Chapter 22
Lola
The pier has never felt small before. It feels small now. Ryan is beside me and Tristan is at my back and the blue-red light is doing its thing through the trees on the far bank and I can hear the approach.
Two officers on the river path.
Moving at the pace of people who are looking rather than searching, which means they haven’t confirmed yet, which means we have a window that is closing.
“Ryan,” I say.
“I know,” he replies.
“The path is—”
“I know.” He’s already reading the ground. I can see him do it, the rapid assessment, the same thing I do but with seven years of knowing this place. His eyes move from the river path to the carnival ground to the main approach and back. “Two minutes. Maybe less.”
“They’ll reach the pier access in ninety seconds,” I say.
“I know, Lola.”
“I’m just—”
“I know.” He looks at me. “When I say move, we move. Not before.”
Tristan is completely still behind me. Not frozen. The Tristan version of stillness, present and ready, the stillness of someone who has assessed the situation and is waiting for the right instruction. His hand is at my back, light, just contact. Just here. For me.
I breathe.
I watch the tree line.
The blue-red stops moving.
“They’ve stopped,” I say.
“Checking the pier access point,” Ryan replies. “They’ll confirm the sightline in—”
“Now?” I ask.
“Now,” he agrees. “Move.”
We move. Ryan sets the pace, which is fast-walking, purposeful and unhurried-looking and covering ground at a rate that is neither.
The crowd is thinner tonight, the core devotees, the families heading out, the night-owl locals settling in for the last hours. Enough bodies to move through. Not enough to disappear into completely.
I stay at Ryan’s shoulder. Tristan stays at mine.
We make it past the stage, which is between sets, the crowd redistributed. Past the prize display by the game alley's perimeter.
I hear the radio.
Not words, just the crackle of law enforcement communication, the sound that has a frequency I’ve been calibrated to for three weeks. Behind us. Forty meters, maybe fifty.
I look at Ryan.
He’s already heard it.
“Faster,” he urges.
We’re faster.
And then—because the universe has a sense of humor that I’ve been on the wrong end of before—I hear someone in the crowd say something, and a head turns.
The radio crackle gets a response, and the response is louder.
Ryan says, “Don’t run,” at the same moment that I hear behind us: “There—the woman in the—”
“Don’t run,” Ryan says again, and his hand finds my arm.
“They’ve seen me,” I reply.
“I know.”
“Ryan—”
“I know.” He looks at the ground ahead. We’re at the edge of the game alley, the shadow maze twenty meters to the left, and I feel him doing the calculation, the same one I’m doing, and we land on the same answer at the same moment.
“The maze,” I say.
He looks at it. “Lola—”
“I know the way around it.”
“If they follow us in—”
“They won’t find us,” I assure him. “Trust me.”
“We could get trapped—” Tristan starts.
“We won’t.” I look at Ryan. “Do you trust me?”
One second.
“Yes,” he says.
“Then run.”
The maze entrance is thirty seconds away at full sprint and we cover it in twenty, Ryan’s hand still at my arm and Tristan’s footsteps right behind mine. The carnival blurs at the edges of my vision, the lights and the noise and the crowd parting around three people moving with urgent purpose.
Behind us: shouting. We’ve been confirmed and the chase is active.
We run into the maze entrance.
The canvas walls close around us and the outside noise drops. The lighting shifts to the dim interior version and I take exactly one second to orient. Just one second, my spatial memory doing its work, the layout resolving in my mind like a map I’ve been carrying all week.
We run down tunnel after tunnel in an endless row of corridors until we’re close to my destination.
“Left,” I say.
“Left eventually ends in a dead end,” Ryan says, already breathing harder.
“I know. Left.”
He doesn’t argue. We go left.
The maze at full run is a different experience from the maze at leisure.
The canvas walls brush our shoulders in the narrow turns and the dim lighting makes the corners come fast. I’m running the layout in my head like a countdown—left at the T, straight through the S-bend, left again at the junction, don’t slow down at the—
“They’re in,” Tristan says, behind me.
I hear it. The entrance, the voices, the radio crackle echoing weirdly in the canvas interior.
“How far?” Ryan asks.
“Thirty seconds,” I say. “Maybe twenty. Keep moving.”
The S-bend. The junction. The narrowing of the corridor that means we’re here.
“This is the dead end,” Ryan says, and I can hear the tension in his voice from trusting my directions and now standing in a dead end with law enforcement behind us.
“I know,” I say.
