It was maybe five o’clock in the morning.
We knocked his door down. Dragged the guy out of bed.
He was pretty much as loathsome as you’d expect a guy like that to be.
But it was what we found in the other bedroom that was worse.
A girl, filthy and starving, tied to a mattress.
She’d been locked in there for God knows how long. ”
Jessica held her glass to her lips but didn’t take a sip.
“I say girl,” he went on, “but she was in her twenties. Although so malnourished, she looked about twelve. Turns out, he’d murdered her mother when she was a baby and then kidnapped her.
He’d been living with her all those years.
First as her father. Then as her husband.
” He shook his head. “To say that was disturbing is an understatement.”
She said nothing for a long moment. Then she said quietly, “When I see those kinds of stories on the news, I never know whether those are good days or bad days for you guys.”
Inglis eyed her over his glass. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Me either.”
Then the lights went out without even a flicker of warning and the room plunged into darkness.