“Okay. You really look messed up.”
Her giggle surprised her. “Yeah?”
“I should have said that differently.”
“No, you’re right. I do.”
“Does it hurt bad?”
“Yes, and I need to clean it up. I have no idea what I fell on. I think it might have been a rock.”
Bash sat silently on the hitch, but his rocking returned. Then he began to pat his hands on his knees in a rhythm. El had once read that autistic people had coping behaviors to help them manage stressful situations. Maybe she was making him nervous, or he just didn’t like sitting still.
El shifted her weight to limp on. “Do you want to keep walking? I can get up now.”
“No, it’s okay. I was thinking I would ask you something, but I don’t know how you feel about me, so I don’t know.”
“Ask.”
He titled his head and looked at the space between them. “I have to go home in a little while, because my shift is over, but I’d feel bad if something happened to you. I can hide you somewhere until it’s time for me to go, and then you can come with me and I can take you to the Greyhound station if you want me to. You seem really nice. I know I don’t know you, but I promise I’m a good person. I’ll even take you to my favorite place to eat, and you can clean up there. I know everyone there, so no one will bother you, because you’re with me and everything and they know I’m weird, and so they never get upset.”
His speech collided with silence at top speed. El’s face warmed with the reminder that though she may have seen the worst of people, in the same day, she was seeing the best of them too. What an odd thing, and so very perfect. Suddenly grateful to the point of shivering, El accepted his invitation.
“I don’t want you to get into trouble.”
“No, it’s okay, I know a place no one ever goes but me. I’ll take you there. I like it because it’s quiet and I can listen to the trains come. It’s my secret place where I am invisible.”
Eyes stinging, El hobbled after him. “Thanks, Bash, it sounds perfect.”
Somewhere outside of Charleston, Riley paid in cash to use a computer connected to a printer. She stuffed a padded envelope addressed to the West Virginia State Troopers with a series of terrible images, a wallet, a phone, and a note.
This man attacked the minor in the photos in the abandoned property indicated on the enclosed map. I have in my possession physical evidence of the crime. The phone’s code is 0827. You’ll find the photographs were pulled directly from it and date throughout the last two years. Do something about him, because if you don’t, I am going to doxx him and make sure he’s on every sexual predator list from here to the arctic.
Riley opened her IP tracking program to find a great deal more traffic on her website. Apparently, El’s reply to her question had drawn thousands of views and she had hundreds of new followers. None of the IP addresses, however, were nearby. With a sickened feeling, her worst suspicions were confirmed—the blogging website funneled questions and answers back and forth with no IP information. If she wanted to follow El, she had to find a way to tempt her back to @hellonaunicycle to trigger the tracking program again.
If she just messaged directly and revealed who she was, Riley wondered if El would reciprocate, or would she be more likely to turn away? Everything in her told her to reach out, to offer herself up like a bodyguard and take El wherever it was she wanted to go. Now, later, until she got bored. Who cared? But El was on her own journey. Who was to say she wasn’t running from Riley too, from an obsession she’d had because there was no other avenue? Who was to say that with the world open to her, El wouldn’t find she needed a new love to be with the new individual she would become?
Uncertainty and doubt were not emotions Riley was accustomed to feeling, and so a coping mechanism did not exist in her repertoire.
She sat staring at the timer on her computer session. She wanted so badly to speak to El and heal what injuries had been done. She knew that fear very well—how noises and smells could trigger the memories, how the events would play behind one’s eyelids, over and over, the words exchanged repeating on an endless loop of misery. El had to be suffering, locked in a mental model of the abandoned house, trying to free herself even though there wasn’t a door to keep her in.
But no . . .
She stopped the spin of her office chair and sat up.
Reviewing El’s reply, she saw that it was poised. It was eloquent. It existed—something Riley could not even comprehend. Long ago, when those older boys had so helpfully shoved Riley down in that alley to straighten her out, her entire life had fallen apart. It had taken weeks to recover, a year to fight her way out of depression and paralysis. Even now, she was still the person that experience had made her.
Here was El . . . calmly back at the helm of her tiny empire, silencing Riley’s fears like the queen that she was.
“One hell of a chick,” she whispered.
If El was cogent enough to write, perhaps she was capable of more than that.
Riley returned to her notifications feed and scrolled. She sifted the data until she found the alert that El had liked one of her motivational quotes that had been scheduled to drop in the early hours of the morning. This gave her an idea of what time El had logged on. Cracking her knuckles, Riley flipped to the trace program and weeded through every single IP that had ever pinged on that entry, collating it to the time of day.
The nearest one wasn’t in West Virginia. It was in Cincinnati. When the map de-pixelated, sheer relief filled her up to bursting. It had to be El! The only public location in the vicinity was a restaurant and hotel near a rail yard. The anonymous kind of place a girl might end up, in the dead of night, after she’d somehow jumped on board the first freight train to pass by.
