NO EXIT a gripping thriller full of heart-stopping twists

by TAYLOR ADAMS

  From the back seat of her Honda outside, under her sheets of rice paper for gravestone rubbings, she’d also grabbed a blue pen and one of her college-ruled notepads. It was in her lap now.

  Page one was doodles. Abstract shapes, cross-hatched shadows.

  Page two — more doodles.

  Page three? Carefully shielded from view, Darby had sketched possibly her finest-ever rendering of a human face. It was nearly flawless. She’d studied Lars, every slouching inch of him. His blonde whiskers, his slack overbite, his mushy chin and slanted forehead. The pronounced V-shape of his hairline. She’d even captured the dim glaze of his eyes. The police would find it useful; maybe they’d even release it to the media to aid the coming manhunt. She also had the van’s make, model, and license plate. Plus a blurry photo of the missing San Diego girl. It would look great on CNN, blown up on forty-inch LCD screens across the country.

  But was it enough?

  Driving was impossible now, but tomorrow morning when the snowplows arrived and opened up Backbone Pass to traffic, Lars would take Jay and leave. Even if Darby could manage a 9-1-1 call immediately afterward, the police would still be acting off a last-known location. Maybe he’d get caught, but maybe he wouldn’t. He’d have ample time to slip through the patchy net, to vanish back into the world, and that would be a death sentence for seven-year-old Jay Nissen. Jaybird Nissen. Whatever her name was.

  According to the regional map on the wall, State Route Seven intersected two other highways near the pass. Plus a major interstate running like a vein to the north. Whether Lars drove east or west, he’d have plenty of escape routes. On closer inspection, she also learned that the Wanapa (Little Devil) rest stop was twenty miles downhill. This one, the one they were all stranded at, was actually Wanapani. She’d misread the map earlier. They were twenty miles further from civilization.

  In Paiute, Wanapani translated to Big Devil.

  Of course it did.

  Darby still had the bullet in her pocket, too. She’d inspected it under green fluorescent lights in the women’s restroom. The bullet’s blunt nose was split with four cross-cuts, which appeared deliberate, for some unknown reason. The bottom of it, the brass rim, had stamped lettering: .45 lic. She’d heard of guns called forty-fives before, in cop movies. But it was chilling to think that there was a real one right here, in the room with her, tucked under Lars’s jacket. Just a few feet away.

  Darby had known this in her gut for an hour now, but her mind was finally coming around to it, too. A suspect description and a blurry, half-assed photo wouldn’t be good enough. It would be enough for the media to brand her a hero if things worked out nicely, but it wasn’t enough to guarantee Jay’s rescue.

  And afterward, if the cops never found Lars, what would she tell the poor girl’s parents? Sorry your kid is dead, but I called the police and wrote down the license plate and ran everything through the proper channels. I even drew a picture.

  No, she needed to take action.

  Here. Tonight. In this snowbound little rest area. Before the plows arrived at dawn, she needed to stop Lars herself.

  Somehow.

  That was as far as her plan went.

  She sipped her coffee. This was her third cup, bitter and jet-black. She’d always loved her stimulants — espresso shots, Red Bull, Full Throttle, Rockstar. No-Doze pills. Her roommate’s Adderall. Anything for that addictive little buzz. Pure rocket fuel for her paintings and oil pastels. Depressants — alcohol, weed — they were the enemy. Darby preferred to live her life wide-eyed, tormented, running, because nothing can catch you if you never stop. And thank God for it, for caffeine’s acidic little kick. Because tonight, of all nights, she would need to stay pin-sharp.

  Above the regional map, she noticed an old analog clock. Garfield-themed. In its center, Garfield courted the pink female character — Arlene — with a handful of crudely drawn flowers. The clock’s hour hand indicated it was almost midnight, but she realized it was an hour ahead. Someone had missed winter daylight savings.

  It wasn’t even eleven yet.

