Chapter Six: What Curtis Knew
Ava would understand, staring at a stranger's face turned suddenly, sickeningly familiar in the flashlight's glow, that the worst part of betrayal was never the danger itself. It was the specific, surgical cruelty of recognizing the person doing it to you, of realizing a familiar smile could hide something this cold underneath it.
That was just past nine at night. First, there was the light.
The flashlight beam held steady on both of them for one long, frozen second, and then a voice followed it out of the dark, warm and familiar in a way that made Ava's stomach drop even before her mind fully caught up to what she was hearing.
"Sit tight, kiddo. I'm not here to hurt you."
"Curtis." Ava's voice came out smaller than she wanted it to, disbelief and betrayal tangling together so completely she couldn't separate them. "What are you doing here."
Curtis stepped into the wash of his own flashlight, hands raised in a gesture meant to look harmless, an older man with kind eyes and a gray mustache Ava had watched go from black to salt-and-pepper over the eight years he'd driven her to school, to riding lessons, to every ordinary appointment of a childhood she'd trusted him to keep safe. "I've been tracking your phone since the airfield," he said, apologetic in a way that made it worse, not better. "I need you to come with me. Right now. Before this gets more complicated than it already is."
"Tracking my phone." Ava felt Ryan shift beside her, tire iron still raised, his whole body angled slightly in front of hers without seeming to think about it. "You put something on my phone."
"Your father asked me to. Weeks ago, before any of this started, back when it was just a precaution in case of exactly this kind of situation." Curtis's mustache twitched, something almost pleading in his expression. "I'm not the enemy here, Ava. I'm trying to get you somewhere safer than a barn in the middle of nowhere with a boy who isn't trained for what's actually coming."
"He got us out of a diner this morning with nothing but a coffee pot and good instincts," Ava snapped, surprising herself with how fast the anger rose. "Where were you this morning, Curtis? Tracking my phone from somewhere comfortable while a stranger threatened to hurt him for the crime of not selling me out?"
Curtis flinched, genuinely, at that, though whether from guilt or simple surprise at her tone, Ava couldn't tell anymore. "I didn't know about the diner until after it happened."
"That's convenient."
"It's the truth." Something raw moved across his face, older and more tired than she'd ever seen him. "I have made choices this week I'm not proud of, Ava. I want the chance to explain them somewhere safer than a dark field with a boy pointing a tire iron at my chest."
He's not denying he's been feeding someone our location. Ryan's mind ran cold and fast through the last three days, the motel room Reyes shouldn't have known about, the diner Reyes had somehow found within hours, and landed, with a sick certainty, on the one person who'd had access to Ava's phone since before this whole thing even started. "Whose side are you actually on, Curtis."
"Frank's. I've always been Frank's." Something in Curtis's face flickered, quick and complicated, gone before Ava could fully name it. "Which means, sometimes, doing things Frank doesn't fully know about, if it keeps his daughter alive."
"You told Reyes where we were." Ava said it slowly, each word landing like a stone dropped into still water, watching Curtis's face for the lie she was suddenly, desperately hoping to find there. "The motel. The diner. You told him."
Curtis didn't answer immediately, and the silence did more damage than any confession could have.
"It wasn't supposed to go that far," he said finally, quiet, almost ashamed. "Reyes came to me two weeks ago. Told me he only wanted to negotiate directly with your father, said knowing your general location would speed up a peaceful resolution nobody wanted to drag out through lawyers and federal investigators for another two years. I believed him. I've known your father twenty years, Ava. I thought I was buying everyone time."
"He offered a boy fifty thousand dollars to hand me over this morning." Ava's voice cracked, fury and grief tangled so tightly together she could barely tell which one was driving her. "Does that sound like negotiation to you?"
Curtis's face went pale in the flashlight's glow, the kind of pale that came from genuine, unrehearsed shock. "That's not what he told me he wanted."
He's realizing, in real time, exactly what he's been part of. Ava watched something crumble behind Curtis's eyes, and found she couldn't decide if she believed his shock was real or simply the last, most convincing performance yet.
"I want to believe you," she said, quieter now. "I've known you since I was nine. But you've already lied to me once by omission, every single day you fed him our location and let me think I was only being careful. Why should I believe anything you say now?"
Curtis had no immediate answer for that, and in the silence, Ryan spoke instead, low and steady. "Whatever you thought you were doing, you need to leave. Now. Whatever deal you made with Reyes, it's already cost us a motel room and nearly cost us a diner. I'm not giving him a barn too."
"I can't just leave her out here."
"You're not going to have a choice," Ryan said, and there was something in his voice, flat and immovable, that made even Curtis, twice his age and presumably far more experienced in exactly this kind of standoff, take an actual step back.
