Chương 14
I carried her up the muddy embankment to the F-250, kicked the passenger door open with my boot, and laid her gently across the wide bench seat. I pulled an old wool wool-blend military blanket from the rear floorboards, wrapped it tight around her trembling shoulders, and locked the door from the outside.
I walked back to the edge of the ditch.
The older transport worker was standing twenty feet away in the darkness, clutching his sprained wrist, his phone held up to his ear. The blue screen illuminated his pale, terrified face.
"He’s on the line!" the worker shouted, his voice trembling as he pointed the phone toward me like a shield. "Mr. Lusk is on the line right now! He knows you took her! He knows what you did!"
I took three long strides through the weeds, reached out, and snatched the phone cleanly from his hand.
I brought it to my ear.
"Boyd," I said.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. The background noise wasn't the gym, and it wasn't the quiet harbor of Morehead City. It was the low, rhythmic hum of an idling high-end engine and the faint click of a police radio scanner running in the background.
"You really shouldn't have done that, Sloane," Boyd said. His voice was completely smooth now, stripped of the manic screaming he had done at the combat club. It had the cold, heavy weight of a man who had already moved past anger into execution.
"I have my daughter," I told him. "And you have an empty van in a swamp."
"I don't need the van, Sloane," Boyd whispered, a terrible, quiet amusement creeping into his tone. "The magistrate's order is already filed with the state registry. As of ten minutes ago, Lainey is officially an escaped patient under emergency psychiatric detention. And you? You're a fugitive who just committed armed kidnapping and vehicular assault on state contractors."
My jaw tightened.
"You think your little shop is going to keep you safe?" Boyd continued, his voice dropping into a razor-thin murmur. "Look behind you, Sloane. Look toward the coast."
I turned my head to the east.
Ten miles away, across the black canopy of the Croatan forest, the night sky above the Morehead City marshlands was no longer dark.
A bright, sickly orange glow was blooming on the horizon, illuminating the low-hanging coastal clouds with the flickering, unmistakable silhouette of a massive structural fire.
"Birch and cedar burn real fast, don't they?" Boyd said softly into my ear. "Hope you kept your insurance paid up, Sergeant."
The line went dead.
Chapter 5: Ash and Iron
The fire on the horizon burned with a distant, hungry brightness, staining the belly of the coastal clouds the color of rusted iron.
My shop. Thirty years of hand-selected black walnut, white oak, and aged cherry. My grandfather’s cast-iron jointers. The heavy maple workbenches my husband had bolted to the concrete slab before our daughter could walk. The framed photograph of Mark in his dress blues, taken three weeks before a dirt road in the Al-Anbar province erased him from the earth.
All of it was fuel now.
I looked down at the transport tech's phone in my hand. Boyd had hung up, leaving only the dead static of an open connection. I dropped the phone into the mud, lifted my right heel, and drove my boot down through the glass and plastic, grinding the circuit board into the black peat.
Tears wouldn't rebuild the shop. Grief wouldn't clear Lainey's name. In the Corps, when your forward operating base is compromised, you don't mourn the tents; you shift to alternate rallying points and re-engage from the flank.
I walked back to the F-250, climbed into the cab, and pulled the door shut.
May you like
Lainey groaned on the passenger seat, the sound muffled by the coarse wool of the military blanket. The midazolam was still pulling at her nervous system, but the cold night air rushing through the open window was beginning to scrape away the chemical fog. She shifted, her knees pulling tight to her chest, her uninjured eye fluttering open against the dashboard lights.
"Mom?" she rasped. Her throat sounded raw, scorched by shallow breathing. "The van... somebody was screaming."
