Chapter One
BY THE TIME THE BLACKpickup climbed out of the dust behind me, I’d already memorized its grille, its cracked passenger-side headlight, and the man behind the wheel.
His name was Dex Tolliver.
Crystal had sent it two nights ago, along with the warning that had dragged me onto the backroads outside Whispering Pines in the first place.
CRYSTAL:
North Fork Bail Bonds sent him. Please don’t let him find me.
I’d deleted the message after reading it three times. Deleting it hadn’t changed a damn thing.
The man behind me was still a bail recovery agent with Crystal’s name in his paperwork. I was still the wrong woman on the right road. And every mile I kept him chasing me was a mile between him and the only person in Idaho I’d burn my life down to protect.
July heat pressed through the old sedan’s vents, thick with dust, warm vinyl, and pine resin baking off the timbered slope. The late sun hit the windshield in hard flashes as the road dipped and twisted through the mountains. Gravel snapped under my tires. Pine shadows cut across the hood in dark green bars. My black tank clung between my shoulder blades, mycutoffs stuck to the backs of my thighs, and sweat slid down into the worn leather of my boots.
A yellow sign flashed past on the shoulder.
OLD QUARRY ROAD
The paved lane curved left toward Whispering Pines, where there were stoplights, storefronts, people, witnesses. The gravel road cut right into the trees, narrow and rutted, with grass growing high along both sides.
Behind me, the pickup eased closer.
Dex wasn’t rushing me. He didn’t have to. The mountain had narrowed to two choices, and one of them led straight back to town.
I hit the turn hard enough to send dust over the windshield.
The sedan fishtailed, and the rear end swung toward the ditch before my hands corrected. My tires chewed gravel. The engine screamed like it had serious objections to my life choices, which made two of us.
The black pickup followed.
He didn’t crowd my bumper. He didn’t throw rocks into my back window or give me a reason to claim later that he’d run me off the road. He kept just enough distance to stay on me and just enough restraint to prove he knew what he was doing.
That irritated me more than if he’d tried to ram me.
A reckless man could be baited. A stupid man could be misled. A man who understood patience on a mountain road was a specific kind of headache, and I’d apparently drawn the deluxe package.
The cheap phone wedged between my thigh and the seat buzzed once.
I didn’t look down.
If it was Crystal, I couldn’t answer. If it wasn’t, I didn’t care. My world had narrowed to the road ahead, the tree line pressingin on both sides, and the shape of Dex’s pickup eating the dust behind me one steady foot at a time.
Old Quarry Road climbed for a quarter mile, then dipped into shade. The air cooled by a few degrees under the trees, but the relief didn’t touch my skin. Sunlight strobed through the pines. The sedan’s suspension popped hard over ruts, and something under the passenger side scraped with a metallic whine that made my teeth ache.
“Come on,” I said to the dashboard. “You’re not dying on me for a man with a cracked headlight.”
The dashboard responded with a rattle.
I’d found this road yesterday morning while Crystal was still shaking too hard to hold a bottle of water. A faded tourist map from the gas station showed Old Quarry cutting across the slope and connecting to a service road near Bearclaw Mountain Pass. The map looked like it had been printed before half the town had cell service, but it was the best I’d had.
Yesterday, the road had looked like a possible escape route.
Today, it looked like a bad decision with trees.
A fork appeared ahead. The left branch climbed toward a rocky shoulder where orange survey tape snapped from a branch. The right dropped lower, narrower, darker, with two tire tracks worn through weeds and a line of posts where a gate had once been.
