The Runaway by Nick Petrie
Nick Petrie has written action novels featuring Peter Ash, a highly-decorated Marine Iraq War veteran who returned home with severe PTSD that did not allow him to be in any confined space. In the first novel, The Drifter, Peter has to stay outside most of the time, including sleeping under the stars. In Petrie’s latest book, the seventh in the series, Peter has learned how to cope with his trauma and is almost back to normal in terms of being able to live like the rest of us.
The book opens at Bogaloosa’s Gas and Grocery in rural Montana. Helene is an attractive eighteen-year old who works there in a dead-end night job. Her mother died recently in a car crash leaving Helene to fend for herself. The accident totaled the car and the phone that she shared with her mother. She had no way to call anyone or leave the area. She was stuck sleeping in a small trailer behind the gas station, with the store’s owner, who was also a deputy sheriff, leering at her. He was insistent on marrying her in a few days when she turned 19. She was miserable.
One night a handsome guy, Roy, came by to get gas for his big truck. He flirted with Helene and she decided that he might be her way out of nowhere. She talked enough to Roy to decide that he wasn’t a serial killer and she asked him for a ride. He agreed, although his partner, Frank, did not like the idea. She gathered her few belongings, including a notebook that her mother had used to write down pearls of wisdom, and left the station in search of a better life.
The book is divided between Then and Now. Helene’s leaving with Roy is Then. Now finds Peter Ash driving his classic, restored 1958 Chevy pickup truck somewhere in the Midwest. He sees an abandoned white car on the side of the road. The car has the keys in it and the door is open. Someone – Helene, it turns out – approaches him and says that her car broke down. She is very pregnant. She needs a ride to Minnesota to her only living relative, Aunt Willa.
Helene’s clothes didn’t quite fit and she looked forlorn. Peter agreed to give her a ride and noticed that a car was after them. His car is souped up with a big engine, but he is losing ground to his pursuer. She offers sex to Peter if he gets her out of her mess. Peter has a woman friend, June, who helped him get over his trauma so he refuses the offer but he will help Helene. After the sex bravura, she looks like a scared teenager now.
Helene’s husband - Roy - is chasing her because she ran away from his controlling home which is a prison for her. Peter ends up getting tricked into going down a road where two of Roy’s buddies had set up a roadblock. He stops the truck, asks Helene where she lives, promises to come and get her, and then jumps into the river 50 feet below just as he’s being shot at by Roy’s boys. Every time he surfaced, shots rang out. He eventually got away.
We go back to Then as Helene gets into Roy’s truck and they move out. Roy seems nice although his partner, Frank, is not happy that Helene is traveling with them. They stop at a motel and Helene has a separate room. It was her first time in a motel. Helene relaxes and goes through her pink backpack, with all of her possessions in it. She loves to read so she has magazines. She also has her mother’s spiral notebook. And she has several hundred dollars she took from the gas station. She wasn’t paid regularly so she figured it was hers.
The next day, they headed off on the truck. Roy never told her what he did but he had a 16-wheeler truck to do it. Roy gave Helene a warm coat, the first nice one she ever had.
Now brings us to Peter who takes off his clothes to dry them out. Helene said that Roy had killed two people that she knew of and his people had tried to kill Peter. Ash can see that they took his truck away although they still waited to get him. Despite his situation, he was having fun. He was committed to saving Helene and to getting his truck, wallet and phone back. Roy’s sniper saw Peter and repeatedly shot at him to no effect.
Peter started to walk, something he had done a lot in Iraq. He came across a nearby farm, but it was empty. While he was checking out the farm, he saw the truck that Roy’s people were driving. They stayed awhile and then drove off before he had a chance to do anything to disable them. Peter started to walk again.
Back to Then with Helene as she and the two men continued their trek westward. They would go out at night and do something while she stayed in the motel. Each day, the name on the truck would change through the use of a new sign. They took a break for a few days in Lake Tahoe. By now Helene was infatuated with Roy, who had been nice to her. The sex was great for both of them.
Now finds Peter walking away from the farm. He knows that there are people in the area looking for him and that they have sophisticated equipment including headgear that had night vision and thermal imaging built in. They could see him in the dark or find him by his body heat.
