No Exit by Taylor Adams 2

media to aid the coming manhunt. She also had the van’s
make, model, and license plate. Plus a blurry photo of the
missing San Diego girl. It would look great on CNN, blown up
on forty-inch LCD screens across the country.
But was it enough?
Driving was impossible now, but tomorrow morning when
the snowplows arrived and opened up Backbone Pass to
traffic, Lars would take Jay and leave. Even if Darby could
manage a 9-1-1 call immediately afterward, the police would
still be acting off a last-known location. Maybe he’d get
caught, but maybe he wouldn’t. He’d have ample time to slip
through the patchy net, to vanish back into the world, and that
would be a death sentence for seven-year-old Jay Nissen.
Jaybird Nissen. Whatever her name was.
According to the regional map on the wall, State Route
Seven intersected two other highways near the pass. Plus a
major interstate running like a vein to the north. Whether Lars
drove east or west, he’d have plenty of escape routes. On
closer inspection, she also learned that the Wanapa (Little
Devil) rest stop was twenty miles downhill. This one, the one
they were all stranded at, was actually Wanapani. She’d
misread the map earlier. They were twenty miles further from
civilization.
In Paiute, Wanapani translated to Big Devil.
Of course it did.
Darby still had the bullet in her pocket, too. She’d
inspected it under green fluorescent lights in the women’s
restroom. The bullet’s blunt nose was split with four crosscuts,
which appeared deliberate, for some unknown reason.
The bottom of it, the brass rim, had stamped lettering: .45 lic.
She’d heard of guns called forty-fives before, in cop movies.
But it was chilling to think that there was a real one right here,
in the room with her, tucked under Lars’s jacket. Just a few
feet away.