A DAZED LATISHA CAME TO HER SENSES DANGLING UPSIDE DOWN in the overturned pickup. She didn’t remember fastening her seat belt. She had done it out of sheer force of habit, because that had been one of Lyle’s inviolable rules—the car didn’t move until everyone inside was belted in. Trayvon had always made fun of her for wearing a seat belt in his Cadillac, but given the reckless way he drove—routinely speeding and often driving under the influence—buckling up had been a matter of life and death. It was this time, too. That unthinking action on Latisha’s part had most likely saved her life.
She remembered seeing a sign warning of an upcoming curve. She had slowed, but not enough. Partway into it she’d felt the tires veering off the road and skidding toward the left. She had pulled the wheel to the right, overcorrecting, and the next thing she knew, the truck flew off the road and tumbled down a steep bank into a ravine.
She was lucky not to have been thrown from the truck, but now she was desperate to escape it. Everything she knew about car wrecks came from movies and TV. There the cars always exploded into fireballs once they landed, so she needed to put as much distance between herself and the truck as she could and as quickly as possible.
The weight of her body against the restraining seat belt made it hard to breathe. After fumbling blindly with the release, she finally managed to unfasten the belt, sending her tumbling down onto the ceiling. The engine was still running. Fighting her way through a layer of deployed airbags, she located the ignition button on the dashboard and shut down the engine. In the process her searching hand landed on one of the stolen boots. If she was going to walk away from the wreckage, she’d need both of those boots. It took time to find the other one—time she didn’t have. She discovered that both plastic containers had been crushed. While searching blindly for the missing boot, her hand encountered puddles of water dotted with mounds of wet kibble. But finally, just when she was about to give up, she found the boot.
Clutching both of them in one hand, she attempted to open the driver’s door with the other, but it didn’t work. The door wouldn’t budge. Next she tried the window button, but nothing happened. The window wouldn’t open, either. Crawling over a layer of shattered safety glass, she found that the passenger-side window had been blown out. Without even trying the door handle, she threw the boots out through the missing glass and then slithered after them on her belly. Just when she thought she’d made it—when she was safely away from the pickup—she came face-to-face with the toes of a pair of men’s shoes.
“Well, looky here,” the Boss muttered, grabbing Latisha by the hair and yanking her to her feet. “If it isn’t my runaway bride! What the hell have you done to my truck?”
“How did you find me?”
“You think I’m stupid or something? How do you think I found you? I followed your tire tracks.”
She tried to wriggle out of his grasp. He had seemed weak and dizzy before, but he wasn’t now. He lifted her off the ground one-handed and shook her like she was a rag doll. That’s when she spotted the gun in his other hand.
“Just shoot me, then,” she whispered. “Shoot me and get it over with.”
“I don’t think so,” he answered, pulling her so close that she could feel the heat of his breath on her face. “That would be too easy. You and me, kid, we’re gonna go back home and have ourselves a little playtime. Afterward I’ve reserved a space in that freezer down in the basement. I’m pretty sure there’s a spot with your name on it.”
The freezer! Remembering Amelia’s desperate plight, Latisha realized she had nothing to lose—nothing at all. Being shot would be better than being locked in that freezer. Anything was better than the freezer.
“Climb,” he ordered.
“I’m barefoot,” she objected. “Let me put on the boots.”
“Bullshit,” he told her. “You left me barefoot, and I’m returning the favor. I said climb! Do it!”
Left with no alternative, Latisha started to comply. Just then flashing lights appeared on the bank above them and a car door slammed shut.
“Police,” a voice from overhead announced as a flashlight beam probed the wreckage of the truck. “Is anybody hurt down there? Do you need help?”
Realizing that the Boss was momentarily distracted, Latisha used the only weapon she had at her disposal. She was far enough up the bank by then that she was able to turn and nail him full in the balls with her knee. As he crumpled to the ground, she took off running.
Running for her life, she found herself in a dry stream bed with steep perpendicular banks on either side. The ground under her bare feet was mostly dry sand punctuated by occasional rocks.
It was still dark, but she had little difficulty seeing her way. The pale moonlight overhead provided plenty of illumination for eyes long since adjusted to the inky darkness of the basement dungeon.
Someone—the cop, probably—was stumbling down the bank toward them, creating a mini avalanche of rocks and dirt that landed on Latisha as she raced past. Instead of breaking her stride, she kept right on running. She darted around a slight curve and then ducked into a small indentation in the bank where a second dry stream bed emptied into the larger one.
She had just made it to cover when bullets began to fly. She counted off the shots in her head—one, two, three, four, five, six. It wasn’t like the spray of automatic-weapons fire that you hear on TV. It was far more deliberate than that, with each shot followed by a distinct pause.
At first Latisha thought the Boss was firing the gun at her, but then she realized that wasn’t the case. He was shooting at the cop, and so she resumed running, picking her way around boulders, sticking close to the shelter of the bank.
At one point she stubbed her right big toe on a rock that turned out to be the same color as the sand. A jolt of pain shot through her body, spreading from the ingrown toenail and traveling up her leg, but Latisha kept on going. Her lungs burned. Long-disused muscles ached, but she kept running until her legs literally collapsed beneath her. She lay prone in the sand, gasping for breath, unable to move, and waiting for the kill shot she knew was coming. And since she was about to die, and since she’d been saying the prayer for months now, she did so again, whispering the words. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”
But then a car door slammed somewhere behind her and an engine started. Latisha sat up and looked back the way she’d come. The bank was somewhat lower here. She couldn’t see over it, but she could tell that the blue and red lights on top of the cop car were still flashing. They hadn’t moved. Meanwhile another set of headlights lit the nighttime sky as a moving vehicle executed a U-turn and sped off into the night—going back the same way Latisha had come, back toward the dungeon.
So had the Boss left her to live, then? Had he decided she wasn’t worth killing? If so, why? And where was the cop? He had come to help her—would have helped her. What had happened to him? If the Boss had been shooting at him, what if he’d hit him? What if he was dying? What if he was dead?
Never in her whole life had Latisha Marcum thought of herself as brave, but the months in the dungeon had changed her. Running away from the Boss tonight, driving off in his pickup, had been brave things to do. Hitting him in the balls had been brave as well. Chained to the wall, she’d been able to do nothing to help Amelia or Sandy or Sadie, but if the cop was wounded and in need of help, maybe it was time for her to be brave again.
Slowly, still breathing heavily and hoping against hope that the Boss really was gone, she got to her feet and started back downstream.