Andy felt numb as she drove through Alabama in her mother’s secret Reliant K station wagon filled with secret money toward a destination that Laura had seemed to pull from thin air. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe her mother knew exactly what she was doing, because you didn’t have a covert storage facility filled with everything you needed to completely restart your life unless you had a hell of a lot of things to hide.
The fake IDs. The revolver with the serial number shaved off. The photos of Andy in snow that she could not ever recall seeing, holding the hand of a person she could not remember.
The Polaroids.
Andy had shoved them into the beach tote in the back of the Reliant. She could’ve spent the rest of her day staring at them, trying to pick apart the terrible things that had happened to the young woman in the pictures. Beaten. Punched. Bitten—that was what the gash on her leg looked like, as if an animal had taken a bite of her flesh.
That young woman had been her mother.
Who had done all of those awful things to Laura? Was it the they who had sent Hoodie? Was it the they who were probably tracking Andy?
Andy wasn’t doing a great job of eluding them. She had made it as far as Birmingham before she remembered that she hadn’t unhooked the battery cables in the dead man’s truck. Laura had told her that she had to make sure the GPS wasn’t working. Did GPS work without the engine running? Coordinating with a satellite seemed like something the on-board computer would do, which meant the computer had to be awake, which meant the car had to be on.
Right?
The LoJack vehicle recovery system had its own battery. Andy knew this from working stolen car reports through dispatch. She also knew Ford had a Sync system, but you had to register for the real-time monitoring service, and Andy didn’t think that a guy who went to the trouble of blocking out all the lights on his vehicle would give up his anonymity just so he could use voice commands to locate the nearest Mexican restaurant.
Right?
What would happen if the truck was found? Andy played out the investigation in her mind, the same as she had while running away from her mother’s house.
First up, the police would have to ID Hoodie, aka Samuel Godfrey Beckett. Considering the guy’s vocation, he was more than likely in the system, so a fingerprint scan was all it would take to get his name. Once they had his name, they would find the truck registration, then they would put out an APB on the wire, which would create an alert that would show up on the screen of every squad car in the tri-state area.
Of course, this assumed that what was supposed to happen was what actually happened. There were tons of APBs all the time. Even the high-priority ones were missed by a lot of the patrol officers, who had maybe a billion things to do on their shifts, including trying not to get shot, and stopping to read an alert was often not a high priority.
That did not necessarily mean Andy was in the clear. If the cops didn’t find the truck, the librarians, or more likely the grumpy old guy with the political rants, would probably report the abandoned vehicle. Then the cops would roll up. The officer would run the plates and VIN, see there was an APB, notify Savannah, then the forensic techs would find Andy’s shoes and work shirt and her fingerprints and DNA all over the interior.
Andy felt her stomach pitch.
Her fingerprints on the frying pan could be explained away—Andy cooked eggs in her mother’s kitchen all of the time—but stealing the dead man’s truck and crossing state lines put her squarely in special circumstances territory, meaning if Palazzolo charged Andy with the murder of Hoodie, the prosecutor could seek the death penalty.
The death penalty.
She opened her mouth to breathe as a wave of dizziness took hold. Her hands were shaking again. Big, fat tears rolled down her face. The trees blurred outside the car windows. Andy should turn herself in. She shouldn’t be running away. She had dropped her mother in a pile of shit. It didn’t matter that Laura had told Andy to leave. She should’ve stayed. At least that way Andy wouldn’t be so alone right now.
The truth brought a sob to her mouth.
“Get it together,” she coaxed herself. “Stop this.”
Andy gripped the steering wheel. She blinked away her tears. Laura had told her to go to Idaho. She needed to go to Idaho. Once Andy was there, once she crossed the state line, she could break down and cry every single day until the phone rang and Laura told her it was safe to come home. Following Laura’s orders was the only way she would get through this.
Laura had also told her to unhook the Ford’s battery.
