The window in her room had a screen with one corner loose. She had loosened it over several evenings and kept the screws in a small jar so they would not fall and make noise. When she pushed the screen outward, hot wind rushed into the room, carrying dust and the distant sound of traffic. She lowered her backpack first, climbed onto the sill, and eased herself to the ground. Her sneakers touched the dirt without a sound loud enough to interrupt the snoring inside.
For several seconds she stood in the narrow strip of shade beneath the trailer, half expecting Richard to roar her name. Nothing happened. A truck moved along the road in the distance, and a dog barked at a neighboring property. Chloe looked at the home she had wanted to escape for years and felt no sadness about leaving it. She felt only the terror of not knowing whether leaving would be allowed to succeed.
She started running. The first mile was a series of painful breaths, her ribs protesting whenever she moved too fast. She stayed below the road embankment where the ground allowed it, ducking whenever she heard an engine and waiting for vehicles to pass before continuing. The hot air made her throat burn. Dust collected along the damp skin of her face, settling around the split in her lower lip.
The highway signs still carried traces of the old Route 66 tourist identity, though the road itself felt almost forgotten. Shuttered motels stood behind sun-faded signs, and empty lots stretched between businesses that had not survived the interstate. Chloe passed a rusted billboard advertising a family diner that had closed before she was born. She paused beneath its shadow to drink one small swallow from her bottle. She needed the rest of the water for whatever came next.
Arthur Pendleton's Auto Salvage lay beyond the edge of town, where chain-link fencing disappeared into pale dirt and an untidy skyline of stacked vehicles. To strangers it looked like a place where useful things went to die. Chloe remembered a very different version of it: her father laughing with Arthur over a stubborn engine and handing her a cold soda on a summer afternoon. Arthur had helped David more than once, and David had pulled him from beneath a slipping vehicle before an accident could become fatal. When Chloe was little, Arthur used to call her the shop's smallest inspector.
She had not visited in almost a year. Richard disliked Arthur because the old man asked questions and never acted especially impressed by a deputy's badge. Chloe worried Arthur might send her back out of fear, or worse, suggest a compromise that required her to return for her belongings. But he was the only person she could reach on foot who might have something with an engine and a willingness to overlook the price. She crossed the dusty entrance with the forty dollars crushed in her hand.