Moll looked Desmond over. “Youdounderstand that just by sitting there, you’ve left enough clues to earn a one-way ticket to Harper Maximum. Imagine what you’d leave if you unzipped.”
Desmond tilted his head, reflecting. “Rest assured, friend, I will refrain from having carnal knowledge with the vehicle. Tempted though I am.”
The man could occasionally display a sense of humor.
“Go to one of your truck stops.”
Desmond scoffed. “There? Half those girls didn’t start life as Betty or Sally.”
“What do you care who you put it in?”
“I’m just saying.”
Where the hell did the man get his hormones?
An incoming text. Moll read it, glancing between the screen and the road.
“Merritt had a talk with her lawyer. It did not pan out.”
“Shit. That could’ve been a good lead.”
Desmond seemed to get tired of playing with the branch. He put it away, the knife too. “What about that guy, Motorcycle Man?”
“What about him?”
“I mean, he’s got a gun, he breaks into her house. Who knows what he’ll do?”
Moll considered this. “The way I look at it: he is both helpful and a problem.”
“Uh-huh.” Desmond’s I’m-not-in-the-mood look emerged. “And that means what?”
“If he leads us to her, that is helpful. Once he does,thenhe is a problem.”
33
At 11 p.m....
Allison Parker was standing at the window of Sunny Acres, lifting aside the curtain to gaze at Route 92.
She wondered why she bothered to do this. How could she possibly identify a threat? The headlights that zipped past could belong to a station wagon driven by a nun on her way to a nun convention. Or to a Ford F-150, driven by a man who used his superpowers to find her, against all odds.
Then he would park, suss out the room they were in and...
Stop it, she told herself.
And began the mantra. Don’t. Think. About. It.
Hannah had grown moody once more. She was staring at her computer screen, typing fast. Her silence was like a splinter, black, deep in the skin.
“You have to stay in airplane mode,” Parker said. There was no way to shut off internet service in only one room. She’d asked the clerk.
The girl snapped, “I am. Want to see?” She was angry.
“No, honey. I believe you.”
Five more minutes of silence, then Hannah closed the lid of the laptop and set it on the nightstand. Saying nothing, she pulled her sweatpants off. She wore navy-blue boxers underneath. The girl climbed under the comforter and rolled onto her side, away from her mother.
Parker sat in the motel’s excuse for an office chair and closed her eyes. After five minutes she roused herself to stand and walked into the bathroom and tended to her nighttime routine. She looked out the window once more. A glance toward the golden Kia, holding its magic envelope. Then she shut the light out and she too lay down in bed, tugging the sheet and blanket around her.