Chubs appeared first, booking it down one aisle of RVs, and Liam a second later, a few rows over. When they saw that it was still just us, they both slowed down. An annoyed look crossed Chubs’s face.
I leaned out of the open driver’s side window and shouted, “We have to go—now!”
Liam said something to Chubs that I didn’t hear, but they did as they were told. I stayed crouched between the two front seats as they boys jumped inside.
“What?” Liam was almost out of breath. “What’s wrong?”
I pointed to the nearest trailer. “They have cameras installed,” my voice rasped. “In every one of them.”
Chubs sucked in a sharp breath.
“You’re sure?” Liam’s voice was calm—too calm. I could tell he was forcing it, even as his fingers fumbled to put the keys in the ignition.
The van’s back tires spun against the mud as he threw it into reverse. I went tumbling onto my backside with the force of his acceleration.
“Oh my God,” Chubs was saying, “I can’t believe it. We got Hansel and Greteled. Oh my God—do you think it was her?”
“No,” Liam said. “No. She’s sneaky for a skip tracer, but this—this is something else.”
“They could have been there for a while,” I said, just as we found the highway again. It was empty and open in front of us, a gaping mouth ready to swallow us whole. “They could have been spying on the people that lived there. Maybe that really was East River. . . .”
Or it was just a trap, for kids looking for the real East River.
Liam propped his elbow against the door panel and his chin against his palm. When he spoke, the hundreds of snaking cracks in the windshield cut up his reflection. He pushed the minivan up into a faster speed, causing the wind to whistle through the bullet hole. “Just keep your eyes open and let me know if you see anyone or anything acting suspect.”
Define suspect. The rows of shuttered houses? A shot-up minivan?
“I knew we should have waited until it was dark,” Chubs said, tapping his fingers against the passenger seat window. “I knew it. If those cameras were on, they probably got the license plate number and everything.”
“I’ll take care of the plates,” Liam promised.
Chubs’s lips parted, but he said nothing, only resting his head against the window.
“Should I be looking for PSFs?” I asked, as we drove over another railroad track.
“Worse.” Chubs sighed. “Skip tracers. Bounty hunters.”
“The PSFs are stretched pretty thin, by all accounts,” Liam explained. “Same with the National Guard and what’s left of the local police. I don’t know that they’d send a unit all the way out here on a tip. And unless they just so happen to have a resident bounty hunter in this neck of the woods, we’re going to be fine.”
Those were famous last words if I had ever heard them.
“The reward for turning in a kid is ten thousand dollars.” Chubs twisted around to look at me. “And the whole country is broke as a joke. We are not going to be fine.”
I heard a train in the distance, its horn so similar to the ones that had passed by Thurmond at all hours of the night. It was enough for me to dig my fingernails into the skin of my thighs and squeeze my eyes shut until the nausea passed. I didn’t even realize the conversation had rolled on without me until I heard Liam ask, “You okay, Green?”
I reached up and wiped my face, wondering if the wetness there was from the rain, or if I’d been crying without realizing it. I didn’t say anything as I crawled to the rear seat. I didn’t jump into their conversation about where they would need to look next for East River, though I wanted to. There were hundreds, thousands, millions of places the Slip Kid could have set up camp, and I wanted to help them puzzle it out. I wanted to be part of it.
But I couldn’t ask, and I needed to stop lying to myself. Because every second I stayed with them was another chance for them to discover that skip tracers and PSFs weren’t the real monsters of the world. No. One of the real ones was sitting in their backseat.
For once, the music was off.
It was the silence from the speakers that unnerved me, more than the deserted roads or the empty shells of repossessed houses. Liam was a constant stream of motion. Looking around the abandoned small towns we drove through, glancing at the gas level, fiddling with the turn signal, fingers dancing on the steering wheel. At one point, his eyes flashed toward mine in the rearview mirror. It was just for an instant, but I felt the small twinge in my stomach as sharply as I would have if he had taken a soft finger and run it down the length of my open palm.
My face was flushed, but something inside of me had gone very cold. It had been half a second, no more, but it was plenty long enough to notice the way his eyes had darkened with something that might have been frustration.
Chubs was in the front seat folding and unfolding something in his lap, over and over again, almost like he didn’t realize he was doing it.
“Will you cut that out?” Liam burst out, agitated. “You’ll rip it.”
Chubs stopped immediately. “Can’t we just . . . try? Do we need the Slip Kid for this?”
“Do you really want to risk it?”
“Jack would have.”
“Right, but Jack . . .” Liam’s voice trailed off. “Let’s just play it safe. He’ll help us when we get there.”
“If we get there,” Chubs huffed.
“Jack?” I didn’t realize I had said it aloud until Liam’s eyes looked up at me in the rearview mirror.
“It’s none of your business,” Chubs said, and left it at that.
Liam was only a little more forthcoming. “He was our friend—in our room at camp, I mean. We’re trying . . . we’re just trying to get in touch with his dad. It’s one of the reasons we need to hit up the Slip Kid.”
I nodded toward the sheet of paper. “But before you guys broke out, he wrote a letter?”
“The three of us each did,” Liam said. “In case one of us backed out at the last minute and didn’t want to come or . . . didn’t make it out.”
“Which Jack did not.” Chubs’s voice could have cut steel. Behind him, house after gorgeous colonial house passed in rapid-fire succession, their colors winking at us through her window.
“Anyway.” Liam cleared his throat. “We’re trying to put his letter in his dad’s hands. We tried going to the address Jack gave us, but the house had been repossessed. He left a note saying he was going to D.C. for work, but no new address or phone number. That’s why we need the Slip Kid’s help—to find where he is now.”
“You can’t just mail it?”
“They started scanning mail for this exact reason about two years after you went to Thurmond,” Liam explained. “The government reads all, speaks all, and writes all. They’ve crafted a lovely little story about how we’re all being saved and reprogrammed back into sweet little darlings at camp, and they don’t want anyone to get wind of the truth.”
I honestly had no idea what to say to that.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean to give you a shakedown about it.”