on her forehead. She kept glancing around to make sure they were alone. She set the gun down on the hood so that she could secure Mattie in his safety seat in back. She worked quickly, but still took the time to kiss Mattie’s forehead once he was strapped in. “You’ve been so good,” she said.
“There he is!” Mattie declared excitedly. He pointed his Woody doll at something beyond the windshield. “There’s the soldier!”
Susan snatched the flare gun off the car’s hood, and she swiveled around in time to glimpse the man as he darted behind a tree at the edge of the forest—not far from the driveway.
“I see you!” Susan yelled, the anger rising up in her voice. “Who are you? Answer me!”
“Mommy?” Mattie cried.
“Stay there, honey.” She shut his door, but didn’t move away from it.
She could hear twigs snapping and the rustling of bushes. A figure scurried through the trees, but he wasn’t running away. She could tell; the sound wasn’t fading. He was just as close—only in a different spot. It was as if he were playing a game with her.
“Damn it, I’m going to fire this thing if you don’t speak up right now!” She had both hands on the gun now.
The bushes moved behind an old wooden rain barrel about twenty feet away—just past the driveway. “I see you there!” Susan screamed. She pulled the trigger and felt an electric-like jolt course through her hands and arms.
With a hiss, the flare left a tail of smoke in its path as it hit the rain barrel. The wooden barrel burst into flames, sending fiery splinters and cinders into the air. Susan heard a howl—as if the intruder might have been hurt or, at least, startled.
She quickly dug into her pocket and pulled out another flare cartridge. Her hands still tingled with reverberations from the blast. But she managed to pull out the spent cartridge and load another into the gun. All the while, she heard bushes rustling. The sound grew fainter, and she could tell he was running away.
Catching her breath, Susan stood guard by Mattie’s door, ready to fire again. Considering the blast and the inferno, she was pretty sure the guy was well on his way to the Canadian border by now.
She opened Mattie’s door, expecting her poor son to be traumatized. “Sweetie, it’s okay now—” she started to say.
“Do it again! Do it again, Mommy!” he cheered. His legs kicked at the back of the passenger seat, and he clapped his hands. Wide-eyed, he watched as flames engulfed the empty barrel and spread to the bush behind it.
“There will be no encore,” Susan muttered, shaking her head, “God willing.”
Shutting his door, she retreated from the car for a moment to retrieve the garden hose, on the same side of the house. Susan managed to douse the fire. All the while, she kept a lookout for the return of their uninvited visitor.
She was watching out for him on the way to Rosie’s Roadside Sundries, too. Checking her rearview mirror every few moments, she didn’t see any cars behind her. But as Susan got closer to the store, she saw an empty car pulled over to the side of Carroll Creek Road.
It was a dark green Honda Civic, the same car those teenagers had been driving yesterday. She remembered how that nice, handsome young man had acted a bit strange when she’d asked how to get to Twenty-two Birch.
He seemed to know the house very well.
Frowning, Susan took another long look at the empty car in her rearview mirror, until she took a curve in the road. Then she couldn’t see it anymore.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Jordan stopped running to glance over his shoulder. Between all the trees, he could see slivers of the road in the distance—and a car approaching. His lungs were burning as he gasped for air. Sweat rolled off him, and his clothes were soaked. The splattered orange juice had made the legs of his jeans sticky and itchy. Burrs clung to his socks.
He was accustomed to running several miles a day—but not in his street clothes, and not along a crude forest path. He’d had to navigate around fallen branches, rocks, divots, and tree roots. He already had a few scratches on his hands and forehead from brushes with low-hanging branches.
Jordan had just chalked up seven miles through the woods in less than forty minutes. Though he’d figured it would be okay to leave his car for a while along that lonely stretch of Carroll Creek Road, he didn’t want to push his luck. And forty minutes was pushing it.
Less than an hour ago, Jordan had hastily dumped Allen Meeker into the trunk of his BMW. The unconscious man’s cheek had been bloody from falling face-first onto the gravel. And under his wavy black and silver hair, he’d had a cut on his scalp where Jordan had hit him with the tire wrench, but it hadn’t bled much.
With Meeker in the trunk, Jordan had quickly finished changing the tire. He’d figured the old, abandoned Chemerica plant would be the best temporary spot to hide the BMW—and his captive.
Back in the sixties, the facility had been a government-subsidized lab. They’d even had some army personnel on staff. Jordan wasn’t sure exactly what they’d researched or manufactured there. Rumor was they’d been working on something top secret, related to chemical warfare or rockets—hence, the isolated location. At least, that was the story Jordan heard. Apparently, for a while, that part of Carroll Creek Road had seen a lot more traffic, and the deli stop, which was now Rosie’s, had done a brisk business. But by 1977, the army no longer needed whatever Chemerica Corporation provided for them, and the facility was shut down.
The government still owned the now-dilapidated two-story facility and the square mile of neglected land it sat on. A high rusty chain-link fence surrounded the property, and concrete barriers blocked the access drive off Carroll Creek Road. But Jordan—along with some resourceful locals—had found a remote dirt road that merged onto the Chemerica facility’s driveway. There was a lot to explore in the deserted forty-room building—if one could find a window that wasn’t completely boarded up. There were also five old bunkers to attract curious or horny teenagers in the mood for exploring. Yet despite evidence to the contrary—fast-food wrappers, beer cans, and pop bottles littered the Chemerica grounds—these instances of trespassing were few and far between. They were even rarer in daytime.
So Allen Meeker and his BMW would probably be safe—for the time being—at the Chemerica facility. Jordan parked Meeker’s car off an old driveway between the back of the building and a swamp.
There, he had more time to search the car. For someone who claimed to have driven up to Cullen with a four-year-old, Meeker had a pretty immaculate car, devoid of any toys or kids’ books. No child safety seat, no food wrappers, no empty juice boxes. Jordan checked the glove compartment. He discovered maps of Washington and Oregon, a BMW owner’s manual, a flier for Domino’s Pizza with coupons that had expired a year ago, and the vehicle registration. The guy’s name was Allen Meeker, all right.
Jordan verified this again when he checked on Meeker in the trunk. He found him still unconscious and still breathing. The driver’s license in his wallet reconfirmed the name:
Jordan couldn’t tell much about him from the wallet. Nor could he find anything in his pockets. He took Allen Meeker’s jacket and tied up his ankles with it. Then he used some twine already in the trunk to bind his hands behind him. Taking a handkerchief from Meeker’s pocket, Jordan stuffed it in his captive’s mouth. Meeker barely stirred through any of this.
But just before Jordan shut the trunk, Allen’s eyes had fluttered open. Past the gag, he’d let out a muffled moan—a pathetic, panicked sound.
Jordan had slammed the BMW’s trunk shut.
And then he’d started running.
