Why couldn’t I have just called the cops in the morning?
She tried to focus on her own survival, on solving problem one (the light) and problem two (the terrain), but she couldn’t.
She wished she could rewind this horrible night and undo her decisions. All of them. Every last choice she’d made, ever since she first peered through that frosty window and saw Jay’s hand grasping that kennel bar. She wished she’d been content to simply play detective and gather information. She could have waited quietly until the morning, held her advantage, and maybe after the snowplows arrived and the rest-stop-refugees went their separate ways, she could have discreetly tailed Ashley and Lars’s van in her Honda. A quarter-mile back, one hand on the steering wheel, her iPhone in the other, feeding the Colorado State Police detailed information to stage their arrest. She still could have saved Jay.
(And Mom would still have pancreatic cancer) But no. Instead, Darby Elizabeth Thorne, a college sophomore with zero law enforcement or military training, tried to take matters into her own hands. And now here she was, walking through the woods with a .45 aimed at her back, searching for a dead child.
To her right, a morbid laugh. “Gotta say, Darbs, as far as Good Samaritans go, you’re just batting a thousand. First you confide in one of the abductors, and then you get the abductee killed. Nice work.”
Everything was a joke to Ashley Garver. Even this, somehow.
Christ, she loathed him.
But now she wondered — had he been telling her the truth after all? Maybe it really was a textbook ransom plot, just like he’d described to her, and post-payment, the brothers really had intended to return Jay to her family alive. She imagined them jettisoning her at some sun-bleached bus stop in flyover country. Little Jaybird blinking in the Kansas sun after two weeks of darkness, rushing to the nearest stranger on a bench, begging them to call her parents— Until Darby intervened, that is. And handed the little girl a Swiss Army knife so she could escape into a hostile climate she was utterly unprepared for. And another venomous thought slipped into her mind — she felt guilty for even thinking it, given what had already happened — but it burrowed in like a splinter and wouldn’t leave.
They’re going to kill me now.
Darby was certain of this.
Now that Jay is lost, now that they don’t need my voice. And now that— *
Now that they were beyond earshot of the rest area, Lars had been waiting for permission to shoot Darby in the back of the head, and Ashley had finally given it to him. The phrase “batting a thousand” was the tipoff.
It meant kill.
It was called Spy Code. Since they’d been kids, Ashley had buried dozens of secret messages within everyday dialogue. “Lucky me” means stay. “Lucky you” means go. “Extra cheese” means run like hell. “Ace of spades” means pretend we’re strangers. Failure to obey one meant an instant yellow card, and Lars’s fingers were pocked with the pale scars of past errors. Tonight had already featured one frighteningly close call — he’d nearly missed “Ace of spades” back at the rest area.
But he’d known this one was coming.
The pistol was ice-cold in his hands. His skin stuck to the metal. It was a Beretta Cougar, a stout, stubby firearm that bulged under his coat and never felt quite right in his hands. Like gripping a big jellybean. The Cougar was usually chambered in 9-millimeter, but this particular model was the 8405, so it fired the fatter .45 ACP (Automatic Colt Pistol) cartridge. More stopping power, but punchier recoil and fewer rounds stored in the clip (the magazine, Ashley insisted). Eight shots, single-stacked.
Lars liked it well enough. But he’d secretly wished for the Beretta 92FS instead, like the iconic pistol that the hard-boiled detective Max Payne dual-wields in his series of Xbox games. He would never admit this to Ashley, of course. The gun had been a gift. You never, ever question Ashley’s gifts, or his punishments. That’s just how big brothers are — one day he’d brought Lars a stray cat from the shelter. A peppy little torby (a mix between a tortoiseshell and a tabby) with a loud purr. Lars had named her Stripes. Then, the next day, Ashley drenched Stripes in gasoline and hurled her into a campfire.
Like any big brother, I giveth, and I taketh away.
Lars raised the Beretta Cougar now.
As they walked, he aimed at the back of Darby’s head (aim small, miss small). The painted night-sights aligned; two neon-green dots traced a vertical line up her backbone. She was still a few paces ahead of them, sweeping Ashley’s flashlight through the trees, her body silhouetted perfectly by her own light. She had no idea.
He squeezed the trigger.
To his right, Ashley plugged his ear, bracing for the gunshot. And Darby kept trudging through the knee-deep snow, aiming the flashlight ahead, unaware that she was inhabiting the last few seconds of her life, unaware that Lars’s index finger was tightening around the Beretta’s trigger, applying smooth pressure, a half-ounce from drilling a .45-caliber hollow-point right through her— She clicked the flashlight off.
Blackness.
*
Darby heard their startled voices behind her: “I can’t see—”
“What happened?”
“She turned off the flashlight—”
“Shoot her, Lars—”
She ran like hell. Staggering through deep snow. Hard gasps stinging her throat. She’d night-blinded them both. Not by flashing them with the LED beam, which their pupils had already adjusted to — but by taking it away. She’d been shielding her own eyes to preserve her night vision. This was her solution to problem one. As for problem two— Ashley’s voice behind her, calm but urgent: “Give me the gun.”
“Can you see her?”
“Give me the gun, baby brother—”
Even downhill, it was like running in waist-deep water. Lurching over snowdrifts, dodging trees, stumbling, banging a knee against icy rock, recovering, her heartbeat thudding in her ears, no time to stop, don’t stop— Ashley’s voice raised: “I see her.”
“How can you see her?”
He kept an eye shut, she realized with racing panic. Just like I taught him— He shouted after her: “Thanks for the trick, Darbs—”
He was aiming at her right now, taking a marksman’s stance. She felt the pistol’s painted sights tingling on her back like a laser. Inescapable. No chance to outrun him. Just dwindling microseconds, now, as Ashley squeezed the trigger and Darby executed her desperate solution to problem two— What’s faster than running?
Falling.
She hurled herself downhill.
The world inverted. She saw a whirl of black sky and frozen branches, plunging in a half-second of free-fall, and then a wall of shorn granite rushed up to meet her. Thunderous impact. Stars pierced her vision. She lost the flashlight. She rolled on knees and elbows, kicking up flecks of snow in a bruising tumble— “Where is she?”