20. Chapter 20
Loralee
“He’s still here.” Rocco’s words change everyone around us.
Deputy Carver reaches for his radio. Grant turns toward the ridge while two security employees move closer to the event coordinator. Even the bomb technician looks up from the monitor, his attention diverted beyond the lodge.
Another response. Another scramble for the man watching us to evaluate.
“Stop,” I say.
No one listens except Rocco. He turns toward me. “What?”
“This is what he wants.”
Carver continues issuing orders, sending deputies toward the tree line. Rocco raises one hand, and Grant immediately signals his employees to remain where they are.
I hold up my phone. “He sent this because he wants to see us react.”
“He also revealed that he has a view of this parking area,” Rocco says.
“Yes, but he already knows you understand that. The message isn’t information. It’s bait.”
Rocco looks at the photograph again.
Everyone visible in it is looking toward the lodge or the equipment road. The image appears to have been taken from above, but I can’t tell whether the height comes from a ridge, a building, or another camera mounted in a tree.
“You keep seeing what I want you to see,” I read aloud. “He wants us searching where he directs us.”
Rocco studies the screen, enlarging one section and then another. “Carver, call your deputies back from the north side. Quietly. No lights.”
The deputy lowers his radio. “You have another location?”
“Not yet.”
Rocco sends the photograph to himself, then opens it on his larger screen. He crouches beside the hood of his truck, using the metal surface to steady the phone while he examines the image.
I stand beside him. “What are you looking for?”
“What he could see.”
The red banner appears through the lodge doors. The bomb squad vehicle blocks part of the main path, and beyond it, several booths form a descending line toward the cider station. My own booth is hidden by the lodge corner.
Rocco enlarges the nearest security light. “The photograph was taken through glass.”
I lean closer. A faint double reflection surrounds the bright fixture.
“Could it be another camera?”
“Possibly, but the image quality is too good for the devices we found. This came from a phone.”
Carver joins us. “Which buildings overlook the south lot?”
“The lodge,” the coordinator says. “The maintenance shed sits higher, but it faces the wrong direction. There’s an old ticket office near the west entrance.”
“Windows?” Rocco asks.
“Across the front and one side.”
“Does it have an upper floor?”
“Storage loft.”
Rocco looks at the photograph again. “How far?”
“Two hundred yards.”
I follow the line from the west entrance to our position. The ticket office would give someone a view of the parking area, the front of the lodge, and the route security used to reach the equipment road.
Rocco turns to Carver. “Don’t send everyone there.”
“You think Mercer expects us to identify it.”
“I think he expects movement. Give him some.”
They coordinate in low voices. Two marked vehicles leave the south parking area with their lights off and head toward the county road. From a distance, it will appear that deputies are expanding the search away from the festival.
Grant sends one employee toward the east row and another to the bomb squad vehicle. Everyone else remains in place.
Nothing about the activity looks urgent.
Rocco takes my arm. “You’re going with Grant.”
“No.”
“Loralee.”
“You said he may be using me to control your attention. Sending me somewhere else creates another movement for him to watch.”
“Standing here makes you visible.”
“Then put me where he expects me to be.”
Rocco stares at me long enough that I feel the force of everything he refuses to say.
The thought of using myself as bait frightens me. I don’t want to be brave enough to suggest it. I want Rocco to take me back to his cabin, lock the door, and hold me until nothing exists beyond the walls.
But doing exactly what Mercer expects has brought us here.
“If he can see us, he already knows you won’t leave me unprotected,” I say. “Pretend nothing has changed.”
“Nothing about this will be unprotected.”
“I know.”
His hand closes around the back of my neck. “You stay with Grant. You do not leave the truck. If he tells you to get down, you do it before you ask why.”
“I will.”
“I need more than that.”
“I promise.”
He searches my face, then draws me against him. The embrace lasts only a second, but it contains everything he cannot allow himself to feel while Mercer remains free.
“Trust Grant,” he says near my ear.
“I do.”
Rocco releases me and walks toward the lodge with Carver. Neither man looks in the direction of the ticket office. Morales disappears between two vendor tents, approaching the western edge of the grounds from below.
Grant opens the rear door of Rocco’s truck. “Inside.”
I climb in and slide across the seat. Grant leaves the door open while he stands behind it, using the frame as cover. From a distance, we probably look as if we’re waiting for instructions.
The grounds become unnaturally still.
Wind lifts the edge of a canopy and drops it again. Somewhere near the food-vendor row, a loose metal sign taps against its support. The sound repeats at uneven intervals, keeping my nerves from settling around it.
I watch Rocco’s reflection in the lodge doors. He stands with Carver beside the bomb squad monitor, apparently absorbed in the device beneath the display.
He doesn’t look toward me.
He doesn’t look west.
A light flickers inside the ticket office.
It is so faint I almost convince myself I imagined it. Then darkness closes over the window again.
“Grant.”
“I saw it.”
His hand moves toward his radio but stops before touching it. Any transmission might warn Mercer that he has been noticed.
Rocco remains beside the lodge.
Seconds pass.
The ticket-office door opens.
A man in a brown vendor jacket steps outside carrying a dark bag. He pauses beneath the shallow overhang and looks toward the south lot. Even at this distance, I recognize the shape of him from the security footage—the same heavy shoulders, the same forward tilt of his head.
He believes the deputies have moved toward the county road.
