Chloe’s cell phone, sitting atop her dresser, lit up and began to ring. She untangled herself from her mother, reached for the phone without having to get off the bed, and looked at the screen.
“It’s him,” she said. “It’s Miles.”
“Don’t answer it,” Gillian said. “You were smart to walk away when you did.”
Chloe had her thumb poised over the screen. “I think I should—”
“No,” her mother said, and snatched the phone from her daughter’s hand and pressed the button to decline the call.
“Mom!”
“It’s the right thing!” her mother said forcefully. “Put this behind you. I’m serious.”
Chloe held out her hand, waiting for the phone to be returned to her.
“Are you going to call him back?” Gillian asked. When Chloe did not answer, Gillian asked again.
Finally, Chloe said, “No, I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
Chloe waited a beat before saying, “I promise.”
Gillian gave her back the phone. Chloe noted the time on the screen: 7:30 A.M.
“I’m gonna be late. I’m supposed to be there by eight.”
“Get dressed. I’ll drive you. Tomorrow, we’ll drive up to Springfield and get your car back.”
After her mom left her bedroom, Chloe noticed that she had a voice mail. Miles had left a message.
“Chloe, I’m sorry about how things have turned out. But I feel like we’re still a team. I’m heading out to Fort Wayne, then the west coast. I’m not letting this go. I could use your help. I can send Charise to pick you up. But it’s up to you. I’ll understand if you want to be done with all of this. And with me. Let me know.”
She deleted the message.
Chloe made it to the diner by ten after eight — her mother blew through all the stop signs and one traffic light — just as the place was starting to fill up. She exchanged only a few words with the other staff, getting straight to work, and she was so consumed with thoughts of what had happened over the last couple of days that she got something wrong on nearly every order. One guy who asked for his eggs over easy got them scrambled. A woman who wanted decaf coffee got tea. She mixed up all the orders for one table with all the orders for another table.
Vivian, who worked the cash register and waited tables when they were short-handed, said to her when the shift ended at two, “You okay, honey?”
Chloe shook her head. “No.”
Vivian gave her a hug. “You messed up big-time today, but hey, nobody died. You’ll be back on top of your game soon. I don’t know what happened, and it’s none of my business, but if you ever want to talk, I’ll listen.”
“Thank you.”
“How you getting home, sugar? Saw your mom drop you off this morning.”
“I told her I’d walk. I need to clear my head.”
“We’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
Chloe nodded, dropped off her apron in the back room, and left out the side door. She heard the limo before she saw it as the tires crunched on the gravel parking lot. When it was up alongside her, the front passenger’s-side window powered down.
The driver, a man, called out to her: “Chloe?”
She looked. It wasn’t Charise, but maybe she’d taken the day off.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Someone would like to talk to you,” he said, pointing his thumb toward the back seat.
But did she want to talk to Miles? She’d promised her mom not to call him, but she hadn’t promised not to talk to him if he came all the way up here to see her. The message he’d left her made it clear he was trying to make things right.
And the truth was, she wanted to apologize for how she’d left things. Getting out of the car, leaving him at his lowest point — the more she thought about it, the more she regretted it.
“Okay,” she said.
The driver hit a button and she could hear the car doors unlock. She opened the back one on the passenger side and got in.
Once she had the door closed, she turned to look at the other person in the back seat.
It wasn’t Miles.
It was a woman.
“Who the hell are you?” Chloe asked.
That was when the woman gave her a shot of pepper spray and the driver floored it.
Fifty
Fort Wayne, IN
Travis Roben had not left the house for a day and a half.
Except to go to the bathroom and have meals, he had barely left his bedroom. It was on the second floor of the house with a view of the street, and he spent most of his time perched by the window, watching for the police to show up.
So far, nothing.
There hadn’t even been anything on the news about the woman Sandy hit with the bat. The back side of that warehouse was clearly not a well-traveled spot. Travis thought the occasional security guard might have wandered that way.
Unless...
She didn’t have to be dead. Sandy had given her a good whack in the face, but it didn’t have to be a fatal blow. Could be the woman’s partner took her to the hospital, got her fixed up. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked, but holy fuck, it sure had looked bad. That would explain why a body hadn’t been discovered. And if those two were fake cops, it also explained why there hadn’t been a story about the woman being attacked. If they weren’t real cops, they wouldn’t be going to the authorities to report what had happened.
Or...
They were real cops, but the whole thing was being kept secret until he and Sandy were found and arrested.
Regardless, Travis still couldn’t figure out why they would want to kill Sandy and him. For trespassing? Seriously?
Nothing about it made any sense, which made it even scarier.
Sandy was as freaked out as Travis. So far as he knew, she was hiding out at her place just as he was hiding out at his, afraid to go out in public in case anyone was looking for them.
Travis’s mother repeatedly asked what was wrong, and he’d done his best to persuade her he had some sort of stomach disorder, although the fact that he was still able to consume the meals she made for him had left her unconvinced. He wasn’t ready to tell his parents what had happened. First, he’d have to tell them he had an actual girlfriend, which was going to make the story sound pretty fantastical before he’d even got started. (His mother had noticed his slightly less nerdy appearance of late, and when asked about it Travis had said he’d simply looked in the mirror one day and decided a change was in order.)
He and Sandy had texted back and forth several times, each asking the other whether they had seen or heard anything.
Nothing.
Until this morning, when that car with an Uber symbol in the windshield stopped in front of the house.
Travis had left his bedroom lookout point for only two minutes to take a leak, and when he returned, a black Prius was at the curb. There was a man in the back seat. Fortyish, moving kind of slow, dressed casually in a sports jacket, jeans, and a pair of high-end runners. He opened the door, got out, stood in front of the house and took it in.
“Fuck,” Travis said. This was not good.
But this man couldn’t be a cop. Nothing about him said law enforcement. First of all, what cop showed up in an Uber? And he didn’t look cop-like. He didn’t have the bearing or the swagger, and it didn’t look like he had a badge clipped to his belt or a holstered weapon under the flap of his jacket.
So who was he and what was he doing here?
The man approached the house, mounted the steps to the porch.