Chapter Thirty-Two
Brock slammed his truck door and ran up the steps to the Coulters’ near-dark house, his wet, muddy boots leaving a trail behind him. He hadn’t been able to reach Rena, but cell towers were down throughout the region, and he only had one bar on his phone that kept going in and out of service.
The screen door banged shut behind him as he stomped into the old farmhouse. Inside, the only light came from a battery-operated lamp in the living room, where Rena sat on the edge of the couch, her head in her hands.
She looked up when he came in—her face blotchy, eyes red from crying. Her lips trembled as she spoke.
“What happened?” He sat next to her, took her hand. It was cold, even though the house was warm. His heart pounded so hard he almost couldn’t speak. “Where’s Sam?”
“In bed. He’s worse. He lied about his pain, now he can’t lie anymore. He needs a hospital. We have to do it, Brock. We have to get help.”
“Okay.”
But he didn’t get up. “What else?” He knew his wife, and he knew that something else was wrong. Then he realized something. “The truck out front—that’s not the same red truck from the house.”
She shook her head. “I did exactly what you said. I took the redhead, I tied her to the steering wheel. She was fighting me, I hit her with the gun. Out of rage, I hit her because she wouldn’t shut up!”
His stomach fell. “And?”
“She complied, just like you said she would if I showed her who was in charge. She drove and then another vehicle was coming toward us. The driver recognized her and I knew we were in trouble. I panicked, turned the wheel, and we plunged into the drainage ditch. The truck started filling with water. I got out, got Sam out and—well, the other driver got out of his truck and I threatened him.” She laughed, but there was no humor.
“I fired the gun and said give me your car. He did. I left him, left her.”
She put her head in her hands and sobbed. “I left her tied to the steering wheel and the truck was taking on water and I just left. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. And now Sam—Sam is worse. If he dies, it’s karma, for me leaving that girl.”
He rose from the couch, his blood cold. Sam would not die. “Rena—” he began, but she steamrolled over what he planned to say.
“I cleaned up the mess you made,” she said.
“The papers. The drawers. I thought maybe if I could undo something—” Her laugh was short, manic.
“It didn’t fix anything. He’s dying. My little brother is dying and it’s all my fault.
” She pointed to the phone table. Brock glanced over, spied a Rolodex like the one his grandmother used to have.
“I went through their phone book. It’s all handwritten.
And Ellen McKenna—the redhead’s mom? She’s a nurse.
It says so, right there. A nurse. Maybe if we had known—”
“The girl didn’t tell us,” Brock said, jaw tight.
“Why would she?” Rena snapped. “We tied her up, scared her half to death, terrified her friend. Why would she tell us? We don’t deserve the money. We don’t deserve anything!”
She stood, paced, wrapped her arms around her body, but she was shaking and Brock didn’t know how to fix it, fix her, fix Sam. He wanted to hit something, but was rooted in the center of the living room. Trapped. Frozen.
“Sam—he didn’t ask for this. He followed us because he loves us. He wanted to help. And now he might—” She stopped, swallowed hard. “He doesn’t deserve to die because we were desperate.”
Brock’s chest ached. He looked toward the hall, toward the dim bedroom where Rena had set up another portable lamp.
“I’ll fix everything,” he said, but had no idea how. No idea what he could do that would change the deadly course of events that were unfolding tonight.
He left Rena sobbing in the living room and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Stood in the doorway and looked at Sam.
He was curled on the bed, barely conscious. Fever glistened on his forehead, lips cracked, eyes fluttering but unfocused. He looked impossibly young—more like the fourteen-year-old boy Brock had rescued than the man he was supposed to be.
Brock knelt beside the bed. God, not him. Please, don’t take Sam.
He thought of the day he met Rena—her arms crossed tight over her chest, trying to act like she wasn’t shattered after her mom’s death. Her dad had been drunk on the porch, yelling at Sam for something. The boy had looked up with silent defiance, his lip still bleeding from an earlier beating.
