Bryan sighed. “You’re right.”
“I know.” Taran looked at Mauro. “Speaking of rednecks. We still planning on surprising the two local cops?”
“Yes. They’re as crooked and lazy as anything you’ve seen in a movie. I don’t want them trying to warn Hedges. ’Course, once we tell them he’s running around with werewolves, they might be happy to give him up.”
Taran made some notes. “We split up and put a couple of guys at different spots around town. Tracking the GPS is great, but we’ll hit Luxor before he does, and if we’re waiting for him…”
“Good idea,” Mauro replied, “but how do we know where to put people?”
Bryan shrugged. “There aren’t that many places to choose from. The old lady’s house, Wayne’s house, maybe Café Caddo if he decides it’s safer to meet in a public place. Besides, it’s not like Luxor takes up that much room. Wherever he goes, if we’ve got three or four cars, someone can get to him in minutes.”
“Good,” said Taran with a curt nod. “Because that’s all it’ll take for the wolves to grab her and run.”
Somewhere around Nacogdoches, she had to pee. It was the first time they’d spoken in over an hour.
“Hell no. Hold it ’til we get home.”
“Wayne, that’s another hour! I can’t make it.” And she couldn’t call Bryan unless she got away from the scumbag for a minute.
“I’m on a schedule. I’m not stopping.”
“Damn it, Wayne! In a couple hours I’m gonna get shipped off to a whorehouse for wolves who like to change while they’re screwing! You’re turning me over to get killed!” He winced, though whether from guilt or from the pitch of her shrieking, she couldn’t tell and didn’t care. “The least you can do is stop and let me pee!”
She got no answer, but when a rest stop came into view a few minutes later, Wayne pulled off the highway.
He came around to uncuff her and waited, pistol in hand, as she climbed out and shook her legs awake.
“Okay, go. Hurry up.”
The gun poked her spine all the way to the restroom.
“I’ll be right here when you get out. Don’t try to pull anything stupid. I
will
shoot you, Sara.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” she muttered. She’d have to whisper on the phone and hope he didn’t hear her.
The foul bathroom contained no window, no second door, nothing to use as an improvised weapon. So she peed, and then she called Bryan’s cell phone.
It went straight to voicemail.
“Bryan?” she whispered. “Bryan, it’s me. I’m with Wayne, and he’s taking me back to Luxor. He’s got a gun, and— And he shot TJ, and I don’t know if— God, don’t call me.
Don’t call me,
understand? I don’t want him to know I have—”
“Sara!” Wayne pounded on the door. “Get your ass out here!”
“I don’t want him to know I’ve got the phone and I don’t have time to call 911, so just—”
“Sara! I said get the fuck out here!”
“I have to go.”
She hit
end
, turned all sounds off, and dropped the phone back into her pocket. Taking a second to put her game face back on, she walked out of the restroom and straight into Wayne.
“I was about to come in there and shoot your ass!”
“I don’t think your buddies would’ve appreciated that, Wayne.”
“
Get back in the fuckin’ car!
”
He looked ready to explode. Fortunately there were no other people around. The whites of his eyes showed all around his eyeballs, the right one twitching spasmodically. His head kept jerking side to side like something was catching his attention, but there was no one and nothing to warrant the reaction. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in days, and she knew he hadn’t slept. It wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge. She didn’t want another innocent person getting hurt on her account.
Sara refused to believe TJ was dead, but she was past worrying about her own life. She’d find some way to get herself killed before she’d let herself be handed over. Since she still had no brilliant ideas for escape, suicide was starting to look like a safe bet.
Wayne shoved her back in the car and cuffed her left wrist to the glove compartment again. Then they were back on the road.
It had seemed to take an eternity from when they’d found TJ and realized Sara was gone to when the plane lifted off from Houston. Bryan had prowled Nick’s office, then the station where Taran worked, and finally the airport hangar, all the while obsessing over everything Wayne could have been doing to Sara at any moment.
But once they landed at Harrison County Airport in Marshall, thank God, things moved quickly.
The four FBI wolves were waiting with three nondescript rental cars. After a short discussion, the group split up. Two of the agents went to Café Caddo on the off chance Wayne Hedges would head there.