“Fuck,” Andy muttered, then, channeling Gordon, Andy told herself, “What’s done is done.” The finality of the proclamation loosened the tight bands around Andy’s chest. There was also the benefit of it being true. Whether or not the Ford was found or what the cops did with it was completely out of Andy’s control.
This was the question she needed to worry about: during her computer searches at the library, at what point exactly had she turned on the Google Incognito Mode? Because once the cops found the truck, they would talk to the librarians, and the librarians would tell them that Andy had used the computer. While she felt certain that the librarians would put up a fight—as a group, they were mostly First Amendment badasses—a warrant to search the computer would take maybe an hour and then a tech would need five seconds to find Andy’s search history.
She was certain the Incognito Mode was on before she looked up Paula Kunde of Austin, Texas, but was it on before or after she searched for directions to Idaho?
Andy could not recall.
Second worrisome thing: what if it wasn’t the cops who asked the librarians these questions? What if Laura’s omniscient they found someone to look for Hoodie’s truck, and they talked to the librarians, and they searched the computer?
Andy wiped her nose with her arm. She backed down on the speed because the Reliant started to shake like a bag of cat treats if she went over fifty-five.
Had she put other people’s lives at risk by abandoning the truck? Had she put her own life at risk by looking up the directions to Idaho? Andy tried again to mentally walk through the morning. Entering the library. Pouring the coffee. Sitting down at the computer. She had looked up the Belle Isle Review first, right? And then clicked to private browsing?
She was giving Google Incognito Mode a lot of credit. It seemed very unlikely that something so standard could fool a forensic computer whiz. Andy probably should’ve cleared out the cache and wiped the history and erased all the cookies the way she had learned to do after that horrible time Gordon had accidentally seen the loop of erotic Outlander scenes Andy had accessed from his laptop.
Andy wiped her nose again. Her cheeks felt hot. She saw a road sign.
FLORENCE 5 MI
Andy guessed she was heading in the right direction, which was somewhere in the upper left corner of Alabama. She hadn’t stopped to buy a new map to plot the route to Idaho. Once she’d left the storage unit, her only goal was to get as far away from Carrollton as possible. She had her highway and interstate scribbles from the library, but she was mostly relying on the back of the Georgia map, which had ads for other maps. There was a small rendering of The Contiguous United States of America available for $5.99 plus postage and handling. Andy had grown up looking at similar maps, which was why she was in her twenties before she’d understood how Canada and New York State could share Niagara Falls.
This was her plan: after Alabama, she’d cut through a corner of Tennessee, a corner of Arkansas, Missouri, a tiny piece of Kansas, left at Nebraska, then Wyoming, then she would literally fucking kill herself if she wasn’t in Idaho by then.
Andy leaned forward, resting her chin on the shaky steering wheel. The vertebrae in her lower back had turned into prickly pears. The trees started to blur again. She wasn’t crying anymore, just exhausted. Her eyelids kept fluttering. She felt like they were weighted down with paste.
She made herself sit up straight. She punched the thick white buttons on the radio. She twisted the dial back and forth. All she found were sermons and farm reports and country music, but not the good kind; the kind that made you want to stab a pencil into your ear.
Andy opened her mouth and screamed as loud as she could.
It felt good, but she couldn’t scream for the rest of her life.
At some point, she would have to get some sleep. The five-and-a-half-hour drive from Belle Isle had been draining enough. So far, the drive from Carrollton had added another four and a half hours because of traffic, which Andy seemed pre-ordained to find no matter which route she took. It was almost three p.m. Except for zonking out for a few hours in her apartment and the catnap in the Walmart parking lot, she hadn’t really slept since she got up for her dispatch shift two days ago. During that time, Andy had survived a shooting, watched her mother get injured, agonized outside of the surgical suite, freaked out over a police interrogation and killed a man, so as these things went, it was no wonder that she felt like she wanted to vomit and yell and cry at the same time.
Not to mention that her bladder was a hot-water bottle sitting inside of her body. She had stopped only once since leaving the storage unit, pulling onto the shoulder of the highway, hiding between the open front and back car doors, waiting for traffic to clear, then squatting down to relieve herself in the grass because she was terrified to leave the Reliant unattended.
