Page 130 of The Lie Maker

“Give me the gun,” she said.

He met her at the door, handed her the weapon.

“Watch the girl,” she said, and stepped out onto the porch.

“Show yourself,” she said to Michael.

The sky was clear and peppered with stars. As her eyes adjusted, she was able to make out the shapes of trees, the gray gravel of the driveway. She could hear footsteps, and, squinting, saw a dark form about sixty feet away.

“Hold it right there,” she said, and ended the call. They could chat without phones now.

“You could try shooting from there,” Michael said, putting Jack’s phone into his pocket, “but you’d never hit me. Not very likely I’d hit you, either. I’ll wait here until Lana comes out. I’ll hand her the car keys as she goes by. Once I hear the car drive off, I’ll drop the gun and I’m all yours. A deal is a deal. My life for Lana’s.”

“You’re up to something,” she said.

“Your call,” Michael said. “I’d rather not stand here all night. I’m not as young as I used to be. Legs get tired.”

Time to roll the dice, Gwen thought. She called back into the cabin, “Cayden, send her out!”

Sixty-Eight

Jack

That goddamn son of a bitch.

I should have seen it coming. Dad didn’t want to risk something happening to me when he went to get Lana. I didn’t know who I was more angry with: Dad or myself.

I kept banging on the trunk lid, hoping to change his mind, hoping he would let me out so that I could go with him. I didn’t want him facing Gwen alone. And maybe he wouldn’t be. Maybe I was right, that he had Gord waiting for him in the wings.

I’d heard him give Walton his freedom, and then the sound of his receding footsteps. He was gone, and I was on my own in the back of this fucking car with no inside emergency release. If I couldn’t escape the trunk the conventional way, maybe I could get out in some other fashion.

I rolled over so that I was facing the back of the rear seats. I started pounding on them, figuring if I could get them to fold forward, I could crawl into the car’s cabin and get out through one of the doors. If the rear doors were still somehow locked, I’d squeeze between the front seats and make my escape from there. And if I could manage all that, I’d qualify for my contortionist’s certificate.

Using my elbow like a pile driver, I hit the seat back over and over again. I had felt a vertical ridge running along there in the middle, which suggested to me that the rear seats could be folded down in two pieces. So they were meant to open through to the trunk, but the releases would be atop the seats, inside the cabin.

I thought if I pounded on them long enough, whatever bracket was holding them in place would give way. But after about two dozen strikes, and an elbow that had gone numb, the seat wasn’t budging.

I felt around in the trunk—Dad had my phone, so I couldn’t even use the flashlight app to see what was in here—and found the hard hat and the clipboard and the fluorescent-orange vest Lana sometimes donned at accident scenes. A crowbar would have been nice.

Wait, wouldn’t there be a crowbar, or something close to it, under the floor, in the compartment with the spare tire? Something with a flat, screwdriver-like end that I could use to pry open the trunk, or rip a hole in the back seat?

The trouble with that plan was that I couldn’t lift the trunk floor because I was on top of it. I tried tucking myself as far forward as possible, then reaching to the back end of the trunk to get my fingers under the floor’s edge. But I could only pry it up about an inch. There was no way I could get at anything that was beneath me.

I ran my hands around the inside of the trunk to see whether I could find anything else useful. I came upon something long, narrow, and cylindrical. Like a dowel, a stick of wood. Actually, it felt more like a stick of dynamite.

It was a road flare.

What the hell could I accomplish with a road flare? In the confined space of this trunk, I could undoubtedly kill myself. Road flares burned, I recalled reading, at about a thousand degrees. But if I ignited it, and aimed it at the trunk lock mechanism, could I burn my way out? Would it melt the lock? If I aimed it at the seats, would they catch on fire and attract the attention of someone passing by?

Well, there’d hardly been anyone on this road when we were coming up here. And even if some random passerby saw the flames, would they open the driver’s door, hit the trunk release, and get me out, or simply call the fire department and wait for help to arrive? By that time, I’d be literal toast.

Shit.

I went back to ramming my elbow into the seat a few more times, but I wasn’t getting anywhere with that. Getting onto my back, squeezing my knees to my chest, I tried pushing one more time against the trunk lid with my feet.

No luck.

I felt around again for that flare.

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