Finally, Peter moved away from them and went to a place that sold construction equipment. He was taking a break when a woman came up to him with a shotgun, inquiring as to what he was doing. Her attack dog, Cupcake, took a special interest in Peter and bit him. Cupcake is half coyote so he likes to bite. After a few minutes, the woman, Bobbie, decided that Peter was OK and she agreed to drive him to the address Helene gave him as Roy’s home. He expects to find his truck and her there. Bobbie and Peter take off on her motorcycle.
Back Then the crew goes to California where Helene finds out that Roy and Frank rob rich people’s vacation houses for a living. They cart the goodies off in their truck, head back to the headquarters, and fence the stolen material to willing buyers. Roy tells Helene that they give a lot of stuff away to less fortunate people so he’s kind of a Robin Hood. He proposes to her and she accepts. He gives her a stolen engagement ring worth $80,000. She is thrilled.
They get married in Utah and go back to robbing rich people. Roy is a former Minneapolis cop who knows how to skirt the law and he’s done a good job doing that. He has a lot of ill-gotten money. He is an expert at getting through security systems which makes his job easier. He brags that they pulled out several hundred cases of expensive wine from one house and cleared $300,000.
At one house in Utah, the owner returns during the break-in. Helene tells Roy and he takes care of it by strangling the woman as she walks into her house. Helene freaks out as Roy explains that he had to kill her. After being married for a few days, Helene wants out. She didn’t sign up for murder. They get rid of the woman’s body and car and head to Colorado.
In the Now, Peter and Bobbie get near Roy’s house and are stopped by one of his goons in a car. They confront him and Cupcake takes him down while Peter ties him up and takes his pistol. He interrogates his prisoner but doesn’t get much. He does take the crook’s phone so he can listen in on Roy’s conversations.
Then finds Helene back in the truck in Nebraska. She still wants to get away but Roy is controlling. They get to one of his houses which was designed to keep people locked in. Roy makes sure to tell his wife that a pack of wild coyotes hangs out in the woods near the house. Helene was getting nervous.
Roy and Frank leave her there as they go off to break into more houses. The doors are unlocked so Helene goes for a walk. She’s in the middle of nowhere with no car and a pack of coyotes as neighbors.
Roy returns after ten days. He has lots of money. Helene complains about not being able to get into the locked closets and the locked basement. He brings her to the basement and shows her a big freezer that has lots of frozen food and a few bodies of people he killed. She really wants out.
Roy sees that she doesn’t want to be with him so he stuffs her in the freezer, alive. She begs to get out but he tells her that it won’t work. She then shares the news that she’s pregnant, which turns out to be her ticket to not becoming another frozen body.
Back in the Now, Peter stole the car from Roy’s guard, who Peter tied up and put in the trunk. Peter, who's on his way to Roy’s house, listens in on the comments of Roy’s other guys as they try to figure out what happened to the guy in the trunk who’s not calling in.
Peter’s prisoner confirms that Roy is smart and crazy and probably has a sophisticated security system. While walking to the house, Peter notices that he went through a graveyard of animal and human bones. Coyotes are hanging around, which explains the bones. Roy is deadly.
At Then, Helene is still shivering from the freezer. She’s trying to stay alive and figures out that carrying Roy’s child is a good way to do that. Of course, she’s not sure that the kid is his since she had unprotected sex with a Montana farm boy right before she met Roy.
Roy hangs around for a while. They have a lot of sex which disgusts her but she needs to play the game. The weather grew colder with snow falling often. In March, she finally found something that she had been looking for to use as a weapon or a way to escape: a shovel.
In April, Roy takes off for an overnight trip. She thinks that he’ll take her with him but he doesn’t. She’s disappointed at first but quickly sees being alone overnight as an opportunity to break out of her prison and escape. Helene found a boarded-up window where one of the planks was loose and used the shovel to pry off the rest of the boards. She got out and found that one of the cars in the driveway had the keys in it. She took off. The car died as Roy returned. He was not happy and locked her in the barn.
Back in the Now – where we will stay for the rest of the book – Peter checked out the barn and the house and noticed that everything was locked up tight and the basement windows were planked over. It looks like nobody's home. He goes back to the barn and someone calls out - Helene. Suddenly all hell breaks out as people start shooting at Peter. He shoots the lock off the door and goes in with Helene. The firing stops and she tells Peter that there’s a Jeep in the garage. She has the keys. They take off.
