Chapter Thirty-Four Cole
“Let’s talk about what ‘gone’ means to you.” Jessica leans back, using her free hand to support her weight.
I’ve been sitting on the couch beside Hailey for forty minutes, and I have done a remarkable job, in those forty minutes, of listening.
“Well, I don’t want him dead. I…just want to rough him up a little bit. Or a big bit. It’s only fair.”
“Noted,” Jessica says, calmly, before raising a finger to every man in the room. “No killing.”
They all have the audacity to look…disappointed?
No. That can’t be right. They’re not really out here killing people, are they?
I don’t know what I was expecting this meeting to be, but from the moment Jessica came at Hailey with a white wine Big Gulp, I’ve been on the back foot. Both women have emptied their glasses now, and while they’re not drunk, they’re definitely feeling something.
“What I want,” Hailey continues, “is for him to feel exactly what I felt in that parking garage. I want him on the ground and overpowered, scared the way he made me scared, and I want him to know there’s nobody coming to save him.
And then I want to call the police, and hand him over to them already broken, because I’ve done everything the legal way for months and I still ended up in the hospital.
Lars Winters will kill the next woman he stalks if we don’t stop him. ”
The whole room is quiet, like everyone is already thinking through the list of things they’re going to do to Winters once we catch him.
I’ve already thought it through a thousand times myself.
If it were only up to me, he’d be dead, but I keep reminding myself I’m not the one in charge here. Hailey is.
I look at her. I can’t help it. I spent so much time trying to keep this woman safe—and most of that time, I made the mistake of thinking she was something soft I had to shield.
She’s not soft. She has never been soft.
She is a woman who treats trauma patients for a living.
She’s seen terrible things. She knows terrible things.
And here she is, thinking not only about protecting herself, but also about protecting the next woman Winters will victimize if we don’t take action.
“So you want him scared.” Jessica is summarizing now. “Hurt, probably. And then handed to the cops.”
“Yes.” Hailey’s voice is strong, likely encouraged by a little liquid confidence. “A full confession tape would be a nice touch, but not entirely needed. We already have video evidence against him.”
Jessica nods slowly, taking it in. “Okay. Consider it done. We’ll do it.”
“Is that…okay?” Hailey’s voice loses a little bit of its swagger, like she can’t believe it’s that easy.
I almost can’t believe it’s that easy, and I’m getting the uncomfortable feeling that the group does this far more often than I originally thought.
“It’s more than okay, Hailey.” Jessica smiles. “It’s actually one of the cleaner asks we’ve gotten. A lot of people in your seat want them dead. You want something we can give you twice over.”
Tyler sits back in his armchair and laces his fingers behind his head. “You sure you’re ready for this?”
“As sure as I’ll ever be.” Hailey shrugs.
I finally break my silence. “I want to be the one to go hands-on with him.”
“Rule three?” Jessica turns her attention to me. “We move as a unit or we don’t move at all.”
“I know.” I drag a hand down my face. “I’m saying it out loud because I know I can’t do it without saying it out loud first. I know I should not be in charge of this. I want it noted that I am, right now, on the record, asking the group not to let me call the shots.”
Tyler’s expression is amused and he chuckles. “Look at you,” he says. “Using your big-boy words.”
“Shut up, Tyler.”
“No, I’m proud.” He grins. “That was very mature.”
Jessica clears her throat. “Boys.”
We both snap our mouths shut, but I let a look that could kill linger on him for several seconds.
“So.” Jessica refocuses the room. “What I think we’re building is: Hailey lures Lars somewhere.
We are staged at the location before he arrives.
He shows up expecting to find her alone.
He doesn’t find her alone. He gets the parking garage special, in reverse.
We get him scared, on tape, a written confession if we can swing it, and then we hand him to the police.
He goes away for a long time. Hailey gets the closure she came for. ”
“Yes.” Hailey sets her glass down. “That’s what I want.”
Jessica stands and looks between the kitchen and Hailey’s empty glass.
“Absolutely,” Hailey says without Jessica needing to ask.
“Tyler, get ready to take notes while I get more refreshments,” Jessica orders before disappearing into the kitchen and reemerging with an opened bottle of wine.
