Nineteen

We had just sorted out who was sitting where and in which vehicle when a fully dressed Chloe came shuffling out of the hospital with an agitated Gage holding her up on one side and Olivia hovering by the other.

“Babe,” Gage pleaded when she reached the truck. “Please. Go back inside. They weren’t ready to discharge you.”

“I’m not letting Simi go on a car-chase heist without me,” she grumbled. “Deal with it.”

“Simi…” Gage tried to cut her off, moving in front of the passenger door. “Do something.”

Even I didn’t want Chloe coming with us. She was still pale, with dark circles under her eyes and a bandage around her head, but I knew my bestie, and when she had that fierce determination on her face, nothing was going to get in her way.

“Where would you like to sit?” I asked her.

“In the back beside the window so I can rest my head.” She skirted around Gage, climbed into the truck, and screamed.

“It’s okay,” I called out. “It’s Simone. She’s wearing a ski mask.”

Emma leaned into the truck. “I screamed, too, but because it was Gucci 2018 and not the new collection.”

“Simone, I’m afraid you’ll have to sit this one out,” I said gently. “I need Chloe and her hacking skills, and we’ve only got six seats.”

A dejected Simone pulled off her ski mask and climbed out of the truck. “I have to miss out on all the fun.”

“It’s not going to be fun,” I said. “It’s going to be dangerous and stressful, and we may not even recover the diamond, in which case, we’re going to need to disappear for a bit. We also need a point person here in the city in case something comes up. And Vera needs you. This must be an incredibly difficult time for her.”

“She did ask me to stay with her tonight.” Simone sighed. “She wants to watch Thelma & Louise. It’s her favorite movie. She said she’s seen it sixteen times.”

“It’s a wonderful film.” Rose had made me watch the 1990s film about two best friends who set out on an adventure that becomes a flight from the law when one of them kills the man who tried to assault her friend.

“Do you want my mask?” She offered me the neatly folded bundle.

“No, you should keep it. Who knows when you might need it again.”

“We need to split up between the two vehicles,” Jack said. “I don’t trust Clare and her team, so one of us should go with them and one of them should go with us.”

“That hurts,” Clare said. “I’ve been nothing but honest since this started.”

“You stole the Wild Heart and ratted us out to the mob and then blackmailed us into doing a heist,” I said. “ ‘Honest’ is not a word I’d use to describe you.”

“Is this going to be like middle school where each side picks the people they want on their team?” Anil asked. “I was always picked last, so this time I’ll volunteer to go with Clare. She has a good side. You just haven’t given her a chance.”

“That’s sweet, hon.” She gave him a smile that made my toes curl, and not in a good way.

“Three pizza dogs coming back to Earth.” Emma bent over. “I’m gonna hurl.”

“Vito can go with you,” Clare said.

“I was going to pick Milan,” I said, thinking of how she’d come to the hospital to check on Chloe and how she’d tipped us off about the trucking company.

Clare shook her head. “I need her with me.”

We decided to put all Jack’s stuff in the truck camper so Chloe, Gage, and Vito could ride in the back of the cab and Jack, Emma, and I could ride up front. Simone offered to take Olivia to her grandparents’ house to spend the night, soothing Olivia’s ruffled feathers by promising to take her to a fast-food drive-through in her Bentley.

After we’d seen them off, we hit the road. Clare raced ahead of us through the city, weaving in and out of traffic until she disappeared in a blur of gray. Milan sent us mocking texts for the next few hours that did nothing to settle the already fraught atmosphere in the back of the truck.

“Can’t this bag of bolts go any faster?” Emma thumped the dashboard as we approached Toledo. “How are we supposed to catch up when we’re weighed down by one thousand tons of gear?”

“We watched your show last time,” Chloe said when Vito pulled up The Towering Inferno on the tablet Lou had left for us. “How about a rom-com? Something light and fun to bring up the mood.”

Vito snorted. “I can’t believe you watch that mindless crap.”

Without warning, Gage ripped the tablet out of Vito’s hand. “Chloe likes rom-coms, so you don’t say shit about them.”

“Gage took the tablet,” Vito called out. “I was about to watch a show.”

