"My daughter is at Carteret Health Care with a split orbital bone and two fractured ribs," I told him, keeping my eyes locked on his. "Colt Lusk put her there this afternoon. I came here to tell him to stay away from my family. He swung on me. I defended myself. Your deputy has the tape."
Wallace’s jaw worked slowly, like he was chewing on a tough piece of cedar bark. He looked over at the paramedics, who were rolling the gurney toward the front doors. Colt’s head was immobilized in a yellow plastic brace, an IV line already taped to his left forearm, a clear plastic oxygen mask fogging with every ragged, shallow breath he drew.
"Take the cuffs off her, Harris," Wallace said.
Boyd Lusk looked as if he had been struck with an iron pry-bar. "Harlan! What in the hell are you doing? She nearly killed him! Look at the floor! Look at the blood!"
"I said take the cuffs off, Deputy," Wallace repeated, his voice cold and hard as salt-cured ham.
Harris stepped forward, pulled his key from his duty belt, and unlocked the Peerless cuffs. The steel parted from my wrists with a light click. I brought my hands forward, rubbing the faint red indents on my skin, never taking my eyes off the Sheriff.
"You're not going home tonight, Sloane," Wallace said, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly tone meant only for me. "Even with Marcus backing you up, you walked into a commercial facility and dismantled a kid who was four weeks out from a regional title fight. The DA in Beaufort is going to want a full sit-down tomorrow morning before we clear self-defense on this. You’re coming down to the substation in Morehead to give a formal deposition on the record."
"My daughter is getting discharged tonight," I said. "She has nowhere to go except my sister’s property."
"Your sister is Claire, right? Up at the pediatric unit?" Wallace asked, his eyes narrowing slightly.
"Yes."
Before Wallace could answer, the phone on the reception desk began to ring.
It was an old landline, loud and shrill, cutting through the low rumble of the paramedics loading Colt into the back of the ambulance outside.
Harris reached over and hit the speaker button. "Lusk Combat Club, Deputy Harris speaking."
There was no greeting on the other end. Only the frantic, ragged sound of Claire’s voice, breathing so hard she sounded like she was running up a flight of concrete stairs in the dark.
"Sloane!" she screamed, the speaker buzzing with the volume of her terror. "Sloane, if you're there, pick up! Pick up the phone!"
I lunged forward, slamming both hands down on the counter. "Claire! I’m here! What happened?"
"They took her, Sloane!" Claire’s voice shattered into a ragged, breathless sob, competing with the blare of a vehicle horn in the background. "They took Lainey!"
The air in my chest went completely still. "Who took her? Where are you?"
"We were in the parking garage at the hospital," Claire cried, her voice hitching wildly. "We were walking to my car. Two men in an unmarked white van with state plates pulled up behind us. They had paperwork, Sloane! They had an involuntary emergency commitment order signed twenty minutes ago by Magistrate Garris in Newport! They said Lainey was an imminent danger to herself after a reported suicide attempt!"
I looked at Boyd Lusk.
The car dealer wasn't screaming anymore. He wasn't red-faced.
He was standing six feet away, his arms folded neatly across his chest, smoothing the lapels of his expensive wool suit with his thumb. A slow, thin, hideous smile was spreading across his face, cold and dead as an unlit lantern.
"They're taking her to the private behavioral wing at New Bern Creek, Sloane," Claire sobbed through the speaker, the sound of her nails scraping against her phone casing coming through the line. "Boyd sits on the board of trustees there. They won't let me in the van. They said if I tried to follow them, they'd arrest me for interfering with a court-ordered medical transport!"
The line went dead with a flat, hollow click.
The gym was silent again, save for the hum of the fluorescent fixtures and the steady drip of Colt’s blood hitting the edge of the mat.
Sheriff Harlan Wallace stood entirely still, his heavy hand resting on the stag-horn grip of his .45, his face suddenly gray under the brim of his campaign hat. He looked at Boyd, then at me, the full scope of what the car dealer had set in motion settling over the room like an iron weight.