Tyler has a yellow notepad out and ready to go, flipped to a clean page. He starts dividing it into three columns of neat block-letter handwriting. DAY OF. LEAD UP. AFTER.
Austen has a laptop open. No, actually, he has two laptops open. Grant produces a mechanical pencil and a pad of graph paper from his camera bag. Zach is on the phone in the corner, mumbling quietly.
These are the same people I sit in folding chairs with. The same people I thought I had all figured out.
I am actively recalibrating everything I thought I knew about these people. I’m not someone who’s easily surprised, but today, reality has humbled me. I couldn’t have even imagined who these people are. Not in my wildest dreams.
Hailey, beside me, holds out her empty glass for Jessica to refill, giving me a reassuring smile.
“Day of.” Tyler’s pen moves. “Eyes on Lars from forty-eight hours out. Two-person rotation, no gaps. Cole, you’re off that one—you’re too close. Grant and I have it. Zach on overflow. Austen, you’re running comms from the van.”
“Got it.” Austen doesn’t look up and continues typing away.
“Lead up. Hailey writes the bait message. Jessica edits. Austen scrubs metadata, sends from a clean burner account. Forty-eight hours of bait time so it doesn’t feel like a trap.”
Tyler lifts his eyes from the pad. “Cole.”
“Yeah?”
“You stay with Hailey for those forty-eight hours. You do not leave her. Got it?”
I would be more annoyed if it weren’t the exact assignment I would have given myself.
Across the room, Grant taps his graph paper. “Usual spot? How tall are those concrete piers?”
“Twenty feet.” Zach doesn’t turn from his call.
“I want to be on top of one.”
Zach doesn’t miss a beat. “You can’t. Train.”
“What time?”
“Every four hours. Noon, four, eight…”
“Let’s plan for nine.”
“Then you can be on top.” He goes back to mumbling into his phone.
Grant nods to no one in particular, like that settles it, and goes back to sketching. “Camera one wide, camera two long. I want every face in the frame except Hailey’s.”
“Why?” Hailey asks.
“Because if for whatever reason, the footage ends up in front of a jury, it shouldn’t be of you. It should be footage of people they’ll never be able to identify.”
“Oh.” She purses her lips but seems content enough with that answer.
I lean toward Austen, trying to see what he’s doing that requires so much aggressive typing.
“Austen.”
“Mhm?” He doesn’t stop typing to look at me.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“The phone thing.”
“You said you’d send him an SMS exploit.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
He finally glances up at me over his glasses. “And once it’s back online,” he says, “I’m going to clone it.”
“You’re going to clone it.”
“The whole phone. Photos, texts, browser history, Reddit cache, everything. Full copy on a hard drive in the van by Friday. So when we hand him to the cops, we hand them a man, a confession, and receipts.”
I stare at him. Who the fuck is this guy?
“I don’t see how we all keep our names clean in this,” I admit, looking at all of them. “The police will have questions.”
He finally stops typing. “They aren’t going to ask, Cole. Jessica gets the relevant pieces onto a USB. The USB ends up in Lars’s coat pocket while he’s zip-tied. The cops find it on him. The cops never have to know where the data on it actually came from.”
I exhale slowly, the full magnitude of the group really hitting me. “You’ve done this before.”
“A few times.” Austen shrugs, then goes back to typing.
I have been so deeply, embarrassingly underestimating my therapy group.
Hailey squeezes my fingers. When I look at her, she lifts her eyebrows just slightly, giving me an “Are you okay?” look.
I squeeze back, offering her a small smile.
Across the room, Zach finally hangs up and turns around.
“Property’s ours. South of town at the train bridge. We’ll stage for the underpass. Nobody will be out there after dark.”
I’ve always viewed Zach as somewhat reserved and occasionally overly cautious. He is, without a doubt, not who I thought he was. He could be the most dangerous person in this room, and none of us would know. That’s…terrifying. And very fucking cool.
“We good?” Jessica asks the group.
“Good,” Tyler echoes.
“Good,” Grant adds.