“The kids are fighting again,” I said to Jack. “Maybe traveling together wasn’t such a good idea.”

We made good time, stopping only twice for gas and a restroom break. Emma and Gage, who both had experience driving large vehicles, offered to take over driving, but Jack insisted he wasn’t tired even though I caught him yawning on more than one occasion. We finally met up with Clare’s vehicle outside the warehouse in Barkeyville, arriving just as the sun began to rise.

“We’ve already been inside,” she said. “Security wasn’t very tight. There was no cell receiver, so Anil was able to cut the telephone line and deactivate the cameras and sensors and we walked right in. We couldn’t find the truck, so we decided to open the shipping containers to see if the boxes had already been loaded. So far, no luck.”

“If you’d just waited, I could have hacked into their system and told you where the goods are,” Chloe snapped. “Now they’ll know there was a break-in. You’d better hope you didn’t miss a single camera. You also took a terrible risk because some companies put security sensors inside the containers. They send out a silent alarm when the door has been opened. The police might just be on their way.”

“Since when did you become an expert on shipping containers?” Jack asked.

“I had to do something during that long drive. I couldn’t sleep with Vito and Emma fighting. I’ll go inside and check it out.”

Chloe returned from the office twenty minutes later with bad news. “The truck had some mechanical problems outside Youngstown, Ohio. They made their way to the nearest freight-forwarding trucking company, which took the goods and consolidated them with one of their own shipments. The Youngstown company sent an e-mail confirming the container number and advising that their truck was scheduled to leave this morning at six a.m. They should be arriving in New York midafternoon.”

“We just missed them,” Anil said. “Maybe we could catch up and break into the truck when they’re at a rest stop.”

“It’s going to be pretty hard to find them on the interstate when all we’ve got to go by is a number stamped on the back of a shipping container,” I said. “Do you know how many trucks are on the road?” I slumped in my seat, exhausted and utterly dejected. Why couldn’t we catch a break?

“We can find it. Don’t give up. It will be like the games my parents played with me on long road trips,” Anil said, smiling. “Five points for the first one to spot a semitrailer truck and twenty points for taking a picture of the container number. Winner gets a candy bar.”

“A candy bar?” Emma sniffed. “That’s what you got as a prize when you were a kid? In my family, you’d get a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of rum, and if you were under twenty-one, you’d have to hand them over to the folks.”

“It wasn’t just when I was a kid,” Anil said. “But now that I’m an adult, the candy bars are giant-size.”

“I’ll play for a giant-size bottle of rum.” Emma raised her hand for a round of high fives. “Come on, guys. Get your game on. It’s not over yet.”

---

We’d been on the road no more than three hours before we got a message from Milan in Clare’s Elantra. They were about thirty miles ahead of us and the police had closed the 80 East due to a crash involving a propane tanker, a water tanker, and a box truck. There would be at least a three-hour wait until the road was cleared for traffic.

“They’ll almost be in New York by then,” Chloe said as we neared a bridge. “We’ll lose our chance to intercept them.”

“No, we won’t.” Jack yanked the wheel and turned off the highway onto a dirt service road leading down a steep hill into the forest.

“Stop. What are you doing?” I braced myself as the truck skidded on the gravel while we drove under the bridge.

“I know a shortcut.”

“What shortcut? How would you know about a shortcut in the middle of the woods in Pennsylvania? Go back up to the road or we’ll get lost.”

“I can’t.” Jack grinned. “It’s one-way.”

“There are no other cars down here and it’s a dirt service road. No one is going to give you a ticket if you turn around.”

“The shortcut will give us a better chance of catching up with them,” Jack insisted. “I was traveling with some guys a while back and I’m pretty sure there was a logging road that bypasses the I-80 and takes us all the way to Bloomsburg. There’s a map in the glove compartment.”

“We have phones. Why do we need a map? I didn’t even know they made them anymore.” I pulled out the worn map, unfolded it, and was immediately engulfed in paper. “I don’t know how to use this thing.”

“There might not be any service in the backcountry, so you need to figure it out,” he said. “I’ll need a navigator. My entire focus has to be on the road. It’s a challenging drive.”

“I don’t like that word, Jack.”

“What word? Challenging?”

