Chapter 7
Marcus picked up the spoon, his brow furrowed. "Six in the morning? You sure about that?"
"Yes, sir," Arthur nodded eagerly. "Every winter since I started working here. They come up the grade, clear the drift right past our driveway apron, and turn around at the summit scenic overlook. If you leave right behind the plow... the road is completely clear. You can coast down into the valley before the state troopers even set up the roadblock at the bottom."
Marcus stared at the boy.
A glimmer of hope—dangerous, seductive hope—flickered in the fugitive’s chest.
Six in the morning. He checked the round clock on the office wall. It was currently 1:42 AM. That meant four hours. Four hours of sitting in the warm lobby, drinking hot coffee, letting the bleeding stop, and regaining his strength.
If Dutch didn't make it back, Marcus could take the kid's car, slip into the wake of the county plow, and be forty miles west into the next state before anyone found the kid tied up in the office.
"What about chains?" Marcus demanded, shoveling a dripping wedge of peach into his mouth. The cold sugar hit his bloodstream like a jolt of electricity. "You said that Honda out front doesn't have chains."
"There's... there’s a set of cable chains in the maintenance shed near the dumpster," Arthur supplied quickly. "Standard fifteen-inch tires. They fit the Civic perfectly. I can... I can put them on for you. Before six. While it’s still dark."
Marcus chewed slowly, the tension in his shoulders easing a fraction of an inch.
The kid was terrified, completely broken, and entirely focused on pleasing him in exchange for his life. It made sense. Meek civilians didn't think about heroics; they thought about survival. They gave you whatever you asked for, pointed out the easiest escape route, and prayed you didn't pull the trigger.
"You do that," Marcus said, swallowing the peach with a grim nod. "You put them chains on, you leave the engine running to defrost the windshield, and maybe I don't leave you with a hole in your head after all."
"Thank you, sir. Thank you so much," Arthur said, his voice trembling with pathetic gratitude.
The coffee maker finished with a violent, steamy burp. Arthur poured the dark liquid into a chipped ceramic mug, stirred in three packets of sugar with meticulous care, and carried it across the room.
As Arthur set the mug on the desk, his knuckles brushed against Marcus’s wrist.
To Marcus, it was an accidental contact from a nervous boy.
To Arthur, it was a precise diagnostic reading.
The skin on Marcus’s wrist was clammy and cool to the touch. The radial pulse was rapid—roughly one hundred and ten beats per minute—and distinctly thready. The fine tremors in the fugitive’s fingers had migrated upward into the forearm. When Marcus reached for the coffee mug, his thumb twitched, sloshing a dark ring of coffee over the rim onto the desk blotter.
*Stage two shock progressing,* Arthur calculated silently. *Peripheral vasoconstriction severe. Grip strength reduced by at least forty percent. Reflexes severely blunted.*
Marcus Vance was an apex predator in name only now. The cold, the blood loss, and the fever were slowly converting him into a carcass that still happened to breathe.
Marcus blew across the surface of the coffee and took a long, scalded gulp. He grimaced, wiping his mouth with the back of his dirty sleeve.
"All right," Marcus muttered, rising from the chair with a heavy, pained grunt. "We’re going back out front. I’m not sitting in this cramped box."
"The lobby is warmer, anyway," Arthur agreed meekly.
Marcus gestured with the revolver, forcing Arthur to walk ahead of him once more, down the dark hallway, past the padlocked cellar door—which remained mercifully quiet for the moment—and back out into the open space of the reception area.
The storm outside was reaching a fever pitch. The wind shrieked through the eaves like a pack of wolves, throwing thick sheets of snow against the picture window until the glass groaned in its aluminum frame. The lobby felt like an island of amber light adrift in a sea of frozen chaos.
Marcus walked straight toward the payphone mounted on the wood-paneled wall near the restroom corridor.
He stopped in front of the vintage black box. The chrome coin return was pitted with corrosion; the heavy steel-sheathed handset hung from its cradle like a dead pendulum.
Marcus reached out, his hand shaking, and lifted the heavy receiver to his ear.
He pressed the metal hook down twice, rapidly. *Click-click. Click-click.*
Nothing. Not even static. Just the hollow, dead weight of an open circuit.
Marcus slammed the handset back into the cradle with a violent, cursing snarl. He rested his forehead against the cold metal casing of the phone, his breathing coming in ragged, wheezing bursts.
"Damn it, Dutch," Marcus growled under his breath. "Where are you?"
Arthur stood three paces behind him, his hands tucked deep inside the sleeves of his yellow sweater, his head bowed.
"Your... your friend, sir?" Arthur asked in a whisper so soft it barely competed with the wind. "Is he... is he supposed to call?"
Marcus turned his head, glaring at the boy with eyes that were beginning to sink deep into purplish hollows of exhaustion. He shouldn't be telling the kid anything. But the silence in the motel was oppressive, the fever was making his thoughts run together, and he needed to hear the sound of a human voice, even if it belonged to a spineless hostage.
"Dutch has the truck," Marcus said, his voice grating and thick. "And he’s got the split from the job. We broke a bank courier outside Helena three days ago. Four hundred thousand in non-sequential twenties."
Arthur let out a soft, theatrical gasp of awe. "Four... four hundred thousand?"
A ghost of a smug, arrogant grin flickered across Marcus’s pale lips. "Yeah. Four hundred grand. Enough to buy five of these shit-hole motels. Dutch went down the mountain to check the bridge at the canyon mouth. The state cops were throwing up roadblocks along the interstate, but Dutch had the radio scanner."
Marcus looked back at the dead payphone, his jaw clenching.
"We had an arrangement. If the canyon road was closed, he turns around. If it’s open, he pulls into the all-night Texaco at the bottom of the pass, drops two dimes in the payphone, and dials this box right here. Three rings. That's the signal that the route is clear."
"That's... that's very clever, sir," Arthur murmured, his spectacles reflecting the dim amber ceiling lamps.
"Of course it's clever," Marcus sneered. "Dutch isn't an idiot. But if your damn lines are dead..."
"They might come back up!" Arthur supplied quickly, stepping forward with an eager, helpful expression. "The storm knocked down the tree on the ridge, but sometimes the maintenance crews work through the night to restore the primary trunk lines. If the junction box down the road resets, that phone could ring at any second!"
Marcus looked at the boy, then at the black rotary telephone on the desk, and finally back at the wall-mounted payphone.
"You really think so?" Marcus asked. The question was an involuntary betrayal of his vulnerability—the desperate plea of a hunted criminal looking for a miracle in the middle of a blizzard.