Back then, Brock only knew one thing: you did not hit someone smaller than you. You didn’t hurt people who couldn’t fight back.
He’d taken Rena and Sam from where he’d found them in rural Alabama when he was working for a jackass who was friends with their asshole dad, and they went to Louisiana, where Brock had grown up, where he knew the land and the people and could survive.
It was a rough life, but it was theirs. They made it work—until they didn’t.
Crime had always hovered at the edge of Brock’s life like a shadow, he flitted in and out of the life, and eventually, he stepped into it for good.
Robinson paid well. It was easy.
Until it wasn’t.
Now Sam, the smartest kid he’d ever known, the one who never complained, who had always looked up to him, was dying. He saw it in his unfocused eyes.
Brock leaned over, kissed his forehead. “I love you, Sam. I’ll fix this.”
Then he walked back to Rena.
“I’m taking him to the hospital,” he said.
She looked up sharply, surprised that he had agreed with her.
He dropped the envelope on the table. “You take this and go home. Sam’ll need you when he’s better.”
“No.” Her voice was firm, almost angry. She shoved the envelope back at him. “We do this together. I love you. Where you go, I go.”
“You don’t understand. They’ll arrest us. I can’t let you go down for what I did.”
“We did it,” she said fiercely, grabbing his shirt. “You think I don’t know what I’ve done? I left a girl trapped in a submerged truck during a storm. I left her. I’ll live with that forever. You don’t get to carry this alone.”
“The driver, he helped her,” Brock said, though he didn’t know that, couldn’t know that. “You said he recognized her, right? So he helped her.”
“If she was alive,” Rena whispered.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he kissed her desperately, then held her tight.
He said, “Bring the truck right up to the door. Not my truck, the other one, I’d rather have the Texas plates tonight than the Louisiana plates. I’ll carry Sam out.”
She nodded and disappeared outside.
Brock wrapped Sam in a comforter and cradled him like a child. He was burning up, murmuring nonsense. As Brock eased him into the backseat, Sam whimpered and clutched his wrist weakly.
Brock leaned close. “Hold on, buddy. We’re going to get you help. Just a little longer.”
Rena slid over to the passenger seat and Brock took the wheel.
The wipers squealed against the glass as the rain pounded and the wind swirled.
They headed south down Privett Road, slow and steady.
Brock’s jaw clenched the whole way, each bounce of the wheels jarring Sam in the back.
But he was silent now. Unconscious? Or dead?
The rain had thinned to a mist, but the road ahead shimmered with standing water. Then, without warning, the front of the truck dropped and slammed hard—thud—into a ditch and stalled.
“No!” Brock pounded the dash. “God, no!”
He jumped out into knee-deep water. The road had partly collapsed. A shallow sinkhole, the remnants of the last storm, now filled with swirling runoff from the fields.
“Damn it!” he shouted. He could practically feel the water rising up his legs.
Back in the truck, he turned to Rena. “Get in the driver’s seat. Put it in neutral. I’ll push us out.”
“Brock, it’s too heavy—”
“Just do it!”
He stomped back through the water, bracing his shoulder against the bumper. The ground was thick, muddy, uneven, but he dug his boots in and shoved with everything he had. He prayed, prayed to a God he had always acknowledged but never counted on.
For Sam. Not me, for Sam.
The tires spun. Mud and water sprayed. The truck rocked, then slowly, miraculously, rolled back.
Brock let out a ragged breath and stumbled to the passenger side. He jumped in as Rena restarted the engine—blessedly, it held.
“Where?” she asked.
“Ellen McKenna’s house.”
She flinched. “Brock, she won’t help us. Not after what we did.”
“We’re not asking.”
Her hands tightened on the wheel.
“For Sam,” Brock said quietly. “We have to do this for Sam.”
She wiped her eyes, put the truck in gear, and backed up slowly until she could turn around and head north.