by TAYLOR ADAMS
Before tonight’s 7:00 p.m. shift, he’d found his wife’s suitcase in the closet.
Upright, and half-packed.
Thinking about this, he almost missed the blue sign that came up on his right, crested with snow, glaring in his high beams:
rest area one mile.
* * *
“Hey.” Fingers snapped in Darby’s face. “Lost you for a sec.”
Her right hand felt like it’d been submerged in boiling water.
At first, it hadn’t hurt at all—just the whoosh of displaced air and the cannon blast of the door slamming beside her right eardrum—and then the pain arrived. Deafening, shattering. At once sledgehammer blunt and needle sharp. It hurled her out of her body, out of this world. For a black instant she was nowhere, and in another, she was back in her tiny childhood house in Provo, six years old again, racing up the creaking staircase, hurtling into the warm blankets of her mother’s bed, taking refuge from a witching-hour nightmare. I’ve got you, her mother whispered, flicking on the nightstand lamp.
It was just a dream, baby.
You imagined it all.
I’ve got you—
And then the bedroom bled away like wet paint and Darby was back in this shitty Colorado rest stop with fluorescent lights and stale coffee, this hellish place she could never escape. She’d slumped into a crouch when she lost consciousness, her back to the door, a sour taste in her throat. She was afraid to look up at her right hand. She knew what had happened. She knew the door was shut, that at least two of her fingers were crushed inside it, pulverized between merciless brass teeth—
I’ve got you, Darby—
“Earth to Darbs.” Ashley snapped his fingers. “I need you lucid.”
“Ashley,” Sandi hissed. “You’re insane. You’ve lost your mind—”
Darby found the courage to look at her hand, blinking away tears. Her ring and pinkie fingers were gone above the hinge, inside the door’s scissor-jaws. It gave her a nauseating, shivery jolt. Her body just ended there. It couldn’t possibly be her hand, but it was. She couldn’t imagine what her fingers looked like inside the door—skin burst, tissue shredded, bones splintered. Tendons crushed and tangled into red spaghetti noodles. There was somehow less blood than she’d expected; just a long, shiny bead trickling down the doorframe.
She watched it inch down the chapped wood.
“Ashley,” Sandi barked. “Are you even listening?”
Darby reached for the doorknob with her unhurt left hand, swiping, missing it twice, finally closing her numb fingers around it, to open the closet door and free her mangled hand, to reveal the hideous, heartbreaking damage—but the doorknob didn’t turn. He’d locked it, the bastard.
Ashley strode across the room, pocketing the key, leaving her pinned there. “All right, Sandi. It’s time I leveled with you.”
“Oh, now it’s time? After all this?”
“Sandi, let me explain—”
“Oh, sure.” She hurled the plastic first-aid box at him, which he swatted away, so that it clattered off the stone counter. “You gave me your word, Ashley. No one was supposed to get hurt through this whole thing—”
He edged closer. “I have a confession to make.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
He spoke slowly, precisely, like a surgeon delivering bad news. “Our meeting here wasn’t about finding a discreet public place for you to hand off your storage key to me. I mean, yes, that was your plan, and maybe I’ll put those steroid shots to use to keep Jaybird alive for as long as they last . . .”
Sandi’s eyes widened with icy terror.
“But, see, I had a plan, too.” He kept approaching. “And, it turns out, your plan was only a part of my plan.”
Sandi took another step back, paralyzed by his wide shoulders, his sheer presence, as the fluorescent lights flickered overhead.
Silence.
“You know . . .” Ashley shrugged. “I really thought you’d try to run by now.”
She tried.
He was too quick.
He grabbed her elbow with that muscular grip Darby knew all too well, and with an aikido spin hurled Sandi into the floor. A shoe flew off. Her other foot kicked the vending machine as she went down, turning the glass opaque with cracks. Ashley was already on top of her, forcing her to lie facedown, his knee on her back.
Ed struggled forward, but Lars aimed his .45. “Ah, nope, nope.”
