by TAYLOR ADAMS
“Jesus Christ. You’re . . . you know you’re a hero, Dara—”
“Not yet.” She winced, looking at the floor, fighting a sickly chill. Hour by hour, she’d grown to loathe that word. “And not even close. Not if I get you and your cousin killed tonight—”
“You won’t,” Ed said. “Hey. Look at me.”
Reluctantly, she did.
“Some words of wisdom for you,” he said. “Do you know the first thing they tell you in the Clairmont rehab center? When you first walk through those doors, and check in your items, and sign all the intake forms, and sit down?”
She shook her head.
“Me neither.” He smiled. “But I’ll let you know, okay?”
She laughed.
It didn’t make her feel any better. But she pretended it had, like a rushed little pep talk in a restroom had been all she needed. She smiled, letting her scar materialize on her eyebrow. “I’ll hold you to it, Ed.”
“You bet.”
As he returned to the lobby, she felt something still lumped in her right pocket — Ashley’s keychain. She pulled it out and inspected it, fanning the keys in her palm. A black USB drive. A key to a storage unit place called Sentry Storage, and, lastly, the all-important key to the kidnappers’ Chevrolet Astro.
Then she closed a fist around them, and before she could reconsider, hurled them out the window. A soft thump as they landed outside.
Call it a peace offering.
A chance for Ashley and Lars to cut their losses, take their Astro van and attempt a getaway before the sun came up. Before the snowplows arrived. Before the cops came in with their guns drawn.
Take your keys, she wanted to shout.
No one has to die tonight.
Please, just take your keys, Ashley, and we’ll all go our separate ways.
It was a nice fantasy. But somehow she figured there was no chance this standoff could end without bloodshed. The Brothers Garver had too much at stake to simply walk away. She’d already sat across the table from Ashley tonight, looked him in the eyes, and seen the ruthless clarity in them. Like light refracted through a jewel. A young man who saw people as meat. Nothing more.
And the witching hour was approaching. That time of evil, of demonic entities, of crawling things that live in the dark. Just superstition, but Darby shivered anyway as she typed another draft text.
Hey, Mom. If you find this message on my phone . . .
She hesitated.
. . . I want you to know that I didn’t stop fighting. I didn’t give up. I’m not a victim. I chose to get involved. I’m sorry, but I had to. Please know that I always loved you, Mom, and no matter what, I’ll always be your little girl. And I died tonight fighting to save someone else’s.
Love, Darby.
2:56 a.m.
On her way back into the lobby, she folded Jay’s cryptic little DON’T TRUST THEM napkin and tucked it in her back pocket.
Why? She wondered, a sore pit growing in her stomach.
Why shouldn’t I trust Ed and Sandi?
She wanted to ask the girl, but Ed was too close. “Jay, did those assholes mention where they were driving you?” he asked. “Before they got stranded up here on the pass, I mean?”
“No.” Jay shook her head. “They’re here on purpose.”
“What?”
“They were looking for this rest stop. They were looking at maps today on the road, finding it—”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just know they wanted to be here.”
Tonight, Darby thought, tying her hair up into a ponytail. Another loose puzzle piece. Another unsolved fragment. It made her stomach hurt. She couldn’t imagine why Ashley and Lars would intend to trap themselves up here with their hostage, at nine thousand feet, among a handful of travelers.
Unless they’d planned to kill everyone here all along? The homicidal brothers had been traveling with a handgun, five gallons of gasoline, and a jug of bleach. Maybe Ashley had something evil in mind. As she considered this, Ed asked Jay something else that caught her attention: “Did they take your meds? When they took you?”
Darby’s ears perked. Meds?
Jay wrinkled her nose. “My shots?”
“Yeah. Meds, shots, pens. Whatever your parents called them.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay.” He sighed, pushing his thinning hair back. “Then, tell me, Jay. How . . . how long have you gone without them?”
“I keep one in my pocket for emergencies, but I used it.” She counted on her fingers. “So three . . . no, four days.”
Ed exhaled, like he’d been gut-punched. “Wow. Alright.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No. It’s not your fault.”
