Charlie—in pain, bound to the chair, white spots still swirling across her vision—can only watch as Marge vanishes down one of the lodge’s two wings. The glow of the lantern she carries forms a bubble of light around her. It isn’t until both Marge and the brightness turn a corner and disappear that Charlie sees someone else.
A figure emerging from the darkness in the opposite direction.
Josh.
Seeing him prompts a dozen disparate thoughts in Charlie’s head. Astonishment that he’s there. Relief that he’s alive. Worry about what he might do to her in retaliation for stabbing him.
Half of his sweatshirt is crusted with blood. The other half looks damp with sweat. Josh moves toward her, the stab wound making only half his body work properly. The other half drags behind him. Still, when his half-good, half-limping form draws near, Charlie flinches.
After what she did to him, she expects the worst.
But all Josh does is scan the lobby before whispering, “Where is she?”
Charlie jerks her head toward the wing Marge disappeared down.
Josh puts his hands on her shoulders, almost as if checking for signs of damage. “Are you okay? Did she hurt you?”
Not an easy question to answer. The throbbing pain inside her mouth where the pliers had scraped and clawed tells her that yes, Marge hurt her. But not as much as she could have. Not yet. To save time—and to spare her aching mouth—Charlie just shakes her head.
“Good,” Josh says.
He pulls something out of his pocket.
The knife.
The same one Charlie had plunged into his side.
Unlike her, Josh puts it to better use by cutting through the rope wound around her wrists. He does it carefully, sawing through the rope in a way that won’t cut her. Charlie can’t believe what she’s seeing.
Josh is saving her.
Using the very knife she tried to kill him with.
“I’m getting you out of here,” he says as the rope binding Charlie’s wrists finally falls away.
Josh moves behind her, trying to undo the rope wound around her torso and the chair.
“I’m sorry,” Charlie says, relieved to find that the pain in her mouth lessens when she speaks. “I’m sorry for what I did to you.”
“I’m the one who’s sorry. I never should have let you get into my car. She told me she just wanted to talk to you. I didn’t know she was going to do something like this.”
“And I didn’t know you were a—”
“Bounty hunter?” Josh says. “I figured that.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I couldn’t. You’re not a fugitive. And this wasn’t a law enforcement gig. You’re just a college student some old lady hired me to bring to a diner in the middle of fucking nowhere. A private job I took because I needed the money. I could lose my license if anyone found out.”
“So everything you said in the car—”
“Was all just a way to get you here as easily as possible,” Josh says. “I was never planning to hurt you, Charlie. Using force would have been a last resort. So I had to get creative. But messing with your head like that was a shitty thing to do, and I’m sorry.”
Charlie would have been less forgiving under normal circumstances. But it’s hard to stay mad when the rope around her arms drops away from the chair and into her lap. Because her hands are free, Josh lets her try to unloop it from around her as he comes around front again and starts sawing at the ties around her ankles.
He’s almost through one strand when Charlie notices the glow of a lantern over his shoulder.
Marge.
She stands on the other side of the canvas drop cloth, kerosene lantern in one hand, pistol in the other.
Seeing Josh there, about to set Charlie loose and ruin her plan, breaks something inside the woman’s grief-rattled psyche. Charlie sees it happening. An internal snapping that jerks her whole body.
And before it passes, Marge raises the gun, aims, and fires.
EXT. LODGE—NIGHT
Robbie almost used the front doors. After quietly steering his Volvo to a stop behind the dented Cadillac, he intended to just storm into the building, tackle that old waitress if necessary, and retrieve Charlie.
But then he thought about the gun.
He knows the waitress has one. He saw it poking against Charlie’s back outside the diner.
And he’s watched enough movies with Charlie to know things usually don’t end well for characters who simply burst through the front door. Especially if the bad guy has a gun. And since the only weapon Robbie has is the same tire iron he’d used to knock out the Caddy’s taillight, he opted for an alternative route.
Now he clambers through the woods to the right of the lodge. His plan is to find a back way into the building that will let him sneak up on the waitress. But this side of the building isn’t landscaped. It’s just a strip of rocky, tree-choked terrain sitting between the lodge itself and the rushing creek that leads to the nearby waterfall, which is deafening in its roar. Robbie can’t hear anything else, which is good in that it masks the sound of his approach but bad in that it does the same to anyone who might be trying to sneak up on him.
The darkness doesn’t help. The trees here are mostly evergreens with full branches that blot out the moonlight and crowd the ground with shadow. Wearing only sneakers, Robbie’s feet slip often on the snow that had fallen earlier. Never a good thing when you’re mere yards from water. One false step could send him tumbling into the creek, at which point it would be over. Sure, Robbie was the star of the swim team and now a coach, but not even an Olympic gold medalist would be able to overpower the pull of that waterfall.
As he trudges through the snow and the dark, always keeping an eye on the rapids to his right, Robbie knows it would have been easier to use the pay phone he saw outside the diner to call the police.
It also would have been foolish.
He’d already tried calling the police once, and that didn’t help. Then there’s the fact that, had he waited in the diner parking lot for the cops to arrive, he’d have no idea where the waitress had taken Charlie. He certainly wouldn’t have known this place existed if he hadn’t followed the Cadillac here.
Making his way to the rear of the lodge, Robbie knows deep down that he made the right decision. It’s better for him to be here, where he can actually do something, than back at the diner, waiting for cops who may or may not believe him.
But he also knows he needs to be cautious. Not just in his movements, but in his thinking. He’s a smart guy. He’s studying to be a math professor, for God’s sake. He can deduce his way out of this. Slow and steady. That always wins the race.