obstacle course. If that happens, I’m sorry to say, I’m still going to press this button. Think of it as a mercy; John-Henry wouldn’t want to live without you.”
The video feed switched back to Somers and Nico asleep on the steps; the location looked familiar, but Hazard’s brain kept short circuiting and rebooting, and he couldn’t place it, couldn’t even narrow down possibilities.
“If you’re not here by dawn,” the voice said, “he dies. If you enlist anyone to help you, he dies. If you decide you’re going to try to rescue him, he dies. Sunrise is at 5:44 AM today, Emery. The clock is ticking.”
The video feed froze, and the timer at the bottom stopped ticking.
Hazard couldn’t explain exactly why he did what he did next: he tapped the voicemail icon on his phone. A little bit of shock, maybe. He needed more information, too, and he hoped that the voicemail might be from Somers or from someone else who could help him. And, of course, the unknown caller had been persistent, trying several times that day to reach him. But mostly, a part of him suspected, he was just committing himself to a delaying action, anything to hold off the reality of the Keeper’s threat.
An unfamiliar voice played over the speaker: “Emery, this is a friend of John-Henry’s. He wanted me to get a note to you, but you’re not answering your phone. I wasn’t sure if I should leave a voicemail or not, but—but you weren’t home tonight, and I can’t find you, and I think you need to know. I’ll read it to you. ‘Ree, the Keeper went back to Wroxall, back where it all started. I’m going to catch him. Come as soon as you can.’ That’s all. I hope this isn’t too late.”
“No fucking way,” Dulac said when the message ended; he had gotten to his feet, but he was clinging to the bed’s chrome rail, barely staying upright. “You are not doing this alone.”
Hazard stared at the frozen image of Somers on the screen and recognized, now, the stairs leading down to the sub-basement of a building on Wroxall’s campus. Despair flooded him.
“What choice do I have?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
JULY 6
SATURDAY
4:52 AM
HAZARD GOT TO THE Empire Fruit building a few minutes before five. He had his bag of gear in the van, so he had driven across town to Sexten Industrial Park, driven straight up to the gravel lot in front of the Empire Fruit building, and stopped the minivan. Like the rest of the buildings in the industrial park, Empire Fruit had been abandoned for a long time. It was one of the original buildings, and it had gone up at the same time as the Sexten Motors plant, sharing the same design: brick walls; narrow, glass-block windows; heavy metal doors that gave onto the warehouse.
Dawn had already begun, the sky lightening to steel at the horizon, but the industrial park was dark. No security lights, no sign of a lantern or flashlight inside the buildings. When the minivan’s automatic lights clicked off, the darkness swept in to press against the glass. The only illumination, faint and distant, came from the Tegula Plant back toward town. Undoing the seat belt, Hazard pushed his door open, breathing the cool, humid air of a summer morning, the scent of fresh dew, clover, the dustiness of the gravel. He shut the door; the click ran across the empty lot like a gunshot.
The duffel with Hazard’s gear could be adjusted into a backpack, and he slung it now over both shoulders, made sure the Blackhawk was clear in its holster, and readied his thumb on the flashlight. He wasn’t ready to turn it on yet; the minivan had already made him visible, but he had wanted the Keeper to know that he had arrived. That was part of the game; unless the Keeper had absolutely no sense of reality, he had to have been experiencing some degree of worry. Psychopaths needed increasing amounts of stimulation in order to feel anything; Hazard guessed that the Keeper had chosen him for this sick game precisely because he thought Hazard was a worthy opponent—a threat, in other words. Hazard was intent on proving him right.
Jogging across the gravel, Hazard chose the shortest route to the edge of the lot, where an old railroad tie greeted him with a whiff of creosote. The tie separated the gravel from the knee-high weeds that rustled around Hazard as he began moving through them. The stalks,