But the most dangerous aspect of this new terrain was precisely that it was new to him. His father had taught him that every terrain, every environment presented its own challenges. Unless you’ve spent hours living with it, he’d said, don’t think you understand how it will respond to your presence.
So Dillon knew better than to think that simply because he knew how to move with stealth through a forest, he could do it here. He had no clue which seemingly harmless things could trip him up. Did gravel have a way of sticking to socks, only to click against the asphalt as he ran? Would it come off his socks and clink into the side of a car? How much pressure could he put on the metal all around him without it creaking under his weight? Could he peer through automotive glass without a thousand reflections transmitting his image to the person he was hiding from?
He had figured out a few things while waiting for his mother and Macie to return with the food: the blacktop was cracked in places, usually at the margins of the aisles, between driveway and parking space; some of these cracks were inch-high toe catchers; headlights could sweep across your hiding spot at any time; and it was never safe to touch a mirror because too many of them were loose and rattled. Even so, there were too many things he didn’t know.
The man slipped between two cars.
Dillon crossed the aisle. He was moving parallel to the man, about forty feet behind him. He looked under the cars. He saw the shifting shadows that were the man’s feet moving away, between the rows. Touching his fingertips to the metal to keep his balance, he sidled to the bumper of the car. He poked his head into the row. The man was walking away from him, twisting sideways when two cars had parked too close together. Near the back end of the row, the man turned in between two cars. Dillon heard a door open. A front bumper rocked. The door closed.
He heard a soft sound, like clothes rubbing together, and turned his head. A dozen cars away, the other man was duckwalking directly at Dillon.
The man had circled around, for whatever reason: Maybe the two men avoided being seen together—more suspicious in a place like this. Or he had hung back to catch anyone tracking or spying on his partner.
Dillon fought the urge to jump up and run. Instead he pulled his head back. Surely if the guy had seen him, he wouldn’t have continued duckwalking. He’d have made an all-out sprint for Dillon.
The man drew closer.
Dillon put his palms on the asphalt and walked his legs out from under him. When he was lying flat, he rolled to the car closest to the approaching man. He went a little farther, so he was lying between the car’s right-hand tires. He watched the man come.
The guy’s moves were apelike—his knees bent, his hands touching the ground now and then to maintain balance and help his speed. He passed in front of the car under which Dillon lay. He paused at the space between cars, where Dillon had been. Three seconds, then he started moving again.
Dillon waited. When he heard a door open and close, he rolled out from the car. He squatted at the opening to the row and eyed the vehicle the first man had entered. An interior light went on, and Dillon could see both men. Neither was much older than Michael, Dillon thought. They were examining something between them. One of them kept looking toward the back of the van. Dillon wondered why. His breath jammed in his throat.
Logan!
If these were the men from the house, they were the ones who’d taken Logan. Could he still be with them? Macie had cried over her brother for most of the day. She’d made him consider what his new friend, Hutch’s son, was going through. It made him sad and scared and, more than anything, angry.
Dillon crossed the row and stopped at the next aisle. The vehicle was pulled in with its rear to the aisle, its windshield facing Hutch’s Honda across three rows of cars. That meant the safest approach was from the aisle behind it. He began moving toward it. He crouched, but kept his eyes high enough to see the lighted passenger-side window. The rear windows came into view. They were small, set high in each of two doors. No other windows, except at the front. If Dillon wanted to sneak a peek, it’d have to be through the back.
When he was three cars away, the interior light flicked out. He braced himself to dive under the car should the doors open. He was behind a Volkswagen bug. He wasn’t sure he could fit under it. Staying low, he took a step back, then another. He was at the corner of the bug now. He figured he could jump down between cars if he had to. Looking through the VW’s windows, he watched the van. It rocked a bit, as though someone were moving around inside.
