Chapter Seven: The Turnout
Ryan would remember the exact weight of Ava's hand slipping out of his, torn away by someone else's grip rather than let go on purpose, and he would spend the rest of that night convinced it was the worst sound he'd ever heard, worse than the crack of the pipe that had caught him across the ribs two minutes earlier.
That was just past noon. First, there was the quiet.
They'd driven through what remained of the night after Frank's text, taking back roads Ryan chose more by instinct than any map, and by mid-morning exhaustion had caught up to both of them hard enough that Ryan finally pulled into a turnout shaded by a stand of cottonwoods, telling himself they'd rest an hour, no more, before pushing on toward whatever came next.
Ava had barely spoken since the news about Curtis, curled into the passenger seat with her knees drawn up, and Ryan understood, watching her, that grief and fear had finally caught up to her all at once, the adrenaline of the last three days no longer enough to hold either one at bay.
"You should sleep," he told her, keeping his own voice low and steady. "I'll watch."
"You didn't sleep last night either."
"I'll manage." He meant it, mostly, though his own eyes felt gritty and raw, sleep deprivation stacking on top of everything else until the whole world had taken on a thin, unreal quality, like watching everything through a pane of slightly warped glass.
She slept for almost two hours, her head eventually finding his shoulder without either of them commenting on it, and Ryan sat as still as he could manage, watching the tree line, watching the road, watching the small, steady rise and fall of her breathing like it was the only thing anchoring the whole exhausted, dangerous morning to something bearable.
He thought, in the quiet of that hour, about the kiss in the barn, about the way she'd said she was glad it had been him her father picked, and found the memory sitting strangely alongside the fear still coiled tight in his chest. I don't know how to keep both of those things at once either, he thought, echoing, without quite realizing it, the same words she'd used about Curtis the night before. The girl who makes me feel like this, and the danger that's still following her everywhere she goes.
He thought too of Maddie, of the specialist in Phoenix, of the fifteen thousand dollars that had started to feel almost irrelevant next to the much larger, much more frightening thing this job had actually become, and understood, with a clarity that surprised him, that if someone offered him the fifty thousand dollars again right now, in this exact moment, he would still say no without a single second of hesitation. Some things, he was starting to realize, simply stopped being about money the moment they became about a person instead.
His phone had stayed silent since the text about Curtis, no further word from Frank, and Ryan chose to read that as a good sign rather than examine too closely why it also unsettled him.
He heard the first car door long before he saw the men attached to it, a soft, careful click rather than a slam, the sound of someone trying very hard not to be heard, and by the time Ava's eyes snapped open, jolted awake by the sudden rigid tension in his shoulders, it was already too late to simply drive away.
"Get down," Ryan said, low and urgent, already reaching past her to lock her door. "Ava, get down, now."
Three men came around the cottonwoods in a loose, practiced formation, the kind of unhurried competence that told Ryan immediately these weren't the same clumsy hired muscle who'd chased them down the highway two days before. These men moved like they'd done this before, calm and methodical, and the man in front, unremarkable in every way except for the flat, patient calculation in his eyes, was the same man from the diner, coffee stain long since dealt with, expression considerably less pleasant than it had been over pancakes.
"You've cost me a great deal of goodwill," the man said, stopping a careful distance from the truck, hands visible, unhurried. "And an associate who apparently developed a conscience at exactly the wrong moment. I'm done being patient about this."
Ryan didn't answer. He was already calculating distances, the tree line, the road, the two men fanning out slowly to either side of the truck in a pincer neither subtle nor slow enough to argue with, his mind running through every option his father had ever drilled into him and finding all of them badly outnumbered.
"You could have taken the fifty thousand," the man continued, almost conversational, as though they had all the time in the world. "It would have been considerably less painful for everyone involved, yourself especially. I do hope you understand that whatever happens in the next few minutes, you brought it on yourself by being stubborn about a paycheck that was never going to matter to you as much as your sister's medical bills."
Don't listen to him. He wants you angry and careless. Ryan kept his hands steady on the wheel, refusing to give the man the satisfaction of a response, though something in his chest had gone tight and cold at the mention of Maddie again, a second time now, wielded like a blade by someone who'd clearly done exactly enough research to know precisely where to cut.
"Ryan." Ava's voice, tight with fear, from somewhere near the floorboard where she'd wedged herself at his order. "What do we do."
"We don't get out of the truck." He kept his voice as level as he could manage, throwing the truck into reverse, the tires spitting gravel as he cut the wheel hard, aiming for the gap between two of the men before they could fully close the pincer.
It nearly worked. The truck lurched forward, clipping the edge of the nearest man's shoulder hard enough to send him stumbling, and for one wild, hopeful second Ryan thought they might actually break through clean.