Now Ashley grabbed the woman by the scalp, both fists clenched in her black bowl-shaped haircut, and yanked her head backward, against his braced knee. “You called . . . Sandi, now, you may not remember this, but earlier tonight, you said some very nasty things about Lars, about his condition. Because of choices our mother made decades ago, when he was just an embryo. How fair is that? Come on, Sandi. You know I love my baby brother—”
She screamed against his grip.
“Take it back, Sandi.” He twisted her neck harder. “Take back what you said.”
She cried out, all vowels.
“Try again. I can’t hear you—”
She gasped: “I . . . I take it back—”
“Okay, well, that’s a nice gesture.” Ashley glanced to Lars. “So, baby brother? Do you accept Sandi’s apology?”
Lars grinned, savoring the power, and shook his head twice.
“Please. Please, I—”
Ashley adjusted his hold on Sandi’s scalp, planted his boot higher between her shoulder blades (for leverage, Darby realized), and tugged hard.
The woman’s neck broke, eventually. It wasn’t quick, or painless. Sandi screamed until she was out of air, her face going a rotten purple, her eyes bulging before going flat, her fingers clawing, kicking. Ashley paused once, adjusting his grip before yanking her head harder, harder, harder, ninety degrees backward now, until her vertebrae finally dislocated in an audible, wet string of clacks. Like popping knuckles. If she had still been conscious, she might’ve experienced the paraplegic horror of her body going numb. It was a straining, clumsy, grunting process, and it took a full thirty seconds before Sandi was visibly dead.
Then Ashley let go, letting Sandi’s forehead thud against tile, her neck loose with separated bones. He stood up, red-faced.
Lars was clapping his scarred hands now, giggling with excitement, like he’d just seen the card trick to end them all.
I just witnessed a murder, Darby thought dully. Just now. In plain view. Sandi Schaeffer—San Diego school bus driver, co-conspirator to this tangled mess of a ransom plot—was gone. A human life, a soul, extinguished. Whether it was door hinges or Lars’s fetal alcohol syndrome—utter a phrase that displeases Ashley Garver, even in passing, and he doesn’t forget it. He makes a note. And later, he takes his pound of flesh.
“Hey, baby brother.” He caught his breath, pointing down at the woman’s warm body. “Wanna hear something funny? Not that it matters now, but did this Jesus freak tell you what she was planning to spend her share on?”
“What?”
“Women’s shelters. Six figures donated to battered women’s shelters all over California, like a real-life Mother Teresa. Can you believe that?”
Lars laughed thickly.
Darby glanced up at the Garfield clock, but her vision smeared with Vaseline tears. Maybe three minutes until the cops arrived? Two minutes? She couldn’t tell. Her mind was a swirl of razor blades. She closed her eyes, wishing desperately to be six years old again. She wished this were just another witching-hour nightmare she’d awoken from, before high school, before Smirnoff Ice and curfew and marijuana cookies and Depo-Provera, before everything got complicated, wrapped up in her mother’s arms, blinking away tears, breathlessly describing the ghostly lady with the double-jointed dog legs who’d strode through her bedroom—
No, it was just a dream.
I’ve got you, baby. It was just a dream.
Just inhale, count to five, and—
Ashley rattled the closet door. Like sandpaper on exposed nerves, a jan
gling, complex pain writhed up her wrist. She screamed in a choked voice she’d never heard before.
“Sorry, Darbs. You were dozing off again.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Trust me, this was supposed to be an easy little one-off. We’d pick up Jaybird from her mansion, drive twelve hours to a storage unit in Moose Head, where Sandi had a stash of money, cabin keys, and Jay’s stupid adrenaline shots, all under a fake name and a five-digit combination lock—one-nine-eight-seven-two. We’d grab that, disappear up to Sandi’s family cabin, and spend a week or two negotiating a sweet ransom payoff. Right?”
He rattled the door again—another violin-screech of pain.
