2. Chapter 2
The headlights showed up behind her on the highway just outside Cedar Junction.
Not close. Not pressing. A pair Maren couldn't make a color or a shape out of, far enough back that a passing semi could eat them for a stretch and then they'd be there again. Then gone. Then there.
She watched them more than she watched the road.
Maren had been doing this for three years.
Most nights the car behind her turned off at the gas station, or peeled into a driveway, or was a trucker just going home too. Most nights she'd been right. The feeling in her chest that something was wrong tonight was the same feeling her body had gotten wrong a hundred times before.
When she signaled for her street, the headlights behind her didn't.
She took the turn.
In her side mirror the two lights kept going. Straight past her street. A second later, gone.
She let her shoulders come down a quarter of an inch. Not all the way.
Nothing came. Again.
She pulled around behind her building into her lot and killed the engine.
Sat there a second.
Three cracked spaces and a dumpster her landlord never moved to the curb. Her own space open. A neighbor’s Buick under the streetlight. The usual work van against the back fence. Nothing on foot. Nothing she could see.
Apron in the passenger seat. Tire iron in her bag under the apron. Keys beside the apron, the kind of ring where you could thread one key through your knuckles so it stuck out past the first joint. Old habit. Old habit was the only habit that had ever kept her alive.
She lifted the tire iron out of the bag and slung the strap over her shoulder. Picked up her keys, one key threaded between her knuckles the way three years of walking to cars at night had taught her to hold them.
She got out.
The lot was cold and quiet and her breath made more fog than it should have.
She started across toward the foot of her back stairs.
Halfway across, two men came out of the alley.
Not neighbors. Not uniforms. The bigger one was taking up most of the space at the alley’s opening. The other cut around behind him toward her side, hands too loose. She'd waitressed long enough to know what hands looked like when they were ready for the next thing.
“Evening,” the bigger one tried to flash a friendly smile.
She brought the tire iron up two-fisted.
“Whoa,” the lean one said. “Easy.”
“Move.”
The bigger one came for her.
Maren swung.
The iron hit his forearm where he'd brought it up to block. Vibration came up her arms to her shoulders. He grabbed the bar. Pulled. Her grip held on reflex. She slid a step with him.
Something behind him moved that wasn't him.
A moment later his body smashed against the pavement with a loud thunk, his head fell hard against the curb in a way that wasn't right. The bar still in her grip, still going where his pull had taken them.
Two seconds. Maybe three.
The lean one didn't look. Ran. Down the alley the way they'd come, past the dumpster, gone before her brain caught up to the fact that she should have been watching him too.
The bigger one was on the ground. A wet sound came out of his throat then stopped, past moving.
A man stood where he had been.
Dark jacket. Wide shoulders. Still.
He wasn't looking at the body. He was looking at her. Careful. The color in his eyes was doing something under the streetlight that eyes weren't supposed to do. Amber, then a flicker of something warmer. Gone. Amber again.
Maren raised the tire iron. “Don't come any closer.”
“I won't.” He stayed where he was.
Three more men came into the lot behind him. Too busy watching the man on the ground, she hadn’t noticed them arrive. One black SUV was at the alley’s end, driver door still open.
She looked at the men again.
The diner. Corner booth. Four cheeseburgers.
She kept the iron raised, ready to swing.
“Who are you?”
“Jace Holbrook.” He said it slow. Like he was talking a dog off a rail. “I was at the diner tonight. At Jenny’s. You were kind to a kid with a broken crayon. The man on the ground came for you. The one who ran came with him. I'm sorry we didn't get here first.”
“You were following me.”
“One car behind you out of Jenny's. Mine. One car ahead of me. Theirs. When you signaled your street they kept going, parked a few blocks over, came around on foot. I parked the way I did to cut off the alley.”
Maren's back was against her own car. She didn't remember stepping back to it. The door handle was cold through her jacket. She wanted to sit down and knew if she sat down she wouldn't get back up.
“Jenny.” He said.
“Jenny?” Her eyes narrowed.
“She’ll vouch for me. She's known me since I was a kid.”
Not taking his eyes from her, he reached back his hand and someone put a dialed phone into it.
“Jenny, it’s Jace.” Jace saw Maren’s surprise. “Some men came for Maren tonight.”
He saw the moment it hit that a stranger knew her name. Something moved in her face before she could stop it. Jace's voice came slower, careful.
“She's not hurt. She's standing right in front of me. She doesn't know me and she's right not to. She can’t stay here.” A beat later. “Your place isn’t safe either, it just puts you both at risk. You need to tell her it’s safe for her to come with us.”
