“It doesn’t matter anymore,” Michael said. “The only thing that matters is surviving the night and getting across that border in the morning.”
I looked over at Rob, who had been silent this whole time. He looked like he was simultaneously going to be sick and kill someone with his bare hands. He had known Stacy for years and had been her partner. That was about as close as two people could get without being romantically involved. It was like being family, and he had just seen her completely gutted on the floor of a truck stop bathroom. I knew that cops were tough and that he had probably seen worse than that, but this had to be impossibly hard for him to just push aside and press on.
“Rob?” I asked as I reached my hand out to touch his arm.
He looked back at me with a cold stare that let me know he had turned off his emotions for the time being. I forgot how good cops were at compartmentalizing too.
“Michael is right,” he said without a trace of emotion. “Our only priority is surviving the night and making it onto Canadian soil tomorrow. Whoever killed Stacy is still here and you can bet that they’re coming for us now.”
“There has to be security at these truck stops, doesn’t there?” I asked.
I looked around and spotted a man in a night guard uniform. He was standing near the vending machines now, with his back toward us. It looked like he was moving his hands around a bit and maybe talking to someone in front of him. He started to turn around toward our direction, but just as I got ready to flag him down, I saw who it was that he was talking to—a cop.
Michael reached to pull my arm down as soon as he saw it too.
“What would a local police officer be doing here in the middle of the night talking to rest stop security?” I asked in a whisper.
I was already afraid that I knew that answer to my own question. When the cop looked over in our direction, I could see him hone in on us, even from a distance away.
“He’s one of them, isn’t he?” I asked Rob, trying not to sound as petrified as I was feeling.
“Yeah, we need to get out of here.”
There wasn’t anything left for us to do but run. We had no car, no supplies, literally only the clothes on our backs and the wallets and passports in our pockets. As the cop started to quicken his pace toward us, the situation continued to worsen.
“Shit,” Michael said as he tightened his grip on my hand and pulled me closely beside him. I was trying to keep pace, but I was tired, and scared, and already out of breath. But when I looked toward the direction that he was looking in I saw what had prompted the curse word. There were more cops coming from behind the building and flanking us on both sides.
“Up ahead!” Adam shouted.
We looked ahead of us about a block’s distance away and saw a wooded area. It was a chance to take, running into the woods here with no supplies and no idea which direction to go in. But it was the only source of cover that we had. We pushed into a sprint in order to make it into the cover of the woods well before the cops caught up with us and knew which direction we had gone. Once we were behind the trees, we kept running in the random direction that Rob had led us toward. When we finally stopped, we were hopelessly lost, cold, hungry, and tired.
“Do you know which way to go?” Michael asked Rob as all of us looked around at the wintry thicket of trees. It literally looked the same in every direction. It also looked a lot less thick and full than the woods at the mountains. All the trees here were bare and the woods didn’t look as though they extended very long at all. This was not a good hiding place because there was barely anything to hide behind.
“We’re no better off here,” Adam said. “Anyone looking for us will be able to find us within hours inside this sad excuse for a forest.”
I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I was starting to lose hope of ever escaping. Even this close to the Canadian border, and we still couldn’t seem to escape the ghosts that continued to haunt us all the way from Charlotte. I chuckled a little to myself, quiet enough that no one could hear my sad little piece of ironic amusement.
My mother thought that I could fix all of this—and boy did I try. But even she would be blown away by how much bigger it all was than she could have ever imagined. So big, in fact, that even when I wanted to just forget about all of it and leave it behind, it wouldn’t let me.
“Okay, let’s take a second to think this through,” Michael said, still not easing up on his grip on my hand. “We know we can’t go back the way we came because that is the direction that the cops from the truck stop will be coming after us.”
“What about if we just kept running in the direction we were headed?” I asked.
“That will take us right to border patrol,” Adam interjected. “Like, literally up to the patrol station.”
“That’s even less of a good idea,” Rob said. “If we thought we had no chance making it across in a car with all of our identification and possessions with us, we’re going to have even less of a chance trying to get across with nothing but our passports and a first impression of coming out of the woods at night.”
“Well we can’t just stay here all night,” Adam said. “We don’t have a tent or even a blanket to keep warm. We have to do something.”
We all stood there in the moonlit dark and tried to figure out something to do that wouldn’t result in our immediate capture. But judging from the stagnant silence, none of us had any ideas. At least not any that were viable ideas. Then suddenly a beam of light flashed in between the trees.
Michael pushed my shoulder down as we all ducked as low as we could behind the thin and bare tree trunks. The beam of light brushed over and around us, and for a moment it lingered right on the puny patch of trees that we were trying to hide behind. This was definitely not working out well. The light came from a flashlight and it looked as if the beam was getting wider by the minute, which meant that whoever was holding the flashlight was getting closer. It would have to be either one of the cops or border patrol. No one else would be out here at this hour, or even at any hour considering that we were in the middle of nowhere between a militant border patrol and a dingy truck stop.
I tried to play out a quick scenario in my head as I held tight to Michael’s arm and tried to make myself as small and quiet behind the tree as I could. In one scenario, if it was a cop (or several of the cops), we would all likely be shot and killed within the next few moments. In the other scenario, if it was a border patrol agent, we would likely be arrested and then returned to our local police. That meant that we would still be shot and killed, but that it just might take a little bit longer. I held on so tight to Michael’s arm that I felt like my fingers were claws tearing into his jacket.
Right before the person holding the flashlight got close enough to make eye contact, a voice emerged.
“Lisette?” the voice called out in our exact direction. “Is that you?”
12
Michael, Adam, and Rob all immediately encircled me at the sound of the man’s voice calling my name.
“Lisette?” the voice said again.
“Get ready to run,” Michael whispered to me as he grabbed my hand and held it tight.
“Lisette, wait. I knew your mother. I can help you.”
It felt as if something had opened in my head that entertained the possibility that somehow my mother had sent us help from beyond the grave.
“Don’t listen to him, Lisette,” Rob said. “These guys will say anything to get to you. All they want is to eliminate anyone that is a threat to them.”
“There’s no place for us to outrun them anyway,” I whispered back. “We’re trapped.”
I took a step forward and tried to push past Michael and Adam’s shoulders to see the man holding the flashlight, but Michael quickly jerked my hand backward to keep me at his side.
