Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 35507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 178(@200wpm)___ 142(@250wpm)___ 118(@300wpm)
Scar-guy stands. "She's quiet. That's new."
"I'm thinking," I say.
"Think all you want. You can’t think you’re way out of this one."
He walks the perimeter. The driver stays on the crate. Two men. One phone. One padlocked door. One unlocked door I can't get to with my ankles bound to bolted wood. I work my wrists anyway, slow, the way Colt showed me in the first house when he thought a lesson was a boundary. The rope burns. It also gives a fraction. A fraction is a start.
"He'll come," I tell them, because lying is useless and the truth might buy minutes. "He'll come and he won't come alone. You should be afraid of that."
Scar-guy smiles with no warmth. "We're counting on it."
The driver looks at his phone again. He shows the screen to his partner. I can't read it from here. Something on it makes Scar-guy's mouth go pleased.
"Soon," he says to me. "Sit pretty."
I don't sit pretty. I sit and I map the room again. Window. Chain. Inward door. Catwalk. Screw. Strap. Train somewhere beyond the brick. Colt somewhere on a road I counted in turns. I pull at the rope until blood warms my palm and I keep my face wet so they keep thinking the only thing happening in this chair is a girl falling apart.
Inside the falling apart I'm doing the other job. Witness. Find the gap.
If there's a way out of this chair before they get their Hawthorne reunion, I'm taking it. If there isn't, I'll still be awake when the door opens. I already missed saying it once. I'm not missing him twice.
17
Colt
Marin finds the van on a county cam eight miles north of the washboard turn, sitting dark behind a brick warehouse that the tax rolls still call vacant. Train tracks run a half mile west. It’s almost too easy.
"Three heat signatures inside last pass," Marin says in my ear. “One’s seated and still. That's her. Don't you dare go through the front. That's a trap."
"Copy."
We stack in the trees on the east side. Nash on my right. Crewe on my left. Sin and Jace already circling south. Mack and Banks with Alden at the lot edge, Banks running a jammer off a box that looks harmless. Harlan from Equinox takes the chain door. Wyatt takes the tree line and the road. Billy stands where I can see him, which is the only place I'll allow him to stand.
"They want all of us in one room," I say. "So we don't give them that."
Alden's voice is flat on the comm. "Harlan hits the padlock on my count. Wyatt calls any runner. Marin keeps the county blind another four minutes. You get the girl. The rest of us get the men. Billy, you stay off the trigger unless the man you've been hunting walks out wearing a name."
"He's in there," Billy says.
"Go," Marin says.
Harlan's cutters take the chain. The sound is ugly and short. Crewe and I are through the inward door before the echo dies. Snowlight cuts a stripe across a swept circle and a bolted chair and Oakley tied in it with her face wet and her wrists dark.
She's alive. Something in my chest slams so hard I miss a step.
A man turns from a crate with a pistol already coming up. There’s two other men close by.
I don't give the man the shot. Nash puts him down from the side door without conversation. One of the other men goes for the boarded window and runs into Sin. Jace is on him a second later. The last guy tries the padlocked door that isn't padlocked anymore and finds Harlan filling it.
"Down," Harlan says. The man goes down. He looks offended about it.
I'm already at the chair.
"Colt." Oakley’s voice breaks on my name. "It's a trap. They wanted all of you. They wanted Billy. Don't."
"Already here." I cut the rope at her wrists first, then her ankles. Her hands are torn. I take them anyway. I pull her out of the chair and into me and the warehouse can burn for all I care about the rest of the floor.
She fists my flannel and sobs once against my throat, furious and shaking. "I didn't want you to come."
"I know. I came anyway."
Wyatt on comms: "Lot's clean. No second van."
Marin: "I've got the phone the driver dropped. Banks, you're going to want this number. It's a Helix board line."
Billy walks to the man in the coat. He doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't have to. The years sit between them without decoration. "You sold the program," Billy says. "You sold my name. You sold my sons when they wouldn't stay gone. You're done."
The man smiles with nothing in it. "You died, Hawthorne. Dead men don't testify."
Banks, from the door, says, "Dead men don't have seven sons and a hard drive and a photographer who kept the raws. Also we have your live voice on a board line and your face in this room. Sit still."