When, after five minutes, no one came out or showed himself in a window that Dillon could see, he crept forward. He made himself crouch lower as he drew nearer. He stopped behind the car parked beside it, a small, sporty thing. Good thing the van didn’t have side windows in the rear. Anyone inside would have been able to stare down on him.
He went to all fours and peered into the space between the van and the sports car. The bad guy’s side mirror stared at him like a lizard’s eye. No face reflected there. One may have been hidden by the darkness inside, or no one was in the passenger seat. Big difference.
Slowly he moved forward, hands and knees. When he was the most exposed, positioned perfectly in the space between vehicles, he shuffled quicker. He stopped behind the van and sat, touching his back to the bumper, but only lightly.
Okay. Hop up, take a look.
The driver’s door opened.
Dillon’s heart stopped. At least it felt that way. His whole body turned to marble: lungs, thoughts. His skin felt stiff and crackly.
At the driver’s door, a foot came down onto the blacktop. The other joined it. The van rocked down and came back up. Whoever stood there snorted up snot and hawked it out. Dillon heard a zipper, then a splattering flow, hitting the car next to the van on that side. It made a hollow, metallic sound, then stuttered to silence. The zipper again. The man sighed loudly. The van rocked. The door shut.
Dillon pulled in a breath. His vision blurred. He was dizzy, lightheaded. He closed his eyes and sucked in little bites of air. After a time he felt better. He realized he had to pee as well. Bad. Maybe it had been the scare or the suggestion, but if he didn’t relieve himself, he would go in his pants.
It’ll pass, he told himself. Like in school. It gave him a sour stomach to even think about drawing attention to his need for relief, so he always held it. Half the time, when a break came, he’d forgotten he had to go so bad.
He turned and rose up onto his knees. He put his hands on the bumper and looked up at the windows. They were too high for him to simply stand and peek through. But if he stepped on the bumper . . . Did he weigh enough to cause the van to shift? Ninety pounds. That sounded like a lot of weight at that moment. Would the men inside feel the movement? Would they think it was Logan—if Logan was in there and able to move?
An alarm went off: a loud beep-beep-beep. His watch! Every morning it went off at four. He slapped his hand over it, pushed the button that silenced the alarm. He listened: no noises from inside. No movements he could feel. It had not been so loud. It had only sounded like it to him.
He thought, What if it had gone off when the man was outside the van? and felt dizzy again.
He shifted his gaze back up to the rear windows. He couldn’t do it.
He did not have enough courage to step on the bumper and look in.
Baby!
I can’t. I just can’t.
He imagined stepping up, panicking, and grabbing hold of the van as though it were his mother. The guys inside would come out and pull him off. They would toss him in the back with Logan, and that would be that. His mom would go crazy, probably come looking for him, and they would get her.
Besides, the interior was probably too dark to see anything. They likely had Logan tied up or drugged, or he was sleeping. Dillon would have risked everything for nothing.
He squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his head. Was he talking himself out of looking through the window because he was scared? Or was he being smart, cau
tious? His father used to look at it from the other angle: when is bravery just plain stupidity?
It was true that his weight on the bumper might alert the men to his presence and that he might not be able to see Logan inside anyway. And what did he stand to gain? If he saw Logan inside, he’d know for sure. If he didn’t, then Logan might or might not be in there. If he could tell Hutch without a doubt that Logan was there, he knew Hutch would tear through those guys inside like a hurricane with teeth. He might do it anyway, just for the chance of rescuing his son. Dillon believed Hutch would do it for him.
Bravery or stupidity?
Gotta know the difference.
Dillon pressed his hand against one of the rear doors.
Logan, are you in there? Hang in there, friend. We’ll get you. Your dad will.
He turned and crawled away. He expected to hear the doors opening, voices yelling for him to stop. But nothing happened. He crawled past six cars, then turned in toward the XTerra.
FORTY-FOUR
“Don’t you ever do that again! Do you hear me?” Laura yelled into Dillon’s wide-eyed face. She yelled in attitude, not in volume: Dillon had told her the men they had seen were close.
