A Garrett Island police force cruiser was speeding up the road, the cherry on top flashing, the siren engaged. Whoever was behind the wheel—and it was a real person behind the wheel—maneuvered around the overturned ambulance and the burned-out shell of the fire truck and drove up to the community center entrance.

And then Joe remembered. There was one car they didn’t trade in for an Arrival because it was in the police garage being repaired.

The car screeched to a halt. As the window powered down, Joe saw that it was Ronny, the well-intentioned but somewhat dimwitted officer he’d spoken to earlier, although it felt like days ago.

“Ronny?” Joe said, stepping toward the car.

“Hey, Chief,” he said, smiling. “Need wheels?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

“I got someone else to take over the phones and decided to have a look at it myself since today was Ernie’s day off, and he’s on the mainland, the lucky bastard.”

Ernie being the department’s full-time mechanic.

“So I looked at the work order on it, and Ernie hadn’t figured out what was wrong. But it was mentioned that the car had a full tank of gas, and I remembered one of the guys saying he was driving a car that never seemed to run out of gas and—”

“Ronny, give me the car.”

“Yeah, right, okay, but I just wanted to tell you that I started to wonder if the gas tank was actually empty, but the fuel gauge was busted? Showing a full tank all the time. So I put some gas in, and sure enough, it was empty and—”

Joe made a thumbing motion.

Ronny got out of the car and let Joe slip behind the wheel. “I’ll drop you off back at the station,” he said.

As Ronny was coming around the other side of the car, he said, “All the cars are going back to their houses. It’s totally weird!”

As Ronny was getting in, Joe’s phone rang. He grabbed it without looking at the screen.

“Yeah?”

“Joe.”

It was Sandra.

“Hey,” he said. “Got your text. It wasn’t anything I did. I think the cars want to be recharged and—”

Her voice very low, Sandra said, “Joe, shut up.”

He stopped talking, and listened.

“It’s got Katie,” she whispered.

“What?”

“One of them. It’s got Katie trapped.”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Coming,” he said.

Joe turned and said to Ronny, “Get out.”

Forty-Seven

Sandra, taking small tentative steps toward Gracie, asked Katie in as calm a voice as possible, “How you doing, sweetheart?”

Katie, pinned at the knees to the front wall of the house by the car’s front bumper, tears running down her cheeks, said quietly, “It hurts.”

“You think anything is broken?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just pressing really hard. Every time I try to move a little it gets closer.”

“Okay.”