Page 3 of South of Nowhere

Beside her, skinny eleven-year-old Travis was lost in his phone,linked in via Airbuds. The jeans and hoodie kid was capable of playing a game and texting simultaneously on a screen the size of a deck of cards.

And, while spelling and syntax were sometimes off, those errors were intentional; he never mistyped.

He noted Sonja’s gaze now turn from the rustic town of Hinowah, below them to the right, to the river. “Never Summer. Funny name.” She grew quiet. “Honey?”

“What?”

Whispering, “I don’t like the looks of that.”

He too took in the torrent once more.

“I think the level’s gone up just in the last few minutes. It could start coming over the top, it looks like.”

“Wish they’d hurry up.” George nodded toward the pickup truck and the blue sports car in front of it.

He smelled the sweet scent of fingernail polish.

Kimberly, the far more energetic—and fidgety—of the children, glanced up. “I’m bored. When’re we going to get home?”

“About one or two.”

A huge exhalation. “It’s like only six-fourteen.”

And George Garvey marveled at the teenage skill to make a sigh sound like a veritable groan of pain.

—

The world changed in an instant.

At exactly quarter past six, the battle between the Never Summer and the Hinowah levee was decided in the river’s favor.

The top two or three feet of the embankment vanished, as if sliced by a huge knife.

The individual with the best view of what happened to the travelers was Louis Bell, in the middle of the procession. Ahead of him, the driver of the Camaro apparently saw the collapse coming. She gunned the engine—the wheels sent up rooster tails as she made aneffort to launch the car the ten feet or so to the asphalt, where the levee ended and the highway proper began again.

He didn’t see if she made it, and he couldn’t afford to wait to find out. He dropped into low gear—to get purchase in the dissolving muck beneath him—and floored the engine. The truck bounded forward, though only a few feet, before it slowed and began to sink as the river simply washed away the ground beneath the tires. The truck listed toward the furious waves.

Behind him, the Suburban containing what he believed was a family of four, took the brunt of the disaster. He observed the vehicle rock sideways, back and forth, and then roll upside down over the edge.

His truck listing harder, he waited for a fate similar to theirs. He tried the handles on either side, but the water and muck held the doors firmly in place.

Louis Bell found himself curiously calm as he considered options.

There weren’t many. In fact, he saw only one question: Was it better to dive into the river and be battered to death on the rocks lining the Never Summer? Or drown inside the cab of his truck?

Bell debated merely a few seconds before rolling down the window and gazing, as if hypnotized, at the icy tide that flooded over him.

2.

Colter Shaw had his enemies.

In his profession of rewards-seeking, he avoided bond enforcement—tracking down bail jumpers—but over the years he had found more than a few men and women who emphatically did not want tobefound.

Nearly all rewards involving criminals were offered for “information leading to their arrest or capture,” with the first word of that phrase always emphasized. The last thing the authorities wanted was private cops engaging in tactical work and bringing the bad guys in, zip-tied. But whether Shaw simply offered up “information” on the whereabouts of a fugitive or physically took him down himself (he’d been a championship college wrestler), the opponents were not pleased.

And they often held grudges. Some of the more sociopathic ones had actually sent him graphic descriptions of what they intended to do when they were out of prison. One had illustrated the torture, and the drawings were surprisingly good.

The incarcerated also had friends and family who roamed the land freely, often with nothing better to do than track down the man who had sent Papa or Mama, or a sibling, to jail.

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