Peter was in reconnaissance in Iraq. His job was to look around and figure out where the enemy was. He used his skills and figured out that at least one of Roy’s goons – Pony Boy – was unaccounted for. Peter calls Pony Boy on the walkie-talkie he stole from Hollywood – the guy he locked in the trunk – and tricks him into coming out of his hiding place. Peter subdues him.
Helene, Peter, Pony Boy and Hollywood head off to find some police help. Roy’s guys are incapacitated but they’re alive. The plan is to go to Bobbie’s house so Peter can return a coat she lent him, dump the two guys so the police can get them, and then drive off to Helene’s aunt in Minneapolis. Peter called June, his girlfriend, to assure him that he’s OK. June is pretty good at not having much information about what Peter is doing at any given moment, but now she is ticked off since he hadn’t called her in a long time. She calms down. Peter asks her to have Lewis, his sidekick in all of his adventures, come to help out. June is a reporter so Peter asks her to do some digging on Roy Wiley, Helene’s psychopathic husband. Finally, Peter puts Helene on the phone with June, who has a way to calm people down. Helene and June are now best buds.
A state trooper shows up at Bobbie’s house and recognizes Peter and Helene as fugitives. Peter pulls out his pistol and gets the drop on the statie. Bobbie knows the officer so Peter has a chance to explain what’s going on. Lisa Falk, the cop, pats down Peter and is about to arrest him when Helene pulls out a shotgun. The trooper has a good sense of humor about all of this – she is Bobbie’s girlfriend as it turns out – and things calm down. Peter is worried that Roy’s previous career as a cop means that he controls all of the local cops but Lisa trusts the local sheriff.
Sheriff Johns shows up after Lisa calls him. Peter vets the sheriff and decides that he’s not on Roy’s payroll. Peter opens the trunk of the car and the sheriff sees Roy’s two goons who are trussed up. The law enforcement official is OK with what Peter did with the two guys who were trying to kill him and carts them off for interrogation. The sheriff wants Helene, who is very pregnant, to go to the local hospital to get a check-up which she hasn’t had since she got pregnant. Peter goes off to the sheriff’s office for more questioning which triggers his PTSD, but he copes with it.
While transporting Peter, the sheriff comes under attack and is killed. Trooper Falk comes to help out and is also killed by Roy. Roy released Pony Boy and Hollywood from the sheriff’s car so the team is back together. Roy grabs Helene and goes off. Peter is trapped in the sheriff’s cruiser which Roy’s goons send off to sink in the river. Peter is in trouble.
Helene is Roy’s captive once again. She is despondent. Peter is probably dead and no one can help her. While she is thinking about her rotten lot in life, Roy shoots Hollywood and Pony Boy because they got caught by Peter. Roy and Helene head off to her aunt’s house in Minnesota.
Meanwhile, Peter is still stuck in a car heading into a river.
Peter’s female friend, June, is with Lewis as they head out to help Peter. She sees that his phone is in the Missouri River, not good. June and Lewis get to Bobbie’s house where Peter told them to go. He’s not there and may be in the police cruiser that’s in the river.
June and Lewis go to the river and find a very wet, cold, unconscious Peter. He managed to get out of the cruiser before it sank. They go back to Bobbie’s house where she puts him in a warm bathtub. It works. Peter revives, none the worse for wear. He feels terrible that Bobbie lost Lisa, the state trooper who was killed.
At first the local police give Peter a hard time but a senior officer who knows what’s really going on shows up. The authorities are after Roy.
June did some digging on Roy and found very little. She is a top-notch investigative reporter so if she can’t come up with much, he is really off the grid. Peter, June and Lewis decide to find out all they can about Helene who is with him. That may help them find out where Roy and Helene are headed.
Roy, his sidekick Frank (the only one who’s still alive) and Helene go to Minnesota to visit Helene’s Aunt Willa. Willa had sent many letters to the gas station where Helene worked but she got no response. She is happy to see Helene.
After having coffee, Roy breaks Willa’s neck. He needs a place to stay and Willa’s house is fine, even finer with Willa dead. This guy is a true psycho. He has killed a deputy sheriff in Utah, four police officers in Nebraska, two members of his gang, and Aunt Willa. He thinks that Peter is also dead in the river.
