As they neared the Explorer, his eyes picked out the police cruiser. It sat dark and steaming a hundred yards farther back, its windows shattered and its radio squawking. A woman’s voice, clear and urgent. The word respond kept coming through the hiss.
They covered the last stretch at a run. The man with the Beretta gripped Dryden’s arm tighter; the second opened the Explorer’s back door on the passenger side. Together they shoved him through, headfirst, onto the floor behind the front seats. For maybe two seconds, one of them stood staring down on him, studying the vehicle’s interior in the dome-light glow. There were scraps of construction materials everywhere in back: lengths of two-by-four lumber, spools of sheathed electrical cable, PVC piping.
“Who is this guy?”
“Who gives a shit? Come on.”
They slammed the door and climbed into the front seats. In the seconds it took them to do that, Dryden positioned himself so that his hands, bound behind him, were pointed back into the space beneath the middle bench seat. He could feel the bottom of the seat’s cushion pressing against his side, the whole length of his torso. Which meant his hands would be blocked from the passenger’s view—and free to grope for anything he might reach beneath the seat.
A second later the vehicle roared to life. Dryden expected it to veer only slightly as it made for the road; it had been parked already facing south.
Instead it took a hard turn, a hundred eighty degrees, the movement sliding his body roughly on the matted carpet. Then the vehicle straightened out and accelerated.
They were going north on 395, not south.
Opposite the direction of the men who’d taken Claire.
CHAPTER NINE
“You see flashers ahead, get off the road,” the man in the passenger seat said. “Kill the lights and get out into the scrub—slow, no dust trail.”
“I know.”
Tension in their voices. From his viewpoint down behind the driver’s seat, Dryden could see the passenger looking forward and backward every few seconds, watching for distant police units, but also watching Dryden, his eyes dropping to take stock of him on every pass from front to back.
Dryden still had his bound wrists under the bench seat behind him. He kept his shoulders dead still, except for the rhythmic movement of his breathing, which he exaggerated. The best things to project now were fear and defeat. He let his head sag to the carpet and clenched his teeth. He blinked rapidly. He made his breath hiss in and out, just perceptibly shuddering. I’m cowed. I’m not going to be any trouble. Go ahead and relax.
Some of this stuff was pretty basic—psy-ops 101. The man in the passenger seat seemed to eat it up. The evidence was subtle, but it was there. Longer glances out the front and back windows, shorter glances down at Dryden. On some passes he didn’t look down at all. The guy was relaxing.
Maybe thirty seconds had gone by since they’d left the scene—maybe ninety since the Jeep with Claire in it had departed. Two vehicles doing 60 or 70 in opposite directions. The math got uglier by the second.
Dryden kept his shoulders moving steadily with his breathing. Kept his head sagging. And moved his wrists.
His hands could feel plenty of things beneath the bench seat. A slip of paper that was probably a Home Depot receipt. One end of a short length of two-by-four lying sideways under the seat. A six-inch scrap of wire sheathing he’d stripped from a cable, last week when he rewired the cottage.
And the trailing edge of a plastic bag. Again, from Home Depot.
Not an empty bag. What was in it? He thought he could remember stowing it here, a few weeks back, before the wiring and before the plumbing, too. Back when he’d still been doing framing work, putting in the new closet in the master bedroom.
He got his fingertips around the plastic and pulled it closer, the crinkling sound lost under the roar of the engine and the drone of the tires.
Something heavy in the bag. He knew what it was—a tight stack of one particular item he’d bought in bulk: framing brackets. Little L-shaped pieces of galvanized steel, stamped out and press-bent and sold with the factory grease and metal shavings still clinging to them. They were practical and unfancy and cheap. And sharp, at least to a degree. Dryden could think of a dozen things that would have been better to find under the seat—a drywall knife would have been nice. But the brackets might do.
He worked the stack out of the bag. Contorted his wrists, gripping the stack, feeling for how best to position the thing to slide it against the zip-tie.
There was no good angle. No way to work the stack against the plastic band without also cutting the hell out of his skin.
So be it.
*
“I think this thing’s on,” the passenger said.
Two minutes now, since they’d left the scene. Three since Claire had been taken south.
Dryden could feel blood slicking his wrists. He thought he could feel the zip-tie beginning to give, too. He hoped.
“Don’t open it,” the driver said.