TWENTY-FIVE
Amber walked from the bedroom to the living room, though she wasn’t walking so much as she was being dragged along by Ross. His arm was draped around her shoulders as he helped her move. Her legs were wobbly. Head spinning. Her stomach throbbed. Not as bad as when she’d been lying in bed, but she didn’t know if it was a good thing or not that the pain wasn’t as intense.
She felt Ross’s arm dig into her back and pull her along.
“Slower,” she said. “Slow down.”
“No. Gotta hurry. Gotta get out of here.”
They walked on. She just couldn’t keep pace with Ross. He was moving so fast. Quick steps, jumpy movements. Earlier, right after the woman had taken her car and driven away, he’d paced around the room and mumbled to himself. He’d asked her a few questions about what to do next. He’d then taken three pills, smashed them into a powder on the table, and snorted them.
The effect had been instant. Like a switch had been flipped. He’d grabbed a phone from his pocket and looked at a few things. A moment later, he tore a sheet out of a Better Homes & Gardens magazine beside the bed, quickly scrawled something on it, and threw the phone back into his pocket. He helped her out of bed and they walked down the hallway.
She didn’t know where they were going.
“Come on, come on,” Ross said, pulling her down the hallway.
“I’m trying.”
They reached the living room, grunting and groaning the entire way. He set her down in a recliner and hurried over to the window. Two cars were outside. The kid’s car with the cracked windshield and a Tahoe.
Ross moved away from the window and threw open a few cupboard doors. He picked up a stack of letters on the table and tossed them to the side. His head was on a swivel as he scanned the living room.
“Keys,” he said. “Need to find the keys.”
She watched him run around the room, trying to find the keys. He looked genuinely frightening, his face mangled, his movements sped up. One eye was starting to swell shut.
“Dammit, dammit!”
He hurried out of the room. Into the kitchen. She heard him opening drawers, rummaging around, slamming them shut. Silverware clanked. A few dishes shattered.
He ran back into the living room. Grabbed a few coats resting near the door and went through the pockets, tossing the coats to the side after he’d gone through them. He ran over to the couch and threw the cushions off, flinging them across the room.
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing, dammit.”
He looked out the window. Back over at her.
“Let’s go.”
“Where—”
“Come on.”
He helped her up out of the chair and they walked outside. It was dark, not pitch-black but close to it. He dragged her over to the Tahoe and sat her down in the passenger seat. He balled his hand into a fist and pounded the plastic covering around the ignition, the impact so hard she thought he might break his hand. The covering loosened after a few blows and he ripped it off. Some wires and other metal pieces were exposed.
“What are you doing?”
“Hot-wiring it,” he said. “If I fuck around enough, might be able to jump it.”
He yanked out a few wires. Touched the ends together. When that did nothing, he yanked out a few more. Tried the same thing. Nothing.
He threw the wires down and pounded his fist against the dashboard. “Come on, you piece of shit! You stupid piece of—”
There was a noise behind them. Distant. Ross snapped his head toward it. Amber slowly turned her head and saw a pair of headlights approaching on the gravel road. A couple of hundred feet away.
Ross threw open the car door and ran down the driveway. He stopped in the middle of the road and waved his hands in the air. The headlights slowed and came to a stop a few feet in front of him. A truck. Beat down and rusty.
An old man stepped out. He wore a red-and-black-checkered flannel shirt. Skinny. Gray hair. Lined face.
He stared at Ross’s bloody face. From this distance Amber could just hear his voice.
“What happened?” he said. “Are you injured—”
Before he got another word out, Ross charged forward and tackled him. The old man stumbled backward and fell to the ground. Ross pounced on him and started throwing punches. One after another. His fists were like blurs, rising and falling, pummeling the old man.
The old man screamed. Yelled.
Amber watched the beating, stunned. It had happened so quickly that it had barely registered.
The beating continued, more punches, brutal, savage. If Ross continued, he would kill the old man.
She pushed open the door and yelled at him to stop. Her voice wasn’t much, and Ross didn’t even hear her. He continued pummeling away.
Amber reached across the center console and pressed the car horn. It sounded, and Ross stopped punching the old man. He looked over at the Tahoe. Looked back down at the motionless old man. She thought he was going to start beating him again. Instead, Ross walked back over to the car.
“Come on.” He picked her up out of the Tahoe and carried her over to the truck in the road. His breaths were short and quick. The truck was still running, and the headlights illuminated the old man on the ground. As they passed him, he grunted. Ross looked down at him and delivered a final, brutal kick to the old man’s ribs. The old man yelled, briefly and piercingly, then went silent.
She cringed and looked away. Ross set her down in the passenger seat and buckled the seat belt. She winced as the strap pulled tightly over her injured stomach. Ross walked around the car and sat in the driver’s seat. He shifted the truck into drive and sped away.
Ten minutes later, they were driving down the highway. Ross’s hand on the wheel was shaking. Every few seconds, the truck would sway a little on the road and veer a few inches in and out of their lane until Ross jerked the wheel back.
“Where . . .” Amber began. The word trailed off. She swallowed, tried to clear her throat. “Where are we going?” she croaked.
Ross wasn’t listening to her. He was focused on the road, his one good eye staring out from the bloody mask of his face. He constantly ground his teeth, the muscles in his jaw flexing.
