Her jaw clenched as she imagined Emmet as one of the laughing imbeciles. Hope you’re having a good time, she thought bitterly. He’d come home from UNL for the weekend. He was supposed to be here, helping her, but when he’d learned that some of his school friends had also driven into town, he’d ditched her to join them. Their parents were at the football game, supporting her cousin on the team.
Rosemarie reached for the pitchfork through the black shadow, but her hand only greeted air. Patting the rough, planked wall farther and farther into the stall, she finally fumbled against the handle in the far corner.
She grabbed it and turned back toward the light.
The bucket was gone.
A confused moment—a dreadful heartbeat—and then her nostrils filled with an unfamiliar and unwelcome odor. It was the unwashed scent of another human being.
The former cruiser tore out of Osborne, but as it hit the connecting highway, the car speeding ahead of them unexpectedly and drastically slowed down.
Makani glanced at the speedometer. It was five under the posted limit. “What the hell?” she yelled at the other car. “Go!”
Ollie’s knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. “This happens all the time. People look in their rearview mirrors, and they think I’m a cop.”
In the backseat, Darby tried to reach Rosemarie, but the cell towers were still overloaded. The calls either went straight to voicemail, or they wouldn’t connect at all.
Ollie swerved into the oncoming lane and stepped on it. They raced past the car, and he zipped back into the right lane. With every mile, his adherence to safety regulations was going increasingly out the window.
Less than a minute later, it happened again. Makani and Alex moaned.
“All. The. Time,” Ollie said, gritting his teeth and passing the second car.
Another speedometer check. Thirty over the limit. He caught Makani eyeing it. “No one’s pulling me over tonight. They’re all on the other side of town.”
Makani liked that Ollie was a careful driver. She respected it. But she was grateful that he felt the urgency of their current situation.
She gave the road a grim smile. “I’m not complaining.”
Rosemarie knew that scents could be comforting, but this was the first time she’d ever smelled a scent that was frightening. The stench of rancid body odor was close, and it was male.
And it didn’t belong to her brother.
A slender figure stepped out in front of her stall. His gait was calm and measured. He was dressed in a strange coat, and he was holding the grooming bucket.
Rosemarie’s knees began to quake.
David Thurston Ware set down the bucket. He didn’t need it. He’d only brought it to show her that he was the one who’d moved it. He shrugged off the coat, which fell to the ground in a woolen puddle. He was wearing the hoodie that she’d heard about on the news. The camouflage was covered with splotchy brown stains that were darker than the fabric’s pattern. Dried blood.
The reveal was both unnecessary and terrifying.
He removed his knife from a sheath on his belt. The blade glinted. Staring into the darkness of her stall, he kicked the plastic bucket, and the tools clanged together.
“They wouldn’t have helped you much.” He took a step forward. “But they would have been better than nothing.”
Rosemarie tightened her grip on the pitchfork and lunged.
Traffic deadened into a complete stop. Hawaii was notorious for its impassable, two-lane roads, and it wasn’t uncommon to get stuck behind a sightseer driving fifteen-under. Yet Makani had never felt road rage more intensely than she did right now.
“Her house is right there.” Ollie gestured angrily at a plain one-story just before the corn maze. The house was set back some distance off the road.
Darby and Alex reached for their seat belts. “We’ll make a run for it,” Alex said.
“No!” Makani’s rage turned into panic. “No splitting up. We stay together.”
“I agree,” Ollie said as the cruiser inched forward.
“But we can’t just sit here,” Alex said. “David could already be there!”
Darby attempted to soothe her. “Most likely, he’s in town. It’s probably okay.”
Alex fumed. “Whose side are you on?”
Ollie craned his neck to see around the gridlock. A pickup passed, and then he sharply turned the wheel and accelerated into the oncoming lane.
A semi was coming straight toward them.
They screamed. The truck blew its horn. Ollie drove straight into the ditch beside the road and kept driving. The truck flew by, and the other drivers laid on their horns, shouting obscenities, as the cruiser hurtled down the length of the ditch, kicking up dust clouds into the night sky. The car bumped and rattled and thumped and shook.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Makani and Darby said together as Alex shrieked, somewhere between pleasure and fear.
They hit the Holts’ driveway, which was a dirt road. The car settled into a quieter grind, roughening as they picked up speed. Makani pointed at a small building away from the main house. Its lights were on. “There!” she said.
“Hold on,” Ollie said, an instructional warning as he veered into the pasture.
Makani, Darby, and Alex screamed again.
“There was a fucking road up there!” Makani said.
“Sorry!” Ollie said as the car barreled through the grass toward the stable. “I got caught up in the moment!”
“What are we doing?” Darby yelled.
Alex shouted with the entire force of her lungs. “We’d better not be wrong about this!”
Rosemarie didn’t grow up in rodeos for nothing. She was tough. A farm girl. And she wasn’t about to be killed by a pathetic boy with a stupid knife.
David looked astonished by the pitchfork coming at him. He dodged, but he wasn’t quick enough. The far tine gouged into his side. He cried out with shock and pain.
Startled that she’d made contact—that her weapon had slid through a living human being—she pulled it out. His body squelched as it released its hold.
He staggered backward.
“That’s right!” Rosemarie said. She kept shouting at him, but she didn’t know what she was saying. It didn’t feel like any of this was actually happening.
David ran from the stable, clutching his bleeding left side.
The horses were upset. They neighed and kicked the walls as she raced through her options: She could wait for a signal and call the police. Or she could make sure that David wouldn’t come back to kill her first.
Rosemarie gripped the pitchfork’s handle so tightly that she felt bruises forming. She took a cautious step forward. Another. And another.
As she reached the stable door, a hand shot out and grabbed the pitchfork—right above her hand. She cried out as she struggled to regain control.
David pulled her toward the ground. For some reason, he’d set down his knife to seize the pitchfork, and now he was trying to pick it back up.
Like hell he would.
Rosemarie wrenched the pitchfork from his grasp. And that’s when she became aware of a pair of headlights and a car thundering straight toward them.
They were both stunned, but David recovered first. He snatched up the knife and swiped. The blade sliced into the flesh of her right thigh. She whacked him on the back with the pitchfork. She saw him double over, and then there was a blinding white light.
And then she couldn’t see anything.