Page 80 of No Place Left to Hide

The fuck is this?I click the link and it takes a few seconds to open. I still only have two bars.

The link redirects to a YouTube video.

The start screen is a still of the inside of a car.Mycar. Facing the front windshield. The top left corner is obscured by something black. The car is on a dark road, only illuminated by headlights. Two people sit in the front seat.

Dread forms in the deepest parts of my chest. My finger shakes as I press play.

Jena’s face appears on the screen. She’s crouched in my backseat, pushing around piles of junk and angling the camera back and forth before settling it where the corner is cast in shadow. She backs up, nods to herself, and climbs out of the car.

All at once I realize what I’m looking at. The black blob is the corner of the headrest. Jena attached a camera to it in the backseat.

No.Not a camera.

I stumble around the back of the Subaru as fast as I can. The rear window and the back passenger window are both smashed to bits and there it is, wrapped around the base of the headrest. A small black phone grip.

She used her phone to record us.

And now it’s gone.

In the video, Jena runs along the side of the road by Beau’s beach house until she disappears down the driveway. The car is still for a long time.

This video is two hours long.

A chill runs down my back and I robotically skip ahead twenty minutes.

The Subaru is lit up by the gas station lights. My own voice rings out.“About time… It’s not like I have a curfew or anything.”

“Sorry! I couldn’t decide if I wanted something besides water. I debated a vanilla Frappuccino, but don’t want to deal with the caffeine—”

I skip again.

The interior of the car is bathed in high beams. Jena’s profile appears on her side of the car, clear as day. It’s like she’s on a stage.“…Did anything else happen that night? Anything the stalker robot might know about?”

She looks straight back at the camera.

I skip again, my heart rate climbing by the second.

The Subaru is awash with police lights.“…Never mind if they tack on a reckless driving charge too,”I say from the driver’s seat.“You don’t have the benefit of my dad’s get-out-of-jail-free card, so this one’s on me.”

Skip. More red and blue lights, but the car is empty.

In one of those rare moments where I know exactly what’s about to happen, I skip once more. Me and Jena argue about the boat, what she did or didn’t see out on the water, and then…

“I had to kill her. It was the only way to make it stop.”

I pause the video, feeling numb from head to toe.

She pretended to lose her phone, and then secretly recorded our entire drive home. How did I not see this fucking camera when I was back there throwing cans? I think again of her panic when I climbed into the backseat.

The pieces click together one by one. This was never about the Bronco. All thatconfess to the proper channelsstuff was total bullshit. She was trying to get me on video, admitting to what I did. The idiots in the Bronco were just a distraction.

Jena was the real threat, and I didn’t even see it.

My mind scrambles for a plan, a way to mitigate the fallout from this video.

Okay, first, it’s two hours long and it’s the middle of the night.Nobody’s going to see this for a while. All I have to do is find her, finish this, and delete the video from her account. I’ll pry the phone from her cold dead hand if I have to. Nobody has to know about this.

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