The other two accompanied Mauro to the police station to meet Chief Rice and his deputy. The cops had likely never met werewolves before. With Mauro as the Designated Human, they might be inclined to cooperate willingly. If not, the agents would put the fear of werewolves and federal prison into the crooked cops.
Taran and Bryan pulled out onto Highway 43, headed for Old Lady Hedges’s house.
She passed the miles between Nacogdoches and Luxor in a weird, hazy funk, struggling to come up with an escape plan. Her thoughts chased each other around and around in useless circles until her brain locked up. All she could think of was TJ’s body in the hallway, and the countless, all-too-imaginable things the werewolves would do to her. She couldn’t even think how to kill herself. The miles flew by while she sank deeper into lethargic despair.
Then Wayne broke the spell by putting the gun down on the seat between his legs and pulling out his phone.
She watched as he punched in a number with a Shreveport area code. He nearly missed the turn off 43 onto the gravel road. She grabbed the glove compartment handle with her free hand as the car fishtailed in the gravel.
“Yeah. It’s me. I’ve got her and I’ll meet you at my— Huh? What? Wait, you— But— Goddamn it, you can’t do that! Now you—”
Whatever the person on the other end was saying, it had Wayne turning several shades of red and purple as he sputtered and hollered into the phone.
“You can’t fucking do this to me! I got her just like you told me to! I need the— Hello? Wait, don’t— Hello?
Hello?
FUCK!”
The car swerved and fishtailed some more as Wayne, shouting and cursing, slammed the tiny phone into the dashboard a couple of times before hurling it over his shoulder. It shattered against the back windshield.
“Problem, Wayne? Your new werewolf homies decide to do an acquisition instead of a merger?”
“Shut up,” he snarled.
She shouldn’t have used a four-syllable word on him.
“Shut up!” he yelled again, though she hadn’t said anything else. “You shut the fuck up! I need to think!”
His heart lurched when they reached the end of the gravel road and he saw Sara’s Miata sitting in front of the old lady’s house. Yellow crime scene tape stretched across the front door, but nothing else would have indicated that anything unusual went down here just four days ago.
“Okay, now what?” he asked as Taran parked the car behind the trailer.
“What’s the GPS showing?” Taran asked in reply.
He’d turned the phone back on when they touched down. His heart had stopped when he saw the voicemail from Sara. Then it had started pounding out of his chest when he listened to the message and heard the fear in her voice.
He’d been logged on to the GPS site ever since. Glancing once more at the comforting yellow dot still blinking its way up Highway 43, he said to Taran, “They’re close.”
“So now we wait.”
“They’re pulling out! The sumbitches are leaving! Thanks to your boyfriend, the Feds are all over the place. All of a sudden, every small-town cop from here to Mississippi is making drug busts! They said it’s too
dangerous!
They were supposed to be tough shit bad guys! I gave the assholes all my contacts, all my customers. I told my guys we hit the jackpot—we’d be moving into Missouri, and Oklahoma, and, and,
shit!
” He pounded on the steering wheel. Blood started to seep through the bandage on his right hand.
“Wayne! Wayne, calm down, it’ll be okay. Let’s forget the whole thing. I’ll get my car from Grandma’s, go back to Houston, and you can—”
“Forget? Forget what? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Just walk away, Wayne. Let me go, and I swear I’ll disappear. You’ll never hear from me again, and we can pretend this never happened, okay? Please, Wayne?”
He stared at her, glassy-eyed and shiny-faced with rage, as he made the last turn. Once more she grabbed the glove compartment handle as he swung wide, tires sliding through the gravel.
“Go? Where am I supposed to go?”
“Anywhere! You know how big the world is? You don’t have to stay in Luxor. If you let me go, you can—”
“I can’t leave!”
“Of course you can! Take all your money and get lost.”
“They’ll track me down, Sara!”
“Why? You said they were pulling—”
“Not the Russians—the cops! I told Bud Rice he’d be set for life, I could pay him twice what I’d been giving him. That’s the only reason he hasn’t charged me with murder. They think I killed Mama and Jasper!”
“Well, you kind of did, didn’t you?”
“SHUT UP!”
