Chapter Fourteen #2
We passed a grain elevator. Concrete silos clustered beside the highway, their corrugated metal roofs catching the late light, a faded sign on the access road reading HARMON CO-OP in letters that had once been red and were now the color of dried blood.
I committed it to memory. Grain elevator, west side of Route 9, approximately eight miles from the grocery store if my mental map was right, which it might not have been because panic did things to distance.
A water tower rose beyond the silos. Blue, faded, the town name stenciled in white letters too small to read at this speed, and I memorized the color -- faded blue, the shade of a paint job that had been repainted once in the nineties and left to weather -- and the approximate bearing relative to our direction of travel, which was east, steady east, the sun at our backs now, the shadow of the truck stretching long across the asphalt behind us.
“I’ve been patient.”
His voice broke into the silence, calm enough that I knew he’d been waiting to say it. I kept my attention on the highway instead of looking at him. The grain elevator diminished in the side mirror, followed by the faded blue water tower, until both were behind us.
“I found you, didn’t I?” There was satisfaction in the statement, as though finding me proved something beyond his ability to pay someone with better resources than he had. The truck stayed at fifty-five, carrying us farther from town. “That should tell you something.”
It did. I’d left the same night the victim advocate called. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going because I hadn’t known myself. Two days later, a breakdown had stranded Ellie and me in a Missouri town I’d never heard of. There shouldn’t have been a trail leading from Indiana to Dread’s compound.
Except somehow there had been one.
“How?” I asked, keeping my attention on the road ahead. I hated giving him the satisfaction of the question, but I needed the answer. “I didn’t even know where I was going.”
He smiled. “Your license plate did.”
My stomach dropped.
“You think people disappear because they drive away?” he asked. “Cameras everywhere. Toll roads. Gas stations. Parking lots. Guy I hired found your SUV. After that, all he had to do was keep looking.”
Which explained the search. The cigarettes that hadn’t smelled like his. Someone getting onto the compound before anyone realized they should be looking for more than one man.
I faced forward again and concentrated on keeping my breathing controlled.
“You need to take me back.”
He didn’t look at me. His gaze stayed on the highway, his profile sharp against the afternoon light coming through the driver’s window, and for a moment the only sound was the tires on asphalt and the low rumble of the engine.
“We’re going to be a family again.” He spoke with the certainty of someone announcing a decision already made, one that had never required my consent. “Whether you want it or not.”
My stomach turned. Not metaphorically. Physically, the lurch of nausea that came from hearing a truth spoken by someone dangerous, and I pressed my back harder against the door and felt the handle dig into my kidney and welcomed the pain because pain was data and data was control and control was the only thing I had left in a truck doing fifty-five on a Missouri highway with a man who had just announced his intentions in the language of ownership.
My right hand moved. Not quickly. Not dramatically.
A slow shift, my fingers finding the edge of my purse where it lay against my thigh, and the fabric was warm from the sun coming through the windshield and my fingertips brushed the zipper pull -- a small metal tab, cold against skin that had been sweating -- and I began to work it backward one tooth at a time.
“Don’t.”
The word landed like a door slamming. His hand hadn’t moved -- still on the console, still two inches from my knee -- but his voice hardened, an edge creeping in that traveled through the cab to where I sat with my fingers on the zipper pull and my heart hammering against my ribs.
I stopped. The zipper pull rested between my thumb and forefinger, the metal cool, and I held it there without moving it farther because the calculation was immediate and brutal: phone now meant he would take it, and phone taken meant no phone at all, and no phone meant no GPS, no call, no way for Dread to find me if by some miracle he was looking, and the value of the phone intact -- hidden, waiting, its battery at seventy-three percent -- outweighed the value of a call I might not finish.
I let my hand settle back on my thigh. The zipper pull slipped from my fingers, and Marcus’s hand didn’t move from the console and the truck maintained its speed and the farmland rolled past the windows in waves of gold that had no end.
The turn came without signal. A gravel road branching north from Route 9, the intersection marked by a faded stop sign tilted at an angle that suggested it had been hit by something larger than a passenger vehicle, and Marcus slowed the truck -- forty, thirty, twenty -- and turned onto the gravel with a smoothness that said he’d driven this road before or had studied it well enough to approximate familiarity.