by TAYLOR ADAMS
A chorus of urging voices: Cambry, do it. Do it.
He will murder you right now, if you don’t shift into drive and—
The cop is coming back.
She hears gravel crunch under his approaching footsteps, brittle as eggshells. She lifts her hand from the Toyota’s shifter guiltily, feeling the mechanism click back into park. Her cheeks burn with shame as his silhouette strides closer in her mirrors.
That’s it, Cambry. That was your chance, gone.
Your fate is sealed.
He rests his elbow on the roof of her car this time, like it’s his. He’s looser now, more comfortable. He leans in and hands her back her driver’s license, and as she takes it, she notices he’s wearing black gloves. Had he been wearing those before? Or did he just now slip them on?
He says, “I need you to exit the vehicle, please.”
“Say again?”
He leans in, one elbow still on the Corolla’s roof. She can smell his chalky breath now. Strawberry-flavored antacids. “I need you to turn off the engine, exit the vehicle, and come with me.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain. Come with me.”
She keeps her fingers on the Toyota keys. Her knuckles tightening.
He smiles. “You’re not in trouble.”
“I know.”
“It’s just procedure.”
Raymond Raycevic is his name, according to the black stitching on his uniform. She decides she should remember this and mouths it. In case that name belongs to someone’s husband or father, facedown in a ditch somewhere. It’s an eerie name, lyrical on her lips. Vaguely demonic.
“Look.” His smile vanishes. “I already told you, you’re not in trouble, Cambry.”
Cambry.
Her name sounds alien coming from his mouth. It touches her like an ice cube between the shoulder blades. This makes it real, somehow. He’s not a bodiless urge in her mind that she’s been told to never fear. He’s a human being, six-two, two hundred and fifty pounds, real skin and blood and bone standing in front of her, and he might be here to kill her.
He moves again. He paces around the Corolla’s grille, studying the tires, looking the vehicle up and down like a car salesman, coming at the passenger window now—
“What are you doing?”
He doesn’t answer. He reaches in through the passenger window—“Hey!”—and lifts out her backpack by a strap. She grabs for it, too late.
“Hey, asshole. What are you doing—”
He unzips her backpack, dumping out her coat and fishing gear. He lifts out the red fuel can and sloshes it. He makes a disapproving face. She’s seen this face before, on teachers and counselors. It’s never fazed her like it does right now, because it’s so clearly false.
“Someone’s been siphoning fuel around Magma Springs,” he says as he paces back to her window, gripping the rubber hose like a knot of pale guts. “A young transient woman living in a blue four-door. It’s been the talk of the town.”
“The talk of the town must be pretty fucking boring, then.”
“This is serious, Cambry.”
“Stealing gas?”
Raycevic frowns and drops the fuel jug to the asphalt with a thud. The rubber tubing, too. He gestures again, harder. “Get out.”
“No.”
“Get out, Cambry.”
Cornered, she goes on offense. She can’t help it. “What were you doing back there?”
He replies immediately, his voice alarmingly crisp, like a snake whipping back to bite the hand that grabbed its tail: “I’m sorry?”
“You were out there in the woods,” she says. “Doing something with those fires. And then you saw me and chased me. All the way here.” She looks at him directly. “Why?”
He says nothing.
“What was all that about? Huh?”
He sighs. Fussing with one of his gloves.
It occurs to her too late, after the words have left her lips—He has to kill me now. Because now he knows exactly what she witnessed. He knows she knows it’s something of consequence. She’s uttered her own death sentence, right off the cuff, like a dumbass.
I’ve given him no choice.
The pines whisper with friction. A breeze cuts through the open windows. It’s going to be a chilly night. Cold for June.
“I’ll explain it all,” Raycevic says. “Okay? Is that what you wanted to hear? But one catch—I won’t talk about it here. So let’s go sit in my vehicle, and I’ll give you a full rundown on what happened back there, and what you saw.”