Curtis looked at Ava for a long moment, something aching and apologetic in his expression that might have been genuine, might have been the last card of a very practiced liar, and Ava found she no longer had the energy to guess which.
"Your father doesn't know how far this has gone," Curtis said finally. "I'll fix it. I'll call him tonight, tell him everything, tell him to shut Reyes out completely. I never wanted this, Ava. I want you to know that, whatever you decide to believe."
He turned and walked back into the dark the way he'd come, the sound of his footsteps fading into the field beyond the barn, and neither Ava nor Ryan moved until the distant cough of a car engine confirmed he'd actually gone.
"Do you believe him," Ryan asked quietly, once the night had gone properly silent again.
"I don't know." Ava wrapped her arms around herself, the earlier warmth of the evening entirely gone now, replaced by a cold that had nothing to do with the desert air. "I want to. That's almost worse than not believing him at all."
She was quiet for a long moment, watching the dark field where Curtis had disappeared, before she spoke again, her voice smaller than Ryan had heard it since the first night. "He taught me to ride a bike. Did I ever tell you that? My father was always traveling, and Curtis was the one who ran alongside me on the gravel driveway, over and over, until I stopped being afraid of falling." She laughed, short and humorless. "I don't know how to hold both of those things at once. The man who taught me to ride a bike, and the man who told a stranger which motel room I was sleeping in."
"You don't have to figure that out tonight," Ryan said, gently. "Tonight you just have to figure out whether we trust anything he told us, and I think the answer is no, at least until we know more."
"Agreed." Ava exhaled slowly, some of the rawness in her voice folding itself back into the steadier calm she'd been building since the diner. "So what do we do."
"We move again. Different direction this time, not toward Sacramento, not yet, not until we understand how deep this actually goes." Ryan was already turning the key, the engine's low rumble swallowing the barn's silence whole. "If Curtis knew where we were, we have to assume Reyes still does too, for at least another few hours, until whatever he told your father tonight changes things."
They didn't sleep in the barn after that, moving the truck a mile down the road to a turnout hidden by scrub brush, the headlights off, Ryan navigating the last stretch by memory and moonlight alone. Ava sat rigid in the passenger seat the whole way, arms wrapped around herself, replaying the last twenty minutes in a loop she couldn't seem to break, and it was only once the truck was fully hidden, engine off, that she let herself finally exhale.
They took turns keeping watch through what remained of the night, trading the tire iron back and forth at what felt like reasonable intervals, though neither of them managed anything close to real sleep, both too wound up from the barn, from the kiss that already felt like it belonged to some earlier, gentler version of the night, from the cold, unfinished shape of Curtis's confession still hanging over both of them.
It was somewhere near three in the morning, Ava dozing fitfully against the window and Ryan wide awake with the tire iron across his lap, that his phone buzzed once, quiet in the dark.
It was a text from Frank Whitfield, three words long, sent at an hour that told Ryan the man hadn't been asleep either.
Curtis is dead.
Ryan read it twice, certain for a moment he'd misunderstood, before a second message followed, shorter still.
Found on the old mill road. Whoever did this knows more than we thought. Do not stop moving. Do not trust anyone but each other. Not even me, if it comes to it.
Ryan sat with the phone glowing in his hand for a long moment, the desert around them gone perfectly, terribly still, before he reached over and gently shook Ava's shoulder, hating that he had to be the one to wake her into this particular piece of news.
She read the messages in silence, her face going through disbelief, grief, and something colder and more frightened than either, before she finally looked up at him, her voice barely a whisper in the dark.
"He was trying to fix it," she said. "He said he'd call my dad and fix it. And now he's dead."
"We don't know that those two things are connected yet."
"Don't we?" Ava's hands had started to shake, and this time it had nothing to do with adrenaline burning off after a chase. "Whoever's willing to kill a man for trying to undo one bad decision is not going to hesitate over anything else. Not the diner. Not us. Not your sister, if it ever helps them get what they want."
Ryan didn't have an answer for that that wasn't a lie, so he didn't offer one, only reached over in the dark and took her hand, the same way she'd taken his on the tailgate hours before, and felt her fingers grip back hard enough to ache.
"We keep moving," he said finally, starting the engine, the headlights staying off as he eased the truck back onto the empty road. "And we stop trusting every single person who isn't sitting in this truck right now."
Somewhere behind them, in the direction of the mill road neither of them had ever actually seen, the first grey edge of dawn was beginning to bleed up over the horizon, and Ava sat with her hand still locked in Ryan's, watching it come, understanding with a cold, settling certainty that whatever safety they'd found in that barn a few hours ago had already, quietly, become a thing of the past.