Hoodie had a name. Andy had looked at his driver’s license before she’d thrown the wallet into the bay.
Samuel Godfrey Beckett, resident of Neptune Beach, Florida, born October 10, 1981.
The Samuel Beckett part had thrown her off, because Hoodie’s existence outside Laura’s office had taken shape with the name. He’d had a parent who was a fan of Irish avant-garde poetry. That somehow made his life more vivid than the Maria tattoo. Andy could picture Hoodie’s mother sitting on her back porch watching the sunrise, asking her son, “Do you know who I named you after?” the same way that Laura always told Andy the story about how the H got dropped from her middle name.
Andy pushed away the image.
She had to remind herself that Samuel Godfrey Beckett was, in Detective Palazzolo’s parlance, a bad guy. There were likely a lot of bad things Samuel or Sam or Sammy had done in his lifetime. You didn’t darken all the interior lights in your truck and cover your taillights on a whim. You did these things deliberately, with malice aforethought.
And someone probably paid you for your expertise.
Nine a.m. A librarian unlocked the door and waved Andy in.
Andy waved back, then waited until the woman went inside before retrieving the black make-up bag from under the seat. She opened the brass zip. She checked the phone to make sure the battery was full. No calls registered on the screen. She closed the phone and shoved it back into the bag alongside the keycard, the padlock key, the thick bundle of twenties.
She had counted the stash in Atlanta. There was only $1,061 to get Andy through however many days she needed to get through before the phone rang and her mother said it was safe to come home.
Andy felt stricken by the thought that she would have to devise some kind of budget. A Gordon budget. Not an Andy budget, which consisted of praying that cash would appear from the ether. She had no way of making more money. She couldn’t get a job without using her social security number and even then, she had no idea how long she’d need the job for. And she especially did not know what kind of job she could possibly be qualified to do in Idaho.
Keep heading northwest after Carrollton . . . Somewhere far away, like Idaho.
Where the hell had her mother gotten that idea? Andy had only ever been to Georgia, New York, Florida and the Carolinas. She knew nothing about Idaho except that there was probably a lot of snow and undoubtedly a lot of potatoes.
$1,061.
Gas, meals, hotel rooms.
Andy zipped the bag closed. She got out of the truck. She pulled down the ridiculously small T-shirt, which was as flattering as Saran Wrap on a waffle fry. Her shorts were stiff from the salt air. Her feet hurt so badly that she was limping. There was a cut on her shin that she did not remember getting. She needed a shower. She needed Band-Aids, better shoes, long pants, shirts, underwear . . . that thousand bucks and change would probably not last more than a few days.
She tried to do the math in her head as she walked toward the library. She knew from one of her former roommates that the driving distance between New York City and Los Angeles was almost three thousand miles. Idaho was somewhere in the upper left part of the United States—Andy sucked at geography—but it was definitely northwest.
If she had to guess, Andy would assume the driving time was about the same from Georgia to Idaho as from New York to California. The trip from Belle Isle to Macon was right under two hundred miles, which took about two and a half hours to drive, so basically she was looking at around twelve days of driving, eleven nights in cheap motels, three meals a day, gas to get there, whatever supplies she needed in the immediate . . .
Andy shook her head. Would it take twelve days to get to Idaho?
She really sucked at math, too.
“Good morning,” the librarian said. “Coffee’s ready in the corner.”
“Thanks,” Andy mumbled, feeling guilty because she wasn’t a local taxpayer and shouldn’t technically be able to use all of this stuff for free. Still, she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at a computer.
The glowing screen made her feel oddly at ease. She had been without her phone or iPad all night. Andy had not realized how much time she wasted listening to Spotify or checking Instagram and Snapchat and reading blogs and doing Hogwarts house sorting quizzes until she lacked the means to access them.
She stared at the computer screen. She drank her coffee. She thought about emailing her father. Or calling him. Or sending him a letter.
If you contact him, they’ll know. They’ll trace it back and find you.
Andy put down her cup. She typed Get-Em-Go Carrollton GA into the browser, then clicked on the map.
She almost laughed.
The storage facility was just over one hundred yards behind the library. She knew this because the high school’s football field separated the two. Andy could’ve walked to it. She checked the hours on the Get-Em-Go website. The banner across the top said that the facilities were open twenty-four hours, but then it also said that the office was open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Andy looked at the clock. She had fifty minutes.
She opened MapQuest on the computer and pulled up driving directions from Georgia to Idaho. Two thousand three hundred miles. Thirty hours of driving, not twelve days, which was why Andy had been forced to take Algebra twice. She had selected PRINT before her brain could tell her not to. Andy clicked CANCEL. The library charged ten cents a page, but money wasn’t the issue. She would have to walk up to the counter and ask for the pages, which meant the librarian would see that she was driving to Idaho.
Which meant if somebody else, maybe a guy like Hoodie who had magnets on his taillights and construction paper on his dashboard, asked the librarian where Andy was heading, then the librarian would know.
They’ll trace it back and find you. Telephone calls, email, anything.
Andy silently mulled over Laura’s warning in her head. Obviously, they were the ones who’d hired Hoodie, aka Samuel Godfrey Beckett. But what exactly had they hired him to do? Hoodie had told Laura that he wasn’t going to kill her. At least not instantly. He’d said that he was going to scare the shit out of her by suffocating her with the plastic bag. Andy’s knowledge of torture came mostly from Netflix. If you weren’t a torturer in a sadistic, Saw kind of way, then you were a torturer in the badass Jack Reacher way, which meant you wanted information.
What information did a fifty-five-year-old divorced speech pathologist have that was worth hiring a goon to torture it out of her?
Better yet, during what period of her life had Laura accumulated this torturable information?
Everything Detective Palazzolo had said about Laura’s past, from being born in Rhode Island to attending UGA to buying the house on Belle Isle tracked with what Andy knew to be true. There was no unexplained gap in Laura’s history. She had never been out of the country. She never even took vacations because she already lived right on the beach.
So what did Laura know that they wanted to torture out of her?
And what was so important that Laura would endure torture rather than give it up?
Andy fluttered out air between her lips. She could spend the rest of her life circling down this rabbit hole.
She located the scratch paper and pencils beside the computer. She took several sheets and began to transcribe the directions to Idaho: 75S to 84E to 80E, NE2E, 1-29S, I70E . . .
Andy stared at the jumble of numbers and letters. She would need to buy another map. There would be a rest stop at the Georgia/Alabama border. First, she would go to the storage facility, change out the truck for the car Laura had said would be there, then head northwest.
She fluttered her lips again.