  Come to think of it, she wasn’t sure which was more nerve-racking — running out of time, or having too much of it. As she completed her sketch (shadowing the lumpy slope of his forehead, which reminded her of a human fetus) she noticed Lars was finally warming up to the others. At least, there was a little more of a group dynamic now. Ashley was showing Lars and Ed a card trick, something he called a Mexican turnover. From what Darby overheard, you flip over a card using another one in your hand — but really, you’re switching them. In plain view. Lars was fascinated by the maneuver, and Ashley seemed delighted to have an audience.

  “So that’s why you keep winning,” Ed said.

  “Don’t worry.” Ashley flashed a huckster’s grin, hands up. “I beat you fair and square. But yes, if I may be permitted to toot my own horn, I did take silver in a stage magic competition once.”

  Ed snorted. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a thing?”

  “Of course it’s a thing.”

  “Second grade?”

  “Third, actually.” Ashley shuffled cards. “Thank you very much.”

  “Did you wear a little tux?”

  “You have to.”

  “How’s the current job market for silver-medal magicians?”

  “Staggeringly poor.” Ashley shelved the cards with a rattlesnake-chatter. “So I went to school for accounting. And let me tell you, that’s where the real magic is.”

  Ed laughed.

  Lars had been listening to their conversation, his hairy lips pursed, and now he seized this pause to involve himself in it: “So, then, were the . . . ah, were the magic tricks real?”

  The blizzard intensified outside. The window creaked under the pressure of gusting wind. Ashley glanced to Ed for a smirking moment (Is magic real? Really?), and Darby watched him decide whether to play it straight or to indulge in a little sarcasm at the expense of the armed child abductor.

  Don’t do it, Ashley.

  He turned back to Lars. “Yep.”

  “Really?”

  Ashley’s grin widened. “Absolutely.”

  She felt a shivery pool of dread growing in her stomach. Like witnessing the moments before a car accident. The scream of locked tires, the unyielding kinetic power of momentum: Stop it, Ashley. You have no idea who you’re talking to—

  “So it’s real?” Lars whispered.

  Stop-stop-stop—

  “Oh, it’s all real,” Ashley said, milking it now. “I can bend time and space, pull surprises out of my sleeves, make people misremember. I can cheat death. I can dodge bullets. I’m a magic man, Lars, my brother, and I can—”

  “Do you know how to cut a girl in half?” Lars asked abruptly.

  The room went quiet. The window creaked under another howl of wind.

  Darby glanced back down and pretended to doodle again with her blue pen, but she realized with a sour tremor — he was staring across the room at her. Lars, the chinless child abductor with a Deadpool beanie and a child’s fascination with magic tricks, was looking directly at her.

  Ashley hesitated. His bullshit machine was out of gas. “I . . . uh, well . . .”

  “Do you know how to cut a girl in half?” Lars asked again, eagerly. Same tone, same inflection. His eyes were still pinned on Darby as he spoke. “You know. You put her in a big wooden box, like a coffin, and then you . . . ah, you cut it with a saw?”

  Ed stared at the floor. Sandi lowered her paperback.

  Again: “Can you cut a girl in half?”

  Darby’s fingers tightened around her pen. Her knees hunched closer to her chest. Rodent Face was standing about ten feet from her. She wondered — if he went for the .45 under his jacket, could she yank the Swiss Army knife from her pocket, retract the blade, and cross the room quickly enough to stab him in the throat with it?

  She rested her right hand on the countertop. Near her hip.

  Lars as
ked again, louder: “Can you cut a girl in—”

  “I can,” Ashley answered. “But you only win gold if she survives.”

  Silence.

  It wasn’t particularly funny, but Ed forced a chuckle.

  Sandi laughed, too. So did Ashley. Lars cocked his head — like he had to squeeze the joke through the clockwork of his brain — and finally gave in and laughed along with them, and the room thundered with belly laughs. Ringing in the pressurized air, until Darby’s migraine returned and she wanted to clamp her eyes shut.

  “See, I got silver,” Ashley added. “Not gold—”

  Under another crescendo of strained laughter, and still grinning widely, Lars whipped his coat aside and reached for something on his hip. Darby grabbed the knife in her pocket — but he was just adjusting his belt.

  Jesus. That was close.

  He’d moved quickly, though. If he were really going for his gun, she realized, he could have killed everyone in the room. Lars only appeared clumsy and sluggish — until he surprises you and strikes.