“How about you follow me into town?” she tries instead. “Whichever way the sheriff’s station is, point me to it, and I’ll drive there. You’ll follow me there, and then we’ll talk this whole thing through—”
He’s shaking his head.
“Okay, but I’m not getting out of my car.”
He shakes his head harder. She notices his other gloved hand has moved from the roof of her car. It now rests on the butt of his pistol. “I need you to cut the engine and exit the vehicle, ma’am.”
“I need you to eat a dick—”
“Cambry.” He’s still shaking his head in tight, clipped motions. “You need to cooperate. It’s more serious than you understand. I’m going to count to three.”
“Then what?”
“You’ll find out,” he says, “if you don’t exit the vehicle.”
“You’re not a cop.”
He counts: “One.”
Her gaze falls back to his palm, which rests on the black Glock holstered on his belt, and she softens. “Look. I’m just passing through here on my way home. I won’t tell anyone what I saw—”
“Two.”
“I don’t even know what I saw.” She feels her voice break. “Okay? Please—”
“Three.” He unbuttons his holster with two clicks and wraps his hand around the pistol.
“Wait, wait,” she says, her hands darting up, palms out the window. “I’m getting out. Okay? I’m getting out of my car and I’ll go with you. Can you just . . . take a step back, please?” She motions down, toward his feet. “So I can open my door?”
Silence. The moment cools.
Raycevic considers this and nods. He takes two steps back.
“Thanks.”
Then Cambry Nguyen shifts into drive.
Chapter 5
Lena
Lena didn’t like how long Raycevic sat in his car.
He was still on his radio. He gripped the little black receiver to his mouth, glancing up at her periodically through the sun-tinted windshield. She saw his lips moving but couldn’t hear his words. He’d rolled up his window for privacy.
She waved. He waved back with an apologetic smile. I’m almost done.
Lena glanced back out to the smoggy horizon and tried to stay focused. She’d been building momentum. This sudden wait had jolted her off her pace.
Who is he talking to?
She didn’t like it. At all.
She held her iPhone in her right hand. No service out here, but in the wait she’d thumbed absently to her texts. To her sister’s final message. The closest thing to a suicide note Cambry Nguyen had bothered to leave the world.
Lena normally slept through her phone’s noises, but for some reason this message had thrashed her awake after midnight on June 8, as if charged with negative energy. She remembered snapping her eyes open to the chime, seeing the blue glow on her ceiling, rolling over and squinting to read her sister’s last words:
Please forgive me. I couldn’t live with it. Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic.
Lena had read it once.
Then she’d rolled over and gone back to sleep.
Suicide hadn’t occurred to her. It happens to other people, other families. In her blurry mind, she’d assumed the text was intended for someone else. Officer Raycevic was a nickname for one of Cambry’s deadbeat boyfriends, maybe, in Kansas or Florida or Sri Lanka or wherever the hell she’d floated to now. Just an out-of-
context snapshot of her sister’s nomadic world. Was it an apology? An inside joke? A subtle threat? With Cambry, it was probably all three.
Lena slept in until ten that morning. Her next phone call was from her mother, choking through tears. She’d been contacted by the Montana Highway Patrol.
Lena never told a soul that she’d ignored Cambry’s text in the middle of the night. She claimed she’d found it only later.
And it didn’t matter—at the moment Lena received it, Cambry had already been dead for over twenty-four hours. She’d typed the message minutes before her death and tried to send it from within Hairpin Bridge’s cellular dead zone. The message sat in her phone’s outbox until later, when paramedics transported her body. Inside her blood-caked pocket, against her cold thigh and fighting a dying battery, her shitty little Nokia flip phone pinged a tower at 1:48 a.m. and fired it off to her sister like a twenty-byte message from the grave.
To be ignored.
As humiliating as it was, she was still glad her estranged sister thought to text her. It came as a relief, somehow, that Lena still mattered enough to warrant a final message. Even one as bizarre and suspicious as this.
