“What are you doing?”
“Letting you stretch your legs.”
It wasn’t much of an improvement, but there wasn’t anything she could do about that. Avery marched along with him back and forth, her head at an awkward angle, his fingers pulling her hair.
Her updo was toast. Her wedding dress wrinkled. Full of crumbs.
She might be dead before the night was over.
Desperation dried her throat and thickened her tongue. She wanted Walker’s arms around her. Wanted him to tell her it would all be all right.
She yelped when Mr. Smith tossed her back on the bed.
“Tie her wrists in front of her this time.”
Owen did as he was told, but Avery was ready for him and braced against his strength. When he finished tying her hands, there was a little slack. Not much but enough to give her hope. Something to work on. He nudged her over on the bed and sat beside her, weapon at the ready. It was a Glock, too, she noticed. Had he and Mr. Smith bought matching guns?
How sweet.
“Don’t even think about doing something stupid,” he said.
She was definitely thinking about doing something stupid.
Mr. Smith took out his phone again. Tapped the screen and held it to his ear. “Well?” he demanded.
“Look!” Owen pointed at the television. Avery’s breath whooshed out in a rush. She could easily identify the woman who’d just taken her seat in front of the room full of senators.
Elizabeth.
“Is that your phone?” Boone asked.
Walker didn’t know how long they’d been driving or what he was looking for. He doubted Avery’s captors would be hauling her around the streets of Chance Creek at this time of night. He simply didn’t know what else to do.
Walker answered the call.
“Well?” a man demanded.
In the background, Walker heard another man say, “Look! That’s her—she’s testifying!”
Testifying? Did he mean Elizabeth?
If so, they’d run out of time.
A crash of noise made Walker wince, and it took him a second to realize it had happened on the other end of the line. The caller swore a string of curses, and there was the sound of a door opening and a change in audio quality that suggested he’d changed location—maybe stepped outside. A burst of music blared in the distance and then dimmed, as if someone near the caller had opened another door and shut it.
Opened a door. Shut it.
Walker tried to parse the sound in his mind. That music hadn’t been close enough to be in the same building as the caller. It was as if the sound had come from down the road. Like someone in the distance had walked into an establishment that was blaring music on the inside.
Where had he heard music like that?
He covered the phone with his hand, juggling it against the steering wheel, trying not to lose control of the truck. “The Dancing Boot. They’re near the Boot!” he hissed at Boone.
“Like in the motel? The Evergreen? People already checked there.”
“I don’t know.” He lifted the phone to his ear again. “Hold on. We’ve got a plan!” He hung up and tossed the phone to Boone.
Let Mr. Smith think he meant a plan to stop Elizabeth.
He’d find out he was wrong soon enough.
Elizabeth was good at her job, Avery had to admit. The presentation she’d prepared showed step by step how opening the Renning field in Alaska to oil drilling and letting the Lawrence Oil project get underway would help push global greenhouse emissions over a cliff in a way that could not be reversed. She didn’t get mired in numbers and graphs; instead the images that flashed on the screen behind her showed the cost in photos of current environmental devastation, with overlaid projections of how much worse those natural and humanmade disasters would become in the future if even more drilling was allowed to happen.
With every sentence Elizabeth spoke, however, Avery knew her own time on earth was growing shorter. Her captors seemed mesmerized by the scene on the television screen, pinned to it as if they thought the people at Base Camp had somehow arranged for a band of rogues to burst into the senatorial chamber and carry Elizabeth off midsentence.
Avery worked at the rope that bound her wrists as quietly as she could. She’d opened her mouth to yell at the phone and tell Walker exactly where they were, but Owen must have expected something like that. He’d lunged at her, slapped a hand over her mouth and kicked over the bedside table in the process. Before she could recover, Mr. Smith was out of the bedroom and onto the balcony, where he stayed until he’d completed his phone call. Owen checked the binding on her wrists and trussed up her ankles, swearing all the while.
“We don’t have much time left,” Elizabeth said on-screen. “The clock is ticking down if we want to save ourselves.”
Don’t I know it? Avery shut her eyes and sent up a prayer.
She’d already missed her wedding.
She didn’t want to die.
Chapter Twelve
‡
“Fuck!”
Walker spared a glance at Boone.
“It’s Montague—he’s at Base Camp, and no one’s there to stop him.”
Walker stayed focused. A glance at the clock a minute ago had told him they were running out of time in more ways than one. All the delays at the hearing had sent it into the wee hours in Washington, DC, time. It was nearly eleven thirty here in Chance Creek. Elizabeth was wrapping up her testimony. Avery’s captors would have to admit defeat and deal with her one way or another. He could only hope that killing her would serve no purpose to them, so they’d simply leave her behind, but he knew he couldn’t count on that.
“Looks like he’s about to bulldoze everything we’ve built.”
Walker spared another glance his way and saw a live feed of Base Camp playing on Boone’s phone. There was the bunkhouse surrounded by the crew’s bright lights. There were the nearby tiny houses. Something was moving in front of them.
Something big.
He glanced over
