Page 45 of You Can Run

A thin line of sweat traced down his spine. They weren't waiting for him to report in. They were checking on him, the way you'd check on a dog you weren't sure would stay where you put it.

His thumbs hovered over the screen.

If he told them, she was dead. If he didn't, he was next.

He typed:No visual yet. Checking secondary routes.

He sent it before he could reconsider, then dropped the phone into the glove box and shut it hard, as if distance from the lie might make it less dangerous.

Trent started the engine. The siren came on a second later, cutting through the morning, and he pulled out of the lot and accelerated toward the highway.

He wasn't handing her over, and he wasn't calling it in. He was going to find her himself, and when he did, she was going to see him the way she used to—as someone who showed up, someone who mattered, someoneshechose.

The fact that she'd stopped choosing him months ago was not something Trent was prepared to examine at seventy miles an hour. So he didn't.

SEVENTEEN

The air changedtwenty miles before they hit the water, lost the scent of sun-baked scrub and diesel, replaced by a heavy, cloying humidity that smelled of salt and rotting kelp.

Dante felt the steering wheel slick under his palms. His eyes were red-rimmed and burning, but the sight of the causeway rising out of the marshland didn't bring relief. It brought nausea.

The I-45 bridge was a gray ribbon of concrete with nowhere to turn around and nowhere to hide. He didn't like it.

“Dante,” Jessica said softly. She was looking at the water, at the brown, churned-up surface of the bay. “We're almost there.”

“We're almost on a bridge with one way off.”

He checked the rearview again. The semi from the morning had long since vanished, replaced by tourist SUVs and rusted-out work trucks. But he couldn't shake the feeling that the road was narrowing around them on purpose.

He slowed the 'Cuda as they hit the bridge. Below, the water was murky and uninviting. He kept to the right lane, trying to blend into the flow of traffic, but it was impossible. The car was too red and too loud. Every time someone passed, his hand hovered over the gearshift, ready to drop it into third and run.

Dante’s eyes scanned the skyline of Galveston. It wasn't the sparkling beach town the brochures promised. From this angle, it looked like a city that had been drowned and dragged back up again. The Victorian houses of the Strand were beautiful but scarred, their paint peeling in the salt air. The giant, rusted skeletons of oil rigs sat in the distance.

They hit the first set of lights on Broadway at the end of the causeway.

The streets were narrow, lined with towering palms that threw long shadows across the asphalt. A police cruiser idled at a gas station to their left, and Dante felt his pulse jump. He didn't look at the cop. He stared straight ahead, jaw locked.

“He's not looking for us,” Jessica said quietly, her hand moving to his arm.

“Doesn't have to be looking for us to see us.”

He turned off Broadway, winding through backstreets toward the harbor until he found what he wanted: a dilapidated parking garage that looked like it hadn't been touched since the eighties.

He drove to the third floor and tucked the 'Cuda into a corner stall behind a concrete pillar.

After he killed the engine, he didn't move. His hands stayed on the wheel, the weight of the last twenty-four hours pressing down on him now that the car had stopped and there was nothing left to outrun. The adrenaline was gone. What replaced it was the plain, exhausting fear that he was leading her into something he couldn't get her out of.

“Is this where we call him?” Jessica asked.

He looked at her. In the dim flicker of the garage's fluorescent tubes, she looked tired in a way that makeup and bravado couldn't fix.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled out the burner phone. “Let's hope Inglis wasn't full of shit.”

He dialed. On the third ring, a voice answered. “Who is this?”

“Ryan Inglis sent me,” Dante said.

A pause. He heard a boat engine idling in the background.