The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [100]
Jason paced for another ten minutes. Or maybe it was twenty or thirty. Clock was ticking, each minute inching toward another morning without his wife.
Max would return.
The police as well.
And more press. Cable news shows now. The likes of Greta Van Susteren and Nancy Grace. They would apply their own kind of pressure. A beautiful wife missing for days. The dark mysterious husband with a shady past. They’d crack open his life for the world to see. And somewhere in Georgia, some people would connect some dots and place phone calls of their own….
Then both Max and the police would have real ammunition to take his daughter from him. How long did he have? Noon? Two o’clock? Maybe they’d break the story just in time to headline the five o’clock cycle. That would score them ratings. Some news anchorman would see his star soar.
And Jason … How in the world would he ever say goodbye to his daughter?
Worse, what would happen to her? Her mother gone, now dragged away from the only father she had ever known … Daddy, Daddy, Daddy …
He had to think. He had to move.
Sandy was pregnant.
He needed to do something.
Couldn’t access his computer. Couldn’t confront Ethan Hastings. Couldn’t run. What to do? What to do?
It came to him, shortly after two A.M.: his last course of action.
It would involve leaving his daughter, sleeping alone upstairs. In four years, he’d never done such a thing. What if she woke up? Found the house once again empty and started screaming hysterically?
Or what if there was someone else out there, someone lurking in the shadows, waiting for Jason to make his first mistake so he could swoop in and grab Ree? She knew something more about Wednesday night. D.D. believed it; he did, too. If someone had abducted Sandy, and if that same someone knew Ree had been a witness …
D.D. had sworn the cops were watching his house. A promise or a threat. He had to hope it was a little of both.
Jason went upstairs, changing into black jeans and a black sweatshirt. He paused outside Ree’s door, straining his ears for any sound of movement. Then, when the silence unnerved him, he had to crack the door open to reassure himself that his four-year-old daughter was still alive.
She slept in a rounded huddle, one arm thrown over her face, Mr. Smith tucked into the curve of her knees.
And Jason remembered clearly then, vividly, the moment he’d first watched her slide into the world. How wrinkly and small and blue. The flail of her fists. The tight, screwed-up pucker of her wailing mouth. The way he instantaneously, absolutely fell in love with every square inch of her. His daughter. His lone miracle.
“You’re mine,” he whispered.
Sandy was pregnant.
“I will keep you safe.”
Sandy was pregnant.
“I will keep you all safe.”
He left his daughter and jogged down the street.
| CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR |
You know the thing that takes you the longest to get used to in prison? The sound. The sheer, unrelenting noise of men, 24/7. Men grunting, men farting, men snoring, men fucking, men screaming. Inmates muttering away in their own delusional world. Convicted felons, talking, talking, talking even as they’re sitting on the john, as if shitting in plain sight is somehow easier if they talk through the entire freaking event.
First month in the system, I didn’t sleep a wink. I was too overwhelmed by the smells, the sights, but mostly the unrelenting sound that never shuts up, never gives you even thirty seconds to escape to some far corner of your mind where you can pretend you aren’t nineteen years old and this didn’t just happen to you.
I got jumped week three. Knew that by the sound of soft-soled shoes suddenly rushing up behind me. Then came other time-honored prison sounds—the wet thump of one man’s fist connecting against another man’s kidney, the crack of a skull against the cinder-block wall, the excited cries of the other zoo animals as I lay in a stunned heap, my orange suit somewhere around my ankles as one, two, three—hell, maybe half