“Very rude,” the wife added.
“Then we heard them kick the door down. The one that woman and girl were staying in.”
“Did the men take them out of the room?”
“No. They ran off before those a-holes got here. Five, ten minutes.”
“Stanley,” she warned.
Ah, so they’d gotten away...
The wife added, “The woman was shouting at the girl. Mad, real mad. ‘How could you?’ Something like that. And the girl was shouting back. They just threw some things in their car and drove off.”
“Bat out of hell.”
“What model car?”
“Kia,” the husband said. “Just like her cousin drives.”
“Just like Bett’s. Only gold.”
“Wish I’d bought one of them.”
“You see which way they went?”
“We could see which way theydidn’tgo—right, east. That’s the only view we got from here.”
A left turn would take them back to 55, though the highway the motel sat on, Route 92, was a major artery and would get her ultimately all the way to the West Coast.
The wife continued, “That man, the one in here. He threatened us. Looked at his license. Memorized the address.”
The husband said with a laugh, “But it’s a year old! I never got around to changing it after we moved. Joke’s on them.”
The one-up-on-them part—a variation on the same tactic that Undercover Shaw had used with Ahmad in the warehouse yesterday morning.
Shaw thanked them and returned to the office, where the clerk was manipulating his nose.
“It’s not broken. Don’t play with it.” Shaw pulled out his phone and scrolled to the most recently dialed number.
46
Don’t say a word.”
Allison Parker was speeding west on Route 92.
“You were spying on me.” Hannah tried to sound indignant and wronged. The words rolled out, though, laced with fear.
Parker muttered, “Don’t. Go. There.”
The girl sat in the passenger seat, hugging her knees. Her stocking cap was unevenly tugged over her head and her gray coat was on the floor. She would have been looking at her phone under other circumstances. Not now, of course. The Samsung was in Parker’s pocket, where it would remain.
Her heart pounding, she looked in the rearview mirror. Expecting Jon’s truck to be following.
Not yet. But he could have come close to finding them.
Thanks to Hannah.
Just after the heartwarming embrace, as they were about to eat, Parker had glanced down at the girl’s phone, which was not only no longer in airplane mode but was open to an Instagram account. Not her old one. But @HannahMer-maid447788.