“Please, Darbs, just tell me, so I don’t have to hurt you. Because if you don’t, you’re forcing me to slam this door.”
He knelt down close so she could see the pained glimmer in his eyes. She knew this was all staged. Another head of the Hydra. This negotiation was just like any other act she’d witnessed tonight, just another version of Ashley to be worn for a while and then discarded, the way a python crawls out of its wrinkly gray skin.
The entire room fell silent, awaiting her answer.
Inhale. Count to five. Exhale.
“If I tell you,” she whispered back, “you’ll just slam the door anyway.”
His eyes darkened. “Smart girl.”
Then he did.
4:26 a.m.
En route, Highway Patrolman Corporal Ron Hill asked Dispatch twice to clarify the two-zero-seven call, but there was no further info available. No name. No background. Just a vehicle (gray van), a license plate (VBH9045), and a rough location, sent to 9-1-1 via text message. No further contact. No calls. All follow-ups had failed, likely due to spotty cell service and tonight’s record-breaking winter storm.
It sounded like a prank.
The nastiest calls always sound like pranks at first.
His cruiser churned uphill, cylinders firing, sand and gravel chattering noisily against the undercarriage. In theory, CDOT has a particular order to its road maintenance at this altitude — plow, then deice, then sand and salt — but apparently their A-team took Christmas Eve off. The whole effort seemed like an exercise in herding cats, while paying them overtime. Snooping in on their CB frequencies, it reminded him of his old CO’s phrase for when Marines move out of formation, risking exposure to enemy fire: a gagglefuck.
Ron was thirty-six, baby-faced, with a wife who’d studied graphic design but settled for being a wife, and a five-year-old son who wanted to be a cop when he grew up. She hated him for that. He’d been reprimanded twice for sleeping on speed traps, and once for what the after-action report called ‘unnecessary verbal force,’ which Ron still believed to be an oxymoron.
Before tonight’s 7 p.m. shift, he’d found his wife’s suitcase in the closet.
Upright, and half-packed.
Thinking about this, he almost missed the blue sign that came up on his right, crested with snow, glaring in his high beams: REST AREA ONE MILE.
*
“Hey.” Fingers snapped in Darby’s face. “Lost you for a sec.”
Her right hand felt like it’d been submerged in boiling water.
At first, it hadn’t hurt at all — just the whoosh of displaced air and the cannon blast of the door slamming beside her right eardrum — and then the pain arrived a moment later. Deafening, shattering. At once sledgehammer-blunt and needle-sharp. It hurled her out of her body, out of this world. For a black instant she was nowhere, and in another, she was back in her tiny childhood house in Provo, six years old again, racing up the creaking staircase, hurtling into the warm blankets of her mother’s bed, taking refuge from a witching-hour nightmare. I’ve got you, her mother whispered, flicking on the nightstand lamp.
It was just a dream, baby.
You imagined it all.
I’ve got you—
And then the bedroom bled away like paint and Darby was back in this little Colorado rest stop with fluorescent lights and stale coffee, this hellish place she could never escape. She’d slumped into a crouch when she lost consciousness, her back to the door. A sour taste in her throat. She was afraid to look up at her right hand. She knew what had happened. She knew the door was shut, that at least two of her fingers were crushed inside it, pulverized between merciless brass teeth— I’ve got you, Darby— “Earth to Darbs.” Ashley snapped his fingers. “I need you lucid.”
“Ashley,” Sandi hissed. “You’re insane. You’ve lost your mind—”
Darby found the courage to look at her hand, blinking away watery tears. Her ring and pinkie fingers were gone above the hinge, inside the door’s scissor-jaws. Gone. It gave her a nauseous, shivery jolt. Her body just ended there. It couldn’t possibly be her hand, but it was. She couldn’t imagine what her fingers looked like inside the door — skin burst, tissue shredded, bones broken into splinters. Tendons crushed and tangled into red spaghetti noodles. There was somehow less blood than she’d expected; just a long, shiny bead running down the doorframe.
She watched it inch down the chapped wood.
“Ashley,” Sandi barked. “Are you even listening?”
Darby reached for the doorknob with her unhurt left hand, swiping, missing it twice, finally closing her numb fingers around it, to open the closet door and free her mangled hand, to reveal the hideous, heartbreaking damage — but the doorknob didn’t turn. He’d locked it, the bastard.
Ashley strode across the room, pocketing the key, leaving her pinned there. “Alright, Sandi. It’s time I leveled with you.”
“Oh, now it’s time? After all this?”
“Sandi, let me explain—”
“Oh, sure.” She hurled the plastic first-aid box at him, which he swatted away, clattering off the stone counter. “You gave me your word, Ashley. No one was supposed to get hurt through this whole thing—”
He edged closer. “I have a confession to make.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
He spoke slowly, precisely, like a surgeon delivering bad news. “Our meeting here wasn’t about finding a discreet public place for you to hand off your storage key to me. I mean, yes, that was your plan, and maybe I’ll put those steroid shots to use to keep Jaybird alive for as long as they last . . .”
Sandi’s eyes widened with icy terror.
“But, see, I had a plan, too.” He kept approaching. “And, it turns out, your plan was only a part of my plan.”
Sandi took another step back, paralyzed by his wide shoulders, his sheer presence, and the fluorescent lights flickered overhead.
Silence.
“You know . . .” Ashley shrugged. “I really thought you’d try to run by now.”
She tried.
He was too quick.
He grabbed her elbow with that muscular grip Darby knew all too well, and with an aikido spin, hurled Sandi into the floor. A shoe flew off. Her other foot kicked the vending machine as she went down, turning the glass opaque with cracks. Ashley was already on top of her, forcing her to lie face-down, his knee on her back.
Ed struggled forward, but Lars aimed his .45. “Ah, nope, nope.”
Now Ashley grabbed the woman by the scalp, both fists clenched in her black bowl-shaped haircut, and yanked her head backward, against his braced knee. “You called . . . Sandi, now, you may not remember this, but earlier tonight, you said some very nasty things about Lars, about his condition. Because of choices our mother made decades ago, when he was just an embryo. How fair is that? Come on, Sandi. You know I love my baby brother—”
She screamed against his thick grip.
“Take it back, Sandi.” He twisted her neck harder. “Take back what you said.”
She cried out, all vowels.
“Try again. I can’t hear you—”
She gasped: “I . . . I take it back—”