by Sam Sisavath
“Stop moving!” Evans was shouting as he followed her and Trent to the Ford. “I said, stop moving, goddammit!”
There were no signs of Mickey or the Subaru’s owner—the man in the wire-rimmed glasses back in the Don’t Stop In, Allie assumed—but she had a feeling the bartender wasn’t just standing in the building behind Evans, drinking her bad coffee. No doubt Mickey was on the phone now, calling for help. That was, if Evans hadn’t already done so before coming out. He had lagged behind just a little longer than she’d expected before pursuing.
Allie kept moving backward toward the Ford with Trent between her and Evans. “Don’t follow me. Do you understand?”
“What?” Evans said. There was a look of confusion on his face that Allie didn’t think was fake. He really didn’t understand what she was saying.
“Don’t follow me,” Allie said again. “I’ll let your partner go when I’m a mile from here. But if you follow me, I can’t guarantee his safety.”
Evans didn’t say anything. Instead, he swiped at beads of sweat that had gathered on his forehead.
“Get in the car,” Allie said, this time to Trent.
She still couldn’t see the older deputy’s face, but she didn’t have to. Trent hadn’t tried anything since she got behind him. Allie didn’t know if that was because he was still hurting or if he was just too smart to do something that might get him killed. She hoped it was the latter. A hostage who didn’t want to be a hero was always so much easier to control.
“Do what she says,” Trent said to his partner.
“What?” Evans said.
“Do what she says. Don’t follow us.”
“What are you saying?”
“Dammit, Philly, don’t get me killed!” Trent said. He hadn’t shouted the words, but it was pretty close.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Evans said, more to himself than to her or Trent.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Trent said again.
“Listen to your partner,” Allie said. Then, taking out her key fob and unlocking the Ford’s doors, “Get in.”
She had led Trent over to the front passenger’s seat and directed him through the door, then pushed him until he was across and over to the driver’s seat. Allie kept an eye on Evans the entire time she had her gun pointed at his partner.
Allie slipped into the vehicle and slammed the door shut. “Drive.”
Trent took the key from her and started up the Ford. The older deputy locked eyes with Evans through the windshield as he backed up the rental. He didn’t glance away until he had turned the car and pointed it out of the Don’t Stop In parking lot.
“East or west?” Trent asked.
The cabin was back east, but she didn’t need Trent to know that right now. He would eventually find out anyway—he and the rest of the Wells City Police Department—but the more time she could give herself until then, the better.
“West,” she said.
Allie glanced up the rearview mirror as Trent turned left onto the highway. Evans stood in the parking lot, hands and gun at his sides, watching them go. She wondered how long it would take him to snap out of it and run to their squad car to call for backup.
“You just made a really big mistake,” Trent said.
Tell me something I don’t already know.
She said, “What happened? Why is there an APB on my car, and why are there roadblocks being put up?”
Trent didn’t answer.
“Tell me, or I’m going to make you keep driving past the one-mile mark,” Allie said.
“You told Philly you would let me go.”
“Yeah, well, I can change my mind about a lot of other things if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
Trent remained quiet, hands gripping the steering wheel. He stared forward, and she imagined he was trying to decide how much to tell her in order to stay alive, while at the same time not completely destroying his credibility as a cop.
Allie decided to lend a hand. “You’ve been smart so far, doing what you’re told. That tells me you want to live through this.”
“Yeah, well, I kinda like living,” Trent said.
“So stay smart. Tell me what I want to know, or we’re going to keep driving. What’s all this about?”
“Tom Marshall.”
Allie sighed. Of course this was about Tom Marshall. Who else would this be about?
I definitely should have gone on that cruise with Lucy…
“What about Tom Marshall?” Allie asked.
“You don’t know?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking, now would I?”
Trent snuck what he probably thought was a sly glance across the front seats at her, maybe trying to read her face.
“He sent you after me?” Allie asked when Trent didn’t continue.
“Who?” Trent said.
“Who else? Tom Marshall.”
“He didn’t send me anywhere.”
“So why are you looking for my car, and why are there countywide roadblocks being erected?”
“Because Tom Marshall is dead,” Trent said. “Someone killed him last night in his own home. Someone driving a white Ford sedan.”
Thirteen
Just when she thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
“Because Tom Marshall is dead. Someone killed him last night in his own home. Someone driving a white Ford sedan.”
Tom Marshall was dead.
A man who Allie had never technically met but had glimpsed in a dark Don’t Stop In last night. She had never even said a word to him. She wasn’t even sure if he’d even noticed her sitting at the bar next to a drunken Stan when he came in with his wife.
Tom Marshall.