Darby grabbed his elbow. “What’s this about?”
“Apparently . . . well, she has Addison’s.” Ed lowered his voice and pointed at Jay’s yellow bracelet. “Addison’s disease. It’s an adrenal condition with the endocrine glands, where they don’t produce enough cortisol for your body to operate. One in, like, forty thousand people has it. Requires a daily medication, or your blood sugar plunges and you . . .” He stopped himself.
Darby touched Jay’s wrist and read the bracelet: ADDISON’S DISEASE/STEROID DEPENDENT. She turned it over, expecting more details, like dosage instructions, a doctor’s phone number, or a recommended emergency treatment — but that was it. That was all. Four stamped words.
Steroid dependent.
“So, what then?” Darby asked. “Ashley didn’t know how to medicate her?”
“They’ve been medicating her incorrectly, I think. Dumbasses probably Googled it, then broke into a drug store and grabbed the first thing with steroid in the name. Just made her sicker—”
“I thought you said were a veterinarian.”
“I am.” Ed forced a smile. “Dogs get Addison’s, too.”
She remembered the sharp odor of vomit in Lars’s van. Jay’s tremors, her exhaustion, her pale skin. This explained all of it. And now Darby wondered — if you’re prescribed a daily steroid shot, how bad can missing four of them be?
To Ed, she lip-synched: How serious?
He mouthed back: Later.
“Ashley and Lars are still by their van,” Sandi called out from the window. “They’re . . . they’re doing something. I just can’t tell what—”
“Preparing to attack us,” Darby said. No point in sugarcoating it.
She paced the room, inventorying weapons. Two carafes of hot water. Sandi’s pepper spray. Ed’s lug wrench.
It was a hasty battle plan, but it made sense. When the assault came, Sandi would monitor the locked front door and barricade with Jay, calling out the attackers’ movements. Darby would guard the men’s room window. If the brothers attempted their entry there, as she anticipated, she’d surprise-attack Lars or Ashley from the blind corner with a splash of scalding water. And Ed, with his wrench, would be a roamer, moving to whichever side of the visitor center he was needed.
“What’s . . .” Sandi wiped her breath off the glass, squinting outside. “It’s been ten minutes. Why haven’t they tried to get inside yet?”
“To mess with us,” Darby guessed. “To make us nervous.”
“It’s working.”
In the building silence, her ears began to ring. The air felt pressurized. The ceiling rafters felt lower. The floor was bare, blotted with loose napkins and mop tracks. Somehow, moving the table had actually made the room feel smaller. The air was stuffy, all recycled carbon dioxide and sweat.
Darby kept waiting for someone to make a joke to relieve the tension.
No one did.
On the long drive from Boulder, she’d hated the quiet stretches between songs, because that’s when her mind went into overdrive. Remembering things she’d called her mother. New pains. New regrets. And now she rethought Ed’s answer to her question, when she’d asked how serious Jay’s four missed injections were. He hadn’t mouthed later.
; No, she realized with a sinking heart. He’d said something different.
He’d said fatal.
Jay would die if she remained under the care of Ashley and Lars tonight. Even if they hadn’t planned to murder her, they were still clueless about how to handle her adrenal condition. And her time was running out.
But really, it made perfect sense that the Garver brothers would turn out to be tragically inept kidnappers. Ashley may have had a cruel streak a mile wide, but he clearly wasn’t methodical enough to quarterback a ransom operation. He improvised too much, and he toyed with his victims. And Lars? Just a whiskered man-child, a soft and undeveloped psyche Ashley had molded into his own morbid image. These two overgrown kids were unprepared for the complexity and scale of what they were attempting. They weren’t remotely qualified for it. They were something far worse.
In a dark Walmart parking lot a few years back, watching a crackhead with a buzz-cut break into their Subaru from the safe lights of the Home and Garden section, she remembered her mother holding her shoulder and telling her: Don’t fear the pros, Darby. The pros know what they’re doing, and do it cleanly.
Fear the amateurs.
