He checked the number he called. Definitely the house phone.
He scrolled down to her cell number and hit dial. It rang a few times and then the same robot told him to leave a message after the tone. He hung up and tossed the phone across the bed.
Why would she have forwarded the house phone to her cell? She’d promised him that she would stay at home while he was away. She needed rest. There was no reason for her not to be picking up the phone right now.
Unless.
He put his head in his hands. God, no. Please. No.
He reached over and grabbed his phone off the comforter, scrolled through his recent calls until he found Rich’s number. He’d still be awake. From what Patrick could tell, his campaign manager never slept.
Rich picked up on the first ring. “Hey, champ! How’s California? Did you knock ’em dead?”
“The conference went fine. Look, I’m sorry to call you this late—”
“No apology necessary. You know I’m available to you twenty-four/seven.”
“I tried calling Rebecca at the house and she’s not answering. I think . . . I think we might have a situation on our hands.”
“Leave it with me. The wheels of justice are already in motion.”
“It might be nothing. She might be at home, asleep. She might have accidentally turned the ringer off or left the phone off the hook . . .” Even as he said the words, he knew they weren’t true. “I’m probably just wasting your time.”
“You did the right thing by calling. Now go get some shut-eye, okay? You’ve got an early flight tomorrow, and we need you looking fresh for the judge.”
“Could you let me know when you find her?”
The line went dead. Patrick cradled the phone in his hand for a minute before placing it on the nightstand and walking across the room to the minibar. He took out a couple of miniatures, poured them into a glass, and bolted the whole thing. And then got down on his knees and began to pray.
Clovis, New Mexico—222 Miles to Albuquerque
Cait knew a lot of people who didn’t like driving—they hated the road rage and the boredom and the stiff necks and the pins-and-needles legs—but she enjoyed it, especially once she was clear of the city and out on the open road. There were times when she would be steering straight on one of these wide Texan roads for hours, staring at the dotted white line leading all the way to the horizon, and a Zen-like calm would come over her. It was the closest she’d come to meditating. She had used one of those apps once—a woman’s voice in her ear, telling her to picture crashing waves or fields of wildflowers—but as hard as she tried, she kept thinking about all the shit she could be doing instead, and eventually, she switched it off and made a to-do list and went to bed.
You could take the girl out of Waco, but you couldn’t make her believe in new-age-wellness horseshit, she guessed.
Out on the road, her mind would empty until it was just the sound of the engine and the feel of the Jeep hurtling forward through space. Sometimes she imagined herself in the car as a single still point in the universe while the rest of the world rushed past. She liked those moments the best, though after a while it started doing weird things to her head, like one of those Magic Eye paintings they ran in the newspaper when she was a kid, and she’d have to squeeze her eyes shut for a second to reset.
Mainly, though, she liked the fact that driving was the only time she was ever truly, genuinely alone. At the bar, she was a sitting duck for whatever lonely soul happened to wander in looking for a drink and a little small talk, and when she wasn’t serving customers, she was laughing politely at the manager’s bad jokes or hassling the barbacks for fresh ice. Even in her cramped one-bedroom apartment, she never lost the sense of being surrounded by people. The walls were thin, and every time her neighbors made a smoothie or had sex or went to the bathroom, she could hear it, loud and clear. The sounds of other people’s lives were with her all the time, pushing their way into her head.
In the Jeep, there was silence. It was like floating in her own little bubble, untouchable, even when she was sharing the road with hundreds of other cars. Even now, with Rebecca sitting silently next to her staring out the window, she could almost pretend she was on her own. Almost.
Cait pulled off at the exit for the first town she’d seen since crossing the border into New Mexico, then steered the Jeep through the deserted streets to the glowing blue-and-red smile of an IHOP sign. “Here okay?” she asked, already pulling into a space in a lot that was empty except for a pickup truck and a beat-up El Camino.
When they walked in, the waitress didn’t bother to get up from the stool where she was filling out a crossword puzzle, just pointed at a pile of menus on the greeter stand and told them to sit wherever they wanted. Cait scanned the room, taking in the cook blowing cigarette smoke out through the emergency exit in back and a four-top of shift workers still wearing their high-vis vests. Cait picked a booth by the window and made sure to sit with her back to the wall, so she could keep a lookout.
The waitress eventually came over and took their order—coffee and a slice of cherry pie for Cait, ice water with lemon for Rebecca—and the two of them sat in silence while they waited, the swirl of Muzak filling their heads. The waitress shoved their drinks on the table with a grunt. Not expecting a big tip, then. Cait couldn’t blame her. She knew from her own waitressing days that when you got a table of women, they weren’t usually big tickets—appetizers split four ways and salads-as-mains and single glasses of house white. They tended to split the bill, too, and calculate the tip down to the penny. It wasn’t like serving a table full of men, all dick-swinging and red meat and bottles of Barolo. Not that they’d be serving Barolo in a place like this, but the principle remained. Men wanted to show off for each other, and—if you were lucky—that meant a fat tip for the cute waitress. If you weren’t so lucky, it meant fending off stray hands when you bent over to clear the table.
Cait always tipped big. She’d give the waitress 25 percent, easy, even though the woman hadn’t said a civil word to them yet. She’d do it to prove a point more than anything else. Maybe next time a couple of women walked in here in the middle of the night, the waitress would be a little nicer to them. “Smile, sweetheart. It can’t be that bad.” How many times had she heard that when she was serving tables? Let the smile falter for one second and they were onto her. They thought she owed them that smile. That she should be grateful.
Bartending wasn’t as bad. She controlled the alcohol, which meant that she was the most powerful person in the place. If somebody told her to smile, she could tell him to fuck off, and all they could do was laugh it off, because they wanted their liquor. Plus, there was a bar separating her from the customer. She still got the occasional hand reaching over when she bent down to fetch a beer from the fridge, but it was rare.
Cait poured a long stream of sugar into her coffee and stirred it with a spoon. She didn’t normally take it so sweet, but the adrenaline from the fox was long gone and the exhaustion had set in right behind her eyes and she was left feeling like she was swimming in murky pond water.
“I’m sorry you’ve got to drive at this time of night,” Rebecca said, scraping with her fingernail at a spot of syrup that had congealed on the table. “You know, I can drive for a while if you’re getting tired.”