“W-where are—”
“Somewhere I wanna go,” he said. “Quick stop. I—”
A horn blared from beside them. Their pickup had coasted into the path of a passing car. Ross jerked the wheel to the right.
“Screw off, asshole!” he yelled as the car passed him.
They drove on, Ross’s unsteady hand on the wheel, the truck continuing to sway. She felt like she was on a rickety roller coaster. Ross reached into his pocket and pulled out the magazine sheet he’d scrawled on earlier. Looked at it.
“Almost there,” he said.
Her eyes stayed on Ross. His image kept going in and out of focus. A leering smile was on his face. He looked mad—his smile, his face bloody and battered, one eye swollen shut.
Seeing him beat the old man earlier had disturbed her. The beating had been so savage. Ross had continued even after the man was helpless to fight back. She’d honestly thought he was going to beat him to death. Almost as bad as the beating was the final kick he gave the man, that heartless, brutal kick he’d given the old man as they’d passed. He was as out of control as she’d ever seen him.
Ross slowed down and pulled off the highway. He took a few turns. The hand holding the steering wheel continued to shake, the car tottering back and forth. He kept gritting his teeth.
He finally stopped on the side of a road. No other cars were around. An empty, darkened parking lot was nearby, in front of a few businesses in a run-down brick building. A vacant storefront. A dingy restaurant with a Closed sign in the window. And in the middle, a shop with a dark sign, just visible in the shadows. GUN SHOP, it read.
“That’s the place,” Ross said.
“A gun shop?”
“Can’t do anything without firepower,” Ross said. “Figure we’ll get some guns and rob a bank. Or a bunch of gas stations. A thousand bucks at each of them. We rob a few, it adds up.”
The plan was ridiculous; it wasn’t even a plan. It was just a random, crazy idea. He gritted his teeth again. Looked at his reflection in the rearview mirror.
“And then, Shane—I want revenge,” Ross said. He was talking so quickly, the words sounded like one big jumble. “Look at what he did to my face, the bastard. I want him dead.”
He slammed his fist against the steering wheel.
“He’s down in Saint Louis, I bet,” he said. “Returned to his buddy Smitty. We’ll show up and give him a big ol’ surprise.”
“N-no.”
Ross wasn’t listening. He floored the accelerator. The tires squealed. The truck sped forward, heading straight toward the gun shop.
Amber tried to brace herself for the collision.
Karen sat in the interrogation room, barely able to keep her eyes open. A cup of coffee was on the table in front of her, steam rising from the cup. An empty chair was on the other side of the table. A few minutes ago, Franny had sat her in the room and left her by herself.
She stared at the cup on the table and thought about Joshua. It was impossible to think about anything else. On the way there, the officer driving the cruiser she was riding in had told her how confident he was they would find him. She wanted to believe, but it was tough. Almost an hour had passed now. All she could do was pray. Pray that they would find him. And that he’d be unharmed once they did.
Franny opened the room door and walked over. He sat down in the chair across from her.
“Officers went to your house,” he said. “No one was there. But we did find something. Someone, actually. A man was outside, very badly beaten. Your neighbor. Bob Chamberlain.”
“What?”
“He said he was driving home. A lanky guy ran out into the road. All bloody. He thought the guy was injured and stopped. The old man took a beating. The lanky guy took his truck. Loaded a woman inside and left. Chamberlain saw them head north. Into the city. Even if they’re passing through, we’re looking for the truck.”
“Is Mr. Chamberlain okay?”
“Got roughed up pretty badly. He’s being taken to the hospital.”
She couldn’t believe it. Mr. Chamberlain was her neighbor dating back to when she was a child growing up in the house. About the sweetest old man alive. He would always bring them strawberries in the summer. Would clear their driveway of snow in the winter with the snowplow attachment on his tractor. She felt physically ill, thinking of him suffering a beating.
“So, that’s where we are currently,” Franny said. “Now I have some questions for you. A lot of them, actually.”
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been honest with you.”
“Didn’t take me long to figure that out. I’ve thought you were hiding something since we talked first. The breakout at the hospital, you had something to do with that, didn’t you?”
“They forced me to break her out. Well, he did. Ross. Her husband. They were at the house when you were there.”
“That yell.”
She nodded. “It was her. Amber. My son had a gun pointed at him. He would’ve been killed if I said anything to you. It was Shane. Ross’s brother. He showed up later, right before you did. He was furious because the money from the bank robbery was gone. I thought he was going to kill us all.”
“This is getting confusing,” Franny said. “Easiest thing to do would be to tell me everything from the start. And I mean everything. No detail is too small.”
She nodded. Yes, that would be easiest. Total honesty. It was time to tell him everything: the accident that started everything, the fight afterward when Joshua hit the man with the rock, Joshua and Teddy not reporting the crime, the events that happened since then.
“This all began with my son,” she said. “He was out driving and—”
There was a knock at the door. An officer with a thick mustache stuck his head inside.
“Need to talk with you,” he said to Franny.
“Can it wait?”
“No.”
The tone of his voice made her heart catch in her chest. Something was clearly up.
“What is it?” she said. “Is it my son? Tell me.”
“Just give us a second.”
Franny walked out of the room. Karen sat in her chair, her mind racing, hoping there would be good news, praying that her world wasn’t about to be crushed.
All she could do was wait for answers.