I press play, and the feed streams.
In an instant I’m on my feet, walking in circles, staring. Wanting to scream.
I grab my keys and run to the front door. The alarm chirps, and I hear Mitch call out, but I can’t stop. The door locks behind me as I bound to my car. The detail sees me and watches my car speed away, but remain guarding my house because that’s the protocol.
My eyes shift from the road to the feed as I drive. Mitch calls, but I don’t answer. He calls again and leaves a message. Then he stops. The cops on the detail call too. And I ignore them as well.
I drive the residential streets at twice the speed limit, looking from the phone to the road.
A man walks, the phone strapped to his chest. His hands are free. I can see one swinging with his gait. The other holds a baseball bat.
Then comes a voice as he narrates his show. “He never should have set me up at the diner,” it says.Hesays.
I know that voice and hearing it again after so much has happened steals my breath.Wade.
“And look—now he’s had a few too many.”
In front of him another man walks on a street downtown. I recognize the buildings. A strip of bars and restaurants that fill up after the workday and thin out by ten, later on weekends. There are people between Wade and this man, but I know him as well. The other man in this new show.
I look back to the road and call out his name as though he can somehow hear me. “Rowan!”
I call his number, but he doesn’t pick up.
“Rowan! Look back!” I scream again as I wait for his greeting to play. His messages are full, so I hang up and dial again. Rowan always answers. Always.
I catch myself before I swerve across the line. I’m ten minutes from downtown. From the street they’re on.
I dial again. Hang up. Dial again. And again. And then I understand why he doesn’t answer. The people walking between Wade and Rowan shift to the right, and I can see Rowan’s hand by his head, holding the phone. He’s on a call. His other hand waves in the air the way it does when he’s arguing. Making his case about something. I imagine he’s on with a woman, and it could be about anything. A woman he stopped seeing. A woman who stopped seeing him. Maybe someone he was just with at a bar where he drank too much and now isn’t thinking the way he needs to be.
Complacency. Distraction.Damn it!He knows better.
“Rowan!” I scream. I dial. I watch the road. I watch the feed.
He’s at his apartment. He stops at the entrance but doesn’t go inside because he’s still on his call. It’s awalk-up, and he needs his keycard for the front door. He searches his pockets with his free hand.
Wade pauses. If he gets too close, Rowan will sense him.
I stop at a light and stare at this image. Wade taps the bat against the cement, softly, just enough for me to hear the sound and understand the message it conveys. Five steps, one swing, and Rowan will be dead.
“Rowan!” I look both ways and run the light. Then I step on the gas as my vision blurs with tears. I’m five blocks away, but Wade is five steps.
He’s caught me off guard. This was supposed to be aboutme. Everything he did was to tormentme. Wade came at me through my children and then Mitch. He’d been inside my home, watching me in the shower and leaving that package, which he knew would cause me to visit Clay’s parents and suffer the pain of seeing what lived inside them.
Now he’s turned to Rowan. Another move I should have seen coming. I thought I’d protected him by keeping him in the dark. I thought Wade wanted to fuck with his head, make him compromise his work. Not this. Nothing like this.
Wade takes a step closer and ducks into an alcove. I dial Rowan again. Drive faster.
The lights are not syncing downtown, and each one turns red before I can get through it. I look back to the feed and see Rowan with his keycard. He swipes it and gets inside and the door closes behind him. Locking. It’s over! This is over. The light turns green, and I drive through the intersection, wiping my eyes, finding my breath.
And then the voice comes again.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Wade says.
I look back to the feed and see him walking. He stops at Rowan’s apartment building and rests the bat against his legs. He’s on the security camera for the building now. He’ll be recorded. Even if he wears a cap and looks down, he won’t be able to run from this. Everything else—the stalking and the images—is nothing compared to what he’ll face if he goes inside that building and carries out this threat.
I tell myself he won’t do it. Just like thedrive-byat the Ridgeway Shopping Center, this is an unforced error. The mistake he should have foreseen, thinking backward from the interrogation room where I picture him now. Because we will catch him. I will catch him.
The car behind me honks. The light is green, so I drive through it and stop at the next one. I look back to the feed and see Wade’s hand reach out toward the lock. He’s holding a keycard. He has a keycard for Rowan’s building.No!