Then something heavy struck the driver's side window, once, twice, safety glass spiderwebbing into a thousand fractured pieces before the third blow drove clean through, and a gloved hand closed around Ryan's collar and hauled with a strength that yanked him half out of his own seat, the truck stalling out beneath them with a shudder.
He fought. He would remember that clearly, later, even through the chaos of it, throwing an elbow that connected with something solid, hearing a grunt of real pain in response, buying himself half a second of space before the pipe caught him across the ribs, white-hot and breath-stealing, folding him over the steering wheel with a force that emptied his lungs entirely.
Get up. Get up, they've got Ava, get up.
He tried. His body, for one long, terrifying moment, simply refused to cooperate, pain radiating out from his side in waves that made the whole world tilt sideways, and by the time his vision cleared enough to focus, hands already dragging him back through the shattered window, he saw Ava on the far side of the truck, fighting two men at once with a wild, furious desperation that reminded him, absurdly, of the diner and the coffee pot, kicking and twisting and shouting his name in a voice raw enough to strip her throat.
"Ryan!"
He lunged, ignoring the scream of pain along his ribs, closing the distance in three unsteady strides, close enough to actually reach her outstretched hand, close enough to feel her fingers close around his for one brief, desperate second.
Then something struck the back of his skull, hard and sudden, and the world went white at the edges, his knees buckling beneath him, and the last thing he registered with any real clarity was Ava's hand torn out of his by a grip stronger than either of them could fight, her voice calling his name once more, farther away this time, and then the slam of a car door, and an engine gunning hard down the turnout's gravel access road.
By the time Ryan's vision cleared enough to push himself upright, one hand braced against the wrecked truck, blood running warm down the back of his neck, the only sign that anyone had ever been there at all was a spray of gravel settling slowly back to earth and a single tire iron, dropped in the dirt where Ava had been standing thirty seconds before.
He stood there a long moment, breath ragged, ribs screaming with every inhale, staring at the empty road where the car had gone, and understood, with a cold, absolute certainty that made his stomach drop straight through the floor of the world, that he had just failed the one thing he'd promised himself he wouldn't.
He picked up the phone with shaking hands, dialed the only number he had that might actually help, and when Frank Whitfield answered on the first ring, Ryan didn't bother with a greeting.
"They took her," he said. "They took Ava."
The silence on the other end of the line stretched long enough that Ryan thought the call had dropped, before Frank's voice came through, rougher than Ryan had ever heard it, all of the man's usual careful composure stripped completely away. "Tell me everything. Right now. Every detail."
Ryan told him, the turnout, the three men, the man from the diner, the pipe across his ribs, the last glimpse of Ava fighting two men at once before the world went white and she was gone, and he heard, on the other end of the line, something that might have been Frank Whitfield actually breaking, just slightly, the sound of a father hearing the exact thing he'd spent two years trying to prevent.
"I should never have let her go with anyone but professional security," Frank said, half to himself, half to Ryan, his voice thick with something between fury and grief. "I told myself hiring you quietly was smarter, safer, less likely to draw attention. I was wrong. I was so wrong, and now my daughter is gone because I decided a seventeen-year-old with good instincts was an acceptable risk to take."
"She's not gone." Ryan said it fiercely, surprising himself with how much conviction the words carried despite the blood still running down his neck, despite the pain radiating from his ribs with every breath. "She's taken. Those are different things. I'm going to get her back."
"You're hurt. You said it yourself, a pipe across your ribs, a blow to the head. You need a hospital, not a rescue mission."
"I need to find her before Reyes decides she's more useful broken than whole." Ryan pushed himself fully upright against the wrecked truck, ignoring the way the world tilted sideways in protest, ignoring the warm, wet feeling at the back of his skull that he suspected meant more blood than was strictly reassuring. "You said not to trust anyone but each other. I'm the only each other she's got left out here. So tell me everything you know about Reyes, every property, every associate, every place he might actually take her, because I am not spending the next hour in an emergency room while she's somewhere with people who already tried to buy me into handing her over once already."
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and when Frank spoke again, something in his voice had shifted, reluctant respect threading through the grief. "There's a property outside a town called Barstow. Old processing plant, technically decommissioned, still owned by a shell company Reyes uses for exactly this kind of thing. It's the only place I can think of remote enough, and close enough to where you are, that he'd risk taking her."
"Send me the address." Ryan was already moving toward the truck's crumpled driver's door, testing his own legs, grateful, distantly, that whatever damage the pipe had done hadn't been enough to actually put him down. "And Frank. If you've got anyone you actually trust left, anyone who isn't Curtis, get them moving too. I'll take whatever help I can get, but I'm not waiting for it to arrive."