Page 150 of You Found Me
He didn’t ease off. He couldn’t. Seconds counted. Milliseconds.
The phone dinged.
“Oh…ah, hell.” Brick glanced at Ward.
“What?”
Two more lights and he’d be on Bridge Road.
“Diggs’s phone just went offline,” Brick said. His voice was too calm. Like he was talking someone off a ledge.
His throat tightened. “They go off the bridge?”
“I’ll ask,” Brick said as he tapped out the question.
Ward forced himself to focus on the road and not the memory of his mother’s car as it tipped over the railing. Traffic was heavy heading into downtown for the last day of the festival. Lucky for them, he was heading out of town, not into it.
It felt like a lifetime before Brick finally responded. “He says no. Last ping from the necklace indicates they are, or were, well past the river.”
Relief let him breathe again. The car wasn’t floating upside down in the water. It was something.
“South of the bridge…that puts them out of town,” Brick said. "Nothing out there but fallow farmland and ditches. Maybe they just got a flat tire or something.”
“She wouldn’t set off the alert for a flat tire.” His mind raced with possible scenarios, none of them good. “Annie’s a skilled driver, and she was on high alert. If her phone’s offline… Were they hit?”
“He doesn’t know. He says, quote, ‘Car isn’t equipped with impact alert features.’ But, um…” Ward glanced at Brick. “The necklace is on the move. Heading southeast, going about sixty miles per hour.”
The steering wheel creaked under Ward’s grip. “He took her.”
“You don’t know that, man,” Brick said. “Maybe they had a flat tire or broke down and someone gave them a ride, uh, away from town?”
Ward hit the steering wheel. “Dammit.”
He punched the gas, racing around an old farm truck to make it through the yellow light at the next intersection. One more turn. “Tell Spencer to stay on her signal.”
“He says you’re one mile from Annie’s last ping,” Brick announced. “Eight miles from the necklace, but it’s moving faster than you. It just hit the thruway, heading north. He can tell all that? Where is he, in a helicopter or something?”
“He’s in a van. He was set up at our fallback in Wilkes-Barre. Tell him to get his ass on the road if he hasn’t already.” Ward turned onto Bridge Road and gunned it. He spared a glance for the spot burned in his memory as they flew over the bridge. No gaps in the rails. No skid marks.
The relief that skittered through his chest fizzled as he caught sight of the wrecked SUV. It had flipped onto the other side of the river and now rested upside down against a tree like a dead bug.
He swore, ripped apart by the need to both chase after Della and check on his team.
He couldn’t be in two places at once.
“Is that gas on the road?” Brick gripped the dash with one hand and the phone with the other.
Ward slammed on the brakes, coming to a skidding stop just short of the wreck.
It wasn’t much, but there was a puddle of something that could be gas. He could see a shattered phone a few feet away from the back passenger door, which swung lazily open on one hinge.
Diggs hung upside down, suspended by his seat belt. His hands fumbled, feeble and shaky, with the belt buckle.
He couldn’t see Annie.
For a long second, his need to get to Della raged.
One thing at a time, son. One thing at a time. What’s right in front of you? What comes first?