Riley dropped her envelope in the mail slot and hit the road. She could clear the two hundred miles in three hours on Aella, especially if she treated the lanes as suggestions and the speed limits as technicalities. It was when she stopped to refill her gas tank that she realized it would do no good to rush. El had apparently last been online hours ago, and there was no way she would just hang around in one place. Not with those men from the train chasing her. Cafés and bars were like the tides, taking people in and spitting them out in a rhythm, so even if Riley got to the place as swiftly as she could, she’d likely be in the same predicament as she was in Alderson.
The very thought of being patient felt like a knife to all the major nerve clusters, but it seemed the universe was going to shove it down Riley’s throat whether she wanted it or not. There was nothing she could do but find that café and pace the terrain around it, check into the adjacent motel, and plan her next move.
She took an icy shower. She looked over her latest group of bruises and popped some pain killers. She scheduled more content on the blog, this time choosing the most provocative things she could find. She inventoried all her gear. She even used the coin-op laundry machine to smell like synthetic flowers.
And that was just the first hour.
For dinner, she jogged across the parking lot to the café and planted her backside in a booth, eating a sirloin steak while she became acquainted with the place. For good measure, she confirmed her suspicion that the night shift rolled over into the early morning—the staff she was looking for arrived at two in the morning and stayed until ten.
The night passed slowly, but sometime around midnight, her mind could no longer circle around El. Eventually, Riley just became too exhausted to stay vigilant, too much of a failure to read any more entries praising her beauty or grace, too weary to fantasize. Her eyes closed and when they opened again, the sun was checking on her through the privacy curtain. Riding soreness had set in. The skin of her back was tender to the touch and every muscle was like a steel cable dragging beneath her skin. In desperate need of coffee and more Tylenol, she looked out the window at the café and felt every fiber of her being slam awake in a painful jolt of adrenaline.
<
br /> A black SUV was parked at the restaurant.
“Fuck.”
Riley packed in record time and checked out by throwing her keys on the floor. From the sidewalk, she could see the air freshener dangling in the windscreen.
So they’d gotten out of jail. Riley tucked her chin to her sternum as ideas manifested in a wrathful surge of exactly how to make them regret their freedom.
The nearest electronics store was only a mile away. She was in and out in fifteen minutes, part of her day’s expense account well spent. The new smartphone took five minutes to set up and claimed a full battery charge. Riley adjusted it to the power conservation mode and downloaded an app.
Squatting on the asphalt at the back of the SUV, she rang home. “Hey, Dad!”
“You sound chipper. Sleep well?”
“Naw, like shit, but . . . you’re never gonna guess what I turned up.”
“You found her?”
Riley couldn’t help but giggle at his enthusiasm. “No, but I found the SUV dudes. Remember when you told me that story about that guy . . . what was his name? Scabies? The one who did that thing with the phone.”
“Scabs? Oh . . . shit, yes! Are you—”
Riley tore the duct tape with her teeth and reached below the back bumper. “Yup. Pull up FindMyPhone, will you?”
She listened to him smash through the house to his computer while Riley made damn sure that no matter what kind of terrain they went over, the phone would never come loose. With it in place, Riley relayed the new phone number and listened to her father go through the screens.
“Cincinnati? By a Motel Six?”
“You got it! Thanks, Dad.”
“Play nice.”
Riley dragged herself upright and carefully obscured her movements behind the other cars in the lot. “Really?”
“I was joking.”
“You had me worried there for a second. Call you from the road.”
Riley dashed around the building and in the front door. The entire circular restaurant wrapped around a central kitchen. If she kept herself beside the register, she was directly opposite the only table occupied by a group scary enough to be the “assailants” from the train. She peered through the heat lamps on the service passthrough and wondered how the hell they’d tracked El. They must have a more sophisticated way than she did. If so, she needed to learn what it was, or she’d never be able to outpace them.
Riley stuck her head around the curve.
Something was off. Four men as rigid as she’d envisioned, but seated in the booth with them was a young guy a little older than her. The body language was all wrong—they were leaning into the kid, their voices low, but he was staring at his lap as if being scolded, pale and silent.
A waitress approached with a taut smile.
“I’m not here to eat.” Phone in hand, she flashed the picture of Rose. “I’m looking for a girl, and I’m guessing that those guys are too.”
The woman’s face dropped every pretense. “What did she do?”
“Not a damn thing.”
Her mouth fell open. “But then, why is everyone—”
Riley scanned her name tag. “Look, Chelsea, it’s a long story, but I’m the good guy. They’re shit-eating kidnapper fucks. No idea who the kid is.”
“That’s Bash.” Chelsea glanced back at the four men and took hold of Riley’s arm. In two steps, they were out of the line of sight, hidden behind the coffee machines. “His mom works here. He comes in every day. Yesterday morning, with that girl. She looked like she’d been through hell. She was covered in blood. She cleaned up in the bathroom, paid for his breakfast.”
Riley’s stomach bottomed out. “What happened to her after she was here?”
“I don’t know. Bash got on the bus with her.” Chelsea wrung her hands and then covered her mouth. “Did they do that to her?”
The truth wouldn’t get Riley what she wanted, but really, it was entirely their fault that El had been attacked. It would be easy to make them look like complete assholes—they were slowly wrapping around Bash as the regretful Samaritan shrank even lower in his seat.
“Yes, and if they don’t get what they want, they’ll hurt him too.”
