WE DROVE THROUGH DOWNTOWN before taking one of the backroads—it might have just been an alley, actually, since it was barely big enough for the one car and we came out on the other side between two buildings. We ended up on another street that looked to be a deserted, seedy part of town.
Charming wasn’t exactly a word I’d use to describe it.
More like dilapidated. Run down. Condemned. I thought that people probably still lived here, though I would hazard a guess that a lot of them were squatters or just passing through. Either way, there was little doubt in my mind that the kind of people who lived here weren’t going to think twice about the car as it drove through the neighborhood with two unwilling passengers, one unconscious, in the backseat. We probably didn’t register as a blip on t