The last sentence, especially: Hopefully you can, Officer Raycevic.
What the hell?
What did that mean?
No one knew what to make of it. Why hijack a suicide note with a message to the random bystander who pulled you over an hour prior? Why not more for her shocked family, for the grieving blood relatives she left behind? Why not an explanation? Why not anything? At the service her parents had smiled stoically and done their best with it, but to Lena it felt like Cambry had texted her a personal insult. A middle finger from beyond the veil.
Forget the riddles. All she had to say, all Lena ever wished for, was I love y—
A metal clap jolted her thoughts.
A car door.
Raycevic was coming back. Finally. He was different now, wearing a toothy smile like a mask. “Sorry about the interruption.”
“It’s all right.” She wiped her eye.
“That radio is like my wife,” he said, forcing an abrasive laugh. “Squawking all day, all hours. Man, I would hear it in my sleep, if I ever slept anymore.”
His lips pulled back into an anglerfish grin. Like the building tension of the last few minutes had fully evaporated, and he’d reverted back to the jovial, sympathetic (if mentally ragged) man she’d first met at Magma Springs Diner.
“Who were you talking to?”
* * *
Nineteen miles away, a man cloaked in black shadow held his radio receiver for a thoughtful moment before setting it back in its cradle with a click. Beside a handwritten note.
LENA NGUYEN. HAIRPIN BRDG
He paused, then added:
UNARMED
* * *
“Dispatch,” Raycevic smoothly answered. “Fire One says the wind changed. The Briggs-Daniels fire is pushing this way now, and everything south of I-90 needs to be evacuated. We should probably call it a day. Did you get your questions answered?”
“That’s close enough.”
He stopped six feet from her and raised both hands in an exaggerated shrug. His muscles coiled under tan sleeves. “Do you have something against cops, Lena?”
“Excuse me?”
“Cops. Me. The thin blue line.” He patted his barrel chest, and it made a click, as if he were made of tungsten. His grin made her feel insects crawling on her skin. “I’m one of the good guys.”
“I’m sure you are.”
“Is this a Gen Z thing?”
“I respect cops, Ray.”
“You’re sure?”
“My uncle was a state trooper in Oregon.” She looked him in the eye. “He was the kindest, most decent person I’ve ever met. And I remember when he told me how often drivers flipped him off on the turnpike. They saw him as a storm trooper, not a human being. A lot of the public is like that. Pissed off. Distrustful. I really do believe law enforcement is the hardest job in the world.”
He smiled, bashful. “Thank you—”
“It’s you I have a problem with, Ray.”
His smile vanished.
Something about this—the way he seemed to phase his expressions in and out—reminded Lena of Cambry’s childhood Barbie collection. How, instead of playing with them, she’d used hydrogen peroxide to melt their faces into slurries of gray plastic, and then posed them on her shelves like faceless little department-store mannequins. It was eerie. Lena never knew why her sister did it.
Raycevic’s smile had flickered back. He reverted to his teleprompter: “If you need to talk to someone else in my department, or if you distrust me, Lena, that’s okay. That’s your right. You’ve been through a terrible loss. Your sister was mentally ill.” He put special emphasis on mentally ill, drawing out an extra syllable and studying her eyes for a reaction. “She was in incredible pain. Pain she never shared with anyone. And she made an unfortunate choice.”
She refused to take his bait. He’s toying with me.
Trying to rub salt in the wound.
She met Raycevic’s gaze and stared into the robotic black shades, trying to find his eyes. “We didn’t finish what we were talking about earlier. So, you pulled her over at eight o’clock?”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t ask her to sit in your car?”
“No.”
“She was never physically inside your car?”
That gentle smile answered her, all teeth. “That’s correct.”
Lena glanced back to her left and made sure the Shoebox was still recording. She didn’t allow Raycevic out of her sight. She kept the armed man squarely in her foreground, her body turned ninety degrees against him for maximum mobility.
