Set You Free (19 page)

Grady exhales, shaking his head. “No way. That was crazy!”

“But you decided it was a good time to start?”

“I guess so,” he says. And then he starts laughing. He reaches over and pats my leg. “In theory it seemed like it would work. And somehow it did!”

“You’re a maniac,” I say.

Morrisberg is a small town, which, if the current development continues, will soon be part of Resurrection Falls. Its little stores and cafés are cute and quaint and will likely be torn down and turned into strip malls. A traffic light switches to red ahead of us. Grady turns in to a parking lot, weaves through some cars and pops out onto a side street.

I’m shaking from what has happened. From sneaking into the cottage to confronting JJ to the crazy driving. My nerves feel shaved. I suddenly notice I’ve been holding the handle above the door. I bring my hand down, and my knuckles are pure white.

My cell buzzes. I pull it out of my pocket, wondering who would be contacting me.

It’s a text:
Tom has been spotted. DE

“
What?” I say, almost dropping the phone in surprise. She has to be lying.

“What?” Grady says.

“Detective Evans just texted me that Tom has been spotted.”

“Find out where,” Grady says.

I manage to get some composure back and say, “Should I be writing her? Shouldn’t I turn my phone off so they can’t track me?”

Grady looks in the rearview mirror. “I don’t think having the police interested in us at the moment would be a horrible idea.”

Where?
I text.

My phone buzzes again.

Come to the station.

“
She’s not going to tell me,” I say. I start flipping through web pages to see if there is anything online. We’re bumping along a pothole-filled mess of a road, which makes selecting links and reading next to impossible.

“How the hell did he catch up?” Grady says, looking in the rearview mirror again. I turn and see the silver
BMW
coming up behind us. “He must be driving like a maniac.”

“Said the pot to the kettle,” I say. “Where can we lose him?”

“Maybe the industrial park,” Grady says. “But if he catches us in there, we’re totally screwed.”

“No, we need somewhere public.” I keep scanning the news sites for information about Tom, and finally I find something on Twitter. “They think Tom’s downtown.”

“Where?”

“It doesn’t say Tom is there. But someone’s tweeting that there’s a major police presence in the 800 block of Fallgate near Toluse.” I stare at the screen for a moment, thinking. We’re on the outskirts of Resurrection Falls, driving past the endless line of big-box stores. The downtown core is maybe ten minutes away if we go straight and hit all green lights. Grady blows a red light, and JJ follows right along behind us.

Grady is right: there’s no way we can lose him.

“We’re screwed,” Grady says. He sighs. “But what does it matter?”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re closing in on Tom, right?”

“You don’t think all of this matters?”

“What can we do about it, Lauren?”

“He hid the fact that his son had something to do with a kid’s death? That doesn’t bother you?”

“We don’t know that for certain,” Grady says, suddenly turning right.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m taking you to the police station. This has all been about Tom from the beginning, right? To make certain he was okay. To find out where he went and why. Well, if the police have found him, then you need to go there. To help him.”

“No,” I say. I hold the
USB
drive out toward Grady. “There’s more to it than that.” I pause for a moment, then say, “It’s all on here.”

“What is that?” he says. “Where did you get it?”

“Everything is on here.” I wave it at him. “The payments, the payoffs, all the places the money went. I bet there’s a payoff to the cop who put the wrong time down on JJ’s incident report. If we don’t get this out, it doesn’t matter what happens to Tom or Ben—all of this will be buried forever.”

Grady glances at the
USB
drive as we go under a streetlight. “Wait a second.” He grabs the drive from me before I know what’s happening. “This is a paired
USB
drive. You can’t see what’s on here unless you have both drives.”

“I know,” I say.

“How do you know that?” He hands me back the drive.

“I just do.”

“What’s going on, Lauren?”

“Go to the mayor’s house,” I say.

There’s a long pause, which breaks my heart a little. Grady is trying to figure out what I know and how I know it. Wondering what secrets I’ve been keeping from him.

“What aren’t you telling me, Lauren?” he asks.

I close my fist around the drive. “You have to trust me, Grady,” I say. “I can make this right. But you need to get me there as fast as you can.”

TWENTY-FIVE

We’re driving through my suburban world.

“You think the other flash drive is in the mayor’s house?” Grady asks.

I say, “If the brothers are working together but didn’t trust one another, they’d split the information exactly like this.”

“But then every time someone wanted to work on the file, they’d have to be together.”

“Which is where JJ stepped in,” I say.

We’re two blocks from the Carters’ house. Grady stops at an intersection and looks both ways. The house on the corner has a giant hedge, which is impossible to see around. Grady looks at me as we pull into the intersection. He opens his mouth to say something, but the words never come out.

“Grady, look out!” I scream.

It happens so fast that my words are buried beneath the crunch of steel and the shattering of glass. We have rammed into a telephone pole, and the resulting jolt sends my entire body into the air, only to be yanked back down by the seat belt. I watch as my face comes within inches of the dash. The
BMW
, which must have been moving at an incredible pace, spins away from the pole and smashes into the back of a parked pickup.

