“We’re not going to lose her.”
The red light of the van’s taillights comes on a second before his headlights do, and then he’s moving backward, careful on the ice though he’s got winter tires to combat the skids.
I take the tablet from Mike. Come on, come on, you assholes . . .
“Mike,” I say. The van makes its way through the parking lot to the exit. Taillights flash again, red as a demon’s eyes, and it makes a right turn. “Mike!”
“Trust me,” he says. “We’re not going to lose him. But there isn’t a lot of traffic out there to cover us. We need a lag.”
“We need to keep her in sight! Go! ”
He fires up the engine and puts the big vehicle in gear, and we glide out, too slowly. I want to jam the accelerator. The parking lot is bathed in chilly white light that reflects off the ice. He turns right and corrects a slight slide with ease.
Mike nods at the shape of the white van ahead. It’s taking a left turn under the freeway. In that lane he’ll be making a U-turn and taking the access road the other direction.
Mike takes his phone off the dashboard and hands it to me. “Watch the screen,” he says. “Make sure we don’t lose the signal.”
I’d been the one to put the tracking device under the van, once the man in the mask had disappeared inside Gwen’s motel room; I’d barely made it back to the Jeep when her attacker came out again, carrying her. But having her go untracked wasn’t an option, no way in hell. And, thank God, the marker on the screen shows a steady green. The van’s emerging from the other side of the freeway underpass, turning left again. Heading north on the map.
I give directions to Mike in a low voice, all my concentration on that light. The light represents safety. As long as we can see it, she’s okay, and I can hold on to that.
We take the first left turn. The sudden grit and bite of clean asphalt under the freeway is a shock after the smooth glide of ice, but it only lasts a few seconds, and then we’re turning left again, and Mike has to control another skid.
The green signal flickers.
I look up from the screen. I can’t see the van, but there’s a slight rise ahead. It must be on the downhill curve. We have to slow down, because there’s a spun-out sedan blocking the right lane of the access road, with a frustrated-looking woman in the front seat trying to get traction with tires that are too bald to grip. In other circumstances I’d feel sorry for her, but right now all I feel is fury that she’s in the way. I see her stark, terrified face as we glide past her. Mike’s an expertly trained driver, but I’m praying we don’t end up blocked by something bigger.
The signal blinks again. It’s still ahead, though. “What the range of this thing?” I ask Mike.
“Couple of miles,” he says. “Why?”
“It’s flickering,” I tell him.
Mike doesn’t say anything. No reassurance. When I look over at him, his face reminds me of those times back in the service, when he pretended everything was all right so convincingly that even I believed it.
We crest the slick hill, and I look for the van ahead.
It’s not there. But there’s another hill. It seems to be staying just ahead of us, just out of sight. Still on the map.
“Goddamn it, speed up,” I tell him. My heart is pounding, my palms sweating. Lot of adrenaline, and no good way to burn it off. All I can think about is her in that van, mixed with flashes of the pictures from Melvin Royal’s crime scenes.
“We’re okay,” he says. “Calm down. You’re not going to help her by freaking out.”
I want to see that van. I want to know where she is. I need to see it.
The glide downhill feels like a controlled skid; I can feel the back tires trying to pull free. The sleet’s stopped. Thick clouds capture the city’s orange-tinted lights and reflect them back to form an unreal, science-fiction sky.
Everything feels wrong, and dangerous, and . . . Where the hell is that van?
The signal flickers again, and as we make our way up the next hill, a steeper one, it looks on the map as if the van’s stopped about half a mile ahead, because we’re gaining on it. I don’t tell Mike. He won’t go any faster in these conditions anyway.
I see the truck coming off the freeway just before it loses its shit. The driver’s going too fast, and when he skids, he panics and wrenches the wheel; the pickup—too light, too unbalanced for these conditions—spins violently, hits a guardrail, tips, and spins midair over the barrier. It lands with a violent crash on its roof and slides right at us. Mike shouts a curse and tries to get us past. He nearly does.
The truck clips the rear bumper of the Jeep, and we lose traction, and I grab for handholds as our vehicle spins out of control, picking up speed as it slides. Mike manages to ease it sideways, then straight again, and we both look back at the pickup behind us. The roof’s half-crushed, and there’s no movement inside. The driver’s hurt in there. Maybe dead.
“Don’t stop,” I tell him. I hate saying it, but there’s no choice. “Can’t help him, Mike.”
“Fuck,” Mike says. “Where’s the van?”
I look at the phone. “Stopped,” I say. “Half a mile ahead.” We’ve lost a minute already, but at least the van’s not moving. They must have pulled off the road.
“Fuck!” He grabs the phone from me and makes a call, reporting the accident and adding his badge number and contact information in clipped, crisp words that are fired like bullets. It takes a full minute we don’t have, and I’m fighting a desperate need to pull that phone out of his hand. He disconnects and tosses me the phone as he eases forward again. Our Jeep took no damage, it seems. Or not enough to stop us.
I flip the display back on again to the map.
There’s no blip.
It’s just intermittent, I tell myself. Wait. I do. I stare at the screen for a second. Five seconds. Ten. I feel the sick, hot weight condensing in the pit of my stomach. Sweat on my forehead. No. God, no.
There’s no signal.
She’s gone. She’s gone.
“Mike,” I say. I think he can hear the desperation in it.
“I’m going as fast as I can,” he says. He is. The hill is steep, and slick as glass, and if he gooses it at all, we’ll break traction and slide back.
“The signal’s failed,” I say. I feel sick. Empty. “Get us there. Now.”
“They’re right up ahead,” he tells me. “Hang on. We’re going to see them as soon as we come up to the top. Just hang on.”
I keep watching the screen, praying for a blip, a flicker, anything. This can’t happen. It can’t. They can’t just make a whole van disappear.
They can if they found the tracker and crushed it.
We crest the hill. We can see for miles ahead. There are four vehicles in view, inching their way along. A red sedan. A police SUV, lights flaring as it makes a slow-motion progress. A black Jeep older than the one we’re in, cruising at an unsafe speed. An eighteen-wheeler, sticking to access roads and slow, steady miles.