Helene is still miserable but she is getting really irritated at Roy. She will play along with being a dutiful wife but she is working on a plan to get away.
Back in Nebraska, Peter found a piece of the hem of a dress that Helene put in his pocket. There are two names embroidered in the cloth. June figures that it must be a message from Helene so she’ll try to figure out who the people are. One of the names, Jessica Moore, was a deputy sheriff in Utah who went missing. Peter figures that she’s the body in Roy’s freezer in Nebraska. The other name, Celeste Johansen, was a person killed in a car crash in Montana eighteen months earlier. June pulls up a picture of Celeste and she looks just like Helene. Celeste is Helene’s mother. The only relative mentioned in the obituary is Willa Sundstrom from Minneapolis. That is where Helene wanted to go. Peter, June and Lewis head off to Minnesota. It’s a long shot but Willa might be able to help them find Helene.
Although they now know Helene’s name and previous address, they find nothing about her on social media. She doesn't have a cell phone so there’s no way to track her calls. As a reporter, June has access to a lot of high-level data bases but she finds nothing. She does find information on Frank, Roy’s partner in crime. He’s a former Minneapolis cop, just like Roy.
June learns that Willa Sundstrom works in an insurance company. A call reveals that Willa didn’t come into work or call in, which is very unusual. One of Willa’s colleagues, Beth, is heading over to her house to find out what’s going on.
Roy breaks Beth's neck. Now Roy and crew have to leave. They put the bodies in the back of Beth’s Volvo and head off to new adventures.
June calls the sheriff in Helene’s home town of Coldwell, Montana, and inquires about Celeste Johansen’s auto crash. The locals called it an accident but the state forensic lab didn't agree. There was evidence that another car hit Celeste’s vehicle and knocked her into the river. It turns out that Deputy Sheriff Anthony Bogaloosa, owner of the gas station where Celeste and Helene worked, was in charge of the investigation and basically whitewashed it.
Helene finds an old farm for the outlaws to stop for the night. She taunts Roy about all of the other girls he picked up before her, the ones he said he dropped off at a bus station. She tells Roy that he likes killing too much to have let any of them live. Roy sort of denies it, but the truth is clear. Frank confronts Roy on Helene’s accusations. Roy does what he does. He shoots Frank. There goes the partnership.
Helene and Roy leave the three bodies in the barn and take off. Shortly after, June, Lewis and Peter show up at Willa’s house and find evidence of two murders but no bodies. Peter thinks out loud that perhaps Roy will head back to Montana to kill Deputy Sheriff Bogaloosa who did bad things to Helene when she was working at the gas station. That may be Roy’s sick way of bonding with her so she’ll be loyal to him. She is all he has left since he killed everyone else he knew.
June calls Campbell, a Minnesota State Police honcho that she knows, to try to get the FBI interested. Campbell says the locals have dug in on the various murders and the FBI won’t bother to muscle them out. The only ones who are interested in stopping Roy are Peter and his crew. They’re off on the hunt to get Roy.
On the trip back to Coldwater, Montana, Helene has several chances to get away. She does not take them. At this point, she believes that she’s in real trouble because she’s stayed with Roy while he killed a lot of people so she’s afraid to go to the police.
She and Roy get back to the gas and grocery store. Helene steals a pistol and a bag of money from Roy and hides them in a bush near the store. No one’s at the store but Roy plans to get Deputy Sheriff Anthony Bogaloosa at his house. They go to his farm and find a guy ¬– not Bogaloosa – sleeping in the barn. You’ll be shocked to learn that Roy shoots him in the head. He does like to kill people.
Roy and Helene go to the house and find Coldwell Sheriff Janacek sitting on the couch. You know what happens. After the sheriff is killed, Anthony Bogaloosa tries to sneak in but Roy grabs him. Helene kicks Anthony – she does hate him.
Of course, Peter, June and Lewis now arrive at the Bogaloosa residence. Bobbie joins them.
June finds out from Campbell that Roy is a suspect in the murders of 33 women who worked at gas stations and disappeared in nine states in the Midwest over the past few years. Peter and crew are approaching Bogaloosa’s house. They see Roy’s truck parked there. June calls Sheriff Janacek for help. He does not pick up his phone because he’s dead.
