“My uncle’s “beachfront paradise” was 40 minutes from the beach. My ocean view? A mural of the ocean in a parking lot. We saved $400. It cost us the vacation.”

My uncle Ray saved us four hundred dollars on this vacation, and at 1:52 a.m. I realized it might cost me my daughter.

I woke to an empty bed. Lily’s blanket was on the floor, and our motel room door hung open a few inches, letting in the thick Florida night.

“Lily?” I whispered. Then I shouted it.

Nothing. I ran to the window, the one Ray had proudly called “the ocean view.” It overlooked the parking lot of the Sunset Shores Inn, where the ocean was a faded mural on a cinderblock wall, painted waves under one flickering yellow light.

Beneath those painted waves, a man in a gray hoodie was lifting my nine-year-old daughter into the back of Ray’s rented minivan.

I don’t remember crossing the room. I remember the stairs burning under my bare feet and gravel biting my heels. I remember screaming her name.

The man looked up. Then Uncle Ray stepped out of the driver’s seat, sixty-seven years old, hands raised like he was calming a wild animal.

“Hannah, don’t yell,” he said. “Please.”

“Get away from her!” I yanked Lily into my arms. She was in her pajamas, wide-eyed, clutching her stuffed rabbit. “Ray, what did you do?”

“I’ll explain. I swear on your aunt’s grave I’ll explain. But not here.” His voice cracked. He kept glancing at the motel office, where a single light burned behind a blind. “We have maybe five minutes.”

“Until what?”

The man in the hoodie finally spoke. “Until Voss checks the cameras.”

I stared at him. Something about his face under that hood felt strangely familiar, and his hands were stained with paint up to the wrists.

Behind us, the office door banged open. A heavy figure filled the doorway, a flashlight in one hand and something long and dark in the other.

“Get in the van,” Ray whispered. “Hannah, please. Get in, or none of us leaves here tonight.”

Then I heard the unmistakable metallic clack of a shotgun being racked.

Teaser:
Who is the man in the gray hoodie, and why does my daughter seem less afraid of him than I am? What did Uncle Ray know about that hotel that he never told us? And what is the man with the shotgun so desperate to keep from leaving the parking lot? By sunrise, I would learn that the cheapest deal of our lives had a price none of us could have imagined.

I got in. God help me, I got in.

Ray hit the gas before my door even shut. Gravel sprayed across the mural as we tore out of the lot, and the shotgun blast that followed blew out the rear window. Glass rained over Lily’s blanket. She screamed into my shoulder, and I covered her with my whole body.

“Heads down!” Ray shouted.

The man in the hoodie was beside us now, pushing back his hood with shaking hands. A thin scar through his left eyebrow. A face I hadn’t seen in eight years.

“Hello, Hannah,” he said. “Long time.”

“Danny?”

My cousin Danny Pruitt, the one our family had erased. The one who supposedly stole eleven thousand dollars from Aunt Carol’s funeral fund and vanished.

“Ray,” I said, my voice trembling, “you told us you found a deal.”

“I found a photograph,” Ray said, eyes locked on the road. “Sunset Shores, with a mural of the ocean. In the corner, a tiny seagull and the initials D.P. The price was too good to be true, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to see my boy.”

“And you couldn’t tell me?”

“You’d have said no.”

Headlights flared in the mirror. A black pickup roared out of the hotel lot behind us, closing fast.

“The deal was never a deal,” Danny said, breathing hard. “Voss lures families with beachfront prices that don’t exist. At check-in he copies IDs and runs cards through a skimmer under the desk. He keeps a ledger of everyone. Names, Social Security numbers, even their kids’ school information. He sells it all.”

“Why are you still working for him?”

“Because he said a deputy friend of his would arrest me for the funeral money. I’ve been painting his walls and keeping quiet for two years. Until last week, when I found the ledger and copied it.”

The pickup slammed into our bumper. The van fishtailed, and Lily shrieked.

“Where is the copy?” I demanded.

A small voice answered from my arms. Lily lifted her stuffed rabbit. Its belly seam had been stitched shut with crooked black thread.

“Uncle Danny said to keep Mr. Buttons safe,” she whispered. “He said it’s a secret mission.”

I stared at my cousin. “You put it in my daughter’s toy?”

“It was the only place Voss would never look,” Danny said. “I was going to get you out before he checked the cameras.”