21

I chose the road less traveled. Now I’m lost.

—T-SHIRT

I pulled Misery to a stop in front of my apartment building at half past three, my eyes so swollen, I could barely drive home. Faye had revived me and offered me some water after I blacked out. Blacked out! I’d actually fainted when I saw that picture. The same picture I now clutched to my chest. I couldn’t look at it. Never again. Not that it mattered. The image had been emblazoned onto my corneas, and I knew I’d never be able to un-see what had been seen.

After stumbling up the stairs, I went straight to my dresser and stashed the picture facedown in my lingerie drawer without so much as another glance.

The ropes. The cuts and bruises. The shame. I almost felt like that was the worst part of it. How Earl seemed to purposely shame Reyes by taking that picture. He’d tied him up, the rope biting into his flesh, reopening wounds that appeared to have been healing. I recognized Reyes instantly despite the blindfold, his mussed dark hair, his smooth, fluidly mechanical tattoos along his shoulders and arms, his full mouth. He looked about sixteen in the picture, his face turned away, his lips pressed together in humiliation. Huge patches of black bruises marred his neck and ribs. Long garish cuts, some fresh, some half-healed, streaked along his arms and torso.

The mere thought of the picture made me cry, which was exactly what I did at Faye’s place. I’d cried for over an hour. We talked. I cried some more. I wondered what the other pictures were like, the ones Faye had burned that were worse than the one I now had. Swallowing hard, I forced the image out of my mind and focused on my client, on finding Teresa Yost.

With a good three hours to dawn, I decided to take a shower and put some fresh clothes on along with a pair of hiking boots, since I was probably going to do some hiking. It would take me an hour and a half to get to Pecos. If I timed it right, I could arrive at sunrise and set out on my search for Teresa early.

* * *

“Left?”

“Right.”

“Right?”

“No, you’re right, turn left.”

“Cookie, really?” I asked into the phone. Yost’s property was proving much harder to find than I’d originally thought, even with Cookie on Google Maps back on her home computer pointing the way, since I kept losing the GPS signal on my phone.

When I’d left my apartment, Garrett’s guy was there, and for once, he was awake. I had to sneak around to Cookie’s silver Taurus and take it instead, a move that I informed her of when I called and woke her up at five thirty to let her know. Naturally I explained how I’d been forced to take her car as a ploy to sneak past my tail. Plus I was out of gas.

Thinking back, I realized I could’ve waited until I actually got to Pecos to tell her I’d committed a felony in the pursuit of justice, since I really hadn’t needed her help until I actually arrived in Pecos over an hour later. But waking her up was fun. And I needed to think about something other than the picture that had been scorched into my mind.

“Sorry,” she said, still a bit groggy even after her shower. “No right, just left.”

“Then I should be there, but I don’t see a cabin.” At this point, I was so tired, I was seeing two of everything except a cabin. I fought to stay focused with a hard blink. “These trees all look alike. I think they’re twins or quadruplets or something.”

“Is there a trail of any kind?” she asked.

I pulled her car into a small clearing just off a side road, rubbed my eyes, then looked around. “Well, yeah, it doesn’t look like much, though. And I don’t know if your car will make it through the brush.”

She gasped. “Don’t you dare take my car down a mountain trail.”

“Really? Because it did great on the first one, aside from that rear axle thing.”

“Charley Davidson!”

“Just kidding, for crying out loud.” Geez, she was touchy about her car.

I wondered if I should tell her about the picture and decided abso-freaking-lutely. If I had to be haunted for the rest of my days, then by golly, she did, too. No idea why. Misery loves company, I guess. The emotion, not the Jeep. I missed it dearly, but now was hardly the time to dwell on it.

“Maybe you should wait for Garrett,” she said. “Where the hell is he?”

“He wasn’t on duty when I left, remember? And since I ditched his phone, we have no way to get ahold of him that I know of.”

“What about Angel?”

“I told him to stick to the doctor like green on guacamole. He won’t be showing up anytime soon.”

“Damn. You need to figure out a way to summon that kid.”

“I know.” I folded out of her Taurus’s hard vinyl seat, still trying to shake off the layer of sorrow that’d enveloped me the instant I saw Reyes bound and blindfolded. “Maybe I shouldn’t have thrown Garrett’s phone in the pond.”

“Ya think?”

I sighed. Nothing I could do about it now. “Okay, I’m heading that way. I’ll call if I break a leg or get eaten by a bear.”

“Play like a rock.”

“Now?”

“No, if a bear starts eating you.”

I thought a moment before replying. “Do they have screaming, sobbing rocks, ’cause that’s probably what I’ll be doing if a bear is gnawing my arm off.”

“It would be difficult to just lay there and be eaten alive, huh?”