Snowbound - Blake Crouch [39]
“Maybe the truck’s up ahead.”
He couldn’t bear the hope in his daughter’s voice. “I’ve been doing ninety for the last hour and a half. If he’d come this way, we would’ve caught up to him by now.”
“Where else could the truck have gone?”
“Where? Maybe he stopped in Tok and we didn’t see him. Probably he went on to Fairbanks.” He lifted what was left of the computer out of the front passenger seat and stared at the destroyed screen.
“Is Kalyn going to die?”
“I don’t know, Devi.”
“But probably she is?” Will punched the gas, spun the car around. “What are you doing, Dad?”
“Only thing left to do.”
THIRTY-ONE
They were passing through a city big enough to boast a pathetic skyline—meager collection of ten- and twelve-story buildings—the tall blond driving, a man on either side of Kalyn in the backseat of the new Suburban. The man to her right was young, twenty at most, and he kept eyeing her, fidgeting with his hands, his hair long and black, drawn back into a greasy ponytail. He’s nervous. The man to her left was perhaps ten years older—buzz cut, light brown hair, heavily freckled. They both wore black jeans and long-sleeved button-ups with down vests over the top, fat with pocket bulges—knives perhaps, or cell phones. She fought the urge to glance back, dying to know if the Land Rover was tailing them.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
The driver turned up the radio—NPR, “Talk of the Nation.”
It was 2:46 P.M., and they soon left the city, passing now along quiet residential streets, then stretches of forest, the houses more scattered, only a few per mile, then no homes or power lines and the road gone to gravel, narrowed into one lane, with tall spruce trees on either side. The Suburban was kicking up substantial clouds of dust, so she couldn’t see in the side mirrors if Will was following them.
Another five miles and the dirt road ended on the shore of a long, skinny lake.
The tall blond turned off the car. They waited, parked parallel to the lakeshore, affording Kalyn a view of the road as it disappeared into the trees. The dust of their passage had settled. Something’s happened. He isn’t coming.
“Would you please tell me where I am?” Kalyn asked.
The man behind the wheel looked in the rearview mirror, said, “Shut up.”
“I have to pee.”
“Hold it.”
“Seriously, my bladder’s about to rupture. I don’t know if I can hold it much longer, and I don’t want to pee all over your seat.”
The blond said, “Take her, Marcus.” She hoped he meant the younger of the two, but the freckled man opened his door instead and helped her out of the car.
He walked her twenty feet from the Suburban to a cluster of saplings, and Kalyn pulled her panties down, lifted her skirt, and squatted.
As her piss hit the ground and steamed, Marcus did exactly what she’d hoped for—looked away.
Kalyn came quietly to her feet, stepped out of her panties, and slipped her hands over Marcus’s head, squeezing them back into his neck for all she was worth. He was a few inches taller, much stronger, but that didn’t matter, because Kalyn had the edge of the metal cuff digging into his carotid artery, the bone of her forearm crushing his windpipe, and it only took five seconds for his knees to go.
She dragged him behind the saplings, ripped open his vest, calculating that she had maybe ten or fifteen seconds before the other men started to wonder where they were.
She found a .357, broke open the cylinder—six rounds—snapped it closed and started toward the Suburban, her bare feet freezing as she moved low and fast across the grass and rocks. She crouched behind the Suburban and peeked around the left rear taillight, spotted the side mirror on the driver’s side, the tall blond in the reflection, his head turned, talking.
She glanced back toward the cluster of saplings, Marcus already sitting up, trying to climb to his feet.
Kalyn crawled past the gas tank, the rear passenger door, stopping finally at the driver’s door.
You can do this. You have to do this. For Lucy.
She thumbed back the hammer, stood up, Marcus shouting in the distance,