The other man looked at half a dozen more photos, then stopped and shook his head. “Just security.”
The shooter leveled the gun through the vehicle’s window and fired once. Then he and the other man continued checking the rest of its occupants.
Paige felt her breathing accelerate. In the fume-choked space, she thought she might pass out before long. The killers found another survivor in the second SUV, determined he was also no one important, and executed him.
Paige turned herself over and got up on her elbows. She looked around. The window facing away from the shooters, the one direction in which she might get out unseen and run for it, was compressed to four inches of space. No way through. Likewise for going forward or back. If she went between the front seats and out the windshield, they’d see her at once. And she couldn’t reach the rear window: the back of the middle-row bench seat, where she’d been strapped in, was almost touching the roof now. There was maybe a one-inch gap below it.
The entity.
If she could get to it, she might get away. She’d need room to actually use the thing—ten feet at least. That meant she’d still have to go out the windshield into open view. But after that she would only need a few seconds to switch the entity on, and then if she moved quickly, she’d be long gone.
She shoved her arm through the gap between the seatback and the roof. The padding gave a little, and so did the soft tissue of her arm, but she could still only reach about ten inches into the space beyond. She swept her arm left and right, fingertips extended as far as possible.
It wasn’t there.
It might be only an inch out of reach, but that was enough. She made another sweep. Nothing. Her eyes were watering now. She wanted to think it was only because of the fuel vapor.
Another pistol shot. Closer. She looked. The killers were at the third vehicle. Maybe thirty seconds from finding her.
There was one other move to make. She didn’t think she had time. She also didn’t have a hell of a lot to lose in trying. She withdrew her hand from the gap below the seatback, rolled on her side and took her cell phone from her pocket. She switched it on and navigated to the macro list. You couldn’t just speed-dial into Border Town. You had to call and then enter a code, then an extension and another code. A macro could do it all in about a second. She found the one she needed and selected it. She waited. It rang.
“Be there,” she whispered.
She watched the shooters examine another victim in the third vehicle. They seemed to be debating whether the body was alive or dead. The one with the PDA looked through the photographs anyway.
The call rang again. And again.
The man with the PDA stopped on an image. Nodded at his partner. They reached inside the vehicle to drag the victim out.
The fourth ring was cut off by an answering click. Paige started talking before the other party could finish saying hello. The words came in a rush. She hoped to hell she was even understandable. There just wasn’t time to say it all. It would’ve been tight even with a full minute, and she had nowhere close to that long. She found herself trying to prioritize even as she spoke. Trying not to leave out anything critical.
But she was leaving something out. She could feel the absence of it gnawing at her.
“Shit, what else . . . ?” she whispered.
She saw the killers turning toward her now, drawn by her voice, and a second later they were running, their footsteps slapping the wet pavement.
What the hell was she forgetting?
The other party began to speak, asking if she was okay.
She remembered.
She composed it into the simplest form she could think of and screamed it into the phone, and even as she finished she felt hands reaching through the window and grabbing her. Getting her by the calves, pulling her from the vehicle. She gripped the phone with both hands and snapped it in half. Heard the circuit boards inside break like stale crackers.
Then she was out on the pavement, turned over, pinned, the pistol aimed down at her. The PDA’s glow on the killers’ faces strobed through the photo sequence again. She looked past them and saw the body they’d pulled from the third SUV. She saw why they’d discarded it after all: one of its legs had been nearly severed by a bullet impact just above the knee. It hung on by only skin and a bit of muscle. The open femoral artery had already pumped a thick sheet of blood onto the pavement. Very little was still coming out. Very little was left to come out.