"Clerk inside says he bought a ticket for New York City. Cape Air flight to Albany, connecting to JFK."
"Has it left?"
"Yeah. Forty minutes ago."
"Did he board?"
"That's the thing." The officer checked his notes. "He didn't board. Bought the ticket cash, went through to the gate area, and never got on the plane."
Noah stared at the terminal. "He bought a ticket he never intended to use."
"Looks that way."
"I'll get a warrant for the surveillance cameras. In the meantime, talk to every driver in this lot. Taxi, rideshare, anyone. See if he got into another vehicle. Check the rental counter. Check if he was alone." Noah turned and scanned the parking lot, the road beyond it, the tree line that bordered the airport to the north. "Maybe he's trying to divert attention while he slips into the parks. He knows we'll chase the flight. He's buying time."
The officer nodded and headed back inside. Noah stood in the lot for a moment, thinking. The ticket was a decoy. Hughes knew how investigations worked. He knew that the moment they found his car at the airport and a ticket to New York, they'd redirect resources to JFK, to Albany, to the connecting airports. They'd pull surveillance from terminals five hundred miles away while Hughes walked into the Adirondack backcountry ten minutes from where he was standing.
Through the terminal windows he could see Callie and McKenzie at the check-in counter, talking to staff. Officers were spread across the small concourse. The operation was running the way it was supposed to. Organized. Exactly what Hughes wanted them doing while he did something else.
Noah walked back to his Bronco. He needed to get back to the department and coordinate with Rishi on the CCTV. If Hughes had left the airport on foot or in another vehicle, there were cameras on the access road that might have caught it. Time mattered. Every minute they spent chasing the decoy was a minute Hughes used to disappear.
He opened the driver's door and climbed in. Reached for the ignition.
The gun pressed into his ribs from behind. Hard. Angled upward toward his lung.
"Start the vehicle and drive."
Noah's hand froze on the key. His eyes went to the rearview mirror. David Hughes was crouched in the back seat, low enough that he wouldn't have been visible from outside. His face was pale and unshaved and his eyes had a frantic clarity. He'd run out of options and was operating on the last fumes of a plan that wasn't really a plan at all. He slipped his other hand around and took Noah's gun from his right hip.
"Drive," Hughes said again. "Now."
Noah started the engine.
27
Noah pulled out of the airport lot with the gun pressed against the base of his ribs. The metal was warm from being held too long and the hand holding it was not steady. He could feel the tremor through the barrel, the small involuntary pulses from someone running on adrenaline and fear rather than any kind of plan.
"What are you doing, Samuel?"
"Drive."
"Where are we going?"
"Just keep driving." Samuel's voice was tight, compressed, pushed through a jaw that was clenched hard enough to crack a tooth. "Take a left up here and follow the road northeast."
Noah took the left. Route 86 opened up ahead of them, the road cutting north through the valley with the mountains rising on both sides. The afternoon sun was low enough to throw long shadows across the pavement and the light came through the trees in broken shafts. Other vehicles passed going south, their shapes flashing across the windshield and briefly illuminating Samuel's face in the rearview mirror. The gun was held in his right hand while his left gripped the headrest of Noah's seat.
They drove in silence. Just the sound of the engine and the air conditioning pushing stale air through the vents. Noah kept his hands at ten and two and his speed five miles below the limit. Nothing that would draw attention. Nothing that would give a passing patrol car a reason to pull them over. Not with a gun behind his head.
"So was the plan to pretend you took the flight to the Big Apple and then slip away?" Noah asked.
"I was going to get on that plane." Samuel shifted in the back seat. "But a security guard got suspicious. I figured you'd phoned it in to be on the lookout. I was going to bolt but didn't figure I'd get far by taxi."
"Look, this isn't beyond repair, Samuel. But if it gets out that you have a gun on a cop, things could spiral."
"They already have."
"It doesn't need to get worse."
