“He’s retreated,” Shaw said.
Hannah: “Or he’s killed all of them.” Her voice faded toward the end of the sentence.
Or...
Another half mile.
They entered under a canopy of trees. It was darker now. Shaw had to slow down.
Hannah said to her mother, “Daddy was saying something to me, at the cabin? Just before he left?”
“I saw.”
“About forgiveness.”
Did this have to do, Shaw wondered, with the woman’s keen fear: that Hannah would learn of what she’d done to her father?
“He wanted me to forgive him.”
“For what?”
“For hitting you with his gun that night in November. He said drinking wasn’t an excuse.”
“Did you?” Parker asked in a soft voice.
After a pause, Hannah said, “I don’t know what it really means when you say you forgive somebody. It’s, like, more complicated, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes,” Parker said.
“Well, Itoldhim I forgave him.” The girl sighed, Shaw believed. She added, “You know, I thought you might’ve done it to yourself. To get him arrested. I’m sorry I thought that.”
Parker said nothing for a moment. Then: “It’s behind us now.”
Life gets by on ninety percent truth and ten percent deception. And not all of those lies are bad. Sometimes honesty derails a train bound for important destinations. In any event, this wasn’t Colter Shaw’s game. He was here to make sure they survived in body, not in heart and soul.
He gave the phone to Hannah. “Signal?”
“No. Still blank.”
Shaw decided, to be safe, he’d use the navigation app in the car and find a circuitous route to get to Millton, back roads and neighborhoods exclusively.
The odds of pursuit?
If there was still gunfire, he’d say ten percent.
With the silence, he guessed sixty. No, Jon Merritt had not killedthem all. But they might think that he, Allison and Hannah had fled on foot into the woods and be looking for them there.
They must be only—
Suddenly there was a flash of white to the right.
Parker screamed, Hannah said, “Mr.—!”
The Ford Transit thundered through the brush and broadsided the Buick hard.
The impact shoved the vehicle over the embankment. It rolled two and a half times, crushing emaciated pine saplings, and came to rest, upside down, in the middle of the steep hill.
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