He set it on the trunk of her car and backed up a pace.
The tire iron was shaking. Not from fear. From a double shift of heavy trays. Her arm was done. She dropped the arm. Kept the iron.
She took two steps and, still watching them, snatched up the phone.
Jenny's voice came in mid-sentence. Loud. Real mad.
“— you understand me, Jace? Nothing happens to her. Nothing. Or they won't even find all your pieces. You hear me?”
“Jenny.”
“Maren. Honey. You okay?”
“There's a dead man in my lot.”
“It’s okay. Jace is there.”
“There was another one too.”
The line was quiet.
“Okay. Listen. I don't know what happened over there but I do know Jace Holbrook. He's been eating at my counter since he was in a booster seat. If he says you're not safe where you are, you believe him. You hearing me?”
“Yes.”
“Whatever else is going on, Jace Holbrook isn't going to hurt you. Go with him, Maren. You’ll be safe.”
“Jenny, I—”
“I'll see you soon, honey.”
She hung up.
Maren stood in her lot with the flip phone hot in her hand. The men hadn't moved. Jace stepped back another pace without her noticing.
One of the other three came forward from the alley mouth. Big. Watchful. Her face held no interest for him. He looked past her at her car.
“Lot's clear, alpha,” he said, quiet. “Their car's three blocks south, sitting empty. Nobody on foot on the street.”
“Clean, alpha.” Maren heard the call from under her car. She hadn’t seen anyone move there and didn’t know how long they had been down there.
A big man slid out from under the trunk. He came out slow, on his elbows, careful not to rise fast anywhere near her. Got to his feet a good six feet clear of her and kept the distance.
He brushed his hands off on his pants and held up a flat black disc the size of a poker chip, a stub of antenna wire trailing off one edge. “Magnetic. Tucked in the back wheel well. Cheap unit, the kind you buy ten of online.” He closed his fist around it. “It's dead now.”
So someone had found her tonight and tagged her car like a parcel, and these men had peeled it off again before she'd finished her shift. Both things were true at once. Maren stood in the cold lot and understood that the second was the only reason the first didn't matter yet.
He had found her tonight. Finally. After three years of memorizing exits, leaving behind jobs and towns before she got comfortable, and creating more aliases than she could name right now, he had finally found her. She knew now that he had. He wasn’t going to give her the chance to slip away again.
“Those weren't cops,” she said.
“No,” Jace said.
She looked at the body. Then the four men. The phone in her hand. Back at Jace.
“Where?”
“A place north of here. About thirty minutes. It's locked, people on the gate. You'll have your own cabin, a lock you control from the inside, and a kettle someone has already put on the stove because she didn't know which you like better, coffee or tea.”
“She.”
“Elena. She’s in charge of the kitchen. She'll be the one not asking you questions.”
Maren breathed in. Breathed out. The wet sound of the man’s gurgling on the ground was still in her head. She was not going to throw up. She wasn't doing that here. Not in front of four strangers.
“Terms,” she waited for his nod. “Back seat. Window seat. I want a door right next to me.”
Jace nodded then waited to hear if she had more.
“You next to me. Not one of the others.”
She thought his mouth curved up but when she looked closer it had settled.
“Okay.”
“I keep this.”
She lifted the tire iron.
“That’s fine.”
“If anyone tries to take it I will use it.”
“You won't have to.”
She nodded, once.
“Anything in your apartment you want to take with you?”
She looked up at her back stairs, at the door she wasn't going to sleep behind tonight. Maybe not ever again.
She nodded, once.
Jace held out his palm for her keys.
She didn’t give them.
“They could have someone up there,” Jace explained.
She looked at him. Looked at the stairs. Looked at the dead man on the pavement.
Three years of everything-is-a-trap told her to keep the keys. Years of being the one who went up alone, every time, told her this wasn't the worst offer she'd had.
She opened her fist. Let the keyring fall into his palm.
“You come down before I go up,” her eyes bored into his. “I don't put a foot on those stairs until you're back on this lot.”
“Deal.”
He went up the stairs light and quiet, in a way a man that size shouldn't have been able to go up cheap exterior stairs. The big watchful one moved to the foot of the stairs as Jace reached the top. Back to the lot. Eyes outward, not on her.
She heard the bolt turn up there.
Nothing else.
Less than twenty seconds and he was coming back down. Two at a time. Quieter than he'd gone up.
He set her keys on the hood of her car, closer to where she could reach them than to himself. Stepped back.