1. The Dreams Were Never Real
Water dripping.
One, two, three.
The figure was in a dark room with painted cinderblock walls. On the floor. Sheet vinyl beneath his folded knees. His shirt was dripping.
And there was something wrong.
Light crept in as a door opened. Weak, yellow, half-blocked. It cut the figure’s slender, shivering frame out of the darkness. His face lifted. Youth, delicate features. A mouth and jawline that gave away his ethnicity as fast as the shape of his eyes would have. But he was blindfolded.
Blind, bound, nothing clothing his body but the soaked fabric of an ill-fitting T-shirt, terrified with every fiber of his being.
And yet, Kellen could hear him silently count. One, two, three.
Kellen Eastland startled awake, a fist clutched to the T-shirt across his chest. He sat up stiffly. His phone was going off. And the light fabric he had been sweating under was the blanket he had dragged over himself to take a nap on the couch after returning in the early hours of the morning.
His dog was staring at him like she knew something.
Kellen’s hands lifted slowly to his face and scraped backward through jet-black strands of unwashed shoulder-length hair. He drew a faltering breath. “Mind your own business, Wolf,” he murmured to the dog. He glanced at the stationary fan at the foot of the sofa. The power must be out again.
Kellen leaned over and reached for his phone.
For a second or two, he stared at the caller ID displayed on the cracked screen, unsure he wasn’t still dreaming. There was a name there—a name he hadn’t seen on his phone for the better part of six years.
She wants money, was the first explanation to dart across Kellen’s mind. They didn’t talk like they used to for a reason. But she also wasn’t any kind of ordinary ex that might call up her estranged man for funds.
“Lila.” Kellen answered the phone with a single word.
There was a lengthy silence on the other end. Then, “Kellen.”
Quiet.
Kellen passed his hand down the lower half of his face. His vision caught and centered on his distorted reflection in an overturned steel dog bowl. A blurry rendering of the dark eyes, unwashed skin, mixed-racial features. “You called me,” he murmured.
“You still taking jobs?” Her voice on that question. Deadpan. And yet, after all these years, Kellen still felt like he could sense the resentment in it.
“Of course, I’m still taking jobs.” His voice was just as dry. Then, with a hint of bitterness, “You still with the Winchester PD?”
“Of course, Kellen.” Another pause. “I have a job for you.”
When the surprise at her statement finally sank in, it was sudden and sharp. “You have a job for me?” She had thrown a dinner plate at his head once over the jobs. A porcelain dinner plate. It had smashed on the kitchen wall inches out of range, but only because he ducked so fast. It had been after the disappearance. She was tired of being alone. Sick with worry. Afraid of more loss.
“The Winchester PD needs someone to go undercover. Given the circumstances of the job, they don’t want to put an officer on it.”
There was too much risk to justify sending an officer, Kellen knew that meant. His finger pressed to his lips for a moment. His eyes tracked to the side and met Wolf’s solemn stare. “Job’s in Winchester?”
“Yep.”
“I’d need housing.”
“That would be provided.”
“For me and my dog.”
“One man and one dog,” Lila confirmed.
“How does it pay?”
“Good.”
A pause.
“When?”
“Soon as you can make it here.”
“I’ll leave tonight.”
“Good.”
Silence.
Then, “Are you still having those dreams, Kellen?”
It flashed through Kellen’s mind, crippling for almost four seconds: that nameless, blindfolded boy. Teens or twenties, so young and fragile. Completely helpless. “No.” Kellen swallowed and shut his eyes. “The dreams were never real.”
Sweltering heat greeted Kellen and his dog as they stepped out onto the screened-in patio at the back of their one-bedroom bungalow. A radiant sunset shot color across the briny water of Lake Pelican, a basin-like widening in the marshy landscape of the Florida Everglades. Over a thousand miles from Winchester, Arkansas.
Lila had thought it was beautiful, the land her man grew up in. The water, the trees, the sawgrass, the cabin. So Kellen had bought the cabin. A vacation home for a young family of three.
