Page 78 of Jessica, Not Her Real Name
She spun around, heart pounding.
Inglis was standing right behind her. He looked in the silver sedan’s direction, then back at her. His expression indicated he knew exactly what she’d been on the brink of doing.
She exhaled a thick cloud of vape that drifted around his face. He grimaced, waving it away with one hand.
“Sorry,” she said. Then, to make sure he didn’t think she was apologizing for the aborted escape attempt, she held up her vape pen and clicked it off.
A distant rumble of thunder came from the south, like a far-off battle beginning. She looked up and saw the stars had vanished.
As if taking its cue from the sound of the coming storm, the sedan suddenly reversed away from the pumps. She watched it speed out of the truck stop, taking with it any last-minute bid for freedom.
“We should get back on the road.” Inglis turned and started towards his car, which she saw was now parked around the side of the diner.
She trotted after him. “They’re saying on the news this storm is gonna be real bad.”
Inglis didn’t look back. “They say that about all of them.”
“They say they’re closing all the Waffle Houses.”
He paused by the driver’s door, one foot in the car. “Well,” he said. “I guess it’s time to panic.”
* * *
The silver sedan sat in a shadowy layby, its sole occupant gripping a SIG pistol in his palm like he was holding hands with a loved one.
In his side mirror, he saw a car’s headlights cut through the night and swing in a wide arc towards him. It was the marshal’s Charger, pulling out of the truck stop and heading back toward the interstate.
He let them pass, then sat there for a full minute longer in the syrupy darkness. His heart was still beating a steady stream of adrenaline through his veins.
She’d been so close. She’d looked right at him and for a hot second he’d thought she was going to actually run across the gas station forecourt and get into his car.
What were the chances of that? He hadn’t even known what he would have done. Killed her right there and then?
That wasn’t the plan, and he knew it. The plan came from people way higher up the food chain than him. From people whose plans you simply didn’t fuck around with.
He picked up a phone from the passenger seat. The metal was cool in his hand. Thirteen hours earlier, he’d taken it from a little bungalow in The Pines neighborhood of Panama City Beach. A souvenir, right before he’d left a souvenir of his own, in red spray-paint.
Then he’d sat across the street from her house, watching the chaos that had ensued. Watching as she realized just how weak the walls were that she’d built around her world.
Just the sight of her had made every muscle in his body tighten. She looked good. Real good. And that pissed him off more than anything. He’d gotten seven years in a federal prison. She’d gotten eleven years in the Florida sunshine.
Would she even recognize him anymore? These days, he barely recognized himself. Prison had stripped him of everything. His possessions, his dreams, even his own name. Nowadays, everyone just called him Roach. When he thought of his old name—his old identity—it felt like it belonged to a ghost.
Far to the south, lightning licked the horizon with its forked tongue. Roach placed the pistol on the front seat beside the phone and started the engine.
As he turned west onto the interstate, he saw banks of thick clouds, darker than the night sky and steadily rolling north.
TWENTY-THREE
As Jessicaand the marshal drove west, the traffic started building in the eastbound lanes of the interstate. The sun was rising, smoldering through the thick bands of rain clouds. Its light glinted off a line of cars that stretched as far as the eye could see. A crawling metallic millipede, extending west, probably all the way to New Orleans. Some had pulled their vehicles to the side of the road to stretch their kids’ or dogs’ legs, or to stare despondently under the hoods of overheated engines.
The westbound lanes were deserted. Large variable message signs bordering the highway were flashing alerts: HURRICANE WARNING IN EFFECT and USE HURRICANE EVACUATION ROUTES and DRIVE TO THE CONDITIONS. Two Mississippi National Guard trucks passed them, also barreling west.
The pressure was already dropping. She shivered and hugged her arms.
The marshal glanced at her in the rearview mirror. Heat began blasting from the air vents. He gave her another quick glance, then returned his eyes to the road.
The guy sure wasn’t big on small talk. Or maybe he just didn’t want to make it with her.
