grunted. “Matti and Roy and Juwon, they can go. I’m gonna find my daughter.”
The twins had started to glance around from the back too, shifting to overhear. I rolled the spare around, away from their watching eyes, and began jacking the car viciously.
“How long are you able to stay awake right now?” I said to Arthur. “Twenty minutes, tops?”
I wasn’t looking up at him. But I could feel his eyes on me, angrier than I’d ever known him, searing into my back.
No father would want to be benched when his daughter was missing, but especially not someone like Arthur. The crack private investigator who would brave hell and high water for any victim wasn’t going to be able to help his own kid.
But he had to accept reality. For Tabitha’s sake. And I was going to have to make him.
“You’re dead weight right now,” I said. “You’ve got almost no mobility, and you’re hopped up on drugs. If we have to move fast, you’re going to get yourself killed. Tabitha’s best chance is if you stay out of the fucking way.”
Even if we put Arthur on a computer, I was betting he couldn’t type more than ten words per minute. I was going to maximize our chances of getting Tabitha back alive, and if I had to sacrifice Arthur’s sensitivities in the process, so be it.
I told myself that was the reason I bit the words at him as harshly as possible. And I told myself the same old flash of hurt was irrelevant, and not why I was saying any of it at all.
“Dad still might see something you don’t,” said a defiant voice.
I glanced up from wrenching at the last of the lug nuts. Juwon had slipped out of the van to come up next to his father, his face puffy and streaked with tears. The twins had climbed around and poked their heads out behind him.
Arthur tried to turn and say something back, but he hunched in pain. All three of the kids leapt to support him.
I stood to face them. “We can keep a phone line open. But be realistic. You shouldn’t even be out of the hospital.”
He wouldn’t look at me.
Since the house, I’d been mostly running on auto. The numbness let me function. If I let myself stop and think … but now a darkness twisted below it, the oily smear of everything I’d felt toward Arthur since all this began.
“Arthur,” I said, and I tasted the ache of it on my tongue. “Do you trust me?”
To go to any lengths, never rest, sacrifice anything, until I either found Tabitha alive or proved I never would? To know this was a one-way function, and that I would find his daughter—his precocious, headstrong, too-smart-for-her-own-good daughter—unless I literally died trying? Whatever else he thought of me, did Arthur at least believe that?
His face creased, a deep pain I was sure wasn’t physical. Tears slid down and over his jaw. And then he turned his eyes on me at last.
“You were there, Russell. You were there when she got taken. You didn’t stop it.”
My joints stopped working. Everything in me went dead. The accusation shattered at my feet, the shards lethally sharp.
I couldn’t speak. The silence swelled and cracked, fissuring every tie with Arthur I’d thought I had.
Into that silence, from off to the right, a keening yell wailed at the sky.
I had one narrow instant before it barreled directly at us, when I heard before I saw and managed to slam my eyes shut. I tried to shout a warning, but it was too late.
A cacophony erupted, inarticulate voices, cries and yells and thuds. I kept my eyes glued shut. Sound localization in space wasn’t a difficult computation—it only depended on two ears, two points of input from which all other points can be mapped, as long as those points are off the axis between them …
It helped when everyone was screaming.
I turned my head in a rapid twitch to cover every angle, and the scene snapped into place. Arthur collapsing on top of Juwon—he must have tackled him, his panic risking every re-injury to block his nearest child from danger. The twins spiraling behind them, falling to the asphalt, and Pilar, spinning up at the open rear hatch from the back seat of the van.
And Coach. A hundred and ten degrees around from me. Closing fast.
Even with my eyes closed, the memory of him staggered me. I reeled against the bumper of the van, banging