Page 44 of You Can Run

He pulled out hard, tires biting against stained concrete, and cut toward the on-ramp without slowing.

The highway opened ahead of them. In the rearview, the semi rolled out behind them, headlights catching the rise of the road as it merged. It didn't surge forward but didn't fall back either. It just held there, maintaining a distance that could have been coincidence but felt like intent.

Dante pressed down on the accelerator and the engine responded, the car surging forward as the gap widened. Not enough. He pressed harder.

“Keep your head down,” he said, his voice quieter now. “And from here on, you don't talk to anyone about us. Not the car, not where we're going, not what I look like. We're nobody.”

Jessica didn't answer, but he saw her hand tighten on the dash, and he knew she understood, not just the instruction, but the thing underneath it. That the world they were moving through now didn't forgive small mistakes, and the conversation at the counter might have been one.

The Corpus Christi police station carried the restless energy of a shift change—voices overlapping, phones ringing, the smell of fresh coffee brewing. None of it reached Trent.

His world had narrowed to a single monitor in the corner of the Real-Time Crime Center. He'd been there for nearly three hours, leaning on a fabricated report about a possible domestic abduction to justify the access. No one had questioned it. He was still a cop, still trusted, at least on paper, and the thing about being trusted was that people stopped looking at you closely enough to see what you were actually doing.

On screen, the highway feeds cycled in a steady loop—gray asphalt, passing vehicles, time codes and camera IDs stamped across each frame. The images were grainy, but good enough.

His eyes burned from the strain. The burner phone sat on the desk beside him, silent and waiting. He tried not to look at it.

Come on, Jess. Don't be with him.

The feeds rolled. Traffic thickened, thinned. Sedans, trucks, a line of early commuters heading toward the coast.

Camera 402. I-45 southbound, just past the marshland stretch near La Marque.

The 'Cuda cut through the frame—a flash of red so out of place it might as well have been on fire. Even through the distortion, Trent recognized it instantly. Recognized the way it moved, fast and aggressive, threading through traffic like everything else on the road was in its way.

He leaned forward and rewound the feed.

The image stuttered backward, frames collapsing into one another until the car vanished. He hit play and watched it re-enter, slower this time, tracking every detail: the angle ofthe hood, the slight drift between lanes, the confidence in it. He rewound again. And again. Each pass slower, the motion breaking down into fragments, until he found what he was looking for.

He froze the frame.

It was grainy, distorted, and barely more than a suggestion, but she was there. A shape in the passenger seat. Pink hair. The tilt of her head toward the window.

Jessica.

His hand tightened on the edge of the desk. She was with him. She was in that car, in that passenger seat, leaning her head against the window the way she used to lean against Trent's truck on long drives, and the intimacy of the posture, the comfort of it, hit him harder than the fact of her being gone.

He stared at the frozen image until it stopped being just information and became something personal, something that burned.

Then he pushed back from the desk, the chair scraping against the floor. A couple of officers glanced over, then away.

Trent didn't log out of the system. He didn't close the report, didn't tell anyone where he was going.

He was thinking now, really thinking, for the first time since this started, and what he was thinking was this: if he called the burner number and handed over the location, Jessica was dead. Not rescued, not recovered. Dead. Whatever these people wanted with Dante, Jessica was a loose end, and loose ends didn't survive contact with people like them. He'd known it since that woman had stood in his kitchen, and he'd been pretending he didn't.

But if he got there first, if he intercepted them himself, with a badge and sirens and the full authority of the uniform, he could pull her out clean. Protective custody. Official channels. She'd be angry, she'd fight him, but she'd be alive, and she'd be awayfrom Castaño. And eventually she'd understand that Trent was the one who'd come for her when it mattered.

The story was already writing itself, and in this version, Trent was the hero.

He walked out of the building, through the lobby, into the parking lot. The morning air hit his lungs, sharp and clarifying.

He knew those roads. He knew the choke points, the speed traps, the stretches where a cruiser could sit unnoticed until the right car passed. He could get ahead of them. He could make it look routine.

The burner phone vibrated in his pocket.

He stopped, hand halfway to the truck door. For a second he considered ignoring it. Then he pulled it out.

STATUS?