They leave the parking lot quickly, tires kicking up gravel as Marge swerves onto the road, heading toward the highway.

Charlie looks out the window, spotting the same scenery the Grand Am passed when she and Josh traveled to the diner from the opposite direction. That was two hours ago, and she’s now in a different car with a different captor.

The only thing that remains the same is her fear.

INT. VOLVO—NIGHT

Robbie watches the dented Cadillac leave the parking lot. Since he doesn’t want the waitress to know he’s following her, his plan is to let her gain a little bit of distance before going after her.

It shouldn’t be hard to keep up. There aren’t any other cars on the road, for one thing. Then there’s the fact that he knocked out one of her taillights in the parking lot, a trick he learned thanks to Charlie. It was in a movie she’d made him watch. A black-and-white one from the forties that mostly bored him. But he remembered the taillight trick, and the broken one now winks at him as the Caddy glides down the road.

It wasn’t easy getting to the diner as fast as he did. After sprinting out of his apartment, Robbie got in his Volvo and hightailed it to I-80. On the interstate, he drove like a bat out of hell, not caring if he got pulled over. In fact, he hoped that he would, thinking he might get a police escort out of it.

He didn’t know what to expect once he got to the Skyline Grille. He’d hoped to find the place open and bustling and Charlie enjoying a milkshake, the whole thing a complete misunderstanding. Instead, the diner was closed and the only person around seemed to be that waitress, who clearly had been lying. In the span of a few sentences, she told him that Charlie had said goodbye when she left and that she hadn’t seen her depart.

So after breaking her taillight, he decided to drive a few hundred yards up the road and wait, the front of the diner still within view. He wanted to see the waitress leave. He thought he’d follow her, ask her a few more questions, get the police involved if necessary. Not that the police had been useful the first time he called them. Considering the way that dispatcher brushed him off, he doubted a cop ever stopped by the diner.

Which is why he sat in his car, the engine off but the keys still in the ignition, watching for the waitress. What Robbie didn’t expect was to see Charlie with her, being led out of the diner like a death row inmate heading to the gas chamber. It was such an awful sight that he almost jumped out of the car and ran to rescue her.

But then he saw the gun the waitress was pointing at her back and decided that running was the worst thing he could do at the moment. As Charlie got into the back of the car, Robbie tried to get a good look at her. Although it was hard to tell from such a distance and in the middle of the night, she didn’t appear to have been physically harmed.

He hopes it stays that way.

What he doesn’t understand—and hasn’t since the moment Charlie called him—is what the hell happened between the university and here. What little she told him on the phone suggested it had something to do with the guy Charlie had gotten a ride with.

Josh.

Robbie thinks that was the name she had mentioned.

But he saw no sign of any guy when he peeked into the diner as the waitress was lying to him. Nor did it look like there was anyone else inside the Cadillac as it sped out of the parking lot.

He can only assume that this Josh—whoever he is and wherever he might be now—is working with the waitress.

What they want with Charlie, however, is impossible to know.

Not until Robbie gets to wherever it is the Cadillac is heading.

Up ahead, the broken taillight disappears below the horizon. Time to move. Robbie quickly starts the car, puts it in gear, and begins to follow.

INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT

He drives toward the diner, even though what he’s doing doesn’t really qualify as driving at all. It’s merely rolling and steering at the same time. And he’s doing a shit job of it. Moving down Dead River Road at a snail’s pace, he can barely manage to keep the Grand Am inside the lane.

The stab wound is to blame. Each time he presses a pedal or shifts gears, pain flares along his side, making it feel like everything from shoulder to knee is on fire.

At least the bleeding’s stopped, thanks to his stitch job, the gauze pad, and an abundance of medical tape. Crisscrossing the gauze multiple times, the tape has seared to his skin, pulling it whenever he moves and creating another, more pinching layer of pain.

It’s still better than what he felt while sewing himself back up. He’s been stitched up plenty of times. That’s nothing new. And back when he was still on active duty and serving in Beirut, circumstances forced him to give stitches to others. But he’s never had to do both at the same time before.

It wasn’t pretty.

When you’re about to hurt yourself, your nerves send a signal to the brain that tells you to stop doing whatever it is that’s causing the pain.

Simple.

Not so simple is forcing yourself to do it anyway, no matter what your brain tells you, knowing you’re about to cause yourself a world of hurt. He paused as the needle went in and paused as it went out, repeating the process five times before the cut in his side was fully closed.

Now he’s driving.

Or trying to.

Heading to the Skyline Grille instead of a hospital, which is where he really should be going. But he doesn’t like hospitals. He’s not a fan of all the questions they ask in the ER. And the first one he’ll get when they take one look at his amateurishly stitched, overly taped wound is “Who stabbed you?”

Because of that, he’d rather skip the hospital for now.

There may come a time tomorrow when he can’t avoid it. If that moment comes, he’ll be sure to make up some excuse as to how he took a steak knife to the gut. He has no plans to mention Charlie. That wouldn’t be wise.

So it’s off to the diner, drifting out of the lane with each line of pain that burns up his side. He needs to get to the diner because that’s where Marge is. It’s also likely Charlie’s location, considering how there’s really nowhere else to go around these parts.

Just the Skyline Grille.

The place where Charlie was supposed to have stayed.

That was the plan, at least. Find her, get her into the car by any means possible, and take her to the diner. Done, done, and done.

Once at the diner, when Marge came to take their order, he gave the signal that Charlie, no stranger to code words herself, didn’t notice.

What’s your blue-plate special?

Translation: This is the girl.

The rest depended on Marge’s response. If she had told him, “We don’t do that here. What’s printed on the menu is what we got,” it meant that everything was called off. Instead, she said, “Salisbury steak.” Which meant that everything was still a go and that he should leave Charlie at the diner.

What definitely wasn’t part of the plan was Marge purposefully spilling tea on Charlie so the two of them could have a moment alone. He knows why she did it. She didn’t think he was doing a good enough job and that Charlie might act in unpredictable ways because of it.

Turns out she was right.

He certainly didn’t predict Charlie playing that damn song on the jukebox, revealing she knew if not everything, then at least enough. Nor could he have foreseen that she’d insist on getting back into the car with him. He only agreed to it because he knew he could easily bring her back in a few minutes. Besides, it seemed better than just taking off while she was still in the bathroom and never seeing her again. He thought it might be nice to drive a little and chat a bit more. A proper goodbye before he slapped on the cuffs.

Then Charlie stabbed him and now he’s got five homemade stitches in his side, tape tugging at his skin, and a sweatshirt crunchy with dried blood.

So much for a proper goodbye.

When the diner comes into view a half-mile down the road, he sees that the place is dark and that the parking lot is empty. Yet there’s still an unusual amount of traffic for this road at this hour. About halfway between the Grand Am and the diner is a Volvo sitting on the road’s shoulder, its headlights off and the engine still. Far in the distance, a car with a broken taillight travels in the direction of the on-ramp to the interstate.

He pounds the brakes and cuts the Grand Am’s own lights, curious to see what happens next.

When the car with the broken taillight fades from view, the Volvo comes to life and edges onto the road. As it drives off in the same direction as the other car, he spots an Olyphant University sticker on the rear bumper.

The boyfriend, he assumes.

Here to rescue Charlie.

Another assumption he makes is that this boyfriend of hers didn’t come all this way just to tail some random car. That means the one with the broken taillight is Marge, with Charlie in tow.

He allows himself a pain-tinged smile.