Whatever drugs Pep had been given were clearly starting to affect him. “Can you tell us why you were there?”
“Getting my car.”
“Why was your car there?”
“Oh…uh…was showing the girl’s picture…around…at bars.”
“Any luck?” Harp asked.
Pep looked like he was going to say something, then his eyes fluttered, and he slipped out of consciousness.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
After weeks of silence, there were nights Sara would forget to bring the phone into the bedroom with her when she went to sleep. That’s why she didn’t hear it the first time it rang several hours before she woke.
When it rang the sixth time, she was still in bed but awake, feeling the weight of another day ahead of her. The sound had been faint, almost imperceptible, but after so long in the cabin, hearing all the noises the walls and the surrounding woods made, the ring was like a fire alarm.
She jumped out of bed, raced into the other room, and grabbed the phone off the couch, afraid she’d arrived too late.
“Hello?” she huffed. “Hello? Hello?”
“Where the hell have you been?”
“What do you mean? Here. Where else would I be?”
“I’ve been calling you for hours.”
“I…I didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“Sara, you have to hear it.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll turn the volume up.”
There was a pause, then her caller said, “Things are happening.”
Sara tensed.
“You need to be ready in case you need to move in a hurry. You remember the escape route?”
Sara closed her eyes, her shoulders sagging at the inevitability of it all. She had hoped they’d succeeded, that she had made a clean disappearance. But…
“I remember,” she said.
“Good.”
Her caller hung up.
Sara stared at the wall. Just moments before she had been suffocating at the thought of living through another boring day of nothing. Now she would give anything for another one like that.
God only knew if she would ever have another quiet day.
CHAPTER TWELVE
They found rooms at a place called the Desert Inn Motel, and spent most of the day either hanging out there or at the hospital, waiting for Pep to regain consciousness.
Dev arrived just before noon, but even his presence wasn’t enough for Pep to fight through whatever drugs the doctors had given him.
When visiting hours ended at eight, they drove back to the motel, ready to call it a night. Everyone but Logan.
“We’ll probably put on a movie, if you want to join us,” Harp said as they approached the room he and Barney were sharing next to Logan’s. Dev’s was downstairs, at the other end of the building.
Logan gave his dad a smile. It wasn’t hard to see from the heaviness of Harp’s eyelids and his lethargic pace that he wouldn’t make it to the end of whatever movie he and Barney were planning on watching.
“Thanks, Dad. Think I’ll pass.”
Harp nodded. “See you in the morning, then.”
They hugged.
“’Night, Logan,” Barney said, looking nearly as tired as Harp.
“’Night, Barney.”
The two older men went into their room, and Logan went into his.
That afternoon, he’d left the others at the hospital while he made a visit to the police station. The first thing he found out was that while the police were still dubious about Pep’s level of involvement in the fight, no charges had been filed because there were no witnesses, and they had no idea who Pep’s sparring partner had been.
The second thing was that Pep had been found on Thatcher Road, near some abandoned buildings, and about a block from a bar called The Hideaway. According to the cop he’d talked to, Pep had been leaning against the empty building, half conscious at best, when someone driving by had spotted him and stopped. The officer hadn’t given Logan the address, but he’d described the buildings as adjacent to some railroad tracks.
In his dad’s room next door, the TV went silent. Just to make sure there was no chance Harp or Barney would hear him, he waited for another hour before slipping out quietly.
Since Dev’s old Jeep Cherokee was large enough for all four of them, they’d earlier left the El Camino at the motel and used Dev’s SUV to shuttle to and from the hospital. Planning ahead, Logan had purposely parked his car far away from his dad’s room, so that as he started it up now, there was no way Harp would hear it.
Less than ten minutes later, Logan pulled to a stop on the other side of the street from the abandoned building Pep had been leaning against when he was found. The structure looked like it was one medium-sized earthquake away from tumbling to the ground, and the same could be said for the ones on either side of it, too. The only place that seemed to be in decent shape was The Hideaway. In fact, Logan was willing to bet it was the only building still in use on the street, its parking lot filled nearly to capacity, with another half dozen cars strung out along the road.
He climbed out of the car, and walked over to the empty building. The cop had said the fight-or ambush, depending on one’s point of view-had taken place around the side, between the building and the one next to it.
Using the LED flashlight on his key ring, Logan hunted around until he found the spot where Pep had been attacked. It was only about a quarter way down the wide gap between the two properties, but far enough in so that passing motorists wouldn’t have noticed anything.
There were dark smudges in the dirt where blood had soaked in then dried in the heat of the day. He did a quick three-sixty, but other than a few beer cans and fast-food wrappers, the ground was bare. If this had been a crime scene in L.A.-or even Cambria, for that matter-everything would have still been taped off. Apparently the Braden police had seen no reason to do so. That decision was backed up by the fact that, except for a few footprints probably made by investigators and by Pep and his assailant, no one else had been around.
Logan crouched down and slowly moved his flashlight across the dirt. The area where the fight occurred wasn’t as disturbed as one might expect. The impression of a prone body, some marks that could have been knees or elbows, a few footsteps, and that was it. How anyone might think this was anything but a one-sided mauling, Logan had no idea. Pep had gone down at the start, and not pulled himself back up until it was over.
Logan moved the light in a wider arc, revealing more spots of dried blood marking the trail Pep created as he’d struggled to get to the front of the building. Standing, Logan slowly walked farther back. There he found two sets of footprints-one leading from the rear of the building to the disturbed dirt, and one headed in the opposite direction. It was clear they were both made by the same person. The tread was heavy and wide, not a tennis shoe, more like a hiking or working boot, and by the length Logan figured the person who wore them had to be at least six feet tall. He followed the prints all the way behind the building, finally losing them on a slab of cracked concrete. He circled it, looking to see if they started up again on another side, but found nothing.
Since Pep wasn’t missing anything, this certainly hadn’t been a robbery. A random beating? Could be. Some local thug sees an out-of-towner on his own and thinks easy target. It wouldn’t even be close to the first time that ever happened.
The problem Logan had was separating the attack from the fact Pep had been asking around about Sara.
With nothing more he could learn at the fight scene, he returned to the El Camino, and drove a block down to The Hideaway, parking in a recently vacated slot behind the bar. The building utilized what appeared to be the most popular building material in town-concrete blocks. But unlike the ones making up the walls of the Braden City Medical Center, there was no artistic texture to The Hideaway’s blocks, just flat gray stones holding up a flat roof.