“I’m going wherever Juneau—” Miles starts to say, but the guard cuts him off.
“You’re both getting in my car. Now.”
We head toward the Jeep. The other guard is sitting in the backseat, wrapping a tourniquet around his arm and growling through clenched teeth. From behind the wheel, Whit is saying, “I told you not to take her on.” He leans over to open the passenger door from the inside and indicates I’m supposed to get in. “Juneau. Finally,” he says.
“You don’t want me to sit next to you,” I manage to say. I have to force the words out, because Whit’s sitting there looking like his same old self. The same man who mentored me for over a decade.
“Why not?” he asks, a fake smile plastered to his lips.
“Because I seriously doubt I’ll be able to refrain from scratching your eyes out,” I say evenly.
Whit pulls on an expression of false surprise. “No need for histrionics,” he says. And then, lowering his voice, he urges, “Get in the Jeep.” He glances down at a folded-up piece of paper sitting square in the middle of the passenger seat and raises an eyebrow, looking back up at me. “Get in! Now!” he yells.
All of a sudden, the sickening sound of crunching metal comes from behind the Jeep, and the vehicle lurches forward, its door springing away from me. As everyone swings around to see what happened, I scoop the paper from the seat and stuff it in my pocket.
“Sorry about that,” comes a man’s voice from the large black car that rear-ended the Jeep. “Let me get my insurance papers.”
The guard drops me and heads for the reckless driver. As I turn to see who hit the Jeep, another man jumps out of the black car and heads straight for me. I recognize him. He’s one of the guys who was trailing me around Seattle—he must work for Miles’s dad. Before I can run, he’s grabbed me around the chest and growled, “I’ve got a gun.”
I turn frantically to look for Miles, but he’s been pulled away by Whit’s guard.
“Miles!” I scream. But my new captor has shoved me into the black car, the driver jumps back behind the wheel, and we take off just as Miles realizes what’s happening. Away from Whit and his men. Away from Miles, who I watch running after us until it’s clear that he’ll never catch us.
Whit’s guard is right behind him and, seizing him by the arm again, leads him back to the Jeep. We turn a corner, and they’re gone.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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53
MILES
THE GUY WHO GRABS ME HAS ARMS THE DIAMETER of a telephone pole. So guess what? I don’t even fight. I let him drag me by the shoulder to the Jeep and stuff me in the passenger seat. He hops in the back and we’re off.
There’s a young guy driving. His hair is like Albert Einstein’s if Albert dyed it with black shoe polish. He looks kind of crazy, but in a good way. Like your favorite science teacher at school—brilliant but hanging out in another dimension. He had exchanged a few words with Juneau, but I couldn’t hear what they said.
The two guys in the back look like they were made from the same cookie cutter. Neckless boulders of steroid-fueled muscle. Both dressed in khaki, green, and camouflage like they think they’re in the middle of a war zone. But the one is giving himself a shot in the arm and bandaging the wound Juneau gave him, and the other is unbuttoning his shirt to inspect the dent Juneau made in his Kevlar vest.
I taste copper in my mouth and realize that I’m scared. And then it occurs to me that I’m not afraid of them. I’m scared for Juneau. I don’t think that Portman and Redding will hurt her, but these guys look rough. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were wearing weapons strapped under their flak jackets.
We pull up to a fork in the road, and the driver looks both ways. There’s no sign of Juneau and her captors. They had too much of a head start: we’ve lost them. He pulls over onto the sidewalk next to a Dairy Queen and puts the Wrangler in park. “Where’d they take her?” he asks, turning to me.
There’s something off about his eyes. Like one of his pupils is slightly facing the wrong way. It freaks me out because I don’t know which eye to look at.
“No clue,” I respond, and receive a cuff on the side of my head from one of the GI Joes behind me.
“Ow!” I yell, and swing around to stare at him.
“Answer the man’s questions,” he says in a thick voice, like his tongue’s on steroids too.
“I’m being honest. I have no clue who those guys are or where they could be taking Juneau,” I lie, looking at Einstein’s right eye.