No Exit by Taylor Adams 2

She wished she could rewind this horrible night and undo
her decisions. All of them. Every last choice she’d made, ever
since she first peered through that frosty window and saw
Jay’s hand grasping that kennel bar. She wished she’d been
content to simply play detective and gather information. She
could have waited quietly until the morning, held her
advantage, and maybe after the snowplows arrived and the
rest-stop-refugees went their separate ways, she could have
discreetly tailed Ashley and Lars’s van in her Honda. A
quarter-mile back, one hand on the steering wheel, her iPhone
in the other, feeding the Colorado State Police detailed
information to stage their arrest. She still could have saved
Jay.
(And Mom would still have pancreatic cancer)
But no. Instead, Darby Elizabeth Thorne, a college
sophomore with zero law enforcement or military training,
tried to take matters into her own hands. And now here she
was, walking through the woods with a .45 aimed at her back,
searching for a dead child.
To her right, a morbid laugh. “Gotta say, Darbs, as far as
Good Samaritans go, you’re just batting a thousand. First you
confide in one of the abductors, and then you get the abductee
killed. Nice work.”
Everything was a joke to Ashley Garver. Even this,
somehow.
Christ, she loathed him.
But now she wondered — had he been telling her the truth
after all? Maybe it really was a textbook ransom plot, just like
he’d described to her, and post-payment, the brothers really
had intended to return Jay to her family alive. She imagined
them jettisoning her at some sun-bleached bus stop in flyover
country. Little Jaybird blinking in the Kansas sun after two
weeks of darkness, rushing to the nearest stranger on a bench,
begging them to call her parents—