In the backseat Macie groaned. She sat up, still mostly asleep.
“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. “I just thought—”
“No! You don’t think! You’re a child. This isn’t a game. Those men mean to kill us, all of us!” Laura closed her eyes, and tears spilled out. Her breath came in sputtering hitches.
“I’m sorry . . . Mom?”
She felt Dillon’s hand on her arm.
She looked at him. The entire time he’d been gone, she had imagined him getting shot, stabbed, strangled. The only thing that had kept her in the car was the fear that her going after him would be the very thing that would draw attention to him and get him killed. He looked at her now with those puppy-dog eyes, that sweet, expressive mouth. She wrapped her arms around him, pulled him close.
“What’s going on?” Macie said.
Laura disentangled herself from Dillon. She held her hand to his face, taking it in, relishing his being alive. She turned in the seat. “Macie, did you get some sleep?”
The girl rubbed her eyes. “Yeah.”
Laura frowned at her. “You know those guys from the house, the soldiers? They’re here.”
“Why?”
“They did something to your dad’s car. I think they’re waiting for him too.”
“What’d they do to it?”
Laura looked at Dillon. “I’m afraid to guess.”
Macie came fully awake. “What?”
“That guy had something in the duffel bag,” Dillon said. “He went under the car with it, and came out without it. There’s only one thing it could be.”
Laura peered through the window at the Honda. She turned her head, as if following a line, toward the van. “They can see Hutch’s car from where they are?”
“It’s a clear shot over the roofs of other cars.”
She knew Dillon was right: it had to be a bomb. It was the cigarette pack–sized device, the one with the red light, that bothered her more. There was something about their looking right at Hutch when they activated it . . .
“Okay,” she said. She found Macie’s eyes with her own. “This is tough stuff, but I don’t know how to make it better without your hearing. Think you can handle it?”
Macie was silent for a long moment. Then she nodded. “If it’ll help save Dad and get Logan back, I can handle it.”
“Dillon,” Laura said, “do you think Logan is in the van?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t look inside.”
While she talked, she looked at Dillon, throwing glances at Macie, but her words were really meant for herself. She was getting it out and reeling it back in, organizing it.
“Here’s what we know: Some people—probably Brendan Page’s people—attacked us and took Logan. They tried to kill us. Hutch called to warn us, but something cut him off. We don’t know what happened after that on his end. We have to assume he’s coming home, because he knows we need help. We don’t have any way to reach him, so we’re here at the airport parking lot, waiting for him. Other men—probably the same people who attacked us—are here too. They may or may not have Logan with them. They put something—probably a bomb—under Hutch’s car. Have I got it all?”
“We have one of the soldiers who attacked us tied up in the back of our car,” Dillon said.
Laura nodded. “We think he wants to get away from his . . . employers.” Her eyes grew big. “He’s really got some issues.”
“So,” Dillon said, “take away all the probablys, and I think that’s it.”
To make the girl feel part of it all, Laura looked at her. “Macie?”
“I want Logan back,” she said. “I want my dad, and he has to stay away from his car.”
Has to stay away from his car . . . Didn’t everything boil down to that? At least right now. Logan was next, but they needed Hutch back alive.
“So we watch for Hutch,” Laura said. “We make sure he stays away from his car.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Dillon said.
“When we see him, we yell and scream and get him into the XTerra. Then we drive away before the bad guys get us.” She held her palms out, as if to say, See? Simple as that.
Dillon squinted at her.
She knew that look: he was assessing whether or not she was serious.
Slowly, as if talking to a child, he said, “He could come from behind the car and we wouldn’t see him until he was in it, or so close to it that it wouldn’t matter. But if we get closer to the car, so he sees us sooner, those guys watching will spot us.”
Laura thought about it. “We have to get to him before he reaches the car. How do we do that?”
“The airport,” Marcie said. “Stop him there.”
