Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(81)

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.

I can’t see a van. Any van. In these conditions, they couldn’t get that far ahead of us. They can’t disappear.

I feel sick now, and I’m sweating. The flashing lights of the police car paint everything in lurid splashes.

“Could be just ahead of the truck,” Mike says. His control isn’t as perfect now, and I can hear the worry. “Son of a bitch, where is he?”

“Just go,” I tell him. “Push it.” I sound desperate. I am.

We take off, moving faster now. We match the black Jeep’s progress, which takes us past both the sedan and the cops; the latter give us cold looks, but I don’t give a shit if we get stopped now. I put Gwen at risk. I stood by and watched her get abducted. I will fight anybody, badge or no badge, who gets in my way right now because we have to find her.

There’s no van in front of the tractor trailer.

There’s no van anywhere.

There’s no signal.

There’s no Gwen.

We’ve lost her, and I can feel panic closing in, cold as sleet.

“Go back,” I tell him. I hear the edge in my voice. “They must have pulled off. Maybe they took a side road. Changed vehicles.”

“Sam—”

“Just do it!” I feel like cut meat inside. I remember the rubber Melvin mask and taste bile. I manage to swallow it back. “We have to find her!”

We do. We turn back on the slick road, find a way back. We check every side road, every lay-by, every building.

The van is gone. I feel his hand roughly pat my shoulder, but I don’t want comfort. I want this not to happen because if I’d done this, if I’ve killed her . . .

The tablet I’ve almost forgotten lights up. A message has come in. I grab for it, and Mike puts the Jeep in park in the empty lot of a closed restaurant as I thumb the device on.

The text is from Absalom. It says, You cheated. You think we wouldn’t know? But we keep our word.

A link comes in the next message. I click it.

A map opens. It zooms in, and with shaking fingers, I pinch in to get an overview. What am I looking at?

It’s a map of Kansas. There’s a pin in the map, in a rural area outside of Wichita.

I look up at Mike. His face is blank. I wonder if he feels the same deep, scorching guilt, or if this is just a goddamn maneuver to him. A gambit that didn’t pay off.

I switch back to the message window. Where is she? I can’t scream it at them in a text, and the letters look stark and desperate. Fuck you, you assholes, what’s in Wichita? It makes an awful kind of sense that Melvin would go back to his old hunting ground. And that he’d take Gwen there.

There’s no response for a long moment, and I want to break this thing, destroy it into pieces too small to find, because there’s no one else to punish. No one but myself.

The reply suddenly pops back. Forget the bitch. She’s not your problem anymore.