He believes Rocco is still looking at the bomb.
Mercer descends the steps and turns toward the western service gate.
Grant presses a button on his radio once.
Rocco moves.
He and Carver separate at the lodge entrance, Carver taking the main path while Rocco cuts between the covered booths. Morales emerges from the shadows behind the ticket office.
Mercer sees him.
The dark bag drops. His hand disappears beneath the vendor jacket.
“Gun,” Grant says.
He pulls me from the seat to the floor of the truck and covers me with his body.
A sharp report splits the night.
Glass shatters.
For one suspended moment, I am no longer beneath Grant inside the truck. I am inside the vision, surrounded by screaming and smoke. A flash of red fills my mind. Cinnamon burns in the back of my throat.
Then the present returns.
There is no crowd.
No child.
Only the echo of a gunshot and glass falling somewhere beyond the vehicle.
“Stay down,” Grant orders.
I hear Rocco shout, but the words are lost beneath another shot. Metal rings as the bullet strikes something near the vendor row. Deputies call commands from two directions.
Mercer runs.
I raise my head enough to see through the lower edge of the window. He crosses the path behind the cider station, no longer heading for the service gate. Rocco follows from the opposite row, using the booths for cover.
Mercer knows the property. He knows where every path leads.
But so does Rocco.
The cinnamon vendor’s canopy blocks my view. I hear another command, then the crash of a table overturning. The red banner inside the lodge swings above a broken section of glass, stirred by the cold air pouring through it.
The vision happened.
Only not the way I saw it.
The future did change.
Mercer appears again near the north path. Blood darkens one sleeve, although I don’t know whether he was shot or cut by glass. The gun remains in his hand.
Rocco steps from behind a booth several yards away.
Mercer lifts the weapon.
Fear tears through me so violently that I stop breathing.
Rocco does not reach for his own gun. Instead, he moves behind the thick wooden support at the corner of the vendor pavilion.
“Drop it,” Carver shouts.
Mercer turns toward the deputy.
That moment of divided attention is all Rocco needs.
He crosses the distance between them with terrifying speed. His shoulder drives into Mercer’s chest before the gun can swing back. Both men hit the ground hard.
The weapon skids across the path.
Morales reaches it first and kicks it away. Carver closes in as Mercer twists beneath Rocco, striking wildly with his uninjured arm. Rocco catches the wrist, forces it behind his back, and pins him facedown against the gravel.
Mercer continues fighting until the handcuff closes around one wrist.
Then he becomes still.
Grant rises cautiously, keeping himself between me and the scene. “Wait.”
I remain inside the truck until Carver retrieves the gun and Morales searches Mercer. Only when Grant receives confirmation through his radio does he let me stand.
Rocco is still kneeling beside Mercer.
Red clay streaks his jeans. One side of his jacket is torn, and blood marks his lower lip. He looks unharmed otherwise, but I need to touch him before I can believe it.
I move around Grant.
“Loralee,” he warns.
“They have him.”
“Wait for Rocco.”
I can’t.
I cross the parking area as Carver pulls Mercer to his feet. The man’s cap has fallen away, exposing thinning brown hair and a face twisted by something deeper than anger.
His eyes find me.
“You,” he says.
Rocco steps between us.
Mercer gives a short, breathless laugh. “You weren’t supposed to see anything.”
The words reach me around Rocco’s body.
“You thought I knew what you planned,” I say.
“You kept looking at the lodge.” His gaze locks onto Rocco. “Then he changed everything. More cameras. More guards. He made you important.”
Rocco moves closer until Mercer can no longer see me. “She was important before I arrived.”
Carver leads Mercer toward the patrol vehicle. He continues talking, insisting the festival ruined him, the coordinator lied, and everyone would have known the truth after tomorrow. His words lose shape as distance swallows them.
Rocco turns toward me. I touch the blood at his lip.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“You’re bleeding.”
“He caught me once.”
My fingers travel over his jaw and down his neck, confirming what my eyes cannot. His pulse is fast and strong beneath my touch.
Rocco catches my hand. “You promised to stay in the truck.”
“I stayed until he was in handcuffs.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“It is exactly what I promised.”
His eyes close briefly. Then he pulls me against him.
The force of the embrace lifts my feet from the ground.
I wrap both arms around his shoulders and hold on while his breath shudders against my hair.
Around us, deputies move between vehicles.
The bomb squad continues its work. Glass crackles beneath someone’s boots near the lodge.
But no one is screaming. No smoke rises above the festival. No child lies injured beneath shattered glass.
“I thought the vision was happening,” I whisper.
Rocco sets me down but doesn’t release me. “Part of it did.”
“The gunshot. The glass. The banner.” I look toward the lodge. “But the people weren’t here.”
“Because you warned us.”
“I didn’t stop Mercer.”
“You saw enough for us to take the threat seriously. That stopped him.”
For days, I have treated the vision as something waiting ahead of us, fixed and unavoidable. I thought my only choices were to understand it or fail the people caught inside it. Perhaps a vision is not a promise. Perhaps it is a door left open long enough for someone to choose another way through.
Rocco presses his forehead against mine. “It’s over.”
I close my eyes and feel the truth of those words move through him. Mercer has been caught. The device will be dismantled. By morning, the festival grounds will be empty rather than filled with families walking unknowingly toward danger.
The future he planned has fallen. And we are still standing.