Story code: ST-001329
Part 3: The Bounty
The thin aluminum of the sedan’s hood groaned and popped under the heavy weight of the neighbor’s steel-toed boots. Chloe remained contorted in the passenger footwell, her spine pressed agonizingly against the lower dashboard, her knees tucked tight to her chest. A steady stream of white steam hissed from the crumpled front end of her car, swirling in the blinding glare of the truck’s halogen headlights behind them. Through the spider-webbed fractures of the windshield, the dark, circular muzzle of the rifle tracked her every microscopic movement.
He had her perfectly pinned. The closed garage door locked her in from the front, the massive diesel truck barricaded her from behind, and the man with the gun stood directly above her engine block.
Chloe’s chest heaved, pulling in jagged breaths of cold night air mixed with the acrid stench of leaking radiator coolant and unburned diesel. Her mind raced, desperately grasping for any thread of suburban normalcy to de-escalate the nightmare. He was angry about the trashcan. He was a fanatic about property damage. He thought she was fleeing the neighborhood to avoid paying for a piece of molded green plastic.
Her fingers scrabbled wildly against the carpet of the floorboard, sweeping through the scattered debris of her shattered driver’s side window until they brushed the familiar leather of her purse. She yanked the bag toward her chest, digging her trembling hands inside. She bypassed her pepper spray-useless against a man with a rifle through a pane of glass-and pulled out her wallet.
She fumbled with the tight leather slots, her thumbnail peeling back the edge of her auto insurance card and her driver’s license. She gripped the two small squares of plastic tightly in her fist and pushed herself up slightly from the footwell, bringing her face just above the level of the dashboard.
The neighbor stood tall on her hood, perfectly silhouetted by the porch lights down the street. He didn’t flinch as she moved. The rifle remained tucked tight into his shoulder, the barrel aimed squarely at the bridge of her nose through the glass.
“I have insurance!” Chloe screamed, her voice tearing at her throat, raw and desperate. She pressed the proof of insurance and her ID flat against the unbroken lower corner of the windshield, tapping the glass frantically. “Look! Look at it! I have full coverage! I can pay for the trash bin! I can pay for whatever you want! Just put the gun down and let me leave!”
She expected him to demand she roll down the window. She expected him to shout for her to pass the cards outside.
Instead, the neighbor slowly lowered his head, peering through the glass at the trembling cards in her hand. A humorless, entirely flat smile touched the corners of his mouth. He didn’t lower the weapon.
“Put the card away, Chloe,” his muffled voice carried through the fractured windshield, steady and chillingly calm over the hiss of the dying radiator. “This has absolutely nothing to do with a piece of plastic.”
Chloe froze, her hand still pressed against the cold glass. The desperate, pleading logic in her brain short-circuited. “I hit your bin… you came out because I hit the bin.”
“You hit the bin because I moved it,” he replied, shifting his weight on the buckling hood. “At midnight, I dragged it three feet off the property line, right into the center of the driveway apron. Directly into the blind spot of your reverse camera. I knew you would be keeping your headlights off to stay quiet. I needed a reason to intercept your vehicle that wouldn’t look like an unprovoked attack on a public street.”
The blood drained from Chloe’s face. The frigid air blowing through her shattered side window suddenly felt like ice against her damp skin. He hadn’t woken up to the sound of the crash. He had been waiting for her.
“You… you trapped me?” she whispered, the realization stealing the air from her lungs. She dropped the insurance card, her hand falling limply to the dashboard. “Why? Why are you doing this? I don’t even know you!”
“Four hundred and twelve miles,” the neighbor said, his voice carrying the practiced, rhythmic cadence of a man reading from a ledger.
Chloe’s breath hitched.
“That is the exact distance from your front door to the Oak Creek Medical Clinic across the state line,” he continued, taking one hand off the rifle’s handguard to tap the side of his own head. “A facility entirely outside of our state’s legal jurisdiction. A facility you booked an appointment with three days ago.”
Chloe stared at him, absolute horror locking every muscle in her body. The clinic. The out-of-state appointment she had made in total secrecy. She hadn’t told a single soul. She hadn’t told her parents, she hadn’t told her friends, she hadn’t even spoken the words out loud in her own empty house.
“How could you possibly know that?” she gasped, her voice trembling so violently the words barely formed.
“You think deleting your browser history does anything?” he asked, a sharp edge of condescension creeping into his tone. “Your digital footprint is glowing like a beacon, Chloe. Data brokers sell location pings for pennies. Your IP address routed through health portals, searching for out-of-state providers. And then there was the dry run you took last Thursday. Your license plate triggered three separate Automated License Plate Readers on the interstate corridor heading straight for the border. You flagged every single parameter in the algorithm.”
He wasn’t a disgruntled homeowner. He wasn’t a crazy neighborhood watch captain. He was a hunter.
“You’ve been tracking my phone,” she whispered, a sickening wave of nausea twisting her stomach.
“I’ve been monitoring a flight risk,” he corrected smoothly, wrapping his hand back around the rifle. “The new civil statutes are very clear. Any private citizen who intercepts and prevents a resident from crossing state lines to procure restricted medical procedures is entitled to a ten-thousand-dollar vigilante bounty, payable by the offending party. That’s you.”
He tapped the steel muzzle of the rifle against her windshield, directly over her face.
“I’m not letting ten grand drive away in the middle of the night just because you think you can sneak out of the state,” he said, his eyes utterly devoid of empathy. “You aren’t going anywhere, Chloe. And when the police get here to write up this little traffic accident, I’ll be collecting my check.”