Chapter 52 #3
Griffin slides into a spot three rows back, angling the van so we have a clear view of the sedan.
Henley gets out, locks his door, then heads toward the store entrance.
A wisp of something peels away from his body like smoke trailing behind a cigarette, disappearing into the air as Henley walks through the automatic doors.
“Did you—” Benji starts.
“Yes,” DJ says.
“Hey there, Casper,” Griffin says, leaning over the steering wheel. “Where did you come from?”
Did we somehow miss Morrow slipping into Henley as he walked from his house to his car? Was Morrow already in the car?
Is that the cold feeling I picked up when the car drove by?
I watch people come and go through the supermarket entrance—a mom with two kids hanging off the cart, an elderly man shuffling with a cane, a teenager in a work vest taking a smoke break by the dumpster.
I know we can’t tail him in there because we can’t do an extraction in the middle of a grocery store, but it feels wrong just to sit here.
I’m starting to wonder if Henley forgot where all the produce is and had to search the entire store for everything on his list when he emerges with no shopping bags.
Gone is the hunch in Henley’s shoulders. His strides are long, eating up ground the same way they did in the abandoned building when he was walking toward Nico and me.
DJ draws in a short breath. Morrow climbs into the car and drives slowly out of the parking lot.
We follow him past a strip mall, a gas station, a row of fast-food restaurants. He signals right. Griffin follows, but there’s a car between us now, and then another merges into our lane.
“Don’t lose him,” DJ urges.
“That’s so helpful, Deej, thank you,” Griffin says.
“He’s turning,” Benji says, twisting in his seat to keep looking at the car.
Griffin follows, but when we round the corner, there’s just an empty street stretching ahead.
“Where’d he go?” DJ cranes her neck, scanning both sides of the road.
“I don’t know where he could go,” Griffin says. “He was right there.”
We cruise down the street at a crawl. Everyone’s eyes search parking lots and side streets, but there’s nothing.
Griffin slams his palm against the steering wheel. “Damn it.”
“Pull over,” Zoey says, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I can find him, but you’ve got to give me a minute.”
Griffin yanks the van into a bank parking lot. Bob shifts in my lap, pressing his warm body against my ribs like he can sense how badly I need him.
The clicking of Zoey’s keyboard fills the van, each stroke making my pulse spike higher. A minute turns out to be optimistic.
“If Henley had his phone in the car, it’ll be broadcasting his location to nearby cell towers,” Zoey says to me.
“We tried to find you and Nico that way,” DJ says, “but yours was in the van, and Morrow destroyed Nico’s.”
“It took a surprisingly short amount of time for Morrow to figure out we can track him through the phone,” Benji says.
“Henley wasn’t possessed when he left the house—hopefully he has his phone on him and hasn’t turned it off yet,” DJ says.
The laptop screen casts a blue glow across Zoey’s face as a sophisticated program loads.
Come on.
A grid of streets loads pixel by pixel. A little yellow dot blinks into existence, smack dab in the middle of a grid of roads.
Zoey zooms in. “Last ping came in four minutes ago. A block away from the highway.”
The highway he’d need to take to get to the abandoned hospital.
Griffin’s already putting the van in gear, pulling out of the parking lot with enough force to make the tires squeal. Zoey refreshes the map again. No more data points come up. He must have turned off his phone.
“How fast can the van go?” I ask.
“Fast enough.” Griffin floors it.
The van lurches forward. DJ yelps, and Bob slides across my lap with an indignant yip. Other cars become obstacles to weave around. The van zips around an old lady who’s taking her sweet time in the fast lane.
“It won’t be fast enough if you get us pulled over,” DJ yells at him.
Griffin eases off the gas just enough to drop us below felony speeds.
“How far are we from the hospital?” I ask.
“Thirty-two minutes,” Zoey says.
DJ whips out her phone, hits call, and snaps it into the phone mount on the dashboard. She connects the phone to the speakers, and the ringtone comes through loud.
“Talk to me,” Nico answers, sounding weary and rough and so him. The sound of his voice rumbles through my body like heavy bass on a song, and I close my eyes for a second to absorb the sound. Bob cranes his head up to look at me, probably wondering why I just stopped breathing.
“We’ve got a situation,” DJ says, and fills him in.
Nico swallows audibly. The ensuing silence familiar and comforting because I know he’s composing himself. “Who’s with you?”
“All of us.” DJ glances at me in the rear-view mirror. “Even Bob.”
This pause is so long that I wonder if the call dropped.
“DJ and Griffin move in,” Nico says. “Zo on comms. Benji, stay behind and engage if they need backup, and Eden… don’t engage.”
By the time we pull up to the hospital, I’m wound so tightly that Bob has started licking my hand. We pass the sedan parked outside the side entrance and drive to the other end of the building to park.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea for you to follow him in there?” I ask DJ and Griffin as they get out of the van. “He has cameras in there. He’d have the upper hand.”
“He could have more victims in there,” DJ says. “Plus, we need a remote location to do the extraction.” DJ pulls her goggles over her eyes.
Griffin does the same and gives me a theatrically solemn nod. “We try not to perform exorcisms in public unless it’s an emergency. People come around asking questions.”
There were a couple of people in the Walmart parking lot when Nico and Donny extracted William Caine, but none of them seemed to have any questions or even wanted to step in and help me. I guess that case would’ve qualified as an emergency since I was actively being murdered.
Griffin hefts a bag of iron chains to his back. He and DJ sling shotguns over their shoulders and slide earpieces in.
“If anything goes wrong, call us for backup,” I say.
“The only backing up you will be doing is away from this building,” Griffin says.
“Be careful,” I tell them.
They duck through a gap in the chain-link fence and disappear through the door.