Rewriting the Apocalypse novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: The Café

Faulk's second text came at nine the next morning.

Coffee at noon. A public table. Proof that Bess is well.

Jo read it twice and handed the phone to Sam.

"It's a trap," Sam said.

"It's a trap with forty witnesses. That's the only kind I'll walk into."

She chose the place herself, a glass-fronted café on High Street, packed with students and laptops.

Sam parked the truck across the road with his phone open on her line.

Eli took the window table, eight feet from hers, where she could see his face.

He had not said a word about the two days he'd asked for.

He drank nothing, and his gloved hands lay flat on the wood.

Faulk arrived at noon exactly, in a pale blue cardigan, carrying her own tea in a thermos.

"Jo," she said warmly, and sat down across from her. "You look worn out. Are you sleeping?"

"Where's Bess?"

Faulk set her phone on the table, tapped it and turned it around.

Bess's face filled the screen, gray curls flat, her voice thin but her own.

"Don't you dare come in here, Jo Hetzel," Bess said. "I mean it."

"Bess, are you hurt?"

"I've had worse tea at church. They've got that poor man from my back room in the next cell, and he..."

Faulk tapped the screen, and Bess was gone.

"She is resting comfortably," Faulk said. "She stays that way until the dinner. Then you walk into Mr. Kessling's ballroom on your own feet, and she walks out of my building on hers."

"And if I don't come?"

"Then I begin the count on her that night. Slowly, so she can follow it."

Jo's hands closed under the table.

Faulk reached across and took her wrist, gently, two fingers on the pulse.

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