Every Precious Thing

CHAPTER TWENTY

Diana sat up with a start. Sweat covered her brow and soaked her shirt. The pleasant desert night had been replaced by Braden’s typical one-hundred-degree-plus day, turning Richard’s rental car into a sauna.

But it wasn’t the heat that bothered her at the moment. It was the position of the sun itself. It was higher in the sky than she’d expected. She grabbed her phone and looked at the time.

A quarter after ten?

She’d slept for over six hours.

With a sense of dread, she looked out to where the El Camino had been parked, and saw that it was…still there.

“Thank you, Lord,” she said, relieved.

Maybe the guy-what had he called himself? Logan? — maybe Logan had slept in, too. Even if he hadn’t, she knew he wouldn’t be too far from that car. It was a beauty, more so in the daylight where its paint job sparkled under the desert sun.

Kitty-corner to the motel was a gas station she’d used a few times. It had a restroom around back that you could enter without going through the store. She drove over, pulled her hoodie tight around her face, and made a beeline for the women’s room. After relieving herself and cleaning up as best she could, she returned to the motel, parking this time a few slots away from the El Camino.

When an hour and a half passed with no sign of Logan, she decided he must have gone somewhere without his car. She wasn’t worried, though. He’d be back. But after another forty-five minutes, it turned out she was wrong. At first she barely looked at the tough older guy who’d entered the parking lot, but then he got into Logan’s truck and drove off.

She couldn’t imagine that there were two electric blue El Caminos in town, so she had no choice but to pull out after it.

Following vehicles always looked easy on TV. Cops and PIs and even amateurs seldom ever lost the car they were tracking. In real life it turned out to be another matter-for Diana, anyway. She was a bartender, after all, not a stock car driver. She made it through two traffic lights before the El Camino disappeared.

She drove through the town, but couldn’t find the car.

“Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!” she said as she pounded the steering wheel, adrenaline and dread racing each other through her body.

When she finally calmed down, she did the only thing she could do-return to the motel and hope that the El Camino showed up again.