“They’re . . .” Sandi cupped her hands against the window. “Okay. Ashley just carried something out of his van. An . . . orange box.”
Ed knelt to Jay. “When they come, you’re going to get behind the counter. You’ll close your eyes. And whatever happens, you won’t come out. Understand?”
The girl nodded. “Okay.”
Over Jay’s head, Darby mouthed to Ed: How do we treat her?
“We . . . we get her to a hospital. That’s all we can do,” he whispered, leaning close. “I’ve only dealt with it in dogs, and even then I’ve only seen it a few times. I just know she’s in a shock period right now. Her body isn’t creating adrenaline — it’s called an Addisonian crisis — so if things get scary or intense, her body could trigger a seizure, or coma, or worse. We need to control her stress level. And keep her environment as calm and peaceful as possible—”
Sandi gasped from the window. “Ashley’s got a . . . oh God, is that a nail gun?”
“Yeah,” Darby said, turning back to Ed. “Not happening.”
* * *
Ashley clicked a battery into his Paslode IMCT cordless nailer and waited for the little green light to blink.
Back in his father’s days (the golden years of Fox Contracting), to get any sort of power behind a fired nail, you needed an air compressor and several yards of rubber hose. Now it was all batteries and fuel cells — stuff you can carry in your pocket.
Ashley’s model was bright, Sesame Street-orange. Sixteen pounds. The Paslode decal worn away. Nails fed from a cylindrical magazine, which had always reminded Ashley of the drum on John Dillinger’s tommy gun. The nails’ lengths are measured in pennies, for some ass-backwards medieval reason, and these ones were 16-pennies, or roughly three-and-a-half inches. Designed to spear into 2x4 lumber. They can penetrate human flesh up to ten feet away, and at distances beyond that, they’re still twirling shards of vicious metal, screaming through the air at nine hundred feet per second.
Cool, right?
Ashley may have spectacularly failed at the day-to-day management of Fox Contracting, but boy-howdy, he sure loved the toys that came with it. Fortunately his father was now too busy forgetting his own name and shitting in a bag to see what had become of the family legacy under Ashley’s leadership. Both specialists unceremoniously laid off, the web domain expired, the phone still ringing sporadically but going to voicemail. Sometimes driving the Fox Contracting van with that peeling cartoon character felt like piloting a big corpse; a dried-out husk of his father’s dreams and hard work.
See, when Wall Street failed, the feds stepped in and bailed them out with other people’s money. When your little Mom-and-Pop outfit fails, well, you have to take the bailout into your own hands. It’s the American way.
Ashley hefted the Paslode nailer and palmed the muzzle with his left hand, defeating the nose-safety with an effortless push. Then a squeeze of the trigger . . .
THWUMP.
A 16-penny pierced the front tire of Darby’s Honda. The black rubber deflated with a hiss.
Lars watched.
Ashley kicked the tire, feeling it soften. Then he leaned and fired another — THWUMP — into the Honda’s rear tire.
“Don’t be nervous, baby brother. We’ll sort this out.” Ashley circled the car and pierced the other tires as he spoke — THWUMP, THWUMP. “Just some dirty work tonight, and then we’ll go see Uncle Kenny. Okay?”
“Okay.”
His voice lowered, like he was sharing a dangerous secret: “And something else I forgot to mention. Remember his Xbox One?”
“Yeah?”
“He has the newest Gears of War.”
“Okay.” Lars’s smile solidified, and Ashley felt a pang of sympathy for his dear baby brother. He wasn’t cut out for this, but that wasn’t his fault. How could it be? He’d had no control over whether his mother chugged two vineyards a day while she’d carried him. Poor Lars had been genetically kneecapped before he even drew his first breath. The shittiest of shitty deals.
Quickly, he double-checked the light on his Paslode — still green. Cold weather was notoriously hard on their batteries, and he only had two. The last thing he’d need would be for his nailer to go powerless when he had it pressed to Darby’s temple. How embarrassing would that be.
