Chapter 24
She pressed against the wall beside the window, below the sightline, breathing in short, controlled bursts because long breaths made sound and sound carried.
She'd was two blocks from the gas station, coming back with the grocery bag when she first noticed the dark SUV with its tinted windows cruising the coast road.
She'd cut through an alley, circled the block, and slipped back into the empty house. She'd been squatting there since she’d run from Pirelli’s car, a dark house at the end of a cul-de-sac with a dead lawn and no lights, the kind of place that sat empty from October to June.
She'd broken a back window with a rock and climbed through, cutting her palm on the glass.
The house smelled like dust and salt and somebody else's summers.
She slept on a bare mattress in a back bedroom with the curtains drawn, ate gas station crackers and bottled water she'd bought with the last of the cash from Pirelli's wallet, until Sara had wired the money.
Then she’d “borrowed” the dusty compact in the house’s garage and headed up the coast to the Western Union place.
So now she had money, and real food. But her pursuers were closing in. She sat on the kitchen floor, the grocery bag pressed to her chest and tried to stop shaking.
She reached into the pocket of her jacket — the replacement coat, a men's fleece from a Goodwill rack, because the one she'd worn out of Pacific Crest was in pieces in a drainage culvert somewhere south of here. Her fingers found the vial. Small. Glass. Cool against her palm.
She checked it twice a day. Held it up to whatever light was available and confirmed it was there, it was real, it was intact.
The proof. The thing she'd carried out of Pacific Crest in her pocket while they thought she was sedated, while Pirelli was smiling his careful smile and adjusting her dosage and telling her she was making excellent progress.
Excellent progress toward what, she understood now. Excellent progress toward disappearing. Literally.
She put the vial back. Zipped the pocket. Pressed her palm against it like she could hold it through the fabric.
Her other pocket held the burner phone. She pulled it out, re-inserted the battery, and turned it on.
Once the screen lit up, she looked at the text again — the one from Sara, the last communication before Elena had turned the phone off and pulled the battery because even burner phones could probably be tracked.
Two photos. Two women, one blonde the other dark-haired. And the message below, in Sara's breathless, all-caps way:
FIND these women. CARA and REAGAN. They'll help you. I PROMISE. Please Elena. PLEASE call me back.
Sara meant well. Sara always meant well — it was her defining characteristic and her fatal flaw. She was gullible. Trusting. Warm in the way that people who'd never been burned were warm.
Not traits Elena could afford.
Elena knew better. Elena knew that everyone who said they were helping was hurting.
Everyone who said they cared was taking.
Trust was not a bridge — it was a trapdoor.
She'd fallen through it so many times the reflex now was to stand still and test every inch of floor before putting her weight down.
She'd put the phone away and not looked at it again.
Until now.
A sound. Outside. On the road.
She went flat. Crawled to the window. Lifted her head just enough to see through the gap between the curtain and the frame.
The dark SUV. Again. Coming from the other direction now — south to north, the return pass. Slower this time.
Then it moved on, disappearing around the bend.
She lowered her head. Pressed her forehead against the cold floor. Her heart hammered — irregular, violent, beyond control.
Tomorrow they'd check this street. Or the next day. They'd notice the car in the garage, or the footprints on the porch, or the fact that a vacation rental that should be dead in January had condensation on the bathroom window.
She pulled the burner phone out again. The fog pressed at the edges of her thinking. The drug was still in her, still working, still eating her hours. Fewer, for sure, but she had no idea how long it would take for her to feel like herself again.
She was out of time, and options. Mostly, she was out of the kind of stubbornness that had kept her alive this long. She could stay in this house and wait for the people Pirelli, or her uncle, had paid to find her. Or she could walk two blocks down and three to the north and trust these women.
Because she knew where they were. She’d seen them driving up the street with the others. Two men, one of whom looked a lot like the men chasing her, only different, somehow.
She deactivated the phone and pulled the battery out again. Her brain was too fried to think straight. Tomorrow, she’d decide. Trust these women Sara wanted her to contact, or drive as far and as fast as she could.