Chapter 3 - The Gas Station Counter
"Close it! Close the laptop!" Sarah screamed, lunging across the console to slam the computer screen shut.
Marcus pulled the thumb drive out of the USB port, his mind racing through options at breakneck speed. "He locked onto the location using the rest stop's public Wi-Fi signal. He knows we’re in Centralia. He’s probably fifteen minutes away."
He looked at the clock on the dash: 3:12 AM.
"We can't outrun his car on the highway," Marcus said, his voice hard as flint. "He’s driving a turbocharged vehicle, and I’m in a ten-year-old wagon with a tired transmission. If he catches us on the interstate, he’ll ram us off the road or call his off-duty cop buddies to set up a roadblock."
"Then where do we go?" Sarah panicked, shaking Marcus by his jacket sleeve. "Marcus, tell me where we go!"
"We go to ground," Marcus said. He threw the Subaru into gear and pulled out of the rest area, bypassing the highway entrance and heading down a dark, two-lane country road that snaked toward the old industrial section of town.
Centralia was an old coal-mining town, full of abandoned rail yards, decaying warehouses, and thick, damp forests that choked the edges of the road.
Marcus drove three miles into the fog before pulling into the parking lot of an old, 24-hour truck stop and diner. Bright yellow neon lights buzzed against the damp mist. A dozen semi-trucks sat idling in the gravel lot, their diesel engines producing a heavy, rhythmic thrum.
"Stay in the car," Marcus told Sarah. "Lock the doors. Keep Chloe under the blankets. If you see a grey Porsche or a police car, slide into the driver's seat and floor it toward the sheriff's department in the next county. Don't wait for me."
"Where are you going?"
Marcus reached down and grabbed the thumb drive, along with his wallet and one of the burner phones. "I’m going to make a trade."
He stepped out of the car into the biting cold rain and walked into the diner.
The air inside smelled of stale coffee, burnt bacon grease, and bleach. A middle-aged clerk with tired eyes and a faded blue apron stood behind the cash register, wiping down the counter with a dirty rag. Sitting at a booth near the window was an old man in a flannel shirt, nursing a cup of black coffee.
Marcus walked straight up to the counter.
"I need to use your landline," Marcus said, placing a fifty-dollar bill on the glass.
The clerk looked at the bill, then looked up at Marcus’s face. He saw the cold sweat on Marcus’s forehead, the mud on his boots, and the intense, dangerous look in his eyes.
The clerk picked up the bill, slid it into the register, and lifted a heavy, black corded telephone from beneath the counter, placing it on the laminate surface. "Local calls only."
"This is local enough," Marcus said.
He didn't call the police. He didn't call Sarah.
He dialed a number he had memorized four years ago—the personal line of a man he had hoped he would never have to contact again.
Ring... Ring... Ring...
"Talk," a flat, raspy voice answered on the fourth ring.
"Detective Miller," Marcus said into the receiver. "It's Marcus Reed. I need a favor."
A long beat of quiet filled the line. Thomas Miller was a retired homicide detective from the King County Sheriff’s Office—a man who had spent thirty-five years dealing with the dark underbelly of the Pacific Northwest before retiring to a small plot of land outside Chehalis. Marcus had worked as an investigator for a legal defense firm five years ago and had crossed paths with Miller on a high-profile corruption case. Miller was one of the few men in law enforcement who knew how deep corporate and political favors ran in the state.
"Marcus?" Miller’s voice lost its sleep-heavy fog. "It’s three in the morning, kid. Why are you calling me on a truck stop landline?"
"Because David Vance is coming to kill my niece," Marcus said simply. "And he’s using active-duty officers to cover his tracks."
Miller let out a long, wheezing breath through his nose. "Vance? The real estate guy who sits on the Police Pension Board?"
"The same," Marcus said. "I have video evidence of severe child abuse, medical fraud, and human trafficking. Vance forged court documents to sell my five-year-old niece to an illegal private facility in Canada. He’s tracking my location right now. He’ll be at the Centralia exit in less than ten minutes."
"Who else knows about this?" Miller asked sharply.
"Nobody. Just me, my sister, and the child."
