Page 68 of You Can Run

Jessica stood on the concrete where the Ram had been idling an hour ago and looked at the empty space it had left. “If they find him, they'll come back here.”

“They'll find him. That's the point. We move now, before they start expanding the perimeter. West, along the dunes.”

“On foot?” She looked at the dark beyond the shed door, at the marsh grass moving in the wind. “We don't have a map. We don't know what's out there.”

“We have the coast,” he said. “We walk until we find somewhere to sit still until sunrise. Then we figure out the next piece.”

It wasn't a plan. It was barely a direction. But they'd run out of alternatives, and the only thing she had left that felt like solidground was the fact that Dante was still standing in front of her, and he hadn't been wrong yet about what came next.

She followed him out.

The salt air hit her immediately, warm and thick, the marsh smell underneath it. Dante was already moving, three paces ahead, picking his way through the grass.

They cleared the marsh and hit the dunes, the sand soft and shifting underfoot. Jessica's shoes filled with it. She kept her eyes on Dante's back and tried not to think too hard about where they were going.

He had the phone out again, briefly. Just long enough to glance at it. Then it was back in his pocket again and he was walking, eyes forward, the black line of the Gulf ahead of them.

The West End was quieter than the rest of the island—darker, the road noise falling away behind them until there was only the sound of the sea and the wind moving through the sea oats. The houses out here sat up on thick concrete pilings, cedar-sided, most of them dark, their big windows facing the water.

Every muscle in Jessica's legs screamed. The sand had been pulling at her boots for the better part of an hour, and she walked with her head down, watching the rhythmic swing of Dante's heels ahead of her, until he stopped.

“This one,” he said. “It looks empty. We can hole up in here.”

She looked up. The house was cedar and glass, sitting further back from the beach than its neighbors, flanked by a dense run of sea oats that gave it a thin screen of privacy. It was completely dark in a way that implied it hadn't seen anyone in weeks.

“Dante.” She kept her voice low. “Look at the gate.” A sleek keypad sat at the base of the stairs. “These places are wired. You touch a door and half of Galveston PD comes back around.”

He didn't answer right away. He circled the perimeter of the pilings, scanning the underside of the structure where the utility boxes were tucked. “Fancy houses have fancy problems,” he said when he returned. “They rely on tech, and tech relies on people who forget to change the defaults.”

He pointed up at a small white dome under the eave. “Camera's live. But look at the driveway.”

A plastic sign near the trash bins: Managed by Coastal Vibe Rentals.

“Airbnb,” he said. “Owner's not here. Management company is. And management companies don't want to drive out to the West End every time a guest forgets their code.”

He went to the heavy storage closet built into the pilings stocked with beach chairs, umbrella stands and felt along the top of the door frame. He brought down a small magnetic key box, opened it. It was empty. He turned it over. Sure enough, on the back, in faded marker was the number 0422.

He led her up the side stairs, away from the beach-facing windows, and punched the code into the deadbolt. The pad beeped—a small, cheerful sound entirely out of place in the night they'd had—and the lock turned.

Jessica held her breath.

The door swung open and the smell of the house came out to meet them—the cedar and lemon of fancy cleaners.

“Guest code disarms the internal sensors automatically,” Dante explained. “The system thinks it's a guest.”

They stepped inside. The wall facing the Gulf was almost entirely glass, and the moonlight came through it and lay across the concrete floors and the white linen furniture in long palesheets. After the bait shop, after the marsh, after all of it, the cleanliness of the place felt faintly unreal.

Jessica stood just inside the door, not quite ready to touch anything.

“We're too visible,” she said. “All this glass.”

Dante had walked to the center of the room. He stood with his hand resting on the back of a chair, looking out at the ocean. “They're looking for us in ditches and dives,” he said. “Nobody's going to come knocking on a five-thousand-a-week rental tonight.”

He turned then, and she saw it: the fatigue, sitting deep around his eyes. He looked like a man who'd been running on something other than sleep for a long time and had just reached the far edge of it.

“Go get clean,” he said. “I'll keep watch.”

She looked at him for a moment. There was something she wanted to ask about tomorrow, about the next move. But all she did was nod and moved toward the hallway.