“Guys.”
Neither Ren nor Brody answered.
“Hey guys.”
“What!” they both said with the same irritation, in the same rhythm.
“Stop arguing. We’ve got something more urgent than your chronic inability to talk without yelling at each other.”
Brody pressed his lips together. Ren crossed his arms.
“The sedan has closed the gap. It’s not two cars anymore, it’s one. And a second vehicle just pulled out from a side road. White van, no identification.”
Ren’s stomach clenched. The heat of the argument evaporated suddenly, replaced by something icy that ran down his spine.
“Are they closing in on us?”
“Not yet. But they’re in a coordinated pursuit formation. If we keep going toward the clinic, they’ll have us pinned down.”
Brody hit the turn signal. He slowed down. The next exit appeared three hundred meters ahead.
“We’re turning back.”
“Brody…”
“We’re turning back, Ren.”
Ren shut his mouth. Not because he agreed. Not because Brody was right, and he knew it. But because Brody’s hand had left the gearshift and closed around his knee with a firm pressure that asked for no permission, that asked for nothing. It simply said: you’re here and you’re going to stay here.
Brody took the exit. The white van didn’t follow them.
The gray sedan did.
Chapter 19
The gray sedan had vanished.
Ren noticed it first in Brody’s silence, in the way his eyes stopped alternating between the road and the rearview mirror and stayed fixed on the mirror for three, four, five seconds.
“Jax.”
“I see it. Or rather, I don’t, which is the problem.”
“Where did it go?”
“It turned off two blocks back.”
Ren sat up in his seat and looked over his shoulder. The road behind them was empty. The streetlights of the residential neighborhood cast yellowish circles on the clean asphalt. The mansion gates swept past on both sides like the ribs of some enormous animal.
“That’s not good,”Jax’s voice came through the speaker, flat.
“I know.”
“They don’t just disappear like that. Either they’ve lost us, which I doubt, or…”
The windshield exploded.
Not in a burst. A dry, almost surgical crack, followed by a shower of fragmented glass that rained over Ren like sharp hail. He squeezed his eyes shut on instinct, covered his face with hisarms, and when he opened them, he saw the hole. Clean. Round. Level with Brody’s chest.