Maybe the driver had to take a monster dump and pulled up to a place to make a run for it.
Maybe the family had given the task to someone who wasn’t strategic or careful.
That part of the puzzle wasn’t his to figure out.
Location. Location. Location.
He refocused.
It was an old eighties-style van in brown, peeling paint, and rust spots at the dents.
In two frames, the witness dipped the camera, and Gabriel could see a partial mud-covered plate. By upping the contrast, he was able to pull outL K 4but nothing more.
Gabriel wrote it down. How many vans from the eighties were still on the road that had this series in the license number? The license was probably meaningless; it could easily be a stolen plate.
The kid must have practiced in his head, making this video; he must have calculated then actuated.
The witness was smart up to a point. Catching the name of the store or the address would have been super helpful.
Gabriel looked back at the video frame that showed the inside of the van with the most clarity.
All four of the men were bald.
One with razor cuts across his scalp, the others with stubble growing in.
All of them had blood visible even in the darkness of the back of the van.
Four.
Gabriel had been prepared for two.
He pushed his laptop forward, crossed his arms, and laid his forehead on the edge of the desk where it was cold, and there was the sting of the edge pressing against him.
Images of war pinged around his brain.
These images were close to home for Gabriel.
He remembered the night when he came back to consciousness, peppered with shrapnel. His hands were bound behind his back. He was faced down. And as he lay there, he hoped that before he got put in anybody’s snuff film, he’d bleed out.
He lay there and prayed for the blood to flow freely into the puddle underneath him and let his life fade gently away, saved in the end by a Delta Force team.
Was that what the four men were thinking?Let me die before I get where they’re taking me.
Gabriel needed to think.
He needed clarity.
He needed to be that hero that he and Daniel had talked about being while they read books like The Three Musketeers, The Black Arrow, and Robin Hood, willing to face evil and fight for a good outcome.
It wasn’t like he was in the field going hand to hand.
He could get himself together enough to embody the person he’d imagined he’d become in those fawn days when he and Daniel had been soft and sweet.
The two of them had been nature hungry. Give them some mud and some tadpoles, a tree to swing from, another to climb.
And they dreamed of growing up to become hard men who rode war horses into battle.
Battle was nothing like Gabriel had imagined it. He never felt bigger-than-life heroism. He was someone who went from task to task and made sure his brothers came home.
