CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
M
anuel couldn’t find words, and his incredulous stare bore into the side of my face.
Veritas didn’t share that same hang-up. “Did you get that, Rex?”
Trees creeped from the darkness, crowding the road. I’d never been this way before, or if I had, it looked completely unrecognizable at night.
“Okay, we had some of Pierce’s information saved since he’s one of our prime POIs—sorry, persons of interest. I suspected, but Rex just confirmed that the chief of police does own a black truck matching the make and model you listed.
” Veritas paused, allowing that information to sink in.
“So you did a great job calling us instead of the local police.”
“The police. That’s the real reason you didn’t want me calling nine-one-one.” Manuel sighed, giving a shaky laugh. “Willa, you sure know how to keep your friends on their toes.”
Suddenly, without being aware that there was another road, I spun the wheel, sliding into a fishtail turn because we’d been speeding so fast.
“We’re gonna die!” Manuel screamed, even as I readjusted the front tires to aim in the opposite direction we slid.
The Jeep steadied, smoothing out and leaning into the slide. The ditch approached fast. I corrected the severity of the spin and began leaning into the gas, trying to convert some of the sideways momentum into forward propulsion.
“Willa! Willa! Willa!”
The tires dug in, and we rocketed forward, ripping through the leaves and scraping branches down the side of the body. It’d been a close call. Manuel looked as pale as a sheet in the phone’s glow.
I released the breath I’d been holding.
“Did he hit you again?” Veritas barked.
“We’re not going to die,” I corrected.
Not from that anyway.
“No, he didn’t hit us,” Manuel conceded, a tremor still in his voice, once the Jeep regained traction. “And yeah, we won’t die because, in a previous life, Willa must have been a stunt driver on some big budget action car movie.”
Behind us, the truck—Ben’s dad—attempted to careen around the corner like we had, but his right headlight dropped harshly, illuminating a curtain of foliage. He’d run off into the ditch.
I’d have smiled if it didn’t feel like any small movement would tip my pervasive nausea into actual vomiting.
Pierce in the ditch bought us some time by giving us some breathing space. Since I was utterly lost, the distance was a godsend.
“Where are we?” I murmured.
Manuel’s head whipped in my direction. “Don’t you know?”
Lights moved in the rearview mirror, drawing my attention.
All too soon, Pierce had reversed and rejoined the chase.
“Damn,” Manuel whispered, echoing my thoughts. I’d never been so annoyed by someone’s custom lift job than in this moment. When Veritas questioned what was the matter, Manuel said, “He went off into the ditch, but it didn’t slow him for long.”
I focused forward.
This road was more deserted than the previous one. Potholes the size of sofas popped up around each turn, and we bounced and splashed through them. The bends alone forced the speed to drop by twenty miles an hour, but it was still ridiculously fast.
“How’d you know when to turn on this road?” Manuel asked, covering the speaker with his thumb. “I couldn’t see it. Pierce had a three second warning, and he still wiped out, but you said you don’t know where we’re at.”
That was a good question. While I might be the one keeping the Jeep on the pavement, the creeping suspicion snuck in that perhaps someone else was directing the turns—and not necessarily for the better.
“I don’t know.”
Manuel gave me a weighted look that spoke volumes.
“Hey,” Veritas added, thinking along the same vein as Manuel. “Where are you guys headed? My team is tracking you in real time when there’s service, but they said the road you’re on isn’t listed on the map.”
Safe.
“We’re… going somewhere safe.” I swung us around another hair turn. “I think.”
But for how much longer?
The truck gained on us with each second. The advantage we’d earned was consumed by unfamiliarity with the twists and turns of these narrow lanes. It forced me to slow down, but Pierce could maintain a brisk clip because he could see my trail and cut corners faster.
“Safe?” Veritas questioned. “Willa, my guy says that you’re going to the—”
Whatever he’d been about to say was drowned out by the booming crash halfway through a tight turn.
The flash of headlights in my window warned me half a second before the impact. Pierce had taken his shot and cut straight through the woods, likely witnessing that the road wound back around with the greater visibility our own lights afforded him.
An overly detailed view of the aggressively masculine and heavily welded brush guard, backlit and way too close, yanked a primal scream from deep in my chest. I shut my eyes and braced as my window shattered so powerfully that fragments projected into the air and cut my skin from their force.
