Logan hits a couple of buttons, and footage appears on the screen: grainy, black and white, but usable.
Logan fast-forwards through hours of nothing, punctuated by lowlifes booking their rooms. The night footage is so dark that it’s nearly useless. But the day footage begins, and Logan stops it as soon as the first person exits their room.
Logan leans closer. On screen, a broad, tall man in a cowboy hat keeps his face angled away from the camera as he heads toward the office.
Logan clocks how large the man is. Not as big as Logan but close. He moves with purpose. He moves like he knows how to handle himself. Logan can also see, even through the grainy footage and the cowboy hat covering the man’s face, that he’s scanning the doors and windows.
But there’s something else. Something that makes thetingle at the base of his skull he’s been feeling since he started tracking them ignite into a full burn.
His heart races.
It never races.
Logan fast-forwards while the figure has ducked into the office, out of the camera’s view.
He stops and plays the footage at normal speed when the cops arrive. But the man never exits the office. He must have gone out a back way after seeing the deputy's car pull up.
Soon, the man in the cowboy hat and Naomi Barrett with darker hair escape their room into a pickup truck. Logan can’t get the license plate.
He watches Naomi jump out and knock on doors, creating a panic they can escape in.
Clever girl.
The feeling is still nagging at Logan, but watching more footage isn't answering it.
Logan rewinds the footage all the way back to when the cowboy first exited the motel. Watches it. Rewinds. Watches. Rewinds. Again and again and again.
And then Logan finds it. Is able to name the feeling.
Recognition.
It can’t be.
Logan shakes his head, irritated with himself. His mind is playing tricks. The footage is shit. He can't make out the facial features or any defining characteristics beyond the basic physical dimensions.
Still, that nagging sense of familiarity persists. Logan ignores it. He's been in this business too long. After a while, all the prey he’s hunted begins to echo.
His phone buzzes. Graves, clearing her throat and insisting again.
Logan answers, keeping his voice level despite his irritation. "Black."
"When I assign you a task, I expect updates,” Graves snaps.
Logan doesn’t respond to that. His eyes stay on the monitor and the gray figure that feels terrifyingly familiar. He doesn’t mention that notion to Graves either. Instead, he simply says, "I’m only a day behind them now.”
Fourteen
Idon't like this.
The highway doesn’t feel like I’m driving on it. It feels like a conveyor belt we’re stuck on, pulling us toward precisely the kind of place I've spent years avoiding. If I hadn't had Naomi with me, I might have gone deeper into the woods after setting her free. Pure instinct would have taken me farther from civilization.
But she needed food and clothes and real shelter. And while becoming a needle in a haystack is best, becoming a needle among a bunch of needles can be a close second if you do it right.
But heading to an airport ain’t doing it right. Cameras, dogs, cops, attention, surveillance. People are paid to pay attention at airports.
"You look tense," Naomi says from beside me.
I adjust my tight grip on the steering wheel. "Airports are literally designed to catch people like us."