Showtime for Peter and crew.
Helene is accusing Anthony Bogaloosa of all sorts of bad things, including trying to rape her. He defends himself by saying that she was so cute that he was in love with her. Wrong approach. She realizes that Roy and Anthony aren’t that different in that they can rationalize any awful behavior.
Roy tells Helene that her mother didn’t die in an accident. She was pushed off the road and killed by a police cruiser driven by Anthony so that he could take.
Helene is in a bind. “She didn’t know which was worse. Knowing Bogaloosa had killed her mother, or knowing that Roy was using that glorious, shining rage against her. To get her to kill Bogaloosa.” Helene asks Roy for a pistol. He is happy to give it to her.
Peter’s people are at the house. He gives June a rifle with a scope and tells her to shoot Roy if she gets a clear shot. Besides being one hell of a reporter, June is one hell of a crack shot.
Peter stands outside a window and hears Roy tell Helene that Anthony Bogaloosa killed her mother. Lewis and Bobbie are also at the house listening in. Helene looks like she’s about to shoot Anthony so Peter decides to jump in through the window to settle things down. Surprise – not a big one – Helene shoots Roy. He is hit but still comes after her. They grapple, each with a gun, and bullets are flying. Peter can’t get a clear shot at Roy, who dies after emptying his pistol. Bogaloosa is killed by one of Roy’s bullets.
After the police - Montana state troopers since everyone in the local police department is dead - get there, Peter worries about Helene’s fate. She is an accessory to a lot of murders, albeit under duress. June is pretty sure that Helene will basically get off because she killed a guy who probably killed 30 people and definitely killed a half-dozen law enforcement officers.
June is right. Helene skates away from any criminal charges and becomes a minor celebrity. Helene gave birth to a daughter that she named Celeste, after her mother. She lived with Bobbie for six months and then went to live in Roy’s house, near the barn where she was held captive. After she killed Roy, she inherited his house because she was his wife. She has over $100,000 that she took from Roy so she refurbished the place to get rid of Roy’s presence. She also found a lot of money hidden in the house so she was in good financial shape.
Peter, June and Lewis go back to Milwaukee where they live. June tells Helene’s story to the world which helps her journalism career.
I guess that’s a happy ending.
Bob’s Take
Peter is coping with his PTSD, which is a major element in all of the novels. His fear of indoor places is much more under control in this book. You don’t get over PTSD. You learn to live with it which he does better with each novel.
This book has a very high body count. This is very unusual for the series, which usually doesn’t include much violence. Roy is a psychopath on steroids which makes him need to kill a lot of people.
Different law enforcement jurisdictions don’t work together well. This is an undercurrent in the book. The FBI, state police (based on which state the crimes were committed), and the local police chiefs and sheriffs – all are big on preserving their turf. That gets in the way of good law enforcement. Since formal law enforcement agencies can’t get their act together, Peter and his crew go after psycho Roy.
Peter’s Marine reconnaissance experience helps him figure things out. In addition to suffering from PTSD as a result of his service, Peter brought home a lot of tracking and survival skills. “In his eight years as a Recon Marine, between training and combat, he figured he’s covered at least twenty thousand miles on foot, most of those carrying sixty to a hundred pounds of weapons, armor, ammunition, and provisions.” Peter does a lot of walking in this book as well as a lot of observing.
Helene flips between wanting to kill Roy and wanting to keep staying with him. It could be Stockholm Syndrome where the kidnapped person copes with capture or an abusive situation by going along with what her captor wants.
The Peter Ash books are a good series. Ash is an engaging protagonist who has a solid support group of June and Lewis. Lewis is a former military guy who is good at getting out of tough situations. June, who really helped Peter out in an earlier novel, is a superb investigative reporter who gets Peter and Lewis a lot of information they could not access themselves.
Peter Ash is often compared to Jack Reacher in books; but while they are each ex-military, there are differences. Ash, with June and Lewis by his side, is not a loner as is Reacher. Ash is not violent unless he needs to be, while Reacher’s books always feature a lot of tough-guy stuff. Peter has an address – he lives with June – while Reacher is a wanderer.
