CHAPTER ONE
785 Words
CHAPTER ONE
U.S. Deputy Marshal Alexa Chase drove down the darkened desert road, hands slick on the steering wheel, peering into the desert on either side as far as her high beams would penetrate, every now and then shouting out the open window.
“Stacy!”
When she wasn’t calling out her thirteen-year-old neighbor’s name, she was steadily, loudly, relentlessly cursing.
Alexa knew she was acting crazy, but how else could she act? Stacy had finally done it. She had threatened to for more than a year now, and she had finally done it. She had finally run away from home.
Stomach sick with worry, Alexa checked her phone, as she had every two minutes since Stacy had been reported missing. The search party her partner Stuart Barrett had organized sent in regular updates from the places they had been posted—the bus stations and movie theaters, the highways in and out of nearby Phoenix, and the red light districts in that sprawling city.
Alexa shuddered to think what could happen to a thirteen-year-old girl on the streets of Phoenix.
Assuming that’s where she went. While it was the most obvious destination, and the most familiar to her, that didn’t mean the kid had headed that direction. She could have hopped a bus or hitched a ride somewhere else.
That’s why Alexa was scouring the roads around Stacy’s trailer in the rural area north of Phoenix. Maybe she’d come across the kid thumbing a ride.
Or come across her tossed to the side of the road after having been taken for a ride.
Tears welled up in her eyes. Alexa quickly wiped them away so she could see the road. She had been in law enforcement too long. She knew the dangers out there all too well. Her mind filled with a thousand terrible scenarios.
“Where the hell is that kid?”
Guilt washed over her. This was all her fault.
Alexa came to an intersection, a crossing of two rural roads stretching into the dark desert night. She hit the brakes on her Jeep, tires squealing, and stopped right in the middle.
She had no idea where to go.
Alexa grabbed her phone and called Stacy’s father.
The phone rang, and rang.
“Come on, already!”
Mr. Carpenter picked up.
“Yeah?” he grunted.
“Is she back?” Alexa asked.
“What? Oh, you mean Stacy?”
Alexa resisted the urge to smash the phone against her dashboard. Her neighbor sounded drunk as usual. No wonder Stacy wanted to run away.
“Yes, I mean Stacy,” she managed to say without swearing.
“Did you check Billy’s house?”
Billy was a senior at her school, seventeen years old and caught trying to sneak out at night with Stacy. The blowup that caused made Alexa punish her for the frist time since they’d met. She’d told the girl that she could no longer come over to the ranch anytime she wanted.
That had been the final straw for the kid. Alexa, in a fit of anger, had taken away Stacy’s only safe space.
Stupid, I was so stupid.
“Yes. As I told you, we checked on him and his parents are on the watch for her. The parents are decent people and will inform us if she turns up.”
“If the parents were decent people, their son wouldn’t be catting around with a girl four years younger.”
Alexa curled her lip in disgust. Like he and his useless wife had a right to criticize other people’s parenting!
“Can you think of any place she might have gone?” She had asked him this before and he had only said the obvious places Stuart had already checked.
“No.”
“Have you been checking the desert around your trailer?” Alexa asked, peering in all four directions from the center of the intersection. Some headlights approached from the left. Alexa put her Jeep in reverse to get out of the way.
“I told you, she’s just gone off to let off some steam. She’ll be back in a few hours. I used to do that all the time when I argued with my dad.”
Yeah, and look how you turned out.
“It’s very dangerous for her to be out this late at night, Mr. Carpenter. Please continue calling all her friends and your neighbors.”
“I will.”
Alexa wasn’t convinced.
The vehicle passed the intersection in front of her. Her high beams illuminated a windowless van. In the front cab she caught a glimpse of a heavyset man and a blonde girl with a ponytail.
Just like Stacy.
- Writer