$240,000
Andy couldn’t leave that kind of cash in the car while she ran into Burger King, and taking the suitcase inside would be like carrying a neon sign for somebody to rob her. What the hell was Laura doing with that kind of cash? How long had it taken for her to save it?
Was she a bank robber?
The question was only a little crazy. Being a bank robber would explain the money, and it jibed with the D.B. Cooper joke on the Canada ID and maybe even the gun in the glove box.
Andy’s heart pinged at the thought of the gun.
Here was the problem: bank robbers seldom got away with their crimes. It was a very high risk for a very low reward, because the FBI was in charge of all investigations that had to do with federally insured funds. Andy thought the law’s origins had something to do with Bonnie and Clyde or John Dillinger or the government just basically making sure that people knew their money was safe.
Anyway, she couldn’t see her mother pulling on a ski mask and robbing a bank.
Then again, before the shooting at the diner, she couldn’t see her mom knifing a kid in the neck.
Then again—again—Andy could not see her reliable, sensible mother doing a lot of the crazy shit that Laura had done in the last thirty-six hours. The hidden make-up bag, the key behind the photograph, the storage unit, the Thom McAn box.
Which brought Andy to the photo of toddler Andy in the snow.
Here was the Lifetime Movie question: Had Andy been kidnapped as a child? Had Laura seen a baby left alone in a shopping cart or unattended on a playground and decided to take her home?
Andy glanced in the rearview mirror. The shape of her eyes, the same shape as Laura’s, told her that Laura was her mother.
The Polaroids showed Laura so badly beaten that her bottom lip was split open. Maybe Jerry Randall was an awful man. Maybe back in 1989, he was beating Laura, and she snapped and took Andy on the run with her, and Jerry had been looking for them ever since.
Which was a Julia Roberts movie. Or a Jennifer Lopez movie. Or Kathy Bates. Or Ashley Judd, Keri Russell, Ellen Page . . .
Andy snorted.
There were a lot of movies about women getting pissed off about men beating the shit out of them.
But the Polaroids showed that her mother had in fact had the shit beaten out of her, so maybe that wasn’t so far off base.
Andy found herself shaking her head.
Laura hadn’t said he can trace you. She’d said they.
Going by the movies, they generally meant evil corporations, corrupt presidents or power-hungry tech billionaires with unlimited funds. Andy tried to play out each scenario with her mother at the center of some vast conspiracy. And then she decided she should probably stop using Netflix as a crime sourcebook.
The Florence exit was up. Andy couldn’t squat on the highway again. She hadn’t had lunch because she couldn’t bear to eat another hamburger in another car. The part of her brain that was still capable of thinking told her that she could not make the thirty-hour drive straight through to Idaho without sleep. Eventually, she would have to stop at a hotel.
Which meant that, eventually, she would have to figure out what to do with the money.
Her hand had pushed down the blinker before she could stop it. She glided off the Florence exit. Adrenaline had kept Andy going for so long that there was hardly anything left to move her. There were signs off the exit for six different hotels. She took a right at the light because it was easier. She coasted to the first motel because it was the first motel. Worrying about safety and cleanliness were luxuries from her former life.
Still, her heart started pounding as she got out of the Reliant. The motel was two stories, a squat, concrete design from the seventies with an ornate balcony railing around the top floor. Andy had backed crookedly into the parking space so that the rear of the station wagon never left her sight. She clutched the make-up bag in her hand as she walked into the lobby. She checked the flip phone. Laura had not called. Andy had depleted the battery by half from constantly checking the screen.
There was an older woman at the front desk. High hair. Tight perm. She smiled at Andy. Andy glanced back at the car. There were huge windows all around the lobby. The Reliant was where she had left it, unmolested. She didn’t know if she looked weird or normal swiveling her head back and forth, but at this point, Andy didn’t care about anything but falling into a bed.
