She pulled her phone, kept it below the window line, and fired off a text to Buddy and Dawson. Four words and her location. Dark SUV. Following us.
Buddy responded in three seconds that he was on it.
Dawson responded right after that, his ETA was twelve minutes.
She mapped the route to her rental in her head, the way she'd been trained to map everything—exits, choke points, sight lines. Two miles to the town limits. After that, the road opened up and narrowed down at the same time, the buildings dropping away and the Everglades closing in on both sides, no intersections, no cover, no one close enough to see or hear anything that happened out there.
She unholstered her weapon and held it low against her thigh, muzzle toward the floor. Out the window, Calusa Cove slipped past in pieces—the diner with its hand-lettered specials board, the hardware store, the bait shop with the pelican sign so faded you could barely read it. All of it slow and sunbaked and ordinary. A woman pushing a stroller. A kid on a bicycle. A man loading bags into the back of a minivan.
All of them obliviously to the situation.
The last stoplight in town turned yellow. Trent didn't slow down. He glided through the light.
So did the SUV.
The sign thanking people for coming to Calusa Cove appeared in the mirror. Then shrank. Then disappeared. And just like that, the town was gone—the buildings swallowed by sawgrass, the road narrowing, the sky opening up overhead in a way that always made Dove feel exposed, like a moving target on an empty table.
The bridge now only a few miles away.
The SUV sped up.
"Shit, they're closing in," she said.
“What do you want me to do, because if we don’t turn soon, we’re gonna be stuck on this road for a while.”
One car length. Half a car length. The dark grille filling her mirror, details emerging as it closed the gap—a rental plate, she caught that much, and a crack in the lower left corner of the windshield, and then she didn't have time for details anymore.
“Brace yourself,” she managed.
The impact exploded through the truck like a detonation.
Metal shrieked. The world lurched sideways. Her shoulder slammed into the door so hard she felt it in her teeth, her head snapping back against the headrest, her weapon hand pressing down hard on the dash to keep the muzzle pointed safe. The truck fishtailed—tires screaming, rear end swinging right—and for one nauseating second, she was looking at the shoulder of the road and the drainage ditch beyond it and the sky tilting at an angle it shouldn't be.
Then Trent's hands moved, and the truck straightened.
She pushed off the dash and got herself upright. The mirror showed the SUV dropping back, recalibrating, the driver steering it back to center after the ram.
"They're not done," she said.
“I didn’t think they were, but we’ve got to do?—”
“Duck!” She put her head between her legs and swallowed her breath.
A shot cracked from behind them.
Not a pop—a crack, the deep, flat percussion of a rifle, and the back window exploded inward. Safety glass cascaded over her shoulders and into her lap, tiny cubes of it, some sharp enough to sting. She felt two or three hit the back of her neck, felt the bright, quick pain of them, and registered it and filed it away because it wasn't important yet.
She had her window down before the glass finished falling.
The wind hit her like a wall—hot and wet and tasting of sawgrass and road heat. Behind them, the SUV was accelerating again, the engine note climbing, and she could see the passenger window down now and an arm extended.
“They're gaining. What do you want me to do?” Trent asked with a voice too calm for the situation.
"Don't swerve yet." She grabbed the door frame with her left hand, leaned into the wind, found the SUV in her sights. "Keep it steady. Thirty miles an hour. Whatever you do, don't touch the brake."
"There's a curve?—"
"Take it. Then a straight line. I need a platform. Steady speed, straight road."