Wife beater. Son of an influential family that probably owned all of Timber Creek County, and within it, Wells City. A man whose wife and child were currently in Allie’s cabin right now, waiting for her to come back with news. A wife and child that Allie had helped to escape.
Tom Marshall.
Dead.
She wished she could say things had become more complicated, but the truth was, it was already complicated when she helped Sarah into her car last night. This morning had just exacerbated the problem.
“Turn here,” Allie said.
“We’re already past the one-mile mark,” Trent said.
“Turn here.”
“You said—”
“I lied.”
“Figures,” the deputy said with a sigh, before turning as he was ordered.
Not that Trent had any choice. She had his Glock in her lap, the muzzle pointed across the front seat at him.
Allie had lied to Mickey when she said her Ford didn’t have GPS navigation. It did, and she was using it now to get off the highway and find another route to the cabin. The urgency was to get off the road before the Wells City Police Department converged on the Don’t Stop In. She was surprised no one had as of yet, but Allie wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She needed, and would take all the extra minutes she could get.
They hadn’t turned off the highway for more than ten seconds when Allie picked up the first sounds of police sirens.
“Stop,” she said.
Trent did, easing on the brake before putting the gear into park. “What now?”
She didn’t answer and instead listened as the sirens got louder. Then strobe lights flashed across the rearview and her side mirror.
One, two—three speeding white vehicles.
Allie waited for one of them to stop and turn back, but they continued on up the highway toward the Don’t Stop In. It occurred to her that it was probably a bad idea to keep the Ford, a car that was already being hunted. There was the Subaru and Trent’s own squad car that she could have taken instead. Then again, how long before Evans radioed in her new getaway vehicle?
Two minutes or so after she first heard the sirens, they began to fade until she could barely hear them out there.
“Let’s go,” Allie s
aid.
“Where are we going?” Trent asked as he put the car back into drive.
“Just drive. I’ll tell you when to stop.”
“I need to know where we’re going.”
“I’ll tell you what you need to know. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Allie couldn’t help herself and smiled. Trent was either being the world’s most cooperative hostage, or he was plotting something. The paranoid half of her leaned toward the latter, but she didn’t believe it this time. The deputy was playing the hand he’d been given and trying to see the other end without getting killed. There wasn’t a shred of hero cop in Trent’s game that she could detect.
Good. At least one thing was going well for her this morning.
There was a serene quality to their surroundings; it was the same ambiance that her cabin had provided. Out here, she wouldn’t know there were roadblocks being set up and likely a manhunt currently being organized for her capture. No doubt Evans would have told the others what she looked like by now. Mickey the bartender would corroborate everything. There was even a third witness, the driver of the Subaru.
Allie hadn’t said a word for a few minutes, and though he sneaked looks in her direction, neither had Trent.
She finally broke the silence. “Tom Marshall is dead.”
Trent didn’t answer.
“Well?” Allie said.
“Was that a question?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, he’s dead.” Again, that questioning look from Trent, as if trying to figure out if she was testing him.
She ignored his not-all-that-subtle glances and said, “How did he die?”
“You don’t know?”
“Just answer the question, deputy.”
“I don’t know, either.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“I wasn’t there when they hauled his body away.”
“Didn’t anyone tell you?”
“I didn’t ask, and no one volunteered.” The deputy shrugged. “They say he was murdered in his home. I don’t know if that means he was shot or stabbed or hung. Just that he’s dead.”
“Who is ‘they?’”
“The Chief. The DA. Them.”
“The district attorney is already involved?”
“Of course.”
The way he had said it, “Of course,” bothered her.
“What does that mean?” Allie asked. “‘Of course.’”
“It’s Tom Marshall.”
And that, Allie understood.
It was Tom Marshall, so of course the DA would already be involved even before any semblance of a case was put together. The death of the youngest son of the Marshall clan would demand that kind of attention. The same clan that, according to everyone she’d talked to so far, ran Timber Creek County.
“What else do you know?” Allie asked. “And don’t give me that ‘I don’t know anything’ shit. You know something. You cops always talk.”
Again, that questioning side glance from Trent.
“Well?” Allie said.
“I don’t have any details, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s all still pretty fresh,” the deputy said.
“So what do you know?”
“Just that it happened last night in his home.”
“I could have gotten that by watching the news.”
“Yes, you could have. You still can. Just let me go.”
“Don’t try to be clever. It’s not a good look for you.”
Trent grunted.
“And someone saw the killer get into a white Ford sedan?” Allie asked. “Or were you just told to look for one?”
“Look for one.”
“So you don’t know if the driver is the killer?”
Trent said nothing, but Allie could imagine his thought process at the moment: “Hey, lady, you just assaulted a cop, shot up a bar, and then took that cop hostage. What’s a little murder to someone who can do those things?”
