She’d heard the wisdom that you should never allow yourself to be taken to a second location. That you should challenge an attacker to the death if he wanted to move you. But what did they say about behaving when your precious child was being taken too? She had to stay alive long enough to save him, so she kept her eyes focused on her son’s moving, breathing body.
How could she get him out of this? How could she keep him alive? “Please just leave him here,” she begged.
He answered with a huff of hard laughter. “Where’s my fucking wife?”
“I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t know! Yes, I admit to helping her. You were right. I was working with Zoey, and I took Amber in, and I hid her here, but we’re not supposed to exchange information. That’s one of the rules.”
“Where did you take her?”
“I just . . . I just drove her to the Quik Trip. Over in Highbank. I drove her there.”
“Why?”
Lily didn’t care about Amber anymore. She’d sacrifice anyone to save her son. “She caught the bus. She stayed for a night, and then I drove her to Highbank to catch the eleven forty-three bus.”
“Ah, that’s more like it,” Mendelson drawled. “Now we’re getting facts.”
Everett slowed when he neared the back gate, where an old black Suburban was parked on the other side.
She looked hopefully up at the camera, but it was dark, of course. No power. Detective Mendelson had obviously parked here in the middle of the night and spent plenty of time preparing for this attack.
He’d planned so well. If anyone saw anything suspicious, he would’ve heard it on the radio and vanished. How was she supposed to stay ahead of that kind of thinking when he’d likely been masterminding this for days?
“It’s unlocked,” he said to Everett. “Open it.”
Everett shoved until the gate slid open on its metal wheels, and when he slipped through, she had the brief hope that he might bolt, but that hope struck her at the same time with the blinding fear that he would. This bastard might shoot her son if he tried to run again. Her skin crawled with the waves of anger pouring off him.
But Everett didn’t run. He’d come back for her, and he meant to stay to protect her. He looked pale and scared, head bowed to frown at the ground beneath him. He was such a good boy. She’d been so stupid to be worried when he was an amazing, loving son. Why had she wasted time obsessing over stupid things?
She was so full of regret now. She was nothing but regret. She just wanted this over and Everett safe, and it didn’t matter what happened to her. She tried to make her brain cough up an idea, any idea for how to save him. But suddenly they were through the gate, and he was leading them toward the SUV.
“She got on the bus to head south,” Lily choked out. “Maybe . . .” She swallowed hard against her dry fear. “Maybe she has family in Texas? Oklahoma? You can track them down.”
“She does not. Get in.” He pushed her toward the front seat. “Son, you get in back.”
She nearly gagged at the sound of him calling her child son. He yanked open the back door and pointed Everett toward it.
“But I told you everything!” she yelled.
“Funny, for the past hour you’ve been claiming you’d already told me everything, and now here’s a very important fucking detail you left out. Now the only thing I can trust is that you’re a lying, conniving bitch who needs quite a bit of persuasion to find the spirit of God in your heart.” He wrapped his fingers in her hair and jerked her head around to face him. “Isn’t that right?”
She couldn’t help her whimper. He was snarling and red-faced, and her scalp felt as if he were ripping it off her skull. Lily drew in a breath, opened her mouth, and lunged for his nose.
Her teeth caught on him. She clamped her jaw down hard. He’d turned away at the last minute, but she had his cheek, and if she could just stay on him, Everett could run. Run to the business park. Run to Nour or Sharon or the plumbers she called neighbors, and he’d be free.
She felt Mendelson’s hand cup the side of her head. She felt glass crack against her skull. And then the world blazed into shooting stars that trailed white tails until they faded into a deep, dark black. And she was gone again.
CHAPTER 34
He knew he shouldn’t be crying. He knew he didn’t have time to cry, but Everett had discovered that the scariest thing in the world wasn’t a crazy man with a gun; it was watching his own mother be hurt. His strong mom, his one parent in the world. Watching her cry out in pain, watching her wince at a rough hand, and now watching her slump limp against the door after that sharp crack of glass against her head . . . it was way more than he could handle.
The cop grabbed a fistful of tissues and pressed them tight against his bleeding cheek before gunning the vehicle into reverse. When he swung onto the road, Everett’s whole body slid over to the door, and he tried his best to brace himself against it, raising his feet up to push against the back of the driver’s seat.
He pressed his forehead to the window and swept his eyes over the back of Nour’s workshop, hoping she might be there, but everything was shut up tight. The detective cursed and grabbed for more tissues.
Just as Everett felt his control slipping, just as he thought he might start screaming in helpless terror, he saw someone at the front of the shop. Right outside the door, Sharon was there, her back to the road, her hand at the lock, and Everett willed her to turn around, turn around, turn—
She did. She turned, frowning at the sound of a vehicle where it shouldn’t be, because she always knew where things shouldn’t be, and Everett sat up straight, opened his eyes wide, and mouthed, Help, as clearly as he could. Then he mouthed it several more times, bouncing up and down just a bit, trying to meet her gaze as they sped too quickly past.
He looked back as long as he could, pressing his temple to the window to keep the shop in sight for a moment longer. Then he faced forward and scooted more toward the middle to stare down the road toward the highway.
Were the police on their way? If there wasn’t radio chatter, was it because they weren’t coming or because they’d taken seriously his warning that their attacker was a cop? They wouldn’t broadcast that all over a cop radio, would they?
But they might have just considered the call a prank from a stupid kid. He thought the whole police force would have been racing down the road by now. Then again that could be something that happened only in TV shows, and maybe everything moved more slowly if they didn’t use the radio.
If it was possible to stare hard enough to make the entire police department appear, Everett gave it his best. Unfortunately they made it all the way to the highway undisturbed, only one other car passed, and then, instead of turning right toward town, they turned left.
As they turned, Everett glanced back down the road, and he saw a gray car pull out of Josephine’s neighborhood, right where he caught the bus. A man was behind the wheel, face shadowed by a ball cap. Then the cop sped onto the freeway, and Everett couldn’t see well behind them no matter how much he twisted.
This evil cop could be taking them anywhere. To another town, to a city, or just to a field where this monster could shoot them and bury them in plowed dirt so that wheat would grow from their bodies.
He hiccuped a little at the thought, but then his mom groaned, and he was so thankful she wasn’t dead that he began to cry in earnest, tears falling freely down his cheeks because he couldn’t reach them. She rolled her head back and forth for a second, but that was her only movement even after he watched her for long minutes.
Everett decided his only strength at this point was observation, so he blinked the grief from his eyes and read each sign that came up, each mile marker. They hadn’t driven far when they got off the highway and turned left again.
“Where are we going?” he forced himself to ask, but he got no answer except a raspy sigh from his mom, who seemed to be struggling to sit up again.