“Hey there,” the woman said. “We got some rooms on the top floor if you want.”
Andy felt the vestiges of her waking brain start to slip away. She’d heard what the woman had said, but there was no sense in it.
“Unless you want something on the bottom floor?” The woman sounded dubious.
Andy was incapable of making a decision. “Uh—” Her throat was so dry that she could barely speak. “Okay.”
The woman took a key from a hook on the wall. She told Andy, “Forty bucks for two hours. Sixty for the night.”
Andy reached into the make-up bag. She peeled off a few twenties.
“Overnight, then.” The woman handed back one of the bills. She slid the guestbook across the counter. “Name, license plate, make and model.” She was looking over Andy’s shoulder at the car. “Boy, haven’t seen one of those in a long time. They make those new in Canada? Looks like you just drove it off the lot.”
Andy wrote down the car’s information. She had to look at the license plate three times before she got the correct combination of numbers and letters.
“You okay, sweetheart?”
Andy smelled French fries. Her stomach grumbled. There was a diner connected to the motel. Red vinyl booths, lots of chrome. Her stomach grumbled again.
What was more important, eating or sleeping?
“Hon?”
Andy turned back around. She was clearly expected to say something.
The woman leaned across the counter. “You okay, sugar?”
Andy struggled to swallow. She couldn’t be weird right now. She didn’t need to make herself memorable. “Thank you,” was the first thing that came out. “Just tired. I came from . . .” She tried to think of a place that was far from Belle Isle. She settled on, “I’ve been driving all day. To visit my parents. In I-Iowa.”
She laughed. “Honey, I think you overshot Iowa by about six hundred miles.”
Shit.
Andy tried again. “It’s my grandmother’s car.” She searched her brain for a compelling lie. “I mean, I was at the beach. The Alabama beach. Gulf. In a town called Mystic Falls.” Christ, she was crazy-sounding. Mystic Falls was from the Vampire Diaries. She said, “My grandmother’s a snowbird. You know, people who—”
“I know what a snowbird is.” She glanced down at the name Andy had written in the guestbook. “Daniela Cooper. That’s pretty.”
Andy stared, unblinking. Why had she written down that name?
“Sweetheart, maybe you should get some rest.” She pushed the key across the counter. “Top floor, corner. I think you’ll feel safer there.”
“Thank you,” Andy managed. She was in tears again by the time she climbed behind the wheel of the Reliant. The diner was so close. She should get something to eat. Her stomach was doing that thing where it hurt so bad she couldn’t tell if it was from being hungry or being sick.
Andy got back out of the car. She held the make-up bag in both hands as she walked the twenty feet to the diner. The sun beat down on the top of her head. The heat brought out a thick layer of sweat. She stopped at the door. She looked back at her car. Should she get the suitcase? How would that look? She could take it to her room, but then how could she leave the suitcase in her room when—
The diner was empty when she walked in, a lone waitress reading a newspaper at the bar. Andy went to the ladies room first because her bladder gave her no other choice. She was in such a hurry that she didn’t wash her hands. The car was still there when she came out of the bathroom. No one in a blue baseball cap and blue jeans was peering into the windows. No one was running away with a 1989 Samsonite suitcase in their hand.
She found a booth by the window overlooking the parking lot. She kept the make-up bag between her legs. The menu was giant, filled with everything from tacos to fried chicken. Her eyes saw the words but by the time they made it into her consciousness, she was stymied. She would never be able to make a choice. She could order a bunch of things, but that would only draw even more attention. She should probably leave, drive up another few exits and find a different motel where she didn’t act like an idiot. Or she could just put her head in her hands and stay here, in the air-conditioning, for a few minutes while she tried to get her thoughts in order.
“Honey?”
Andy jerked up from the table, disoriented.
“You’re beat, ain’t you?” the woman from the motel said. “Poor thing. I told them to let you sleep.”
Andy felt her stomach drop. She had fallen asleep again. In public—again. She looked down. The make-up bag was still between her legs. There was drool on the table. She used a napkin to wipe it up. She used her hand to wipe her mouth. Everything was vibrating. Her brain felt like it was being squished onto the point of a juice grinder.
