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This is not good.
Heart pounding, her nerves strung to the breaking point, she tried to come up with some way to beat Hedges at his own game, but the farther they got from the city, the more unlikely that was becoming.
She glimpsed reflective eyes caught in the beams of her headlights. “What the—” She slammed on the brakes as a coyote streaked in front of her headlights, a flash of silver gray and brown fur.
“What the hell!” Hedges yelled, then he, too, saw the furtive animal scurrying into the shadows. “Just drive!”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re almost there.”
She had to find a way out. There had to be some way to save them. He had the phones and the guns, and if she hit the car’s panic button out here, no one would hear them and he’d shoot her or, worse yet, Noah.
The nose of her Subaru crested the ridge, and then the gravel road sloped sharply downward, ruts causing the car to bounce, tires spinning, gravel spraying as they slid downward. The steering wheel slipped through her fingers until finally the headlights found the valley floor. Here, the ground was more stable, though it still sloped and was surrounded on two sides by mountains of sand.
“What is this place?” she asked and felt a chill as cold as the desert night.
“Where OH Industries gets its sand. And where you’re going to find out what it felt like for your mother in that Cadillac, all those years ago . . .”
At that moment, her headlights washed upon several oversized pieces of machinery. A dump truck, and a backhoe with a huge bucket. Parked next to the dusty construction equipment was a black pickup, its paint job so shiny as to nearly appear liquid.
Hedges’s vehicle.
“Park it.”
“Here?” she asked.
“Yeah, fine.”
“I don’t understand.” The car was still angled about fifty yards from the truck and equipment, situated in the middle of the pit.
“This is payback,” he said calmly. “For your mother. That bitch tried to ruin me. She sold me my own kid. For a quarter of a million dollars. Told me I had a son, and I paid her, only to find out that night that she’d had twins, and she switched out the daughter for my son. She planned on trying to sell me each of them, one at a time.”
“But you cheated her.” Remmi had yet to slip the car into park. She kept her foot on the brake, to keep the Outback from rolling down the slight incline.
“She was selling me my babies. Of course I cheated her. What mother would do that?” He stared at Remmi as if she were crazy. “And it was complicated on my end, because I wasn’t the only one who wanted my kids. My older brother? Oliver, or OH2, as he liked to think of himself? He wanted them, too. Considered them his heirs when they were mine. He couldn’t have kids of his own, so he thought, he really thought he could swindle mine. I was the one who dealt with Didi, and he thought he was going to take them from me. And how was he going to do that? Kill me, of course.” His agitation grew, and with it, he began waving the gun.
Remmi kept her eyes on the gun’s muzzle. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but she wanted to keep him talking, not for his story as much as to buy time. If there was some way to get him out of the car, she could drive away . . . or if she could get the gun or the phones or something. She heard another groan from the back seat, and her heart soared. At least Noah was alive.
For now.
“But he didn’t . . . your brother didn’t get Adam and Ariel. He died,” she said.
“Kyle and Kayla.” Hedges barked out a laugh. The gun was pointed at her again. “Good old OH2. All his brains. All his education. All his plotting. For what? He ended up dead.” Another harsh chuckle. “It seems we’re all a murderous lot.”
“What do you mean?”
Keep him talking. She was looking at Hedges, but in her peripheral vision she was trying to see any means of escape. That’s when she saw the movement in the back seat. Noah was rousing.
Keep him talking. He can’t know that Noah is coming around.
“My brother was poisoned,” Hedges said.
“You killed him?”
“No. Oh, no.” He gave his head a shake. “My father took care of that. He blamed my brother for his skiing accident, something about the bindings being tampered with, and it crippled him, didn’t quite kill him, but almost did. Dad was sure his namesake planned not only to win his woman back, that bitch Marilee, but also to take over the company and my kids. Before he could, though, Dad got his revenge.”
“I thought your father was in a retirement home. In a wheelchair . . .” If she could just get the gun!
