No Going Back Read Online Free PDF

old-school country, and, though it wasn’t to my particular taste, I allowed Patsy Cline and Hank Williams to drown out the railroad sounds. Mesas and cliffs built around me, monoliths of red stone that glowed like old blood under my headlights. Somewhere along the way I crossed the state border and pushed on through Lupton and a proliferation of signs indicating I was now in Navajo country. There was even a sprawling trading post set against a cliff-side pocked with caverns and cave art depicted in stark turquoise lit with spotlights. I considered pulling over, to see the sights as Jay and Nicole would have, but decided against it and continued to the junction with state highway 77 where I angled north for the Painted Desert.
    A couple of miles into the desert there was a truck stop and I pulled in. It didn’t look the kind of place where the girls would have felt safe; they would likely have continued up towards Indian Wells looking for somewhere more appealing. But it suited me fine. I wasn’t intimidated by the big rigs or the rough men that drove them; in fact, the rougher they were the better for me.
    Inside the diner, I showed the photos of the girls to some of the staff, but I knew I was wasting my time. These were the night shift, and if by chance the girls had been through here, a different bunch of workers would’ve been on duty then.
    An elderly Navajo guy I found leaning on a broom in the washroom said, ‘Good luck, man, but you’re wasting your breath round here. People like me, well, we keep our noses outta other people’s business.’
    ‘Even if that means not helping someone?’
    ‘Some people just can’t be helped.’
    At my bemused expression, he led me back out of the foyer and indicated a noticeboard tacked to a post. On it were upward of ten curling Missing Persons posters. Barring one which depicted a middle-aged white man, all the others were of females ranging from thirteen up to sixty-three years of age.
    ‘We get lotsa those things turnin’ up,’ the old man said, tapping the board with his broom. ‘Not so sure any of them missin’ folks get found, though.’ He glanced at the ground, ran the bristles of the brush through the dirt. ‘Not alive anyways.’
    Thanking the old man for his candour, I went back inside and ordered coffee and a supper of cold meat and cheese. Sitting at a corner table, picking at the food, I thought about the old man’s words. In a country as immense as the US, tens of thousands of people went missing every year. I didn’t know the statistics, but there had to be a fraction of them that were never found again. Talking fractions kind of minimised the seriousness, because when you converted it to percentages then you suddenly had a very real figure. If one in ten never turned up again, then the number truly became shocking. People would disappear for many reasons, many of them innocent enough, but then there were the horrifying realities of kidnap, murder and abduction. How many of those who disappeared under those circumstances ever returned home to their loved ones?
    I still entertained the notion that Jay and Nicole were simply enjoying their freedom and soon enough Jameson Walker would inform me he’d received word from them, but that could prove to be wishful thinking. No, on seeing those weathered posters, it had sunk an icy talon into my guts, focusing my mind on the urgency of finding them. The police speak about the forty-eight-hour rule: if a person who’s been abducted isn’t found before that time elapses, then tracking them down becomes very difficult indeed. Truth was, I’d already gone beyond forty-eight hours and was rapidly approaching the next marker. It was often believed that if abductees hadn’t turned up within seventy-two hours, then you could expect only to find a corpse.
    Sitting there, eating and swilling down coffee, I felt guilty. But I wasn’t wasting time, I was watching, waiting for the correct moment to move. A good mix