Chelsea was beside herself. “He’s a good boy! He’s just like a little kid in his mind, you know? He gets taken advantage of a lot. I thought she was—”
“She wasn’t. He was helping her.” Riley thought swiftly. Somehow, she needed to get Bash away from them and convince him to talk to her instead. “I have a plan.”
Chelsea managed a hard swallow. “They have guns. I thought they were cops.”
In reply, Riley’s face split into a cocky grin. “Don’t worry.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Picking up a menu, Riley dialed the restaurant’s phone number. “Answer like normal. Let them see you do it. Then go over to the table and tell Bash his mother is on the phone. Be casual. Smile. Refill their coffees.”
Chelsea chewed her lip. “I don’t know . . . if they’re as dangerous as you say—”
Riley threw down the menu with a snap that made the waitress jump. “Look . . . I’m going to go over and talk to them. When I do, call the police. Got it?”
Riley didn’t wait for an answer, but hit the Dial button on her cell. The café phone summoned the woman to bravery. Despite an ornery glance, Chelsea picked up a coffee pot and role-played a few moments of false conversation. Moving back around the breakfast bar, Riley took up position beside the stack of extra chairs and watched the exchange in a polished water pitcher. Chelsea waved a hand. Bash shot up out of his seat. One of the men tried to grab for him, but the one sitting across from the kid gave a subtle shake of his head.
Bash made it to the phone unscathed. Riley cleared her throat.
“Hello Bash, this isn’t your mother, but I can help you get away from those guys. They are not nice.”
To her surprise, he let out a sardonic noise. “Yeah, duh. I knew that. Nice guys don’t threaten to kill your family.”
Riley slid back toward the register. “The girl you met yesterday, the one who was covered in blood?”
“Snow? Yeah, she was hurt—”
Riley wanted to hear more, but it had to wait. “I know. They’re asking about her, right?”
“Yeah. I know how to play dumb, though. I’m not a snitch.”
“That is perfect! I have a plan. Tell them you need to use the bathroom, but then go out the back door instead. I will meet you outside.”
“I don’t know who you are,” he said softly.
Riley came up level with him. He was staring at his shoes, his body bobbing back and forth. He wore a shirt that said “Security” and had a belt with a radio and a flashlight. Riley put two and two together and couldn’t help a smile. El must have made friends with him in the rail yard.
“My name is Riley. I’m Snow’s friend,” she whispered.
His eyes ticked upward, found her chin, and then swept back to his shoes. Without being instructed to, he kept the phone to his ear, though the call had ended. “You have pink hair.”
“Yup! Do you think you can help me fuck with these guys?”
He frowned at the counter. “Yeah. I know all about spies. I’ve seen every detective movie and I read all the books too.”
“Awesome! Me too! We’ll make a good team.”
“Okay, bye.” Bash hung up the phone and turned on his heel. Returning to the table, he shuffled his feet and excused himself to the bathroom. Again, the man who’d been sitting beside him moved as if to escort him, but once more, the apparent leader shook his head.
As soon as Bash was up from the table, Riley stepped out from cover and swooped in as a distraction. She should be scared of these guys. Somehow, though, she was right at home. As she sauntered to their booth, Riley’s eyes flicked over the ink on their forearms. Not for the first time, she was grateful that she’d spent so many hours in tattoo parlors learning the codes. Abuela had said it was no pla
ce for a child, but it was exactly the sort of place to craft an avenging angel.
Without a care in the world, Riley plopped down in Bash’s empty seat and stole a piece of bacon from the man who’d been so eager to keep him in it.
“Hey there, guys! I’m thrilled we finally get to meet!”
It took a chew for them to get over their astonishment. She knew the leader was a former Devil Dog before he ever bothered to spit out the word “Ma’am,” but it was nevertheless funny to hear it applied to herself.
“Ma’am. Who might you be?”
“Your competition!” Riley grinned at him and wedged her knee against the table. “Mama Glasse did tell you she hired someone else after you bozos got arrested, right? How’d that work out, anyway? Isn’t impeding a train like a terrorist offense? They let you post and then tell you not to leave town, or what? Are you even supposed to be traveling right now?”
He crossed his ropey arms with a glance to the man beside her. “We’re fine. And yes, she told us.”
“What a bitch, am I right?” Riley tongued the bacon, her ear pitched so as to capture every vocalization, her eyes cemented to his impassive features.
“We don’t discuss our clients.”
Riley arched a brow. They could be part of some kind of security firm. Each one of them had hip holsters and polo shirts that looked about two sizes too small, but something about that seemed off. She counted one convict, one Marine, and one Army. The fourth man was older than the others, no ink, and less fit—possibly ex FBI or homicide. But why would they ever agree to this? Taking a child across state lines was kidnapping, even if the girl was a runaway and the kidnappers were acting on the guardian’s approval. They had to be walking a fine line, some kind of desperation. They might even be some of Mama’s zealots.
She licked her fingers and leaned forward, plucking a piece of toast from a plate. “Man, you guys are so professional. That must be how you got here this morning, yeah? Too bad she isn’t here.”
“How do you know that?”
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