"Sloane," Wallace began, his voice dropping an octave, stepping into my path as I turned toward the exit. "Don't you do it. New Bern Creek is outside my county line. If you drive up there tonight, you're crossing into state jurisdiction, and you won't have Marcus's video to protect you."
I didn't answer him.
I didn't look at the Sheriff, and I didn't look at the two young deputies standing with their mouths slightly open.
I looked directly at Boyd Lusk.
"You should have let your nephew take the beating, Boyd," I said, my voice so quiet it barely disturbed the dust in the air.
I turned my back on the law, walked out through the double glass doors, and stepped into the Carolina dark.
Chapter 4: The Paper Cage
The heavy door of the F-250 slammed shut, cutting off the wail of the departing ambulance and the glare of the gym’s neon lights. I turned the ignition. The old 7.3-liter diesel roared to life with a low, bone-deep vibration that shook the dashboard.
I reached across the passenger seat, popped the glove box, and pulled out my mobile phone. There were three missed calls from Claire and a text from an unsaved number that read simply: *Walk away while you can still breathe air, Sloane.*
Boyd’s work. He wanted me panicked. He wanted me driving fast, making sloppy errors, crossing double yellows so some state trooper could pit-maneuver me into a ditch before I reached the county border.
I ignored the text and dialed Claire directly, putting the phone on speaker and dropping it into the cup holder as I dropped the transmission into gear.
She answered on the first half-ring. "Sloane! Where are you?"
"Rolling out of the gym parking lot," I said, my voice level, watching the side mirrors as I pulled onto the asphalt. "Tell me about the van."
"It’s an older Ford Econoline, white, no logos on the panels," Claire said, her voice shaking violently against the speaker. She was crying, but she was a triage nurse; she forced the panic down beneath clinical observation. "Commercial plates, state exempt. The driver had an ID badge clipped to his pocket from Tidewater Transport Services. That's a private sub-contractor out of Jacksonville."
"How long ago did they clear the hospital bay?"
"Eight minutes. Maybe nine," Claire said. "They took the access road behind the physical therapy annex, heading straight for the bypass. Sloane, they strapped her to a backboard. They gave her five milligrams of midazolam through her IV before they even wheeled her into the lift. She couldn't keep her eyes open. She couldn't even say my name."
"Midazolam," I repeated. Versed. A fast-acting benzodiazepine that induced retrograde amnesia and heavy sedation. Boyd’s tame magistrate hadn't just signed a transport order; he had sanctioned a chemical gag. By the time a state evaluator saw Lainey tomorrow morning, she would be slack-jawed, unresponsive, and clinically incoherent—the textbook portrait of acute psychotic delirium.
"Claire, listen to me," I said, hitting the blinker and angling the truck onto Highway 70 West. "Stay at the hospital. Don't go back to the Harkers Island cabin. Go straight to the chief of nursing's office. You pull every digital security log from the emergency room entrance between four p.m. and now. You pull the intake doctor's initial handwritten notes before Boyd’s administration friends can scrub the server. You understand?"
"What are you going to do?" Claire breathed.
"They're taking Highway 70 through the Croatan," I said. "There is no other way to get a heavy van from Morehead City to New Bern without adding forty minutes through the back swamps. I’m going to catch them before they reach the Trent River bridge."
"Sloane, if you hit a state-contracted vehicle—"
"They don't have state authority," I told her coldly. "They have a piece of paper signed by a corrupt magistrate who takes campaign cash in white envelopes. Keep your phone on."
I tapped the screen, ending the call, and pressed the pedal down to the floorboards.
The diesel turbo whistled shrill and sharp under the steel hood. The speedometer climbed past sixty, then seventy, the yellow lane markers blurring into a solid golden ribbon under the high beams.
To the left and right, the commercial sprawl of car dealerships, strip malls, and seafood shacks began to thin out, swallowed by the suffocating black wall of the Croatan National Forest. The air out here was thick and damp, heavy with the stench of peat moss, stagnant brackish canals, and loblolly pines. The road was a four-lane divided highway, flat as a carpenter's level, cut straight through sixty miles of coastal wilderness.