The Jeep slid sideways, forced along by the truck that, instead of slowing, revved faster. Without the window to dampen the sound, the growl of the huge motor hiding inside its engine bay roared in our ears with percussive force.
Even Manuel in the seat beside me couldn’t be heard. He might have been yelling.
I might have been too. My foot stayed on the gas, but we had no traction.
Realizing how little prevented us from being pancaked by a ten thousand pound truck stole my breath. The upper metal bar of its guard had dented the entire B-pillar inside, making my head bounce off the seatbelt’s hook as Pierce bulldozed us across the road.
I could reach out and touch the driver’s side headlight, could feel the heat radiating from it. Its close proximity overexposed the interior of the Jeep, whitewashing our world.
Manuel’s side found the edge of the road and dipped off into the ditch, making the truck struggle. Its RPMs screamed as Pierce floored the gas.
“He won’t stop until he crushes us!” Manuel screamed, barely audible.
That seemed to be exactly Pierce’s intent, collateral damage or not.
The pressure increased as our passenger side tires dug into the ditch’s dirt, but the two opposing forces reached a stalemate.
Pierce let off, rocking back an inch before he stomped the gas again. My entire door panel crinkled and popped. The Jeep tilted into the air a fraction, the driver’s tires lifting from the ground, but no matter how beefed up it was, the truck lacked the momentum to do much more than that.
Pierce realized this as well, and he reversed.
Manuel tugged on my shirt. “Willa, come here! Your door is nearly gone!”
I didn’t.
Pierce would get a running start.
I tried to drive forward, keeping my attention divided evenly between the space in front of us and the threat.
The black truck—most definitely the one that’d chased me on Friday, gained more and more distance.
It felt like being slotted into a guillotine, viewing the blade rising inch by inch into the air.
“Drive, drive!” Manuel bellowed.
“I’m trying!”
Clods of wet, sloppy mud flung up as I worked the tires left and right, searching desperately for traction. They landed on the glass like miniature swamp bombs and pelted my left side since my window had been well and truly destroyed.
Visibility worsened to zero on Manuel’s side of the windshield, but I resisted the urge to kick on the wipers.
With such dark, sloppy clay, they would only spread the muck and rob the last of our sight, smearing uselessly.
I’d witnessed this several times while riding shotgun in my dad’s various off-road rigs growing up.
My tires were all-terrains, a misnomer since they failed ninety percent of the time once leaving pavement.
We weren’t going anywhere.
Pierce’s tires boasted aggressive tread, chunky with visible crevices that ran deep, even in the dark. Much like when it ditched itself earlier, it faced no challenges bouncing backwards through the ditch on the other side of the road.
Pierce reversed until he knocked into the trees behind him, raining down a fall smorgasbord of red, orange, and yellow leaves that’d still be clinging to life high in the canopy.
He’d run out of road… and we’d run out of time.
I yanked the secondary shifter in the middle, locking the Jeep into four-wheel drive—a last, desperate Hail Mary—and gave it my all, unworried about redlining the motor.
At this point, the Jeep was totaled anyway.
Faced with blowing the engine in an attempt to escape or being crushed to death by a psycho, it was a no-brainer.
The chief dropped into neutral as the motor climbed in RPMs. Pierce would wait until he’d maxed out before throwing the tranny into drive.
It’d burn through the clutches and start stripping the gears, but he didn’t seem to care much at the moment.
He’d risk it to gain as much momentum as possible in such a short distance, guaranteed.
If we were lucky, the harsh flip of torque would snap his U-joint, making the vehicle a sitting, whining duck.
Meanwhile, the four-wheel drive helped, and with time, we might have been able to nickel and dime our way out of the rut, but… well, the incoming truck of doom carried a pretty solid due date.
I let off the gas, switched to neutral, and laid into the pedal.
“You aren’t in gear!” Manuel yelled.
“I’m fighting fire with fire!” I hollered back.
“We should just run!”
Oh, I should have thought of that!
Were these woods dense enough to prevent him from going off-road and chasing us through the forest?
Too late.
Pierce dumped the truck into gear, and the intimidating vehicle lurched, eating up way more distance than comfortable.
“Willa!”
No more time. It’d have to do.