Blake Crouch: Birds of Prey

“Ben, you hear that?” Winston said.

Ben looked up and down the length of the beach.

It took him a moment, but Luther heard it too over the constant crush of the breakers—the low rumble of an engine.

In the distance, a pair of headlights appeared, and then another.

Winston walked over to Rufus and put the barrel of the shotgun against his throat.

“Where are the keys to the truck?”

“In the ignition.”

“Maybe they won’t even stop,” Ben said.

“Maybe they fucking will. Maybe there’s a half-dozen people coming to crash the beach party. We’ll never get off this island if word gets out.”

Ben closed his knife, slipped it into his pocket. Then he scooped Katie up and threw her over his shoulder.

“No!” Rufus screamed.

“What are you doing?” Winston asked.

“Taking a little something for the road.”

The twin growl of the approaching trucks was getting louder—fifty, maybe seventy-five yards away and closing fast.

“Kill ‘em,” Ben said, stumbling toward the truck.

He dropped Katie in the bed and climbed in behind the wheel.

“No,” Winston said. “If the trucks don’t stop, we’ll come back.”

Winston rushed around to the passenger-side door as the Dodge grumbled to life.

The tires slung a stream of sand and the Dodge whipped around and sped off into the darkness like a phantom—no headlights, no taillights.

Rufus screaming after his daughter.

The oncoming trucks roared past, one on each side of the bonfire, and in that half-second of firelit illumination, Luther saw the truck beds crowded with teenagers hollering and drunk, beer bottles raised to the sky.

A midnight race down the beach.

Luther got up and started toward the bonfire.

Rufus still screaming from the bottom of his soul, “My baby girl! My baby girl!”

Maxine was coming to her feet, and when she saw Luther, she said, “Darling! You’re alive!”

He ran into his mother’s arms and she held him tight for five seconds.

Shaking.

Sobbing.

Then Maxine went over to Rufus and tore at his knots until the rope came loose.

“We have to go,” she said. “They’ll come back.”

“We can’t leave,” he said, sitting up. “Not without Kate.”

“They were going to kill all of us, Rufus. They’ll finish the job if they come back and we’re here.”

“I’m not leaving my little girl!”

Maxine stared north up the beach, the noise of the trucks steadily dwindling away.

“I’m taking Luther, and we’re going to the sheriff’s house. Stay if you want.”

Rufus stared at his wife.

“Are you okay, Max?”

He reached out to touch her face but she swatted his hand away.

“What do you think?” She took Luther by the hand. “We have to run, boy.”

From the southernmost tip of the island, they could either bushwhack through the live oaks for a mile to the village of Ocracoke, or stay on the beach for two until it lead them to the access road that joined Highway 12.

They started jogging up the beach.

“We have to go faster,” Maxine said, panting.

“I can’t go any faster, Mama.” He was crying. “My feet hurt.”

Maxine stopped and collapsed in the sand.

“I’m tired too, Luther, but we have to reach the sheriff. Do you understand what will happen if those men get on the ferry tomorrow morning with Kate?”

He shook his head.

“We’ll never see her again.” She squatted down with her back to Luther. “Get on and hold on.”

Luther climbed onto his mother’s back, and she came to her feet and started jogging again.

The trucks had long since gone.

No sound but Maxine’s bare feet pounding at the tide-smoothed sand and the endless white noise of the sea.

Luther watched the breakers and the starry sky and the dunes scrolling slowly past.

He thought about his sister, tied up in the back of the truck.

He didn’t know how long his mother had been running when she finally collapsed.

Maxine hunched over on all fours and threw up in the sand.

Luther pulled her hair out of her face.

He patted her back.

“It’s okay, Mama,” he whispered.

In the weak starlight, he could see the black blood running down the inside of his mother’s thigh.

Another image to haunt his dreams for all time.

“Are you hurt, Mama?”

“I’ll be okay. Just climb back on.”

Luther snapped back into consciousness.

His arms were draped over his mother’s shoulders, and she stood in the middle of an empty, two-lane highway, bent over and trying to catch her breath.

“Luther, you awake?”

“Yes.”

“I need you to walk for awhile.”

He slid down her back and eased his shredded feet onto the pavement.

Felt like standing on a bed of razor blades.

“How much longer?” he asked.

“Just a half mile up the road to Dom’s place.”

“Is Katie okay, you think?”

“I don’t know, son.”

Maxine started jogging and Luther followed along down the double-yellow lines.

He couldn’t stop crying and every step left a bloody footprint in his wake, but they kept on, half-jogging, half-limping, until the first buildings of Ocracoke appeared in the distance.

The driveway leading to the home of Dominick James was a long, single lane framed by live oaks dripping with Spanish moss.

When she saw the saltbox in the distance, Maxine accelerated to a sprint, Luther calling out for her, begging not to be left, but she didn’t even look back once.

Luther came to a full stop and sat in the middle of the gravel road, watching the shadow of his mother running toward the house.

He wrapped his arms around his knees.

He’d been apart from Katie before—when she’d spent the night at a friend’s house, when she started school three years ahead of him—but it had never felt like this.

Like he’d left a core, integral piece of himself behind.

Like he wasn’t Luther apart from her.

He was less than. Or some new version of himself he didn’t know or understand.

In the distance, he could hear his mother banging on the screen door, her voice shouting, echoing through the live oaks, descending back into hysterics.

Ten seconds later, the porchlight winked on.

Maxine’s legs gave out.

She was crying, screaming Katie’s name over and over.

Sheriff James stood over her in a dark-colored robe, and as he reached down and put his hand on Maxine’s shoulder, Luther heard him say, “We’ll find her, Max. We’ll find her. I promise you we’ll find her.”

The next morning, one of the half-dozen deputies sent out to scour the island found the Kite’s Dodge pick-up truck abandoned in front of the Tatum dock on Silver Lake Harbor.

The Tatum’s Island Hopper had been stolen during the night.

Thirty-six hours later, the Tatum boat was discovered beached in the swamps east of Swan Quarter, on the mainland of North Carolina.

No Winston.

No Ben.

No Katie.

The going theory was that the two convicts, now escapees from a South Carolina prison, had crossed the Pamlico Sound under cover of darkness and fled into the mainland of North Carolina.

They’d be caught, probably within the week, Sheriff James assured Rufus and Maxine as they sat in their living room like a pair of broken figurines in clothes they hadn’t changed in five days, staring at the lawman standing before them with his hat in hand and a somber intensity in his eyes that belied the optimism he was trying so desperately to sell.

Nearby, Luther crouched in the darkness under the staircase, beside the little door that led into the basement, listening to every word.

But days and weeks and months crept by.