I’d like to keep her at my side.”
Danny hesitated only a moment, but when he did move, it seemed to be more out of something exchanged in his stare with the woman than in direct obedience to Josiah’s instruction. He leaned over the bed wall and tried to gather her up, but he was handling her gently, not getting a thing done.
“Go on and pull her out of there!” Josiah barked. “She ain’t that fragile, boy.”
Danny ignored him and went to the back of the truck and climbed in the bed to help her to her feet. As he did that, he pushed aside another tarp, glanced down to see what it had covered, and froze with his arms extended to the woman.
“Is that… dynamite?”
“Indeed,” Josiah said. “And it would take one squeeze of this trigger to blow the back of that truck into Martin County. Now you want to hurry up?”
Danny got her upright and down out of the truck then, used his pocket knife to cut the tape free from her feet at Josiah’s instructions, and then started down the trail. The woman was unsteady with her hands still bound, and he kept an arm on her to help with balance. They’d gotten well into the trees now, the vehicles out of sight, and were crossing over familiar ground, a path on which Josiah knew every root and stone. Trees were downed in every direction, some snapped in half, others torn free at their bases, leaning crazily against one another, but somehow many had stayed upright and largely intact. Even now they were tossing around in that freshening wind. Josiah couldn’t help but marvel a little as he watched them. Damn things didn’t seem so flexible on a normal day, appeared stiff as the boards they produced, but look at ’em whipping around now. Some would break; some just bend. All depended on the tree and the storm. Some would break and some just bend…
He’d gotten lost in the trees and didn’t see what Danny and the woman saw. Didn’t understand what was happening until the woman dropped to her knees in the middle of the trail, and when he turned to jerk her upright, he saw Danny was pointing ahead. He looked back down the trail.
Eric Shaw was coming up it.
57
CLAIRE.
Eric saw her before anything else, focused on her so much that for an instant he was unable to see the rest of the frame. The first thing that stood out was the tape: a bright shining silver X across her face. Then she dropped to her knees on the trail and the rest of the pieces clicked into understanding in his brain—Danny Hastings at her side, Josiah Bradford behind them with a gun in his hand. In that first moment, that first blink, they’d been insignificant pieces of scenery around his wife. Now they stepped forward and joined the cast and became significant as hell. Particularly the shotgun.
He’d left Kellen beside the gulf not five minutes earlier and begun the trek back up the hill, thinking that help was a few minutes away. His hands were shaking and his head throbbed but he’d told himself that he needed to think of Kellen, because Kellen needed help of the kind that could be found—normal, human help, different from that required by Eric. So he’d walked up the storm-ravaged slope, intent on finding rescue for Kellen, and now he was staring at his wife bound and gagged.
For a moment nobody moved or spoke. They all just froze there, looking back at one another, and then Eric started forward at a run, and Josiah Bradford’s face split into a grin and he lifted the shotgun and laid the barrel against the crown of Claire’s skull.
Eric stopped running.
“What are you doing?” he shouted. “What do you
“Only what’s owed to me,” Josiah said. His voice didn’t sound anything like it had two days ago. It seemed to have gained a deeper timbre, gained power. It was the voice of an old-time revival preacher, primed to stir the crowds into a frenzy.
“Take that gun away from—”
“You come on up here. Walk slow, but get closer. I don’t want to shout.”
He moved forward to join them.
Devastation. That was the word across the shortwave bands—reports coming in from around the area to Anne’s basement while she waited for the police. The tornado that had passed overhead while Josiah Bradford was still in her home had touched down just west of Orangeville and moved northeast into Orleans. Houses had been torn apart, cars overturned, utility poles ripped from the ground. At least two fires started in the aftermath. Highway 37 was closed between Orleans and Mitchell, keeping many rescue crews from reaching the scene.
A second tornado had touched down within minutes of the first, this one just to the southeast. It had flattened a group of trailers and then moved back into farmland, taking a cellular phone tower out in its path. Early estimates said that one had stayed on the ground for at least six miles.
She had no view of the sky from down in the cellar, but the spotters to the west were issuing frantic warnings that things were not done yet. The supercell was shifting and realigning and, they warned, possibly preparing to spit out another funnel cloud.
Tornado outbreaks generally spanned a wider area, sometimes putting up as many as forty or fifty or even a hundred tornadoes spread out across a wide, multistate region. To have a cluster outbreak like this, so many tornadoes in one county, was rare but not unprecedented. She remembered studying a similar event that occurred in Houston in the early nineties, when six tornadoes spawned from four separate storms hit one county over the course of about two hours. At one point, three of them were on the ground at the same time. Things like that could happen. You could never predict the behavior of a truly furious storm. All you could hope to do was see the warnings.
That was her role—to see the warnings and hope that people heeded them. She had frequencies for the security outfits with both the French Lick and West Baden hotels, and she contacted them immediately after finishing her initial conversation with the sheriff’s department, explained the threat, and suggested they post some guards at the property entrances. She couldn’t say whether they believed her, but she’d done what she could. She’d issued the warning.
Fifteen minutes after she’d made initial contact, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department dispatcher came back to Anne to report that a detective named Roger Brewer from the Indiana State Police had arrived at Josiah Bradford’s home.
And found it missing.
It appeared, the dispatcher said, as if the tornado had in fact touched down almost on top of Josiah’s house before beginning its path into Orleans.
“No sign of the truck?” Anne asked.
No sign of the truck. The state police were reaching out to the FBI for assistance—with every available unit out on storm-related calls, the kidnapping called for focused attention that the locals could not provide. But the nearest FBI contact was in Bloomington, which was a forty-five-minute drive in the best of conditions, and these weren’t the best of conditions. So there was one detective on the search.
One.
The dispatcher, who was talking to Anne with detached calm, which was of course part of the job but which was also frustrating beyond measure to someone trying to convey a sense of urgency, said that the detective was “making a sweep.” Then she told Anne that there were too many other emergency calls going on to prolong this one.
“He was headed toward his property,” Anne said. “Some area of woods near his property. Keep looking. And remember that he said his truck was full of—”
“I remember. I’ve advised our officers. They understand the threat.”
She couldn’t say what she knew to be true: that the storm and Josiah were linked, that something evil had