  “Gold medal,” he chuckled, tugging his belt around his scrawny ass, pointing a thumb at Ashley. “I, ah, like his jokes. He’s funny.”

  “Oh, give me time,” Ashley said. “You’ll find me quite grating.”

  As the false laughter faded, Darby processed something else. A small detail, but something deeply unsettling about the way the abductor had laughed. He’d seemed too alert. Normal people blink and let their guards down. But not Lars. His face laughed but his eyes watched. He scanned everyone’s faces, pupils searching the room, coldly assessing while he showed his mouthful of pointy teeth.

  That’s the grinning, stupid face of evil, Darby realized.

  That’s the face of a man who stole a little girl from her home in California.

  The lights flickered. A seizure of icy darkness. Everyone glanced up at the fluorescent overheads, but as they chattered back on and the room filled again with light, Darby was still studying Lars’s whiskery face.

  That’s what I’m up against.

  * * *

  There’s a time, deep into the night, when the forces of evil are said to be at their strongest. The witching hour, Darby’s mom used to call it, with a silly little voodoo twang to her voice.

  It’s 3 a.m.

  Supposedly this was the Devil’s mockery of the Holy Trinity. Growing up, Darby had respected this superstition but never really believed it — how can one time of day be more evil than any other? But still, throughout her childhood, whenever she woke up from a nightmare, her breaths hitching and her skin glazed with sweat, she’d glanced to her phone. And eerily, the time had always been close to 3 a.m. Every time she could remember.

  The time she dreamt that her throat closed up in seventh grade Social Studies class and she vomited a three-inch maggot, pale and bloated, writhing on her desk?

  3:21 a.m.

  The time a man stalked her on her way to Seven-Eleven, whistling at her, and then cornered her in the restroom, produced a tiny handgun, and shot her in the back of the head?

  3:33 a.m.

  The time that tall ghost — a gray-haired woman with a floral skirt and double-jointed knees, both bending backward like a dog’s hind legs — came lurching through Darby’s bedroom window, half-floating and half-striding, weightless and ethereal, like a creature underwater?

  3:00 a.m. exactly.

  Coincidence, right?

  Witching hours, her mother used to say, lighting one of her jasmine candles. When the demons are at their most powerful.

  Then she’d snap her Zippo lighter shut for emphasis — click.

  Here and now at the Wanapani rest area, it was only 11 p.m., but Darby still imagined a darkness gathering in the room with her, with all of them. Something sentient pooling in shadows, giddily awaiting violence.

  She hadn’t yet decided how she’d attack Lars.

  She’d already memorized the floor plan of the visitor center. It was simple, but honeycombed with significant details. A rectangular main lobby with two gendered restrooms, crusty drinking fountains, and a locked supply closet labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY. A stone-and-mortar coffee counter, encircling a closed coffee shop, sealed off with padlocked security shutters. One highly-visible front door with a squeaky hinge. One broad window overlooking the parking lot, half-blocked by a shelf of windswept snow. And a small, triangular window in each restroom, nestled into the ceiling, ten feet off the tile floor. Like a jailhouse window, minus the bars. She’d remembered this, because it seemed like a detail others would forget.

  Outside felt like another planet entirely. The moonlight snuffed by clouds. The temperature had dropped to negative two, according to the mercury thermometer dangling outside. Heaped snow crowded up to the window, still accumulating. The wind came in shrill spurts, slashing flurries of dry snowflakes that tapped the glass like pebbles.

  “I could sure go for some global warming right now,” said Ed.

  Sandi turned a page. “Global warming is a hoax.”

  “I’m just saying, thank God we’re indoors.”

  “That’s true,” Ashley murmured, tilting his head in Lars’s direction, “until someone gets locked in a wooden box and sawed in half.”

  Rodent Face was back to hovering by the door, picking at the brochure rack. Darby couldn’t tell if he’d heard Ashley’s joke. She wished he would stop tempting fate. This situation couldn’t possibly sustain itself for eight more hours. Sooner or later, Ashley would wander onto a verbal landmine.

