“I’m on leave.”
“So you just happened to be in the parking garage. Lurking in the shadows like Batman.”
“I was waiting for you.”
The words hang in the air, heavy with implication. Waiting for you.
“Why?”
“Because my boss called me. He said you were a bleeding heart about to get yourself killed.” He runs another mirror check, and this time something else flickers in his gaze. Heat. A challenge. “He wasn’t wrong. You froze.”
“I was going to the police.” I cross my arms to hold myself together.
“The police would have put you in a holding cell, and you’d have hanged yourself with your own shoelaces before morning. That’s how Mercer works. He doesn’t leave loose ends. He ties them off.”
Mercer. The name lands heavy in the cab. The silver-haired man with the glacier eyes.
I turn to the window. The city lights fade behind us, a glowing dome of civilization receding in the side mirror. Ahead, the dark of the pines swallows the highway. We’re heading west, into the mountains. The darkness out there runs absolute.
“So where are we going?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“And then what?”
“And then we wait.”
“For what?”
“For you to testify. Or for them to try again.”
He reaches into his jacket. I flinch, instinct overriding logic, expecting a weapon.
He pulls out a secure sat-phone and tosses it onto the seat between us. It lands on the leather with a thud.
“Call your mother. Tell her you’re taking a double shift. Tell her your phone died. Do not say you’re with me. Do not say you’re in danger. You have thirty seconds.”
The request disorients me.
“My mother.”
“Hutchinson said you call her every night at ten. It’s ten fifteen. If you don’t call, she worries. She calls the hospital. The hospital tells her you left. She calls the cops. The cops put out a BOLO. Mercer finds us.”
No emotion in it. No judgment. Just facts, lined up end to end like dominoes he’s already tipped.
He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t need to.
He knows my schedule.
My habits.
The carefully constructed rhythm of a life built on predictability and control.
“You stalked me.”
The words come out flat. Observational. Not an accusation.
He keeps his gaze on the road.