"Listen to me very carefully, Marcus," Miller said, his voice dropping into a razor-sharp tone that carried the authority of three decades on the street. "If Vance has people on the payroll, he didn't dispatch an official squad car. He dispatched guys working off the clock—private security, former deputies, guys who take cash to make problems disappear. If they catch you at that truck stop, there won't be an arrest record. There will just be a missing person report that gets lost in a filing cabinet next month."
"I know," Marcus said, his eyes scanning the empty parking lot through the diner window. "That’s why I need you to bring your old badge, Miller. And your shotgun."
"Where are you?"
"The Texaco on Highway 9," Marcus said. "How fast can you get here?"
"Eight minutes," Miller snapped. "Keep the kid out of sight. If a car pulls up that doesn't have official county markings, you don't talk, you don't negotiate. You run."
The line clicked off.
Marcus set the receiver back on the cradle. He turned to the clerk, who was staring at him with wide, shocked eyes.
"Sir," Marcus said, pulling another hundred-dollar bill from his wallet and laying it on the counter. "In about five minutes, a man in an expensive suit is going to walk through that door. He’s going to ask if you saw a guy with a little girl."
The clerk looked at the money, then at the door. "I've been in the back room cleaning the grease trap for the last hour. Haven't seen a soul."
"Good man," Marcus said.
He stepped back out into the rain, his heart pounding against his ribs like a sledgehammer.
As he walked toward the Subaru, a set of bright, white halogen headlights appeared at the far end of the highway, cutting through the dense fog like two search beams.
The car was moving fast, its engine producing a low, metallic whine that Marcus recognized instantly.
The grey Porsche pulled off the highway and turned slowly into the truck stop parking lot.
Marcus didn't run. He pulled his leather jacket tight around his shoulders, stepped into the dark shadow between two parked semi-trucks, and waited.
The Porsche came to a stop fifty yards away, its engine idling with a sinister, purring rhythm.
The driver’s side door opened.
David Vance stepped out into the rain.
He wasn't wearing his suit jacket. He wore a dark, tactical windbreaker over a black turtleneck, black leather gloves on his hands, and a small, silver earpiece tucked into his right ear. He held an umbrella in his left hand, keeping the rain off his neatly combed hair.
From the passenger side of the Porsche, a second man stepped out. He was huge—six-foot-four, at least two hundred and fifty pounds—wearing a heavy canvas jacket with a security badge pinned to his chest and a military-grade holster strapped to his hip.
"Check the diner, Roy," David said, his voice carrying clearly over the idling diesel engines. "I’ll check the perimeter. The signal died right here."
The big man pulled a heavy flash-light from his belt and walked toward the diner door.
David turned his head slowly, his eyes scanning the rows of parked trucks. He pulled a slender, silver pistol from the inner pocket of his windbreaker, holding it low by his side, concealed under the umbrella.
"Marcus!" David called out, his voice smooth, warm, and utterly psychotic in its calm tone. "Come on out, man! Let’s talk about this like adults! Sarah’s worried sick about you! She’s having another one of her episodes, Marcus! You know how she gets when she forgets her medication!"
Marcus stayed perfectly still in the shadows between the two eighteen-wheelers, his breath coming in slow, controlled gasps.
David took three steps toward Marcus’s hiding spot, his leather boots crunching softly over the wet gravel.
"I know you found the thumb drive, Marcus," David said, his tone turning reflective, almost instructional. "You think you discovered some great evil, don't you? You think you’re playing the hero in a movie. But you don't understand how the world works. Children like Chloe... they’re undisciplined, Marcus. They’re chaotic. They inherit the filth of their parents. I was building a system to fix that. A system that creates order out of trash."
He took another step closer. The silver barrel of his pistol caught the yellow light of the diner sign.
"Give me the girl, Marcus," David whispered, stopping just ten feet from where Marcus stood in the dark. "Give me the girl, and I’ll make sure you get a nice, comfortable settlement. Five hundred thousand dollars. Clear your debts. Start a new life. Otherwise... you die in a gravel pit tonight, and your sister goes to a state mental hospital for the rest of her life."
Behind David, from the dark edge of the tree line at the edge of the parking lot, a heavy iron sound echoed through the night air.
CLACK-CLACK.
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It was the unmistakable, terrifying sound of a twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun being racked into place.
"Drop the piece, Vance," a gravelly voice growled from the darkness. "Before I tear a hole in that expensive jacket big enough to drive a truck through."