I go straight to the east wall. Two inches of misalignment. Shoulder-width. The gap that I found on day one walking the exterior, that I’ve kept for myself, that Jack swore to secrecy about, that has been my private exit route in a town full of men who think they know all the exits.
I find it in the dark by memory alone.
“Here,” I say. I get my fingers into the overlap and pull. The panel shifts, the canvas giving at the misaligned join, and the gap opens. The exterior corridor is on the other side, dark and empty.
Ryan stares at it. “You knew about this?”
“Since day one. Go!”
He goes.
Tristan goes.
I go last, pulling the canvas back into position behind me. It’s not perfect, not seamless, but close enough that in the dark of the dead end with a flashlight they’ll spend thirty seconds looking for the mechanism before they find it.
Thirty seconds is enough.
The exterior corridor is narrow and runs along the outside of the maze structure, invisible from the carnival ground. I turn immediately toward the north end where it opens onto the service road.
“Run,” I urge.
We run. Behind us, muffled by canvas and distance, I hear the officers reach the dead end. I hear the confusion of it, the voices, the flashlight, the thirty seconds of looking for an exit that isn’t where exits are supposed to be.
We’re already at the end of the corridor.
Already on the service road.
Already running.
Ryan is close to me and Tristan is at my flank. The night air is cold and the carnival is behind us and the service road curves toward the tree line and I don’t look back.
I don’t look back because I know what’s behind me and I know what’s ahead and I know this town now, I know this territory. I know I’m not running away. I’m running toward.
Ryan leads us to the pack house.
Tristan makes tea as soon as we arrive.
Archer and Jack arrive soon after.
I sit at the kitchen table with the mug in my hands and the four of them arrange themselves in the room. They are managing their own reactions in order to manage mine. I let them do it because I’m running on emergency instincts and it’s not enough for everything simultaneously.
“Tell us what you know,” Ryan says.
So I do.
I tell them the full version.
Not the deflected version, not the layered version I’ve been constructing and reconstructing for three weeks to make it manageable in my own head.
The actual version. Amber, the fifteen years of friendship.
How she walked me into the bank explaining it as an item on her to-do list. I had no reason to doubt this because I had no reason to doubt her.
How I handled equipment she’d already arranged for me to handle. How there were cameras at every angle she’d mapped in advance. How she put her voice in my ear afterward telling me to run.
I tell them about the three states I ran through. The burner phone. ‘The borrowed’ car. The four hundred dollars that is now closer to two-fifty because Sweetwater Valley has been feeding me and housing me for two weeks.
I tell them about Amber’s partner, Daniel, whose involvement I’ve inferred from the logistics of the frame and was largely confirmed by the private investigator, Margaret Finch.
I tell them how I gave all the information to my lawyer friend who is trying really hard to clear my name and build a case to take to the police on my behalf.
When I’m done the kitchen is silent. The quiet that follows something big being put on a table. It requires a moment to be looked at.
“The partner,” Ryan says. “You’re sure about him?”
“Someone ran the equipment on the technical side. The camera angles were deliberate, the timing was too clean for one person. Amber’s skilled but she’s not technical.” I feel the warmth of my mug in my hands as I take a breath. “Daniel Marsh has a history of being involved in crime like this.”
“Which means he knows what he’s doing,” Archer says.
“Yes.”
“And the law enforcement presence tonight,” Ryan begins. “You think they caught up with you?”
“They were looking for me. It couldn’t be for any other reason.” I’ve been running this since the bridge. “Someone must have tipped them off.”
“Maybe it was a credit card transaction? Your phone?”
“I haven’t used any of my cards. Everything has been cash only. My phone is a burner phone, new three weeks ago and not registered with any personal details.” I pause. “The car?”
Ryan looks at Archer.
“Plates,” Archer says. One word.
“The plates are borrowed with the car.” I close my eyes briefly. “Which means whoever’s tracking knows the plates and knows this is the car I used to get away.”
“They’ll keep looking until they find it,” Ryan says. “Now they know you’re in the area.”
“Yes.” I open my eyes. “Which is why I need to move the car tonight and decide whether to—”
“You’re not leaving,” Jack states.
I look at him.
“That’s not what I mean,” he says, and his voice has the tone it had on the pier when he held my face. “I mean we handle the car tonight and you don’t have to leave.”
“Jack,” I say.
“The town already—”
“I know what the town did.” The town that told a plainclothes officer a woman matching my description was last seen heading north two days ago. I know what that lie cost and what it means and I can’t… “I can’t ask the town to keep doing that.”