He was waiting.
She decided—yes, it was time to pull the trigger. The niceties were over. It had all been an act, anyway, from the instant she’d first met him outside the Magma Springs Diner today.
“My sister was an artist,” Lena said. “She’s brilliant. Was brilliant. She draws better than people can photograph, because any phone can copy an image, but Cambry catches the truth of it.”
Raycevic’s smile was evaporating again.
“There’s this one thing she drew. Not a sketch. More of a calling card, a tag. It’s a cartoon dinosaur, one of the smaller velociraptor-type ones, but friendly and expressive, you know? Like Garfield.”
She gave him a moment to give an affirmative nod. He didn’t.
“She’s drawn it ever since elementary school, back when she wanted to be a cartoonist. She named it Bob the Dinosaur. And later, as a teenager, she scratched and inked it into everything. So now, traveling from ocean to ocean and back again, there’s no question she must have drawn and carved Bob the Dinosaur into dozens of bar stools and tree trunks and restroom stalls all over the country.”
She let the moment hang.
“So what’s he doing carved into the back seat of your police car, Ray?”
Chapter 6
Cambry’s Story
There’s something eerie to how the state trooper watches her accelerate away. He’s surprised by her deception, but he doesn’t panic. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t draw his weapon and pepper her back window with gunfire. He just watches her go under a billow of dust, a shrinking figure in her rearview mirror. And then he turns and calmly retreats to his cruiser.
He’s going to follow you, Cambry.
This is a certainty. He will. The chase is just beginning. But right this moment, at 8:23 p.m., Cambry is alive, and her foot is clamped to the pedal, and the engine is throttling up, and she knows she’s got a fighting chance. When her Corolla is halted in park, she’s as vulnerable as a sitting bird, but when Cambry Nguyen is in motion? From Glass Beach to the Everglades, from white sand to white snow, the world races with possibilities, because motion is life.
And yes, motion is literally life, right now.
Holy shit.
She wants t
o punch her steering wheel. She’s shivering, her nerves crackling with energy. Her skin erupts into goose bumps. Yes, yes, yes, that all really just happened.
What were those fires? Those four ritualistic fires that Raycevic had been tending to? She’s been thinking on them, turning it over in her brain, and she has a guess now. Like completing a jigsaw, it reveals a larger picture. The cop’s binoculars, his sunburn, his panting desperation to catch her before she escapes back out into the world—
He’s following you.
Yes, of course, there he is. No surprise there. Corporal Raycevic’s black Dodge Charger crowds up in her rearview mirror. He’s caught up to her easily, and now pulls behind her in an aggressive pursuit. His car seems to bob on her tail, the snarling teeth of his impact grille closing to within twenty, ten feet. Close enough that, if she stomps her brakes at this very moment, she can almost guarantee she’ll wreck them both. She considers this.
The road unrolls blacktop. Weaving through pines and prairie, crossing lazy foothills. Turn markers glint orange in her headlights, threatening a sharp turn ahead. She taps her brakes, letting Raycevic’s headlights draw even closer.
I won’t do myself any good if I crash, she thinks. Raycevic would probably be delighted to watch her Corolla spin out and wrap itself around a tree. His work would be over. He could go home.
Another sinking feeling.
He knows my name. How much information is stored in police databases? Is it like the movies? Cambry’s address was never up-to-date—she moved too much, too fast—but if her misdemeanors or her DUI are in there, then Corporal Raycevic knows her parents live in Olympia, Washington. If he fails to catch her tonight, he could pay them a visit and kill them instead. Or hold them hostage.
She hasn’t seen another motorist yet.
She checks her flip phone for signal—still nothing. This highway is empty, but maybe she can catch an access road to the interstate, which runs parallel. I-90 will certainly have other drivers. The thought of being near witnesses is reassuring. A psychotic cop wouldn’t dare try anything in view of bystanders, right?