CHAPTER THREE #2
Ben forced his hands to go still, forced his breathing to stay even. Through swollen eyes, he watched the violent guard enter—the one who enjoyed his work a little too much—carrying a small cooler and a folding chair. The calm one was nowhere in sight.
The guard set up his chair against the far wall, positioning himself where he could watch Ben while he ate. He pulled a sandwich from the cooler, unwrapped it, and took a bite.
"Hungry?" He chewed with his mouth open, a petty cruelty. "Thirsty? I got a beer in here, too. Nice and cold."
Ben said nothing. His wrists throbbed where the rope had worn through the skin, but he'd made progress in the hours since the last beating. The knots were looser now. Not loose enough—but close.
The guard took another bite, watching Ben with the casual interest of a man observing an animal in a cage.
"You know what I think? I think you did see something out there.
I think you're just too stubborn to admit it.
" He shrugged. "Doesn't matter to me either way. I get paid whether you talk or not."
He pulled a phone from his pocket and started scrolling, his attention divided between the screen and his sandwich. A video played—something that made him chuckle, some stupid clip that meant nothing except that his eyes were on the phone instead of on Ben.
Ben resumed his work on the ropes. Slow movements, careful movements, nothing that would register in the guard's peripheral vision. The knot at his right wrist had a weakness, a loop that had loosened incrementally with each hour of patient manipulation. If he could get his thumb past that loop—
The guard laughed at something on his phone. Took another bite of sandwich. Cracked open the beer.
Ben pulled.
The rope caught on the heel of his hand. He twisted, feeling skin tear, feeling the rough fibers bite into raw flesh. Pain flared up his arm, sharp and bright, but he didn't stop. He pulled harder, felt something pop in his thumb—a joint forced past its natural limit—and then his hand was through.
The guard looked up.
For a frozen instant, their eyes met. Then the guard dropped his phone and reached for the gun at his hip.
Ben was faster. His captivity had weakened him, but desperation and training made up the difference.
He launched himself forward, closing the distance before the gun cleared the holster, and slammed his forearm across the man's throat.
The guard went down choking, the chair clattering beneath him, and Ben followed him to the floor.
He punched the man twice in the face, the second blow causing the man's head to bounce off the concrete floor.
The man's eyes rolled back and he went still, unconscious.
Taking a deep, calming breath, Ben got to work. He took the gun, the keys, and the guard's phone. Then he slipped out of the trailer into blinding afternoon sunlight.
He was at an airfield. Old, abandoned, the kind of place that had served small planes decades ago and now served only as a dumping ground for rusted equipment and broken dreams. A single hangar stood nearby, its roof half-collapsed. Beyond it, desert stretched in every direction.
He was somewhere north of Phoenix, he guessed from the terrain. Maybe fifty miles from the reservation, maybe more. A long way to travel on foot, especially in his condition.
But he didn't have a choice.
Ben disabled the guard's phone and left it in the trailer—no sense carrying a tracking device.
Then he started walking, keeping to the washes and the low ground, avoiding roads and anything that looked like civilization.
His body screamed with every step, his vision swimming from dehydration and blood loss, but he kept moving.
He thought about Kari and the overlook where they'd sat together after finding Evan's body. About the way she'd looked at him in the starlight, her face open and vulnerable in a way she rarely allowed herself to be.
If you ever need to disappear, he'd joked, this is where you'd do it.
He hadn't been talking about the trading post. He'd been talking about the ridge.
Ben's training told him to find the nearest police station, the nearest hospital, the nearest representative of the system he'd spent his career serving.
Call for backup. Report what had happened. Let the machinery of law enforcement grind into action.
But the calm man's words kept circling through his head. We need to know who you told. Not just what you saw, but who you told. They weren't just worried about Ben. They were worried about the investigation spreading, about other people learning what he might have learned.
And they'd known about the search warrant before it was executed. They'd known to clean the site, to move their operation, to stay one step ahead of official channels.
That meant someone inside was feeding them information. Someone in law enforcement, maybe. Someone at the Bureau. Someone who would know the moment Ben Tsosie walked into a hospital or a police station and started talking about being kidnapped.
He couldn't trust the system. Not yet. Not until he knew how deep the rot went.
He could, however, trust Kari. She had been chasing this conspiracy since before Ben even knew it existed, had lost her mother to these people and refused to stop digging despite the threats. She would come looking for him if he could just get word to her.
The gas station payphone couldn't be traced back to him. No caller ID, no records, no digital trail. He'd give her just enough to find him, and then he'd get somewhere safe and wait.
Somewhere only she would think to look.
It took him most of the day to reach the gas station.
Every step was a negotiation with a body that wanted nothing more than to collapse.
His vision swam. His thoughts fragmented and reformed in patterns that didn't quite make sense.
Twice he had to stop and rest, hiding in the scrub while vehicles passed on the distant highway.
He had no way of knowing if they were ordinary travelers or his former captors hunting him.
After calling Kari, he made his way back to the overlook, where he sat down, closed his eyes, and listened to the silence of the desert. The wind moving through the scrub. The distant call of a nighthawk. The sound of his own breathing, ragged and shallow.
He was still alive. Somehow.
He held onto that thought as the darkness closed in and waited for headlights to appear on the fire road below.