The seat belt has held me tightly, but my neck feels as though it’s been snapped. There’s a ringing in my ears, and when the car was thrown sideways, I smashed my hand into something.

“Are you okay?” I say.

“I don’t know.” Grady holds his hands up before him. “What just happened?”

“He rammed us,” I say.

I open my hand to find it empty. There are bits of broken glass all over my lap, but the windshield is a spiderweb of lines. It’s the side window that is broken.

I undo my seat belt and look between my feet at the floor. “Where’s the drive?” I say.

Grady looks at me like he’s been hit in the head with a shovel. Which, I suppose, is not that far from what has actually happened.

“What?”

“The
USB
drive. Look for it, please.”

Grady touches his head, then turns to his window. “There’s JJ,” he says.

I look up to see JJ falling out of his car. He lies there for a second before attempting to stand—without success. I go back to looking for the drive.

I move my hand around on the floor until I feel something slice into my thumb. “Shit,” I say.

Grady is still staring out the window.

“I have to go,” I say.

“What?” Grady mutters.

“Did you bang your head?”

He touches his head again. “No. I just…” His sentence stalls, and he goes back to staring at JJ on the ground outside his car.

“Tell me when he gets up,” I say. I hammer on the door until it pops open. Already I can hear sirens cutting across the sky. People are coming out of their houses, calling out to one another.

“You’re going to be okay,” I say. “You’re going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.”

My heart is going triple the speed it should. I slide out of the car and drop to my knees beside it. The drive has to be under the seat. It can’t be outside the car—there’s just no way.

Because without it, I’m lost.

Grady looks down at me, stunned.

“I can’t go without that drive.” I glance back up at Grady. “Grady, you have to help me.”

“This?” he says, holding up the
USB
drive.

“Yes, that,” I say. I reach out and take it from him. “Thank you.”

“Sure.” He points out the window. “JJ is coming over here.”

“Don’t worry about JJ,” I say, clasping the flash drive. “This will all be over soon.”

“Are you all right?” someone yells. I look up and see an older man with his hands on JJ’s shoulders. “Son, are you okay?” There are people pouring onto the street now.

JJ stumbles as he pushes away from the man. There’s a tear in his pant leg, and blood is staining his expensive shoes. I back away from the car. JJ looks at me, his eyes not quite focusing. The older man grabs him again and tells him he should sit down. JJ’s uncle is still in the car. There is blood on his face, and he’s not moving. The air bag has inflated on the driver’s side, but not the passenger’s. For some reason, the right turn signal is flashing.

I give JJ a quick smile as I hold the
USB
drive up.

I see the recognition on his face. What that little piece of plastic means.

“You’ll never find it!” he yells.

But he’s wrong. I already know exactly where the other
USB
drive is.

And I’m going to get it.

I turn and cut through the advancing crowd. Running as quickly and strongly as I ever have before.

The patio door is open, and the alarm is off inside the Carters’ house. I slip in as quietly as possible, even though I already know no one is home.

I go straight to Jack’s den, a place I have only been once before, on the day Erin showed me the
USB
drive. There’s a catch beneath the middle of his desk that unlocks a small compartment. I slide my hand along until I feel the hard plastic there and pull out the matching
USB
drive.

As I push the compartment back into place, I move the curtains aside to look out the window. An ambulance flashes past, followed by a cruiser. Lights go on in the driveway as another police car starts up. I hadn’t thought anyone would be left outside the Carters’ house. Luckily, I decided to go in the patio door.

The scream of sirens invades the house. A pulsing of noise, wave upon wave descending on the neighborhood. I wait at the doorway, listening. I thought I heard a sound. Footsteps, or the banging of the patio door closing. But there’s no way that JJ, in his condition, would have been able to make it here. A firefighter or paramedic would have stopped him and forced him to sit down.

I pass Benny’s room and look inside. It’s clean, cleaner than any kid’s room should be. But that is the way he likes it. I notice his stuffed elephant lying on the floor, slightly beneath the bed skirt. I go in and grab it, then run to the
patio door. I stop for a moment, knowing I’ll never be in this house again. Knowing that with all I have just done, everything has changed. But that it’s changed for the better.

I turn toward my house but quickly realize the police will almost certainly be there. They’ll be expecting Tom to run home. Plus, if JJ has been in contact with his father, the police will be looking for me by now as well. My name and picture popping up on all the little in-car computers.

I look up and down the street. There has to be somewhere I can go to download the information from the
USB
drives and still get away. Headlights break the darkness of the street, so I lean into the shadow surrounding a large maple tree on the Carters’ lawn. The car slows, though it isn’t a cruiser. It speeds up as it passes the house and a moment later is gone. I look at the sidewalk and wonder how many times I’ve walked these streets. How many times my feet have touched the earth.

Then I know exactly where I can go.