More?

I’d lost track of how many campers, motor homes, and trailers had rumbled by.

But Bill was paying attention.

He was sitting in the open doorway on the little pulldown steps watching the Pod drive past, one by one.

I was sitting at the kitchen table handcuffed to the pole holding up the table. I had a strip of duct tape across my mouth. My legs and arms were manacled and stretched out about as far as they could reach. They hurt. But I guess that was the point. They wanted me to hurt. They wanted to tire me out so I couldn’t resist, so I couldn’t fight.

Bella was sitting across from me reading the FBI document, turning the pages one by one with her right hand. In her left hand, she was holding a butcher knife. When she cuffed me to the table I’d told her the tape wasn’t necessary. I wasn’t going to call out for help. She smiled and slapped me across the face. Hard.

“I don’t care if you scream or not,” she said. “No one here is going to help you. I gagged you so I don’t have to listen to any more of your lies. I told Lod the truth about how you got to Nehalem Bay, but he had already figured it out, because he knows exactly what he wrote in his notebook and what he didn’t. Carl also confessed to Lod about the money he took from your pack. You have no friends here. Bill offered to kill you himself, so did Carl, and so did I. Lod said he would think about who would get that honor and let us know. He didn’t want to leave any corpses above for the cops to find.”

Since then Bella hadn’t uttered a word.

I could still feel the sting from her slap. If I had hadn’t been cuffed I would have …

I took a deep breath, trying to quell my anger, then realized that I no longer had to hide my true feelings. As soon as Bella finished she would know everything, and she would pass it on to everyone else. Her slap had taken away my last shred of sympathy for Lod, or anyone else in the Pod.

For as long as I was alive, which I predicted was not going to be much longer, they were going to get the real Kate.