“Now, Darbs,” Ashley said, “I’m going to count down from five. You’re going to tell me where you hid my keychain, or I’ll kill Ed.”
She shook her head, thrashing left to right, helpless denial. Up on the wall, the Garfield clock now read 5:30 (4:30) a.m.
It’s been thirty-two minutes. The police are late— Ashley raised his voice. “Five.”
“No. I . . . I can’t—”
“Four.”
“Please, Ashley—”
“Three. Come on, Darbs.” He punched the nail gun’s muzzle against Ed’s forehead in cruel, bruising impacts: “Look. At. Him.”
Ed now stared across the room at her through watering eyes. Poor old Edward Schaeffer, the ex-veterinarian with an estranged family waiting for him in Aurora, Colorado. A human cover story; Sandi’s unwitting collateral damage. He was moving his lips again, muffled by clammy red gauze, trying to form words with a tongue impaled to the roof of his mouth. She could feel his eyes on her, begging her to tell Ashley what he wanted to know. To just please tell him— “If I tell Ashley,” Darby whispered to Ed, “they’ll kill us both—”
This was true, but she wished she could tell him another, greater truth, to reassure him: The police are almost here. They’re a few minutes late. Any second now, they’re going to kick down that door and shoot Ashley and Lars— “Two.”
“I . . . I can’t say it.” She looked at Ed, realizing what this meant, and a racking sob rattled through her lips. “I’m . . . oh God, I’m so sorry—”
Ed nodded slowly, knowingly, dripping globs of stringy blood into his lap. Like he somehow, impossibly, understood.
She wanted to scream it to him: Any second, now, Ed. The cops are coming to save us. Please, God, let them get here in time— The patience drained from Ashley’s voice. “One.”
*
“Ten-twenty-three. Approaching the structure on foot.”
Corporal Ron Hill clasped his shoulder radio and tripped on a snow bank, catching himself on a gloved palm. The ice was rock-hard here, like sculpted cement. He was just a few paces from the Wanapa visitor center.
He reached the front door, stepping under the saucer-shaped lamp. Again, no further information from Dispatch beyond the initial two-zero-seven text message, which was frustrating.
He rapped the door with his Maglite. “Highway Patrol.”
He waited for an answer.
Then, a little huskier: “Police. Anyone here?”
It was still technically just a public building, but his right hand moved to the heel of his Glock 17 as he gripped the doorknob and sidestepped into the crunchy snow, using the brick wall as cover.
In entry drills, doorways are called fatal funnels because they’re the defender’s natural focal point. No way around it, unless you blow down a wall — you’re literally walking into the bad guy’s sights. If there really were a two-zero-seven hunkered inside this rest stop, he’d be watching the door right now down the barrel of a shotgun, perhaps crouched behind his hostages for cover.
Or, just an empty, harmless room. Not that Dispatch knew.
A sharp wind tugged his Gore-Tex jacket, peppering dry snowflakes against the door, and now Corporal Hill wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. For Sara to finish packing her goddamn suitcase? To hell with it.
He twisted the doorknob.
The door creaked open.
*
“Zero,” Ashley said.
But Darby wasn’t listening, because she’d just realized something. She stared past Ashley now, at the Colorado map on the wall behind Ed — and her heart sank with a heavy, cloying dread. State Route Seven was a thick blue line on the map, slithering through mountain topography, and the rest areas were marked as red circles. Wanapa, Wanapani, Colchuck, Nisqual.
This one was Wanapani. Big Devil.
Not Wanapa.
But she’d typed her text message to 9-1-1 earlier in the night, around 9 p.m., before she’d learned this. Back before she’d returned inside, reexamined the map, and realized her error — that she’d transposed two similar-looking, similar-sounding Native American names, both concerning devils.
My text sent to the cops to the wrong rest area.
To a completely different one, twenty miles down Backbone Pass. On the other side of that jackknifed eighteen-wheeler. The police weren’t coming after all. They were still miles away, unreachable, misdirected. No one was coming to arrest Ashley and Lars. No one was coming to save them.
She wanted to scream.
She sagged against the locked door, feeling her fingers twist inside the doorframe. Another jolt of meat-grinder pain. She felt weightless, like dropping into free-fall, plunging to some unknown depth. She wished for it to all be over.
No one is coming to save us.
We’re all alone.
I got us all killed— Ashley sighed petulantly, like a frustrated child, and now he jammed the nail gun against Ed’s temple and squeezed the trigger— “Stop,” Darby gasped. “Stop. I’ll tell you where your keys are, if you . . . if you promise you won’t kill him.”
“I promise,” Ashley said.
It was a lie, she knew. Of course it was a lie. Ashley Garver was a sociopath. Words and promises were meaningless to him; you might as well attempt to negotiate with a virus. But she fell apart and told him anyway, the entire room falling silent, her voice a fractured whisper: “In the snow . . . outside the restroom window. That’s where I threw them.”
Ashley nodded. He glanced at Lars, then Jay. Then back at her, his lips curling into a boyish grin. “Thank you, Darbs. I knew you’d come through,” he said, raising the nail gun to Ed’s forehead anyway.
THWUMP.
4:55 a.m.
“Don’t kill her until I’m back with the keys,” Ashley instructed his brother. “I need to be sure she’s telling the truth.”
Rodent Face nodded as he dumped gasoline over Ed and Sandi’s bodies, drenching them, darkening their clothes, slicking their hair, swirling ribbons into the blood on the floor. Acrid fumes curdling the air. Then he poured a glugging trail toward Darby, mouth-breathing as he approached her, raising the fuel jug high with both hands.
She closed her eyes, bracing for it.
An icy gallon crashed down on her, pounding the back of her neck, splashing off her shoulders, plastering her hair to her face. Droplets spattered off the door behind her and pooled at her knees, shockingly cold. Gasoline in her eyes, her mouth, a pungent taste. She spat on the floor.
Lars backed up into the center of the room, holding Jay’s shoulder. He set down the fuel can and it sloshed, still half-full. Right beside a roll of shop towels and that familiar white Clorox jug. It all made sense now.
Bleach to break down their DNA evidence. Towels for their fingerprints. Fire for everything else.
Something white dangled from Lars’s back pocket as he leaned to wipe the countertop. She recognized it — the rock-in-a-sock Ashley had thrown into the parking lot hours ago, now obediently retrieved by Lars. The brothers were in cleanup mode now, performing the grim work of erasing any forensic clues that might pin them to the massacre here.
That’s why the keys are so important, Darby realized numbly. That’s why Ashley can’t leave them behind here.