Laura’s nod turned into a shake. “We don’t know what airline he’s using. We don’t know when he’s coming. Do we wait in the East Terminal or the West? There are too many ways to miss him at the airport. That’s why we came here in the first place.”
She turned from Macie to Dillon, hoping one of them would somehow pull a magical solution out of the air. They gave her blank stares.
Macie said, “You have to stop him. Please.”
“Mom,” Dillon said, “why don’t two of us go to the airport, one for each terminal. The other can stay here.”
“No,” she said immediately. “No way. Doing that would put one of you out in the open, alone. I can’t risk that.”
“But we don’t have any choice,” Macie said.
“I have a choice about putting you guys in more danger or not.” She looked between them. “I choose not.”
They were silent for a while. Laura wondered if the kids felt the sense of claustrophobia that she did—like all the bad in the world was swirling around them, pressing in. The XTerra was a bubble, temporarily keeping them safe, but she felt the air pressure changing outside. It was building, threatening to crush them.
Dillon said, “We can’t let Hutch get to his car.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. Despite the bad guys and what was probably a bomb in Hutch’s car, she felt the airport was even more dangerous. At least here, they could hunker down, stay out of sight. She hated Page for putting her in this position. “I’ll go,” she said. “I’ll watch for him at the airport. You guys stay here. If you see him, stop him. Yell and scream, but don’t go near the Honda, you hear? Get him in the XTerra and get out of here fast.”
Their faces were twin expressions of hopelessness.
Laura said, “It’s not perfect, but it is what it is.” She took a deep breath.
It hurt, leaving them, but waiting wouldn’t help and could be a terrible mistake, if she missed Hutch.
“I better get going. If Hutch rushed to the airport as soon as he called to warn us, he could be here anytime now. I’ll get to one of the sh
elters on the other side of the lot and wait for the shuttle there.”
“Stay low,” Dillon said. “Don’t let the bad guys see you. They know what we look like.” His eyes followed the path she would take. “You should probably crawl. Or do what that guy did, duckwalk. Fast.”
“You’re the expert,” Laura said.
“What about him?” Macie said, looking over the back of her seat. From her expression, she could have been watching an autopsy.
“Michael,” Dillon said.
“When he wakes up, give him some food, but stay away from him.”
“No problem there,” Macie said.
Laura touched Dillon’s neck. She kissed him. “You guys stay down too. Those men might decide to take a look around. And, Dillon, no matter what happens, don’t be a hero, you understand?”
He smiled. “You too.”
When Laura put her hand on the door handle, Dillon covered the dome light. She opened the door and slipped to the ground. Then she crawled back inside and tugged the door closed.
“I can’t,” she said. “I can’t leave you here. Not with . . . them.” She squinted through the side window toward the van. Macie’s face rose into her field of vision.
“Please,” the little girl said. “You said those men are watching my dad’s car. They don’t know we’re here. We’ll be quiet. Please.” She seemed on the edge of tears.
“Mom,” Dillon said, “if Hutch gets to his car . . .” He shot a glance at Macie.
Laura shook her head. “I hate this.”
Dillon squeezed her hand. “We’ll be okay.”
Laura opened the door and forced herself to climb out. Everything told her to stay; everything except the part of her that wanted to stop Hutch before he showed up at his car. She gave them a final look, drawing courage from their sweet, frightened expressions, and pushed the door shut.
FORTY-FIVE
Laura followed Dillon’s advice, crawling and duckwalking all the way to the end of the aisle. She stopped twice and almost returned to the XTerra. Then she remembered Macie’s face, so much pain carved into her porcelain features. The lines would cut deep into the child’s soul if they didn’t reach Hutch in time. She thought of Dillon, how his resolve would slip away at night—as though it retired before the rest of him did—and he’d cry quietly in bed. She would often lie down with him, holding him and gently rocking him until he fell asleep. Who would do that for Macie? The question got her moving again.