In terms of raw firepower, Lars’s .45-caliber Beretta Cougar was the obvious winner — you don’t enter a gunfight with a cordless nailer and expect to win. And it would take quite a few three-and-a-half-inchers to reliably put a human down. Worse, the projectiles themselves rarely penetrate anything beyond ten feet. But Ashley Garver loved the nailer, he supposed, for all the things that made it a deeply impractical man-killing weapon. He loved it because it was heavy, cumbersome, inaccurate, scary, and gruesome.
All artists express themselves through their instruments, right?
This was Ashley’s.
“Come on, baby brother.” He pointed with his nailer. “Get your war face on.”
The Paslode’s cylinder magazine held thirty-five 16-penny nails, fed in little five-nail racks. He’d fired four. He still had more than enough to turn a human into a screaming porcupine. Walking beside him, Lars racked the slide on the Beretta the way he’d been taught, dutifully checking to ensure there was a chambered round.
“Gears of War 4, right?” he asked as they walked. “Not last year’s?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Okay.”
“And don’t you dare shoot Darby,” Ashley reminded him. “She’s mine.”
* * *
“They’re coming.”
“I know.”
“Now they have a nail gun—”
“I know, Sandi.”
Jay clasped her temples like she was warding off a headache, rocking against the flipped table legs. “Please, please, don’t argue—”
“Ed, they’re going to kill us—”
He pointed his lug wrench at her. “Shut up.”
Darby took the child by the shoulders and pulled her back, away from the barricaded window, toward the center of the Wanapani lobby. Any stress or trauma could trigger a seizure. This is literally life and death. I have to keep her calm.
Would that even be possible tonight? She tried to remember the exact phrasing Ed had used — an Addisonian crisis? — and she crouched down to Jay. “Hey. Jay. Look at me.”
She did, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Jaybird, it’ll be okay.”
“No, it won’t—”
“They won’t hurt you,” Darby said. “I promise, I won’t let them.”
By the door, the argument intensified: “Ed, they’re going to get inside—”
“Then we’ll fight them.”
“You’re just drunk. If we try to fight them, we will die.” Sandi’s voice rattled. “I will die, you
will die, and she will die—”
“She’s wrong.” Darby pulled Jay further back, behind the coffee counter. She patted the packed stones with her palm — solid enough to stop a bullet. “But stay behind this counter, like Ed said, okay? Just in case.”
“They won’t hurt me,” Jay whispered. “They’ll hurt you.”
“Don’t worry about me.” She recalled the girl’s eerie message on the napkin and scooted closer, lowering her voice to a whisper so the others wouldn’t overhear: “But tell me. Why don’t you want me to trust Ed and Sandi?”
Jay looked embarrassed. “I . . . no, it’s nothing.”
“Why, Jay?”
“I was wrong. It’s nothing—”
“Tell me.”
At the front door, Ed and Sandi’s argument reached a screaming fever pitch. He held the lug wrench out at his cousin, brandishing it like a weapon, his voice thundering now: “If we cooperate, they’ll kill us anyway.”
She swatted it away. “It’s our only chance—”
“I thought . . .” Jay hesitated, pointing over the countertop at Sandi, finally answering: “I thought, at first, that I recognized that lady. Because she looks exactly like one of my school bus drivers.”
All the way in San Diego.
Darby’s world froze.
“But that’s impossible,” Jay said. “Right?”
She didn’t have an answer. What were the odds of that? What were the odds of two other travelers having come from the same West Coast city as the abducted child? Of all places? Here, hundreds of miles inland, stranded at a remote highway rest stop in the Rockies?
The oxygen seemed to drain from the room.
San Diego.
“But . . . but, that’s not her,” Jay added quickly, gripping her wrist. “She just looks like her. It’s just a coincidence.”
No, it’s not, Darby wanted to say. Not tonight.
Tonight, there are no coincidences—
By the front door, Ed and Sandi had stopped arguing. They were both listening now, standing in petrified attention. Then Darby heard it, too — a pair of muffled footsteps, boots crunching in the packed snow outside, approaching the door. A two-man death squad.
Ed backed away from the door, red-faced. “Oh, Jesus. Everyone get ready—”