“We put everything that’s for killing in one of the trucks and we go. Now. Get her out of the pit!”

Without another word of protest, her boys get to work. The boys she has left anyway.

Zoey can barely make out the words. But the terror in the crazy old woman’s voice has stirred something in her she was on the verge of losing.

Hope.

Then the ladder drops down into the pit once more and down it come two men, her abductor and one she doesn’t recognize. Both descend with a determination that brings the chill of dread back to every bone in her body. And the one she doesn’t recognize is holding something strange. At first, she thinks it might be another hideous contraption like what they gagged her with. But it’s more ordinary than that.

It’s the harness they used to lower her into this pit. No sooner has she noticed it than the man she’s never seen before is putting her blindfold back in place.

A few yards from the entrance to the ranch Cyrus Mattingly directed them to, Charlotte sees something in the truck’s headlights: deep, fresh tire tracks cutting through the last section of the ranch’s dirt road before vanishing into the blacktop of the road they’re traveling. She thinks she can see which direction they headed, but she’s not sure.

She cries out for Luke to stop and he does, but she’s jumped from the passenger-side door before the truck stops moving, and the run of skipping steps she takes as soon as her feet hit the road would probably have broken the ankles of a normal person.

Behind her, the truck groans to a halt, brakes squealing, as she bends down and studies the tire tracks in the headlights.

Luke starts toward her, Glock out, shooting glances up the dark road. There’s a gentle swell in the earth that keeps the ranch house hidden from here, and if Mattingly told the truth about everything, it’s a good ways up the dirt road.

“They ran,” Charlotte says.

“Canadian River’s that way,” Luke says.

By the time she’d made her way up to his wrists, Mattingly told them that if Mother and his brothers made a run for it, they’d probably use back roads heading north of the property, through the isolated landscape where a few creeks intersect with the Canadian River’s east–west passage above town. The reform school where she’d first recruited all three boys had been close to this area before it burned down, and all the boys have experience hiking and horseback riding through its small, dusty canyons. None of the canyons are very deep, but they were the few hiding places amid a landscape that was mostly flat.

“Is it one truck or two?” Luke asks.

“Looks like one.”

“Go.”

“What?”

“Take the truck and go. See if you can catch up with them. I’ll check out the ranch.”

“Isn’t this the part in the horror movie where everyone splits up and the audience screams?”

“In the horror movie, the hero can’t break the killer’s neck with one hand. Go, Charley. If they ran, they ran with those women. No chance they’ll leave them behind so they can tell everything they know.”

“And if they did?”

“That’s why I’m going to secure the ranch.”

“Luke . . .”

“Charley, take the truck and go. Give it thirty minutes. If you don’t catch up with them, come back and we’ll search everything together.”

He’s got a point, but leaving Luke to search the ranch alone turns her stomach. But it won’t be much longer before the team following them descends out of the sky in a blaze of military-issue lights. If that wasn’t the case, she’d never leave him alone here in a million years. She doesn’t care how good his training is.

“Charley, go. You’re their only hope.”

You, not us.

If she lingers on this moment, regret will slow her down even further. So she just nods and walks past Luke and carefully steps up into the driver’s seat of the truck. Only once she’s pulled the door shut does she remember she’s still got Cyrus Mattingly in the back. She’s not going to dump him now. That would give Luke a distraction as he searches the ranch alone. And besides, the guy’s got two broken feet and he’s strapped down like a shrink-wrapped chicken breast.

The first time she drove while triggered, she almost broke the gas pedal.

This time, she’s had practice.

And that’s good.

Because she plans to go fast.

39

“Turn the headlights off,” Marjorie says.

“I can’t, Momma. It’s too twisty.”

“Do what I’m—”

“Momma, there’s no moon; we’ll go off the road!” Jonah’s voice sounds as frightened as hers did back in the barn. Maybe it was a mistake to have him drive given his recent failure. Wally’s always been a cooler operator. But Wally’s seedling is Wally’s responsibility; he’s been with her for hours, knows all the tricks she might try if she sees their flight as an opportunity. As for Jonah’s panic, it can only mean her mother’s ghost is doing far more than just dancing at the edges of Marjorie’s vision. She’s infecting their minds, their souls. And it’s all Cyrus’s fault. His betrayal has weakened them, cast cracks through all the majesty and meaning of what she built for her boys over the years.

She’s once more riding beneath the Texas skies her father taught her to love, but she’s never felt more distant from him. Because her mother’s back, and she’s not just screaming. She’s filling Marjorie’s mind with hateful curses she’s fine-tuned during the years she’s spent in hell. Your game ain’t workin’, Momma.

On the camera linked to the truck’s cargo area, he can see Wally holding on to the wall next to him to stay balanced, loaded shotgun in one hand. A few feet away, his seedling’s strapped to the gurney and gagged once more, staring at the ceiling overhead. Something’s wrong with the look in her eyes, and Marjorie realizes there’s not enough fear there. There’s hardly any at all.

“She knows something. She’s in on it.”

“Who?” Jonah asks.

“Wally’s seedling. Look at her. She knows something. This whole thing, it’s some kind of trap. We’ve got to question her. Find out what she knows.”

“We will. Let’s just get some distance between us and the ranch; then we can find a highway and keep going. I can take us all the way back to my place in Albuquerque—”

“No, no. They might know about all of us. None of us can go home.”

“Where do we go, then?”

“We just drive.”

Jonah shoots her a look. She doesn’t look back because she doesn’t want to see whatever’s in his eyes—the fear, the confusion, the disappointment. It’s sinking in. They’re homeless now. Who knows how much Cyrus told? Cyrus failed them, but that means she failed them, because Cyrus was her boy.

“Forget it,” Marjorie says.

“Forget what?”

“I don’t give a damn what the little bitch knows. We kill her and dump her and the other one in Chicken Creek. Then we keep going. If we don’t know where we’re stopping, I’m not towing all that evidence along with us.”