“Backcountry. We’re not backcountry folk. We’re front country. City people. I don’t want to wind up in a Deliverance situation.”

Vito leaned forward. “What’s Deliverance?”

“It’s a 1972 American thriller film about a bunch of city guys who get lost in the backcountry and fall afoul of the locals,” Emma said. “If Anil cried at Finding Nemo, he would shit himself at Deliverance.”

“Could we keep our language clean, please?” Chloe asked. “Just because we’re off-roading, there’s no need to be crude.”

“How about defecate?” Emma asked. “Or poo? Vito needs to understand what we’re about to face, and his likely physical response.”

“We’re not going to encounter any inbred mountain men in the Appalachians,” Jack said. “No one uses these roads anymore. There’s nothing out here. No cabins or service boxes or houses. No highway markers, electricity poles, or cell towers. Nothing. Just flora, fauna, and the logging trail.”

“Now it’s a trail?” My voice rose in pitch. “I didn’t sign up for off-roading on a trail in the middle of the wilderness. It’s not me.”

“I thought you were a survivalist,” Jack retorted. “Or was all that stuff you told our architect a lie?”

“Why do you two have an architect?” Emma asked. “Did someone get married and buy a house and forget to tell the rest of us? Is Simi pregnant?” She covered her mouth and gasped. “Was it a shotgun wedding?”

“No one is married or pregnant,” I snapped. “And I didn’t lie about my survival skills, but I didn’t expect to have to use them for real.”

“Pull over so I can get my bag of guns.” Gage leaned over the seat. “Three or four ought to do it.”

I turned and glared. “I told you this is a ‘no guns’ heist.”

“Actually, you changed your mind and said it was a ‘yes guns’ heist so you could shoot Clare,” Jack pointed out.

Vito scowled. “You’ll have to go through me if you’re planning to shoot Clare, and FYI, you won’t survive no matter how good your skills.”

“Relax. I retracted that statement when I came up with a plan.”

“You didn’t say it was a ‘no guns’ car chase, or a ‘no guns’ trip into the backcountry,” Gage said. “This is definitely a ‘yes guns’ scenario. Who knows what we’ll encounter up there? Bears, wolves, cougars, serial killers…I promise not to say ‘I told you so’ when it turns out we needed them after all.”

Jack pulled to a stop beside a battered pickup truck parked in a small clearing half in and half out of the bush. He checked his GPS while Gage retrieved his bag of guns from the truck camper.

“Jack…” I poked him in the side. “There’s a guy watching us from the bushes. I don’t think we’re supposed to be here. Let’s go back to the interstate.”

Instead of doing the sensible thing and listening to me, Jack rolled down his window and called out a greeting. Moments later a man dressed in full camouflage with a bag slung across his front and a rifle across his back was walking toward us. Gage stiffened, his hand reaching under his jacket.

“Why did we get your bag of guns when you’ve already got one with you?” I asked.

“Been working with Jack for a while now,” Gage said. “I’ve learned from my mistakes.”

“Are you looking for mushrooms?” The man’s forehead creased in a frown. “This is my patch.”

“Oh God. He’s a drug dealer.” I slumped down in my seat. “We’re all going to die.”

“We’re trying to bypass the roadblock,” Jack said. “I was pretty sure there was a logging road around here that leads to Bloomsburg.”

“Yeah, it’s that way.” Camo Man pointed to a roughly hewn trail barely wide enough for a vehicle that led into the forest. “I thought you were after the chanterelles. Best season ever.” He opened the bag slung across his body to show us his fungi. “I’ve been picking here for two days now.”

Jack tipped his chin. “We won’t get in your way.”

“The logging road is pretty rough going,” Camo Man said. “Pretty isolated, too, if you get into trouble. No cell service after the first mile. You sure you want to take that truck through the woods?”

“This baby can handle anything.” Jack patted the steering wheel. “It was made for this kind of off-roading. It’ll be a blast.”

I sent my parents a text to tell them I loved them and to give Nani a kiss for me, and to tell Nikhil that I was the one who broke the drone he got for his sixteenth birthday, and to tell the twins there was some part of me that loved them even though they’d made my life a living hell.

Then I prayed.