“Wrong. After we surprise-adopted Jaybird, when we were halfway across the Mojave, we learned there was a break-in at Sandi’s stupid Sentry Storage place, and all of the combination locks had been compromised. Figures, right? So they were back to using default keys, which only Sandi had, all the way back in California. And problem two—Mr. Nissen called the cops, despite our explicit instructions not to, and now Sandi was under all kinds of scrutiny since she’s the goddamn school bus driver who took Jay home that day. She couldn’t FedEx the key to us without risking a stakeout. Meanwhile we’re out here in the Rockies with no place to stay and a sick kiddo in the van, puking up a storm. What were we to do? Huh?”
He reached forward, as if to rattle the doorknob again—Darby winced—but he showed a flash of compassion and didn’t.
“So, Sandi cooked up a last-minute family Christmas trip to Denver as a cover story for the police, and on the drive she’d covertly stash the key for us in a public place, like a rest stop, so we could then access Jay’s meds and our supplies. Which brings me to problem three.” Ashley pointed outside. “This goddamn winter wonderland.”
The pieces clicked together in Darby’s mind: Snowmageddon trapped them all here at the handoff point. With poor Ed as Sandi’s unwitting prop.
And then I showed up.
The sheer scale of it dwarfed her and made her head swim. This viper’s nest she’d wandered into at 6:00 p.m., strung out on Red Bull and exhausted. She watched the long, beady drip of her own blood. It almost touched the floor now.
“I’m not stupid,” Ashley said. “I’ve seen enough movies to know everything leaves a digital fingerprint. Since the police are involved now, collecting Jaybird’s ransom from Mommy and Daddy is pretty much impossible. And the cops are all over Sandi, too. She stole Jay’s cortisol shots from the school nurse’s office a few months back, so they’ll pin that on her pretty quick. And then she’d probably roll over on us, which makes her a liability. So we came up here to kill her after she gave us the key. Make it look like a robbery-gone-wrong, gunshot-to-the-face deal. But I wasn’t expecting the blizzard, or for her to bring Cousin Ed. And I wasn’t expecting you, obviously.”
It all interlocked and made a macabre sort of sense. Except for one last unknown, burning in the back of Darby’s mind with unresolved tension. “Then . . . if there’s no ransom money, what’re you going to do with Jay?”
“Hey.” Ashley snapped his fingers in her face again. “Answer mine first, okay? Where are my keys?”
“What are you going to do with her?”
He smiled guiltily. “It’ll just make you uncooperative.”
“Yeah? What the hell have I been all night?”
“Trust me, Darbs. Just trust me on this one.” He stood up, hefting the orange nail gun, and paced across the room. “Because, hallelujah, I’ve figured you out. I could slam that door on each of your fingers until the sun comes up, until you have nothing but bloody hamburger hands, and you still won’t tell me what I need to know, because you’re just not that kind of person. You’re a hero, a bleeding-heart. Your whole night went to hell because you broke into a van to save a stranger. So guess what? Here’s your chance to save another one.”
He crouched beside Ed and pressed the nail gun to his forehead. The older man’s eyelids slid groggily half-open.
“Now, Darbs,” Ashley said, “I’m going to count down from five. You’re going to tell me where you hid my keychain, or I’ll kill Ed.”
She shook her head, thrashing left to right, in helpless denial. Up on the wall, the Garfield clock now read 5:30 (4:30) a.m.
It’s been thirty-two minutes. The police are late—
Ashley raised his voice. “Five.”
“No. I . . . I can’t—”
“Four.”
“Please, Ashley—”
“Three. Come on, Darbs.” He punched the nail gun’s muzzle against Ed’s forehead in cruel, bruising thrusts: “Look. At. Him.”
Ed now stared across the room at her through watering eyes. Poor old Edward Schaeffer, the ex-veterinarian with an estranged family waiting for him in Aurora, Colorado. A human cover story; Sandi’s unwitting collateral damage. He was moving his lips again, muffled by clammy red gauze, trying to form words with a tongue impaled to the roof of his mouth. She could feel his eyes on her, begging her to tell Ashley what he wanted to know. To just please tell him—
“If I tell Ashley,” Darby whispered to Ed, “they’ll kill us both—”
This was true, but she wished she could tell him another, greater truth, to reassure him: The police are almost here. They’re a few minutes late. Any second now, they’re going to kick down that door and shoot Ashley and Lars—
“Two.”
