Chương 15
"Go back to sleep, baby," I said, putting the heavy floor shifter into four-wheel drive. "We’re out of the ditch."
"Where... where are we going?"
"Nowhere Boyd Lusk expects us to be."
I cut the headlights, leaving only the amber running lights to illuminate the white center line, and pulled the F-250 off the shoulder. Instead of staying on Highway 70 where the North Carolina Highway Patrol would soon be setting up rolling blockades, I took the first unpaved forestry access cut—a narrow ribbon of crushed coquina rock and mud known as Catfish Lake Road.
The heavy tires ground into the wet shell with a low, spitting growl. Within fifty yards, the black wall of the Croatan forest swallowed the truck whole. The trees here grew thick and suffocating—stunted pond pines, tangled bayberry, and cypress knees rising out of dark, tea-colored canal water. Out here, there were no cell towers, no streetlights, and no cameras. There were only logging trails cut fifty years ago by the paper companies, half of them washed out by hurricanes and marked only on topographical military maps.
I drove six miles into the interior, keeping the speed at a steady twenty miles an hour to minimize engine noise, before pulling the truck behind the berm of an abandoned borrow pit. The vehicle was completely concealed by a thick screen of wax myrtles and loblolly saplings.
I shut off the engine. The silence that rushed in was absolute, broken only by the tick of cooling exhaust manifolds and the distant, rhythmic chirping of swamp treefrogs.
I pulled my personal phone from my jacket pocket, turned it on, and waited for the single bar of roaming service to register.
There was a text waiting from an unfamiliar number.
*Shop is gone. Two engines on scene, but the hydrants had no pressure. Total loss. Boyd is at the marina office in Morehead with three men from out of county. Harlan is trying to stall the state warrant, but Magistrate Garris signed the kidnapping charge twenty minutes ago. Call me on this line. - Vance.*
I dialed the number. Marcus Vance picked up on the second ring.
"Where are you?" he asked without preamble. His voice was muffled, competing with the sound of rain beginning to tap against a tin roof.
"Deep in the timber," I said. "Where are you?"
"The old boatwright shed behind the fish house on Harkers Island," Vance replied. "Your sister Claire is here. I went to the hospital and pulled her out before Boyd’s boys thought to check the pediatric ward. She has her nursing kit and a duffel bag full of records."
A knot in my chest loosened by a fraction of an inch. "Claire is safe?"
"She’s sitting three feet from me, holding a cup of cold chicory coffee and shaking like a wet setter," Vance said. "Sloane, you broke Colt’s jaw in two places. His zygomatic arch is crushed. They flew him by helicopter to Vidant Medical Center in Greenville half an hour ago. He’s going to be drinking his meals through a plastic straw for the next six months."
"He's lucky he's drinking them at all," I said coldly.
"Boyd isn't thinking about luck," Vance warned. "He thinks he's fighting a war now. He’s telling everyone who will listen that you went combat-fatigue crazy, stole a state ambulance, and ran into the swamp with your sick kid. He’s got the local news running your service photo from twenty years ago. The state troopers have the bridges locked down from Emerald Isle all the way up to Cedar Island."
"Boyd burned my life down to the slab, Marcus," I said, looking out into the pitch-black woods.
"I know," Vance said, his voice dropping into a heavy, gravelly sorrow. "I saw the smoke from the highway. I’m sorry, Sloane. If I had known that bastard was going that far—"
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"Stop," I cut him off. "Regret is dead weight. Tell me why Boyd is burning the world down to keep Lainey quiet. A domestic assault complaint doesn't justify a structural fire and a state kidnapping charge, even for an arrogant car dealer. What did Lainey see?"
Silence hung on the line for four long seconds.
