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“Take the road south,” he ordered.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this.”
In the flash of the interior light, she’d caught a glimpse of him, a beard starting to gray, hair thinning a bit, but a normal-looking man, not a psycho. “It doesn’t matter. Just head south.”
She pulled out of the parking lot. Her brain was engaging again, and she was thinking faster, trying to come up with a way to escape. He’d surprised her and scared her out of her mind, but now, she had to think, had to find a way to stop whatever madness he had planned.
She turned onto the access road.
“No! Shit. Not north. I said south. The other way, damn it!”
“Sorry,” she said. She wheeled a quick one-eighty and watched the city grow smaller in the rearview. “I–I’m not used to driving with a gun pointed at me.”
“I’m not moving the barrel.”
“If you killed Noah—”
“He’s not dead. Yet.”
“But you intend to kill him? To kill me?” she asked. “Is that what this is all about?” If so, she should drive like a maniac and wreck the car, take him with them. But even as the thought came into her head, it fled. As long as they were alive, there was hope, a chance that they would find a way to escape.
For now, she’d do as he wanted.
CHAPTER 35
“Man, that was some weird shit,” Martinez said as they climbed into the rental car at the Las Vegas airport. Stinson had flown them in his Cessna once more, and now Settler owed him not one, but two dinners. He was also hinting that she throw in a Vegas show.
As if.
“You mean the song?” Settler said. They’d interviewed Milo Gibbs after his surgery, and either he’d lost part of his mind or the anesthesia hadn’t worn off because he kept singing some little song she’d heard long before.
“Yeah, the light shining song. Over and over again.”
“Yeah. I heard it. And if anyone hasn’t given him the word yet, he’s not gonna make it on The Voice.”
“Unkind, Settler.”
They’d gotten more from Gibbs than the song. With his attorney present in his hospital room, Gibbs had confessed to the murders of the Crenshaws, Bob Rice, the handyman for Kris Kringle, and even to giving Karen Upgarde the drugs that literally pushed her over the edge. He also admitted to killing the still-unidentified man in the car in the desert twenty years earlier and attempting to kill Remmi Storm and Noah Scott the night before. But he’d sworn he hadn’t killed Didi, which meant, if he was telling the truth—a big leap, given the man’s perfidy—that a killer was still at large. Settler wasn’t sure what to believe. Gibbs was a consummate liar, but it was entirely possible that Didi’s murderer was someone else, as she had collected enemies like dogs collected fleas.
So, it wasn’t out of the question that the same killer who had helped OH2 to an early grave had taken Didi’s life.
“She’s on the move,” Martinez said, staring at the cell phone that Milo Gibbs had given them. The man had admitted planting a tracker on Remmi Storm’s car, and though it was evidence, they’d chosen to use it to keep tabs on Didi’s daughter.
“Remmi is?”
“Yep. Heading south.”
“Damn it! I told her to stay put.”
“Apparently she doesn’t take orders all that well.?
?
“Apparently,” Settler repeated grimly, as the entrance to the freeway heading south came up. “Let’s see where she’s going.”
* * *
The city was far behind them, barely visible in the mirror as Remmi drove onward, angling into the mountains. They’d left the freeway for a county road and from there to a smaller, private byway that cut upward through the cacti, Joshua trees, and rocks. No streetlights. No cars. No people. Total isolation.
