Page 61 of I Will Find You

“I don’t buy it.”

“Tell me why.”

“Too many holes. Burroughs is a city kid. Does he have any survivalist experience?”

“Maybe. Or maybe he thinks, how hard could it be? Maybe he thinks he has no choice.”

“It’s not adding up, Sarah.”

“What’s not adding up, Max?”

“Let’s start at the top: Was this escape planned out in advance?”

“Had to be.”

“If so, wow, it’s a pretty wacky plan.”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I think it was pretty ingenious.”

“How so?”

“It’s so simple. Burroughs just grabs the gun and walks out with Mackenzie. No tunnels to dig. No trucks to hijack or garbage cans to hide in. None of that. If that guard…what was his name again?”

“Weston. Ted Weston.”

“Right. If Weston doesn’t look out the window at just the right time—if he doesn’t spot the warden and Burroughs getting into the car—they’re home free. No one would have reported Burroughs missing for hours.”

Max thought about it. “So let’s follow that trail, shall we, Sarah?”

“We shall, Max.”

“When it all went wrong—when Weston sounded the alarm—your theory is that they were then forced to improvise.”

“Exactly,” Sarah said.

Max considered that. “That would explain Burroughs’s call to Rachel when she was at the diner. If Rachel was in on it from the get-go, he wouldn’t have had to make that call. She’d have already been in place to pick him up.”

“Interesting,” Sarah said. “Are we now theorizing that Rachel Anderson wasn’t part of the original breakout plan?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it isn’t a coincidence. Her visiting Burroughs on the day he breaks out.”

“Not a coincidence,” Max agreed. He started working on a fresh hangnail. “But, Sarah?”

“What, Max?”

“We are still missing something. Something pretty big.”

Chapter

18

I stand on Twelfth Street in New York City and eat the most wonderful slice of pepperoni pizza ever created, from a place called Zazzy’s.

I am free.

I don’t think I believe it yet. Do you know that feeling when a dream gets weird—good weird, in this case—and suddenly, right in the middle of your nocturnal voyage, you realize that you may indeed be asleep, dreaming, and you fear you’re going to wake up and so you try desperately to stay asleep, clinging tightly to the images in your head, even as they fade away? That is what I’ve been experiencing for the past few hours. I am terrified that soon my eyes will open, and I will be back in Briggs instead of standing on this urine-scented (a smell I welcome because you supposedly don’t have scents in your dream) city street.

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