“You’ve got spies all over town, is what you’re saying.”

“He’s not worth your time, Luke.”

“He beat up a woman.”

“If that’s true, he’ll be dealt with. Just not by you.”

For a second, Luke feels a surge of relief. Cole Graydon can deal with people far more effectively than any member of the Altamira Sheriff’s Department ever could, usually with private armies of mercenaries and surveillance technology that puts the most paranoid conspiracy theorists to shame.

Who knows? Maybe the punishment Cole’s got planned for Jordy’s going to be way too severe. But Luke doubts it. What he hears is the powerful protecting the son of someone slightly less powerful, someone he might have made a special backroom deal with to get the tunnel project underway.

“Luke?”

“OK.”

“Good. Take care.”

Cole hangs up, and the next thing he knows he’s settling back into the chair in front of Mona’s desk while she studies him with as much energy as she can muster, which isn’t much.

“Luke . . . ?”

“Charley’s coming home soon.”

“Oh, good. Where’s she been?”

“Visiting family.”

“Not her father.”

“No, never.”

“I didn’t think she had much family left.”

“Some cousins . . . aunts,” Luke lies.

Mona nods. Luke nods.

“Luke?”

“Yeah?”

“Jordy . . .”

“I know,” Luke says, more to himself than to her. “We have to let him go.”

She feels the wind first.

It’s colder than any she’s ever felt in town. Then she feels the dull throb of the injuries covering her battered face. There’s a new sensation there, not as deep and painful as the others. When she tries to open her eyes, she learns the source—she’s been blindfolded.

Now that she’s aware she can’t see, her body is in a rush to make sense of her surroundings using her other senses.

A length of something—she figures rope—ties her wrists against her back. She can’t be sure the same rope is what’s securing her ankles together. But there’s something else of which she’s becoming gradually but sickeningly sure.

She’s upside down.

Her hair’s been tied back; otherwise she would have realized this right away, but her postnasal drip’s running backward, making fire in the back of her throat, and her upper jaw’s going sore from hanging at an unusual angle.

The cold, persistent wind grazing her body from inverted head to toe suggests she’s inside some sort of vast outdoor space. Now she remembers the mad rush back to her trailer after the asshole cop threatened her. She remembers throwing open the door, already planning in her mind what she would grab and what she would leave behind. Then the darkness inside seemed to grab her, and that’s when she realized, too late, that one of them had been waiting for her. Maybe they knew what she’d found, or maybe the other cop, the one who seemed to believe her, had made too much noise.

As soon as she put some distance between her and Altamira, she would have called him, told him about the gift she’d left him. That had been the plan. But she’d always been good at making plans, bad at keeping them.

And now, here she is.

Maybe they’re trying to tell her they know about her fall. She wouldn’t be surprised if they’d brought her back to the same spot. It was isolated as hell. When she’d gone to visit the place, she hadn’t calculated the right time for sunset. The spot was on the eastern side of the mountain, which meant the place lost its good light well before dusk, and she’d found herself lost in shadows quicker than she’d expected. That’s why she’d tripped and almost somersaulted to her death.

There’s a sharp crack off to her right.

It takes her a second to identify the sound.

At first, she thinks maybe it’s a snapping stick. But it’s too resonant.

It echoes.

And then there’s another sound just like it. Farther away.

Farther down.

Farther below.

The sound repeats, and repeats, as the rock bounces down into what sounds like a chasm that travels to the center of the goddamn earth.

Of course, she thinks, fighting a sob. Of course they’d try to break me like this.

When they’d all moved to Altamira, they’d driven her over that back road just up the coast because they said the views were beautiful, but it was barely two lanes wide, made of dirt, and there were no guardrails. The drops to one side were so steep she’d actually started screaming in the back seat and begging them to turn around. She’d always been afraid of heights, ever since she was a little girl and her dad took her on the gondola that traveled up the side of the mountain next to Palm Springs. At least her dad had allowed her to shield her face against his chest. But the men who drove her over that twisting mountain road had only laughed at her tears, joked about how they’d take her over the road on a motorcycle so she could really get a sense of its twists and turns. And she’d been forced to cover her head in the back seat and breathe as deeply as she could, imagining she was someplace else, someplace with level roads and better, kinder men.