His gaze passed over her position and kept going. He didn’t have a clue where she was. That was good. All she had to do was stay a step ahead of him until the cavalry came.
He retreated back inside the stable. The second he was gone, she ran again. She kept low, below the level of the grass, to remain unseen. She kept zigging and zagging to hide her path but always headed in a direction that put more and more distance between herself and the stable.
“Oh, Zo?,” he yelled.
Again, she dropped to her knees and held fast. He reemerged from the stable, carrying something in his hand. He strode back toward the dead cop.
“Do you know how you find a needle in a haystack?”
The randomness of the question confused her.
“No? Well, I’ll tell you. You set fire to the hay.”
Fear knifed through her. He was going to burn her out. She peered at the thing in his hand. It was a gas can with a hose. He stopped next to the patrol car. He was going to siphon the tank.
He wouldn’t need much fuel to get a fire started. Once it took hold, the bone-dry vegetation would do the rest. She needed a new hiding spot. The house looked like the best bet. She was closer to it than he was. It might have things she needed—a phone, clothes, water—and it was shelter. She could barricade herself in, at the very least, and rely on the house’s ability to survive a fire in the short term. Short-term solutions were her primary drive. She just had to stay alive long enough for the police to arrive.
She looked over at Beck. He was funneling the tube into the gas tank, not watching for her. She broke into a run, aiming straight for the house.
The grass stopped short of the dwelling, and she dropped to her belly when she reached the edge of her cover. She looked the place over. The last thing she needed was it to be some sort of trap. It looked like what it was—an abandoned house. She wouldn’t know if there was anything wrong with it until she got inside.
She pushed herself up and looked back at Beck. He was still busy siphoning the patrol car’s tank. Staying low, she darted over to the building and kept going until she reached the back porch. She dropped to her butt and leaned against the wall with her shoulder.
It was time to lose the shackles. If he’d shackled her with the cable ties he’d used earlier, she would have needed a knife to get through them, but he’d used the leather cuffs, held together with a steel ring. A strap with a buckle cinched the restraints tight. She worked the band free with her teeth, then bit down on it, pulling it tight to release the prong. With her newly liberated hand, she undid the other.
Getting to her feet, she gingerly massaged her bruised wrists and went to the back entrance. She tried the knob. It was locked. It wouldn’t take much to break one of the door panes but she needed something to deaden the noise. She found an ancient feed sack and put it up to the glass. She’d been taught that the elbow was the strongest bone structure in the body in her defense classes, so she put it to the test. She drove it into the center of the pane. The impact sent a crackle of fire through her arm, all the way to her fingers, but the move worked. The pane fractured into three shards, tumbling into the house. She grabbed the knob and let herself in.
The kitchen smelled stale, the air bottled. It had to be years, if not decades, since someone had opened up this place. A thick layer of dust covered every surface. Her feet were the first in a long while to disturb its abandonment. The stable might have been Beck’s special place, but the house wasn’t.
She went to the living room. It was furnished but had been left to rot. She lifted the receiver of a rotary dial phone. She wasn’t surprised that she didn’t get a dial tone.
“Don’t worry, the cops are coming,” she said to herself.
If this place had been left exactly how it had been years ago, there’d be clothes. She cut back through the kitchen and toward the bedrooms. She opened the first door on her left and her breath caught in her throat.
Unlike the kitchen and the living room, this room was bare—no furniture, no possessions, nothing. There wasn’t even carpeting or hardwood, just bare boards. The room contained only two things—graffiti on the walls, and something she could only describe as a pillory.