Flecks of spittle flew in her face, followed by a vicious backhand. She heard and felt a sickening, squishy crunch as Wayne’s knuckles connected with her nose.
He threw the car into park. Her head snapped forward, then slammed back. Limp and dizzy, she passed out.
Chapter Eleven
“Where are they?” Bryan muttered as he paced the grassy circle in front of the house. “Hedges is still headed toward us, so where are the wolves? Why’s he headed back here, with her, if he’s not meeting the wolves?”
They both froze as they heard a car turn onto the gravel road. Taran ran to take up position on the south side of the house, where he could see the car as it drove up but wouldn’t be seen himself. Bryan staked the same position on the north side and pointed his pistol at the ground. He flipped the safety off and tensed as he waited.
When she came to a second later, blood was flowing from her nose and the gun was poking her in the cheek. Wayne pushed it into her face until her head was pressed against the window, cold glass on one side, cold barrel on the other. Between the taste of blood at the back of her throat and Wayne’s hot, wet, raspy breath on her face, she couldn’t decide whether to puke or gag.
“You fucked up my life, Sara.”
“I hate the way you breathe.”
Where did that come from?
She glanced sideways to see him blinking at her in confusion, his whole fat face scrunching up each time his piggy little eyes opened and shut, opened and shut.
“Huh?”
The way he said it, slack-jawed and wheezing, snapped her last nerve.
It would’ve been one thing to die at the hands of evil werewolves. But to start a brand new life, a life that might be better than anything she’d had before, only to lose it to this brutal, stupid, mouth-breathing slug of a bubba who’d tormented her for fourteen years…
She watched her free hand come up to grab his wrist and wrench it away from her head. Had she always been able to move that fast? His tiny eyes widened with shock as she banged his hand against the dashboard. The gun clattered to the floor by her feet.
“I said, I
hate
the way you
breathe
. And the way you blink, and the way you talk. You’re stupid and lazy and you look like a pig, and— And—” She dropped his arm and ran her sleeve across her nose. “And your clothes are ugly, and no woman would ever—
ever—
fuck you for free, and you got blood and snot on my one hundred dollar T-shirt, you mouth-breathing, nose-picking, knuckle-dragging, bargain-basement-hooker-fucking pussy!”
He slapped her.
Twisting like a corkscrew to reach him, she landed a hard right jab on his nose. She yowled with pain—it
hurt
to punch someone in the nose—but Wayne started wailing like a girl. The middle of his face was a bloody, pulpy mess, much worse than hers.
Now that she’d hurt him, she was like a wild animal at the first scent of its prey’s blood.
“Aw, did I hurt the poor thing? Are you gonna cry now? I’ll give you something to cry about, you whiny little
bitch
!”
Grabbing a fistful of his hair, she banged his head into the steering wheel. He tore at his seatbelt as he hollered, scratching and clawing at the door handle until it gave. Then he tumbled into the gravel beside the car, leaving her clutching a few strands of greasy brown hair.
“Come back here, you fucking asshole!
Get the fuck back here!
”
She jerked her left arm until it felt as if her shoulder would pop out of its socket. The cuff held. Wayne was running away while she kicked and screamed, trapped in the car.
Cursing a blue streak, using words she’d never uttered before and some she’d only read, she reached down to the floorboard (banging her head against the glove compartment, which prompted a fresh round of profanity) and picked up the gun.
She leaned toward the open door and aimed for Wayne’s doublewide ass as it jiggled slowly toward the trees. The bullet missed him by a mile.
A frustrated, multi-octave, throat-stripping wail of rage poured out of her. Yanking and flailing her left arm like a creature possessed, she punched herself in the face with her fist.
Her left fist.
She was free. Free to find her car and get the hell out of Luxor, this time for good.
Right after she killed her uncle.
When he heard Sara scream, he took off down the gravel road, Taran right behind him.
“Slow down, wolf! Get back here! We need to have a plan!”
“Fuck the plan—she’s in trouble!”
A gunshot boomed. Taran let him go.
She squeezed off a couple rounds, but it wasn’t easy to fire while running, especially in cowboy boots. She just kept doing it because she liked to see him jump and squeal like a pig every time she fired a shot.