“I’ll fix everything,” he said, but had no idea how. No idea what he could do that would change the deadly course of events that were unfolding tonight.
He left Rena sobbing in the living room and walked down the hall to the bedroom. Stood in the doorway and looked at Sam.
He was curled on the bed, barely conscious. Fever glistened on his forehead, lips cracked, eyes fluttering but unfocused. He looked impossibly young—more like the fourteen-year-old boy Brock had rescued than the man he was supposed to be.
Brock knelt beside the bed.God, not him. Please, don’t take Sam.
He thought of the day he met Rena—her arms crossed tight over her chest, trying to act like she wasn’t shattered after her mom’s death. Her dad had been drunk on the porch, yelling at Sam for something. The boy had looked up with silent defiance, his lip still bleeding from an earlier beating.
Back then, Brock only knew one thing: youdid nothit someone smaller than you. You didn’t hurt people who couldn’t fight back.
He’d taken Rena and Sam from where he’d found them in rural Alabama when he was working for a jackass who was friends with their asshole dad, and they went to Louisiana, where Brock had grown up, where he knew the land and the people and could survive. It was a rough life, but it wastheirs. They made it work—until they didn’t. Crime had always hovered at the edge of Brock’s lifelike a shadow, he flitted in and out of the life, and eventually, he stepped into it for good.
Robinson paid well. It was easy.
Until it wasn’t.
Now Sam, the smartest kid he’d ever known, the one who never complained, who had always looked up to him, was dying. He saw it in his unfocused eyes.
Brock leaned over, kissed his forehead. “I love you, Sam. I’ll fix this.”
Then he walked back to Rena.
“I’m taking him to the hospital,” he said.
She looked up sharply, surprised that he had agreed with her.
He dropped the envelope on the table. “You take this and go home. Sam’ll need you when he’s better.”
“No.” Her voice was firm, almost angry. She shoved the envelope back at him. “We do thistogether. I love you. Where you go, I go.”
“You don’t understand. They’ll arrest us. I can’t let you go down for whatIdid.”
“Wedid it,” she said fiercely, grabbing his shirt. “You think I don’t know what I’ve done? I left a girl trapped in a submerged truck during a storm. Ileft her. I’ll live with that forever. You don’t get to carry this alone.”
“The driver, he helped her,” Brock said, though he didn’t know that, couldn’t know that. “You said he recognized her, right? So he helped her.”
“If she was alive,” Rena whispered.
He didn’t respond. Instead, he kissed her desperately, then held her tight.
He said, “Bring the truck right up to the door. Not my truck, the other one, I’d rather have the Texas plates tonight than the Louisiana plates. I’ll carry Sam out.”
She nodded and disappeared outside.
Brock wrapped Sam in a comforter and cradled him like a child.He was burning up, murmuring nonsense. As Brock eased him into the backseat, Sam whimpered and clutched his wrist weakly.
Brock leaned close. “Hold on, buddy. We’re going to get you help. Just a little longer.”
Rena slid over to the passenger seat and Brock took the wheel. The wipers squealed against the glass as the rain pounded and the wind swirled. They headed south down Privett Road, slow and steady. Brock’s jaw clenched the whole way, each bounce of the wheels jarring Sam in the back. But he was silent now. Unconscious? Or dead?
The rain had thinned to a mist, but the road ahead shimmered with standing water. Then, without warning, the front of the truck dropped and slammed hard—thud—into a ditch and stalled.
“No!” Brock pounded the dash. “God, no!”
He jumped out into knee-deep water. The road had partly collapsed. A shallow sinkhole, the remnants of the last storm, now filled with swirling runoff from the fields.
“Damn it!” he shouted. He could practically feel the water rising up his legs.