Allie didn’t bother protesting her innocence. He was a small cog in a big machine. Not that he would have believed anything she said anyway, not while she was holding a gun—his gun—on him and forcing him to drive up the side of a hill. In his shoes, she wouldn’t believe a damn thing she said, either.
“You said there were roadblocks,” Allie said. “Where are they?”
“Everywhere,” Trent said.
“Be more specific.”
“There’s someone watching every exit and entrance at the moment. They just haven’t expanded into the hills yet. You’ve been lucky so far, but it’s not going to last. You have to know that. Taking me hostage was a very big mistake.”
Allie didn’t believe that there was someone “watching every exit and entrance,” but she fully agreed with the “big mistake” part. Her first really big one was stopping at the Don’t Stop In last night. Then there was that note. That damn note.
Sarah. She was still at the cabin right now. Allie wondered what the woman would do or say when she found out about Tom’s death.
Happiness? Shock? Anger?
It was hard for Allie to predict; she’d never had to live with an abuser before. She had no idea what kind of hell that was, and she never would. Allie would die first before she allowed something like that to happen to her. She’d spent so much of her life fighting that to just subject herself to that kind of treatment was beyond her understanding.
But Sarah wasn’t her. Sarah and every other abused wife out there had never had to lose a sister to a serial killer. They’d never spent years of their life training to hunt down and kill that man as revenge. They had never been so singularly driven that they ate and slept and breathed vengeance.
In so many ways, Allie wasn’t even close to a “normal” woman.
“Turn left,” she said, watching the car’s navigation screen with one eye.
“There’s no turn,” Trent said.
“It’s coming up.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see—” He stopped when the trees parted as if by magic to reveal a turn in front of them. “Turning left it is.”
According to the map, the cabin was still far up ahead. They would come up on it from behind because of the back roads they were taking. Sarah would be inside, waiting with her baby, and Allie pictured the woman’s face as she broke the news.
Sarah.
What about Sarah?
It hadn’t occurred to her before, but Trent hadn’t said a single thing about Sarah. Why was that?
“What about the wife?” Allie asked.
“The wife?” Trent said.
“Tom Marshall’s wife.”
“What about her?”
The way he had posed the question…
He doesn’t know she’s missing.
Was that possible? Did the police still not know that Sarah had run off with her and Tom’s newborn?
Allie didn’t discount the possibility that Trent wasn’t telling her the whole truth. He could very well be playing his own game, trying to extract information from her while she was doing the same to him. He appeared smart enough. He was certainly calm and collected and in control. A man like that could be dangerous.
And yet, looking at him, Allie didn’t think so.
“Did she see what happened?” Allie asked.
“I don’t know,” Trent said. He sounded believable enough. Sounded. “All they told me was to look for a white Ford sedan, because the driver is a person of interest. That’s it. If you wanted the down and dirty, you should have taken another deputy hostage.”
“What about the baby?”
“What baby?”
“The Marshalls had a baby. Is it okay?”
“I don’t know anything about that, either.”
“You killed Tom Marshall. Shouldn’t you already know the answers to all of this?” she half-expected Trent to say, but he didn’t. Even if he was thinking it, Trent was too
smart to do it out loud and risk antagonizing her.
He’s like you, Hank, except with more hair.
Allie said, “I thought the Marshalls were famous around here. Influential men about town. Word is, they were here before Timber Creek County.”
“They are definitely all that, but it doesn’t mean we all know about their personal lives,” Trent said. “At least, I don’t. I’m not that nosy. They may be famous, but it’s not like they’re the Royals.”
“The Royals?”
“You know, the English Royals?”
“You follow them?”
“They’re interesting. Also, there isn’t a lot to do when you’re waiting at the grocery store to check out.”
Allie wondered if Hank had a secret interest in the Royals, too. She’d have to ask him when she swung by to pick up Apollo. Right now, though, that reunion was looking further and further away.
“So you don’t know if the wife saw Tom Marshall’s murder or not? Or even if their baby’s okay?” Allie asked.
“That’s correct,” Trent said.
“And you don’t know how Tom was killed.”
“No.”
“Did someone shoot him?”
“I have no idea.”
“You don’t know much, do you?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Allie couldn’t help herself, and she smiled again. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think Trent was taken hostage on a daily basis; that he was used to it.
“You really want to live, don’t you?” she asked.
“Is that a trick question?”
“So what’s her name?”
“Who?”
“The woman you’re so desperate to live through this in order to see again.”
Trent chuckled. “Cynthia.”
“Is she pretty?”
“She’s thirty-two, blonde, stacked as hell, and way too young for an old fart like me.” He rubbed his chest with one hand while driving with the other. “That really hurt, you know.”
“What?”