Gabe had driven close to two hours and was fighting off a serious bout of fatigue when he grabbed his phone to dial Yun. He pressed the display to find three missed calls from her.

“Where are you?” she asked without saying hello when he dialed her back.

“Ah, no idea. Middle of nowhere, it looks like. Guess I’m about forty-five minutes out.”

“Forty-five? Then you’ve probably not passed Sikeston? It’s like a twenty-five-minute drive from there to New Madrid.” From her punched breathing, he could tell she was walking.

“Ah, no, I’ve seen some signs for it though. Why?”

“One of the rescue drivers is stranded there. I’ll text you an address. You two are going to the same place. Someone else can haul her dogs back to St. Louis, but they need her crates to move them, and everyone’s got their hands full.”

“Am I picking up crates or a person?”

“Both maybe. Maybe just crates. I’m in St. Louis, friend. I’m not getting all the details.”

“I’ll pick up crates, but I’m not hauling around a stranded motorist.”

“Gabe, you’re such a grouch. You can handle less than half an hour in a car with a fellow rescue worker if you have to.”

“I don’t know; there’s a chance it could kill me.”

Yun groaned. “I’m adding ‘reassimilating back into humanity’ to your to-do list. Text me when you get there. Let me know what cases you get. They’ve listed a few cool ones, but I’m not going to say and jinx it.”

Gabe hung up, and a few seconds later, his phone dinged with a new address that he copied into his maps app. It was twenty-three minutes south of him.

Behind Gabe, Samson’s snore crescendoed. “Sleep while you can, buddy. If we end up having a rescue worker with us to finish out this drive, I’m sticking you up front and her in back.”

Chapter 3

The address Gabe had been texted was to a repair shop a few minutes off the highway. The garage—this whole section of town, for that matter—looked to have been in its prime forty or fifty years ago. He knew this didn’t have anything to say about the quality of the mechanics working there. Good mechanics could often be found in the most unlikely shops. There were more mechanics in Gabe’s family than anything else, from his dad and his grandpa to a few uncles and several cousins. It was no wonder he spoke shop before entering preschool.

Growing up, Gabe had worked at his dad’s auto body repair center and had had a free ride into managing it. In late high school, he had found himself way more interested in finding out what had happened to the people who’d been inside than he was in repairing mangled cars.