Page 72 of One Last Chance

Chapter 26

Being suddenly confrontedwith the depth of David’s violence changed my whole perspective in a heartbeat. I’d been laboring under the misconception that between the two of us, I had the most to lose if I mismanaged this situation—my freedom was kind of a big deal—but I hadn’t fully understood the reality of the risk Daisy had been taking every damn day that she and I were together.

She was a goddamn prisoner in that house of hers. I’d never seen her so subdued. She had prison bars behind her eyes and her dad was the jailer. I had the means to bust her out and by God I was going to do it, Breaker be damned.

There was only one route into the woods by car—a winding, lumpy dirt road which poured out of the woods through an ancient gate and ended unceremoniously at a rusty cattle grate embedded into the ground. I’d avoided the spot for the last several months, unable to bring myself to visit the scene of the crime. It was here that Hunter had been murdered, his body left hanging over the fence like an animal pelt.

I had seen the pictures of Hunter’s body enough times in the interrogation room that the image was burned into my brain. So hot and so deep that even if I wanted to, I would never be able to forget it.

I slowed as I approached the cattle grate. The place looked annoyingly normal. There were no markers, no hurriedly erected crosses, nothing at all, but a dark smear across the top of a beam where the sun had baked his blood into a rich wood stain. Frowning, I pulled the truck to a stop.

Yes, I had to get Daisy out of there. That wasn’t even a question. But if I could do it with my freedom intact, we would both be safe. She wouldn’t have to choose between living in America or being with me.

I was no damn detective, I knew that—but if there was a chance that they’d missed something, even a small chance, I couldn’t afford to pass it up.

I saw all the evidence markers in my head. There had been a footprint here, where the killer had planted his feet to strike. The marks had been deep and heavy, but obscured by rainfall. Inconclusive evidence, they had said. Didn’t matter anyway, they were long gone now. Any tire tracks that might have been here had been washed away before the cops even showed up.

“What am I looking for?” I muttered to myself out loud.

I didn’t have an answer to that question. Still, I kept my eyes open as I retraced the killer’s steps. They’d come out of the woods together, Hunter slightly ahead of the other person. There was a struggle—here. I moved my body, trying to hit all the broken branches and flattening the grass the way it had been flattened in the pictures.

I frowned. The range of motion was clumsy and limited. I bent my knees, taking a few inches off my height and condensed my steps. It was still clumsy, but I fit inside the parameters now.

I slipped on the slick grass and my foot caught on a thick, exposed tree root. I fell to my knees and found myself staring directly at the dark stain on the fence.

“You clumsy bastard,” I said to the mystery assailant. “You short, clumsy bastard.”

The ghost who had lived in my head for so long, obscured by my own face, was beginning to take shape. I let it stitch itself together on its own, resisting the urge to try faces on the outline.

Crawling on my hands and knees, I rooted beneath the grass, covering the whole six feet between the root and the fence, looking for anything else. I didn’t come up with much, just a few degraded cigarette filters and a couple of bottle caps. Kids came out here to get drunk all the time. And maybe the years had erased the bad memories associated with this particular location. Either that, or they thought they were cool drinking in an ancient crime scene. I felt a chill run through my spine and failure capture me in a chokehold.

I searched the place some more, stupid as that might have been. Years later, there wasn’t a chance of evidence being left. Deep down, I knew that, but I was also okay with grasping at straws. And so, after a while, I said ‘fuck it’. This town wasn’t where we belonged. Too many bad memories, too much hurt, too much pain. Fuck proving my innocence too. The only damn thing that mattered was that I didn’t kill Hunter. I knew it. Daisy knew it. Everyone else could shove a rod up their asses.

My frustration mounted. I needed my freedom. Daisy needed her freedom.Weneeded our freedom. And I would stop at nothing to make sure that we got just what we truly deserved.

The sun had gone down and the light was fading fast. The road would have changed its shape over the years. I got moving, jumping back on the mission that had brought me out here to begin with. Daisy needed my help.

Holding her firmly in the center of my mind, I navigated the poorly kept trail into the dark forest. Fuck legal. Fuck Breaker. And fuck this town. After what happened tonight, Mexico was a real fucking option. I just had to find that money.

The problem with hiding money in a forest like this was you sort of had to rely on landmarks to tell you where you were and where to go. The problem with that was that it had been a very warm, very wet several years, and everything had grown and changed. Everything except that big boulder with the crack right down the middle of it.

“Gotcha,” I said.

A turn to the left, a turn to the right, up the hill, down the hill, stop at the big tree. Crap. The trees were all the same size now. There had been a mother oak here once, huge and intimidating, which dwarfed all the trees around it. The hollow with the fallen tree was directly behind it, but it wasn’t there anymore. Maybe this was a sign that I should have just turned the fuck around, but I was angry. I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t watch Daisy stay here. In this town, sneaking around and having the lives strangled out of us one way or the other. I wasn’t really sure how this would go. Like I said, I was bigger than her father, more powerful than him too. But did I really expect to walk into her house and drag her out of there and all the way to Mexico, did I? I guess I kinda did. There were some specifics I would need to figure out afterwards. It was one thing to leave when I wasn’t allowed to leave the state. It was a whole other thing to do that with the cops on my ass. And there was no doubt in my mind that as soon as I set foot on his property, David was going to call the cops.

I shook my head, trying to taper my anger while I walked over to where I felt like the tree should have been and stood there like an idiot looking at a cluster of young, small trees.

Frowning, I walked back and forth along the trail. I didn’t expect the tree to suddenly appear or anything, but I was hoping to find its stump or a hole in the ground or a fallen log or something to show me exactly where Hunter and I had hid the money.

Eventually I gave up on spotting it and decided to just venture out into the woods in the general direction I felt like the box would be in. This was turning out to be a lot damn harder than I expected it to be.

The problem was that Hunter and I almost never came from this direction. We’d always walked out here to tend to our stash—it was more direct, and it was easier to tell if someone was following us. No one ever was, but that paranoid seed stayed active in my head. Turns out I wasn’t far off with my suspicions. Obviously someone had followed Hunter, or he’d still be here to tell me I was being an idiot.

I almost didn’t see the tree. I was so focused on figuring out why Hunter had gone the way he did that night that my feet were dodging things on their own. If it wasn’t for the fact that I had to step up on the tree to get over it, I wouldn’t have seen it at all, especially not in the deepening dark.

“There you are, you beautiful bitch,” I said.

I walked along the top of it until I found the root and reoriented myself from there. It was a good thing I did—I’d been about twelve feet off from the target and walking diagonally. I never would have found the damn thing.

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