CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
By the time Selena was well on the road, the adrenaline from the silo had burned down into something colder.
Connor had retrieved his car. His SUV stayed ahead of her on the two-lane, brake lights flaring now and then as he took the curves a little too fast. Selena’s rental car was running okay. The steering still pulled slightly left, but it ran, and that was enough.
Fields slid by under a washed-out afternoon sky.
Wind bent the tops of late grass along the ditches.
More than once, Selena caught herself tightening her grip on the wheel for no reason beyond the pressure in her chest. Three women dead.
All three tied to the revival. Three chances for Croft to tell the truth, if truth had ever been on offer from him in the first place.
Connor’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Turn up ahead. Fairgrounds are on the right.”
“I know where they are,” Selena said. “We slept here last night.”
“Oh, you’ve been here before?” he replied sarcastically.
She almost smiled, then the gate came into view, and the smile vanished.
The revival grounds looked dead.
Connor’s SUV rolled through the open entrance first. Selena followed and braked hard enough to feel the nose of the car dip.
Yesterday the place had hummed with movement.
Folding chairs. Families. Lights. Music.
Hands lifted in prayer. Now the tent had been collapsed into itself, canvas sagging low over the frame like a body under a sheet.
Trucks were gone. Volunteer tables gone. Generator gone.
Most importantly, Croft’s bus was nowhere in sight.
Selena stepped out fast.
Wind moved across the empty grounds and slapped loose plastic against a post. Tire marks cut through the mud in layered arcs.
Off to one side a trash barrel had tipped over, scattering paper cups and hymn sheets into the weeds.
Nothing remained to suggest this had been a living camp only hours earlier except the churned-up earth.
Connor came around from his SUV and scanned the grounds once.
“I wonder if he ran the second we left.”
“He moved,” Selena said. “Could be just heading to their next location, as was their plan.”
“I suppose.”
They crossed the mud toward what had been the center of the camp. A folding sign lay face down in the dirt. Selena flipped it with the toe of her boot and saw the painted words half-smeared with mud.
ONE MORE NIGHT OF MERCY
“Cute,” Connor muttered.
No one answered when he called out. No volunteer stepped from behind the collapsed tent. No caretaker appeared from the fair office. The silence had that abandoned fairground quality to it, every loose flap and bent pole looking faintly obscene now that the crowd was gone.
“Why would they leave the tent?” Connor asked.
“That’s the question,” Selena answered. “It’s the type of thing you do when you’re running.”
From the road beyond the gate came the rattle of an old pickup. Selena turned.
A local man in a seed cap slowed when he saw the SUVs and leaned out his window. Gray whiskers. Sunburned face. Tobacco in one cheek.
Connor approached him first. “Hey there. Did you see the revival folks leave?”
The man nodded toward the west with two fingers on the steering wheel. “A few minutes ago, maybe. Bus and a few cars. Headed out that way in a hurry.”
“What kind of cars?” Selena asked.
“Vans, black SUVs. That sort of thing.” He squinted past them toward the empty grounds. “Something happen?”
Connor said, “Where exactly did you see them?”
“Route Nine headed west. They took the fork by Candler’s Feed instead of the highway.”
Selena and Connor exchanged a look.
Connor asked, “You sure?”
“Sheriff, my eyes still work.”
“Thank you.”
The man drove on, still looking back in his mirror.
Selena headed for her car. “If they took Nine, they’re heading south.”
Connor got in his SUV. “They won’t like us catching up either way.”
The engines turned over almost in unison.
They were less than ten minutes out when Connor’s voice hit the radio again.
“Got visual.”
Selena came over the rise and saw it.
Croft’s bus ran ahead on the rural highway like a moving chapel, cream sides flashing in the flat light. Two escort vehicles bracketed it. Black SUV in front left. Beige sedan on the right rear quarter. Both positioned just close enough to make a statement.
“I wonder if that’s Leon’s SUV,” Selena said.
Connor’s SUV surged ahead of her, closing the distance from behind. “This flock has more goons than they need. What’s going on here?”
“Try the left. I’ll take the right.”
The road narrowed between shallow ditches and telephone poles.
Open pasture lay on one side, soybean fields on the other.
No shoulder worth using. Selena accelerated, bringing her car up alongside the beige sedan.
Its driver glanced over once and immediately drifted wide, forcing her toward the line.
“Come on,” she muttered.
Connor tried the other flank. The black SUV moved to block him, too, edging across the center until oncoming traffic forced it back. The bus kept going, steady and unhurried, as if the entire convoy had rehearsed this.
Connor came over the radio. “They’re boxing us.”
“I noticed.”
“State line’s not far if they keep west.”
“I noticed that, too.” The radio buzzed.
The sedan on Selena’s side tapped its brakes, then surged, then tapped again.
Amateur intimidation. Still dangerous enough to kill somebody.
She dropped back half a length, then cut outward the instant the road widened near a farm access lane.
Tires bit loose stones and dust on the road.
The rental fishtailed once. Selena corrected, heart punching against her ribs, and came up nearly even with the sedan’s back door.
The driver stared straight ahead now.
Connor saw the opening and jammed his SUV through on the left. For a second both he and Selena were abreast of the escort vehicles, the bus looming ahead between them. Then everything went wrong at once.
A civilian hatchback pulled out from a side road ahead, saw the chaos too late, and swerved hard. The black SUV clipped it with the rear corner. Metal screamed. The hatchback spun, left the road, and slammed broadside into a shallow culvert wall with a burst of dirt and shattered glass.