Austen lifts a thumbs-up, and Zach nods once.
“Great,” Hailey chimes in.
“That’s it?” I ask. “What about the small details?”
“We’ve done this before,” Tyler reminds me, giving me a mischievous grin. “You’ll learn as we go. Consider it on-the-job training.”
Hailey leans into my shoulder, letting her eyes drift closed for half a second before she forces them back open. It feels good to be beside her.
Twenty minutes later, we’re halfway down Jessica’s walkway when Tyler comes jogging out behind us.
“Hey. Before you go. One more thing.”
We stop and wait for him to catch up. “What’s up?” I ask.
“I need to show Hailey the van.”
Hailey blinks at him, clearly as confused as I am. “The van?”
“The van.” He beams, clapping his hands together.
“Your…brewery van?” She glances between the van and Tyler.
“It is technically a brewery van, yes.”
Hailey looks at me for answers, but I am so far past being able to anticipate anything Tyler’s going to do that I just shrug at her.
Hailey shoots Tyler an assessing gaze. “You, a self-proclaimed stalker, are asking me to get in your van?” She covers her mouth, trying to suppress a giggle.
Tyler cringes but quickly recovers. “I see how this looks, but I promise it’s cool. I have stakeout snacks.”
“Okay. Show me the van, Tyler. The stakeout snacks better be top-tier.”
Tyler smiles so broadly I notice his dimples for the first time.
He leads us to the van, which from the outside looks like a standard, beat-up, white panel van. Tyler unlocks the back doors with a fob he produces from his pocket, like it’s the key to a Bugatti.
He swings the doors open. Hailey’s eyes go wide as she takes it all in.
“Whoa,” is all I can manage.
It’s a stakeout suite. A stalker’s paradise.
The walls are lined with foam soundproofing, and there’s a workstation built into the left wall—three monitors, a laptop dock, two sets of headphones on a hook.
There’s a small fridge mounted under the counter and a bench seat along the right wall that looks just soft enough to sleep on.
Blackout fabric covers the rear windows.
The only light source is mounted above the workstation—a neon-pink sign that reads, in bold font: STALKERS ANONYMOUS.
Hailey, who has not said a word for thirty whole seconds, leans into the back of the van and looks around, then turns to Tyler. “Question.”
He’s too eager to answer. “Yeah?”
“Did you make that sign yourself?”
“I commissioned it under a different name and had it sent to the wrong address. I waited for them to deliver it, then swiped the package off their porch.”
I nearly jump back when Hailey all but squeals, clapping her hands together. “I love it!”
But I’m more skeptical than she is. “What happens if you get pulled over and they ask to see what’s in the back of the van?”
Tyler grins widely, like he’s been waiting for one of us to ask. “Cole, if I am ever pulled over by a cop and that cop opens the back of this van, the sign is the least of my problems.”
Hailey grabs my arm excitedly, making chills roll over the entirety of my body. Fuck, I’ve missed her and her touch. I’ve missed this so much.
“Your therapy group has a neon sign.”
“I am aware.”
“In their stakeout van.”
“I can see that.”
Her attention turns to Tyler. “Can we go in?”
“I thought you’d never ask.” He waves us in with the most boyish grin I’ve ever seen.
Hailey climbs up carefully onto the bench seat, and I follow her in. The bench is, in fact, soft enough to sleep on.
My girl folds her hands in her lap with exaggerated politeness before she says, “I was told there are stakeout snacks.”
Here I am, in complete awe at the elaborate surveillance setup, and Hailey is asking about complimentary snacks.
“We have organic granola bars, Greek yogurt cups, chocolate truffles, and Jessica keeps us stocked with everything she needs to make a charcuterie board. She’s obsessed with them. We’re all secretly obsessed with them.”
“This is magnificent.”
“Thank you. We really tried to think it all through.”
Hailey reaches up and very gently taps the bottom of the neon sign. The pink light flickers.
Tyler doesn’t say anything, but he looks practically giddy. This van is so obviously his favorite toy.
Hailey turns to me and stares with an expression I can’t read. After a second, she reaches up and pats my cheek.
“I think I love your therapy group.”