  Weapons, then.

  That was what tonight would come down to. And as far as Darby could tell, this public rest area was as harmless as a preschool. Outside the security shutters, the coffee bar had only plastic forks and spoons. Paper plates and brown napkins. There was a janitorial closet, but it was locked. No tire irons, or flare guns, or steak knives. Her best offensive option, unfortunately, was the two-inch serrated blade on her Swiss Army multitool. She patted her jeans pocket, reassured that it was still there.

  Could she stab Lars with it? More importantly, would it even stop him? She didn’t know. It was barely a weapon, unlikely to pierce a ribcage. She’d need to catch Rodent Face off-guard, and she’d need to plunge it directly into the soft flesh of his throat, or his eyes. No time for hesitation. It was possible, she knew, but not exactly plan A.

  The cracked mortar under the counter, she remembered. The loose stone.

  That could be useful.

  She stood and approached the coffee counter, pretending to fill another Styrofoam cup. When no one was looking, she raised her right foot, rested it on the wobbly stone, and leaned forward. She applied a little pressure, then more, then more — fussing with the COFEE carafe’s lever to conceal the noise — until the stone popped free and clacked to the tile floor. Lars, Ed, and Ashley didn’t notice. Sandi glanced up briefly, and then resumed reading.

  When the woman’s eyes were back in her paperback, Darby scooped it up. It was a little smaller than a hockey puck, smooth and egg-shaped. Just large enough to bash out a few bloody teeth, or to throw hard. She pocketed the cold rock and returned to her seat on the bench, taking mental inventory.

  A two-inch knife.

  A medium-sized rock.

  And a single .45-caliber bullet.

  I’m going to need help, she realized.

  She could try and take down Lars herself, of course. Surprise him, injure him, twist the gun from his jacket and detain him with it until the snowplows arrived at dawn. Hogtie him with his own electrical tape, maybe. And if things went to hell, she supposed she’d be mentally prepared to kill him. But attempting it right now, solo, would be irresponsible. She needed to share her discovery with someone else here, in case Lars managed to overpower her and quietly hide her body without the others realizing. She couldn’t save Jay if she got herself killed first.

  The difference between a hero and a victim?

  Timing.

  At the table, Ashley fanned out the cards in a smooth rainbow, all fa
cedown except a single, upturned ace of hearts. “And, here’s your card.”

  Lars gasped, like a caveman discovering fire.

  Ed shrugged. “Not bad.”

  From the bench, Darby assessed her potential allies. Ed was pushing sixty and carried a belly. His cousin Sandi might as well be made of balsa wood and hairspray. Ashley, though — as gratingly chatty as he was, he was also broad, muscular, and quick on his feet. The way he moved to pick up dropped cards, the way he confidently shimmied around chairs — he had the swooping, ducking grace of a basketball player. Or a stage magician.

  A silver-medal stage magician.

  “Do another one,” said Lars.

  “That’s the only authentic trick I remember,” Ashley said. “Everything else was kiddie stuff. Fake sleeves, trapdoors in cups, that sort of thing.”

  “You missed your calling,” Ed said.

  “Yeah?” He smiled, and for a split-second, Darby glimpsed pain in his eyes. “Well, accounting is pretty badass, too.”

  Lars moped by the door, disappointed that the show was over.

  Darby decided that her next step had to be Ashley. He was strong enough to fight, at least. She’d catch him alone, in the restroom maybe, and tell him about the girl. She’d make sure he understood the gravity of the situation; that right now, a child’s life was at stake outside. Then she’d have backup, when she chose her moment to attack and detain Lars—

  “Oh!” Ashley clapped his hands together, startling everyone. “I know how we can pass the time. We can play circle time.”

  Ed blinked. “What?”

  “Circle time.”

  “Circle time?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell is circle time?”

  “My aunt is a preschool teacher. She uses this to break the ice with small groups. Basically, you’re all seated in a circle, kind of like we are right now, and you all agree on a topic, like my favorite pet, or whatever. And then you take turns, clockwise, sharing your answer.” Ashley hesitated, glancing from face to face. “And that’s . . . that’s why it’s called circle time.”