Selena’s stomach dropped.
For one fractured instant the present split open and she saw another road, another burst of impact, another impossible second when a car had careened outside her home years ago into a woman and nothing in her life had been the same afterward.
Flash of headlights. Shouting. A body on the road.
The helpless animal certainty that whatever came next would be worse.
Then the road snapped back into focus.
The hatchback sat crooked in the ditch, steam already leaking from the hood.
Selena grabbed the radio. “We’ve got a car on the side of the road. Possible injuries. Need ambulance and fire service now.”
Connor’s voice came back sharp. “You stopping?”
Her hands clenched the wheel. The bus was pulling away. It was an impossible choice.
Another glance in the mirror showed the hatchback motionless at the culvert, one wheel spinning uselessly. She saw people getting out. They looked okay.
“Dispatch will get units there,” Selena said, hating every word. “We keep going.”
No answer for a second.
Then Connor said, “Understood.”
The black SUV and beige sedan had created enough confusion to regain position, but their spacing was sloppier now. The crash had rattled them. Selena used it.
She dropped two gears and shot past the beige sedan on a straight stretch where the road skimmed along open pasture. Its driver tried to squeeze her, but too late. Connor bullied the black SUV wide at the next bend, his larger vehicle forcing the issue with local knowledge and nerve.
Now there was only the bus.
Selena could see straight into the rear window, dark glass reflecting the sky. Connor’s SUV tucked close behind it. She pulled alongside on the left, then had to fall back when an oncoming feed truck blasted around a blind bend.
Connor came over the radio, calm in that way he got when things were moving too fast for panic.
“Next turnoff’s a county road. Barely more than a lane. If we can force him onto it, I can beat him at the crossroads.”
“Can you?”
“Remember I used to dirt bike here in my teens.”
A harsh breath left her. “You crashed more than once.”
Up ahead a weathered sign leaned beside a narrow road disappearing between trees and hills.
Connor said, “Now!”
Selena surged forward until her front bumper reached the bus’s driver window.
The machine was huge up close, all vibrating panels and reflected light.
She leaned on the horn and drove half a car-width into its lane, not enough to collide, enough to threaten.
The bus drifted away from her by instinct.
The county road appeared and Croft’s driver, boxed between Selena and the ditch, took it rather than risk a head-on with Connor’s SUV pressing from behind.
The bus lumbered onto the smaller road, suspension rocking.
Selena followed hard.
Trees crowded close here. A small sidewalk narrowed to patched blacktop with no center line, twisting between steep banks and split-rail fences. The bus could not use its size anymore. It had to slow for every bend.
Connor disappeared from her mirror.
Good.
He had taken the shortcut.
The road climbed, curved left around a stand of sycamores, then dipped past an old red barn with half the roof gone. Selena stayed on the bus’s back corner, close enough now to see the driver’s silhouette through the windshield when the road straightened.
“Come on,” she whispered.
At the next rise the shortcut paid off.
Connor’s SUV shot into view from a lane on the right and swung broadside across the road ahead of the bus. Brakes screamed. The bus lurched. Selena stamped on her own pedal and stopped at an angle behind it, trapping the larger vehicle between them.
Dust drifted through the evening light.
Connor was already out of the SUV, weapon drawn, moving to the driver’s side of the bus with quick, sure steps.
Selena came out of her car a heartbeat later, gun in hand, and advanced quickly.
The ground felt solid under her boots. Her pulse was hard and clean now. No room left for anything but command.
“Driver!” Connor shouted. “Shut it down and open the door!”
For a second nothing happened.
Then the engine noise softened. Air brakes hissed. The folding door opened with a mechanical sigh.
Elias Croft stepped down first.
Hands raised. Coat neat. Silver at his temples untouched by the chase. His expression was composed enough to insult the effort it had taken to bring him here.
“Hello, children,” he said, voice carrying with practiced ease. “I want counsel immediately. You can contact my attorney at—”
“Save it,” Selena snapped, cutting him off.
His eyes came to her. Not startled. Almost gentle.
Connor moved to cover the interior of the bus. “Anyone else inside, show your hands!”
No one emerged.
Selena closed the distance until Croft stood a couple of feet away, hands still up, face calm in the late light. Close enough now to smell soap and road dust and something medicinal beneath it.
“You’re under arrest pending questioning in connection with three homicides,” she said.
Croft gave the smallest sigh, as though this was tiresome rather than dangerous. “Agent Raven, I told you already, I’ve done nothing but preach.”
“Not now. You ran. Turn around.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Turn around.”
This time he obeyed.
The cuffs clicked shut around his wrists.
Metal on bone. Final. Selena had made hundreds of arrests.
Plenty of liars. Plenty of narcissists. Plenty of men who thought performance could protect them.
Yet as she secured his hands and stepped him back from the bus, a chill worked its way through her all the same.
Croft did not seem shocked.
Not angry enough.
Not even especially afraid.
He looked like a man who had been waiting for this exact moment and had decided long ago how he meant to stand when it came.
That more than the chase, more than the empty revival grounds, more than the escort cars and the blocked road, unsettled her.
Because people surprised by the law usually behaved like it.
Elias Croft did not.
He turned his head just enough to look at her over one shoulder, eyes clear, mouth almost kind.
“I hope,” he said softly, “you’re not losing time on the real monster.”
Selena tightened her grip on his arm and looked toward the bus, its dark windows giving nothing back.
For the first time since the silo, certainty flickered.
Then it was gone again, and all that remained was the man in cuffs and the unnerving sense that he had expected them all along.