Chapter 5
The woman watched her own studio door from the abandoned beachcomber’s shed half a mile north of the marina, the wool blanket she’d cached two summers ago pulled around her shoulders, her water bottle warm against her hip from body heat.
The phone feed from the streetlamp camera came in grainy at this distance. Good enough.
The lithium battery she’d swapped out for the older, weaker model six months ago had definitely been the right call. Even if the sun was reliable on the coast, she didn’t dare set out solar panels. So she had at least two more days of power for the camera monitor.
It wouldn’t take that long for the people pursuing her to make a move. Then she’d at least have clues to work with when she disappeared. That was a lot more than she’d had when Ray rescued her.
She’d been watching the studio since she’d lost her attackers at the Overlook.
The note on the door was her own work. Family emergency.
Class fees refunded. Back next week. She’d printed it at the truck stop in Tillamook and taped up with two strips of green painter’s tape, the kind that came off without residue.
Running for her life, or not, she believed in good habits.
The shed smelled like creosote and old rope.
Despite her unrelenting daily workout routines, her thighs ached from sitting on a folded tarp on a concrete pad.
She did her yoga breathing through her nose.
The breathing didn’t make her thighs hurt less.
It did make her brain hurt less, though, which was the priority.
It was almost midnight when the man strolled up the studio walk.
Heart pounding despite all her training, she catalogued the details.
Medium build, mid-thirties, wearing a dark coat and jeans.
It was the gloves that gave him away. She had no way of knowing if he’d been one of the men chasing her down that trail, but even if he wasn’t, the latex gloves gave him away.
A second man slid up behind him, standing watch while the first man readied his tools.
She’d half-hoped for one. A single operative meant Neptune only wanted to make certain she was long gone. Two meant find her.
The second arrival pulled out a phone. The camera’s mic only reached thirty feet. The studio door was at the edge of it, but she caught the cadence — short, clipped — and one word that was all too easy to lip read. Gone. He nodded and put the phone away. The first man jimmied the door.
It took him longer than it would have taken her. She did not feel smug about this.
Okay, yeah, she did, a little.
They were inside for nine minutes. She hadn’t wanted to risk hanging around long enough to activate the interior camera.
There wasn’t anything for them to find in the studio anyway.
Every piece of evidence or leverage she had was digitized, copied onto multiple flash drives, each stashed in a remote location.
Her backups had multiple backups. None of which they’d ever find.
They left through the door, locking it behind them, a decidedly unsettling detail. The second man paused on the walk to check his phone. The first one waited beside him, hands shoved into his coat. Skye held her breath. They were back in the mic cone.
The first man, low: “Bakery gal’s next.”
The second, drier: “Looks like. But in the morning. I’m beat.”
A short, easy laugh. The kind that did not belong in the same sentence as what they were laughing about. “She’s not going anywhere.”
A beat.
“Yet.”
They walked west.
The scene on the monitor remained unchanged. The weak light over the studio door, and the shadow from Mrs. Saroya’s American flag flapping in the light night breeze.
She ran the audio back in her head.
Bakery gal’s next.
Cara, the quiet woman who owned Sugar this new one, she hadn’t been able to read yet. So no, she was not handing the warning to a uniform.
An anonymous warning. Scary enough to be taken seriously, but not frightening enough to create outright panic. Lots of people froze when they panicked. The bakery woman was, she believed, a person who would verify before she acted. Which would take time the woman did not have.
The warning had to be in person. Now.