“I . . . I can’t say it.” She looked at Ed, realizing what this meant, and a racking sob rattled through her lips. “I’m . . . oh God, I’m so sorry—”
Ed nodded slowly, knowingly, dripping globs of stringy blood into his lap. Like he somehow, impossibly, understood.
She wanted to scream it to him: Any second, now, Ed. The cops are coming to save us. Please, God, let them get here in time—
The patience drained from Ashley’s voice. “One.”
* * *
“Ten-twenty-three. Approaching the structure on foot.”
Corporal Ron Hill clasped his shoulder radio and tripped on a snow bank, catching himself on a gloved palm. The ice was rock hard here, like sculpted cement. He was just a few paces from the Wanasho visitor center.
He reached the front door, stepping under the saucer-shaped lamp. Again, no further information from Dispatch beyond the initial 207 text message, which was frustrating.
He rapped the door with his Maglite. “Highway Patrol.”
He waited for an answer.
Then, a little huskier: “Police. Anyone here?”
It was still technically just a public building, but his right hand moved to the heel of his Glock 17 as he gripped the doorknob and sidestepped into the crunchy snow, using the brick wall as cover.
In entry drills, doorways are called fatal funnels because they’re the defender’s natural focal point. No way around it, unless you blow down a wall—you’re literally walking into the bad guy’s sights. If there really were a 207 hunkered inside this rest stop, he’d be watching the door right now down the barrel of a shotgun, perhaps crouched behind his hostages for cover.
Or, just an empty, harmless room. Not that Dispatch knew.
A sharp wind tugged his Gore-Tex jacket, peppering dry snowflakes against the door, and now Corporal Hill wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. For Sara to finish packing her goddamn suitcase? To hell with it.
He twisted the doorknob.
The door creaked open.
* * *
“Zero,” Ashley said.
But Darby wasn’t listening, because she’d just realized something. She stared past Ashley now, at the Colorado map on the wall behind Ed—and her heart sank with a heavy, cloying dread. State Route Six was a thick blue line on the map, slithering through mountain topography, and the rest areas were marked as red circles. Wanasho, Wanashono, Colchuck, Nisqual.
This one was Wanashono. Big Devil.
Not Wanasho.
But she’d typed her text message to 911 earlier in the night, around 6:00 p.m., before she’d learned this. B
ack before she’d returned inside, reexamined the map, and realized her error—that she’d transposed two similar-looking, similar-sounding local names, both concerning devils.
My text sent the cops to the wrong rest area.
To a completely different one, twenty miles down Backbone Pass. On the other side of that jackknifed eighteen-wheeler. The police weren’t coming after all. They were still miles away, unreachable, misdirected. No one was coming to arrest Ashley and Lars. No one was coming to save them.
She wanted to scream.
She sagged against the locked door, feeling her fingers twist inside the doorframe. Another jolt of meat-grinder pain. She felt weightless, like dropping into free fall, plunging to some unknown depth. She just wanted it all to be over.
No one is coming to save us.
We’re all alone.
I got us all killed—
Ashley sighed petulantly, like a frustrated child, and now he jammed the nail gun against Ed’s temple and squeezed the trigger—
“Stop,” Darby gasped. “Stop. I’ll tell you where your keys are, if you . . . if you promise you won’t kill him.”
“I promise,” Ashley said.
It was a lie, she knew. Of course it was a lie. Ashley Garver was a sociopath. Words and promises were meaningless to him; you might as well attempt to negotiate with a virus. But she fell apart and told him anyway, the entire room going silent, her voice a fractured whisper: “In the snow . . . outside the restroom window. That’s where I threw them.”
Ashley nodded. He glanced at Lars, then Jay. Then back at her, his lips curling into a boyish grin. “Thank you, Darbs. I knew you’d come through,” he said, raising the nail gun to Ed’s forehead anyway.
Thwump.
4:55 A.M.
“Don’t kill her until I’m back with the keys,” Ashley instructed his brother. “I need to be sure she’s telling the truth.”