Chapter 6 - The Long Walk
At 2:45 AM, the fog off Miller Creek was so thick it swallowed the headlights of Sarah’s SUV two hundred yards before she even reached the rusted iron gates of the rail yard.
I watched from the tree line, crouched low in the wet brush. My boots were caked in black mud, and the freezing mist soaked straight through my canvas hunting jacket, but I barely felt the cold. Adrenaline hummed through my veins like high-voltage wire. In my right hand, I carried a heavy steel tire iron I had pulled from my truck’s tool kit.
Deputy Harris and a tactical unit of four county deputies were positioned half a mile back down the county road, maintaining strict radio silence. If they moved in too early, Greg would spot them. This had to look authentic. Sarah had to draw them out.
Through the fog, two high beams flared to life deep inside the abandoned train depot.
A dark blue minivan idled beside a string of decaying, graffiti-covered boxcars. The driver’s side door opened, and Greg Miller stepped out. He was wearing a heavy work coat, his face shadowed under a baseball cap. In his hands, he held a short, compact 12-gauge shotgun.
Sarah stopped her SUV twenty yards away. The engine died. She stepped out into the damp night air, holding a black laptop bag in one hand and the silver flash drive in the other.
"Where is she, Greg?!" Sarah shouted, her voice echoing off the corrugated metal roofs of the warehouses. "Where is my daughter?!"
Greg didn't move. He kept the shotgun pointed casually at the ground. "Show me the drive first, Sarah. Hold it up."
Sarah lifted the flash drive into the beam of her headlights. "It's right here! Everything Mark had! All the bank routing numbers, the keys, everything! Now let me see Lily!"
The side sliding door of the minivan clicked open.
Tricia emerged. Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, her face manic and pinched with sleepless paranoia. In her arms, she held Lily, wrapped tightly in a woolen blanket. Lily wasn't moving much, but I could see her small head shifting against Tricia’s shoulder, her little fingers peeking out from under the blanket.
She was alive.
"Give Greg the bag," Tricia ordered, her voice trembling with hysteria. "Toss it on the hood of the van, Sarah. Then you can have your turn to say goodbye."
"Goodbye?" Sarah yelled, taking a step forward. "You said I could take her!"
"I said we wouldn't throw her in the river!" Tricia snapped back, her eyes rolling wildly. "Lily belongs with me now! She’s going to have a real mother who doesn't work sixty hours a week! Mark gave her to us! He signed the papers!"
"Mark signed nothing that matters!" Sarah screamed.
While they argued, I moved.
I slipped out of the brush, keeping my footsteps silent in the wet gravel behind the line of rusted freight cars. The shadows swallowed me as I crept along the rear bumper of the minivan.
Tricia was standing five feet from the open sliding door, her back completely turned to me. Greg was focused entirely on Sarah, watching her every twitch, the shotgun slowly rising toward her chest.
"Put the drive on the hood and step back ten paces, Sarah," Greg commanded, racking the shotgun slide with a sickening metallic clatter. "Do it right now, or this gets ugly."
Sarah looked directly over Greg’s shoulder. Her eyes flicked toward the darkness behind the minivan. She saw me.
Without missing a beat, Sarah screamed, dropped the laptop bag into the mud, and lunged forward as if she were charging Greg head-on.
"You touch my baby and I’ll kill you!" Sarah shrieked.
Greg swung the barrel of the shotgun directly toward Sarah, startled by her sudden, reckless charge.
May you like
That single second of distraction was all I needed.
***
