Chapter 146 Vanishing Point

Chapter 146 Vanishing Point
Sierra pulled the driver's side door shut. For a moment, neither of them spoke. The Circle K clerk's words hung in the air between them… a man in a dark SUV… confronted him… then followed him… and…? Sierra felt the weight of each syllable pressing down on her chest like stones.

She turned toward Sylvia.

The tears came before the words. They welled up fast, hot, blurring the edges of the parking lot into watercolor smears of grey and white. Sierra's jaw trembled, and she pressed her fingers against her lips as if she could hold it all in, hold herself in, but the dam had already cracked.

"Ryder doesn't get into arguments with random strangers," she blurted out, her voice breaking on his name. "He's not like that. He doesn't provoke people, he doesn't start things. He's the calmest man I've ever known." She sucked in a ragged breath. "Something bad has happened to him, Syl. Something really bad."

Sylvia reached across the console and took Sierra's hand. Her grip was warm, steady, an anchor against the current pulling Sierra under.

"We don't know that yet," Sylvia said quietly.

"Yes, we do." Sierra's voice had dropped to a whisper. "We do know. His truck is sitting in a parking lot at Flagstaff. He never boarded a flight. He never went home. And now we find out some stranger in a black SUV followed him out of this gas station." She gestured toward the road. "What else am I supposed to think?"

Sylvia didn't answer. She studied Sierra's face for a long moment, her dark eyes reading the fractures, measuring the distance between composure and collapse. Then she unbuckled her seatbelt.
"Get out," she said. "I'm driving."

Sierra opened her mouth to protest, but her hands were shaking too badly to grip the steering wheel, and they both knew it. She nodded, feeling suddenly, profoundly weak.

They switched seats in the pale morning light. Sylvia adjusted the mirrors, checked the GPS, and eased the car out of the Circle K lot and back onto the road. The engine hummed. The tires whispered against asphalt. Sierra stared through the windshield at the road Ryder had driven and felt the distance between them as a physical ache in her ribs.

"Maybe he had an accident," Sierra said, her voice thin and searching. "Maybe he was trying to get away from whoever was in that black SUV. Maybe they ran him off the road." Her mind spun forward, each possibility worse than the last, tumbling over themselves like debris in a flood. "Maybe they forced him to pull over. Maybe they..."

"They didn't." Sylvia's voice cut clean through the spiral. Firm. Not unkind, but absolutely final. "Don't go there, Sierra. You hear me? Don't go there."

Sierra pressed her forehead against the cool glass of the passenger window. The trees along the highway were just beginning to turn, the faintest edges of gold and rust creeping into the green, and she thought absurdly of the mesquite and juniper back home.

Where are you?

She straightened suddenly, pulling her phone from her jacket pocket.

"Hospitals," she said.

Sylvia glanced at her. "What?"

"Maybe I should start calling hospitals. If there was an accident… if he was hurt and couldn't call… he could be in an ER or an ICU somewhere between here and the city. Or maybe in the city, if they took him by ambulance. He might not have had ID on him. He might…"

"Okay." Sylvia nodded, recognizing that Sierra needed something to do with her hands, her mind, her voice. Something besides sitting in the passenger seat, imagining the worst. "That's smart. Just make sure."

Sierra was already pulling up a browser. Her fingers moved across the screen with a precision that belied the tremor in her hands. Hospitals along I-90, eastbound, from the junction to Manhattan. The list populated in seconds, and the sheer length of it hit her like a wave.

There were dozens.

Small community hospitals in towns she'd never heard of. Regional medical centers with automated phone trees that looped in circles. Larger facilities closer to the city with transfer departments and patient-information lines that required last names, dates of birth, descriptions. Sierra worked through them methodically, one by one, her voice shifting into the calm, controlled register she used in boardrooms, the professional mask she could wear even when the woman beneath it was falling apart.

"I'm looking for a patient, male, thirty-five years old. Ryder Marsh. M-A-R-S-H. He would have come in within the last forty-eight hours."

No record, ma'am.

"Could you check John Does? Approximately six-four, brown hair, athletic build."

We don't have anyone matching that description.

"Thank you."

She ended the call and dialed the next number. And the next. And the next.

Sylvia drove in silence, navigating the unfamiliar highway with careful concentration, her eyes flicking between the road and Sierra every few minutes. She didn't interrupt. She didn't try to fill the gaps between calls with conversation or reassurance. She simply held the space, the way a wall holds back water, quietly and without complaint.

The miles unspooled. Sierra worked her way through the list, Canajoharie, Little Falls, Herkimer, Utica, Rome, Oneida, each call a tiny door opened and closed, each negative result simultaneously a relief and a devastation. He's not there meant he wasn't hurt in those places, but it also meant she was no closer to finding him.

By the time they passed through Hillside, Sierra's voice had gone hoarse. By Gardnertown, she'd switched to whispering. Sylvia handed her a water bottle from the cup holder, and Sierra drank without tasting it.

Sierra shook her head. "Nothing. Not a single match." She saw the turn to Stewart International Airport. "Maybe he caught a flight out of there."

"Sierra," Sylvia said. "He didn't catch a flight. If he had, he'd have arrived in Flagstaff."

Sierra kept calling hospitals.

When they hit Hillburn and the first suburban sprawl of the metropolitan area began to close in around them, Sylvia eased the car off the highway and into a convenience store parking lot.
"I need you to take the wheel," she said. "I don't know how to drive in this."

Sierra looked up from her phone. Her eyes were raw, her cheeks streaked with dried salt. Realizing where they were, Sierra agreed to switch back. Her moved on autopilot, muscle memory taking over where her mind had surrendered.

She drove them into the city in silence.

The last hospital on her list, Mount Sinai, had returned the same answer as all the others. No record of a Ryder Marsh. No unidentified males matching his description.

They had retraced every possible step. All they knew was that Ryder ate breakfast and filled up the car, been confronted by a stranger in a dark SUV.

She had nowhere else to look. Nowhere left to turn.

The Manhattan skyline rose ahead of them like a wall of glass and steel. For the first time in her life, the city had nothing to offer her. No answers. No strategies. No deals. All she had was an apartment with most of her things packed in boxes waiting at the end of the road.