Admission by Travis Thrasher

Nothing ever disappears completely.

The author of Gun Lake and The Second Thief is back with a riveting tale of how buried mistakes can resurface at any time. Adventure Company entrepreneur Jake Rivers gets a call from the parents of a woman who has disappeared and who was last seen with Alec, Jake’s best friend from college. The girl’s parents believe she is hiding out with Alec, but Jake hasn’t heard from him in 10 years. Jake’s moved on from his college days, but the memories of what he’s tried to forget—a friend’s suicide, an enemy’s mysterious disappearance— keep surfacing. Someone wants to keep him from discovering what really happened.

Chapter One

April, 1994

Something deep and terrifying jerked him awake. Even before he opened his eyes, Jake knew he was confined, his head lodged against something unmovable. He couldn’t feel his arm tangled underneath him. His dry tongue rolled against cracked lips as he tried to clear his ragged throat. The first thing he saw was the tan faux-leather back of the car seat. Then, looking down on the floor, he saw a handgun wrapped in a muddy towel.

He sat up in the big backseat, the scent of reefer undeniable. The smell alone identified the car as Bruce’s tattered Chevy Monte Carlo, but there was no sign of his friend. The keys were still in the ignition.

Moving brought a wave of nausea and pain. His back was drenched in sweat. Rolling down the window, Jake breathed in and felt a throbbing in his left side. Like an air bubble, but far worse. It felt like the time he’d been beaten to a pulp, the time he lost consciousness just a month ago. But judging by the way he felt, and his total ignorance of where he was or what had happened to him in the last twelve or twenty-four or God knows how many hours, he realized this time could be worse.

He opened the car door and stumbled out, falling over and feeling the sting of blood rushing back into his legs. For a moment he lay there breathing, the morning sun making him perspire more.

The sky and the clouds above looked peaceful, and he wished it could be like this, staring at the heavens with no worries or fears. But something nagged at him. Something awful.

Finally sitting up, Jake looked around. He sat on a patch of gravel off a rocky unnamed road. A cornfield fenced him in on one side, a forest on the other.

He stood up and looked around. Then he stared down at his shirt, his jeans, his shoes.

All were covered in blood. The crusted red on his white T-shirt—the dark smudges on his jeans—the specks on his shoes, even his shoelaces—Jake absorbed all this with a slow-burning hysteria.

He’d come out here with his friends for the last few days of spring break. To camp out and drink and have fun. The last thing he remembered was sitting around the fire last night. Or maybe the night before.

Jake didn’t know.

A feeling of guilt and dread began to fill his mind. The scary thing was that he had no idea why.