“Hon?” the woman said. “You should probably go to your room now. It’s getting a little busy in here.”
The restaurant had been empty when Andy walked in, but now it was filling with people.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right.” The woman patted Andy’s shoulder. “I asked Darla to put a plate aside for you. You want it here or do you wanna take it to your room?”
Andy stared at her.
“Take it to your room,” the woman said. “That way you can go right back to sleep when you’re finished.”
Andy nodded, grateful that someone was telling her what to do.
Then she remembered the money.
Her neck strained as she turned to look for the car. The blue Reliant was still parked in front of the motel office. Had someone opened the trunk? Was the suitcase still there?
“Your car is fine.” The woman handed her a Styrofoam box. “Take your food. Your room’s the last one on the top floor. I don’t like to put young women on the ground floor. Old gals like me, we’d welcome a strange man knocking at our door, but you . . .” She gave a husky chuckle. “Just keep to yourself and you’ll be fine.”
Andy took the box, which weighed the equivalent of a cement block. She put the make-up bag on top. Her legs were wobbly when she stood. Her stomach rumbled. She ignored the people staring at her as she walked back into the parking lot. She fumbled with the keys to open the hatch. She couldn’t decide what to take inside, so she loaded herself up like a pack mule, slinging the tote bag over her shoulder, tucking the sleeping bag into her armpit, grabbing the handle of the suitcase and balancing the make-up bag/take-out Jenga with her free hand.
Andy made it as far as the stairway landing before she had to stop to readjust her load. Her shoulders felt boneless. Either she was still exhausted or she’d lost all of her muscle mass from sitting in the car for almost ten hours.
She scanned the numbers as she walked along the narrow balcony on the top floor. There were burned-out hibachi grills and empty beer cans and greasy pizza boxes in front of some of the doors. The smell of cigarettes was strong. It brought back the memory of Laura bumming a smoke off the orderly in front of the hospital.
Andy longed for the time when her biggest concern was that her mother held a cigarette between her finger and thumb like a junkie.
Behind her, a door opened. A disembodied hand dropped an empty pizza box on the concrete balcony. The door slammed shut.
Andy tried to calm her heart, which had detonated inside her throat when the door opened. She took a deep breath and let it go. She readjusted the sleeping bag under her arm. She mentally summoned her father and tried to make a list of things she would need to stop doing. One, stop panicking every time she heard a noise. Two, stop falling asleep in public places. That seemed a hell of a lot easier than it was proving to be. Three, figure out what to do with all of the money. Four, locate another library so she could read the Belle Isle Review. Five, stop being weird, because right now, if the cops happened to follow her trail, the first person any of the potential witnesses would think of was Andy.
Then they’d get Daniela Cooper’s name, and the car details, and that would be it.
Andy looked out at the road. There was a bar across the street. Neon signs filled the windows. The parking lot was packed with trucks. She could hear the faint clink of honky-tonk music. In that moment, she wanted a drink so badly that her body strained toward the bar like a plant reaching up to the sun.
She put down the suitcase and used the key to open the door to her room. It was the kind of cheap place Laura used to book for vacations when Andy was little. The single window looked out at the parking lot. The air conditioner rattled below. There were two queen-sized beds with sticky-looking bedspreads and a plastic dining table with two chairs. Andy gladly put the heavy take-out box on the table. The chest of drawers had a place for a suitcase. She lugged the Samsonite on top. She dropped the tote bag and make-up bag and the sleeping bag on the bed. She lowered the blind on the window and dragged closed the flimsy blackout curtain. Or at least tried to. The curtain rod stopped an inch before the window did. Light bled in around the edge.
A flat-screen television was mounted on the wall. The cords hung down like tendrils. Out of habit, Andy found the remote and turned on the TV.
CNN. The weatherman was standing in front of a map. Andy had never been so relieved to see a hurricane warning.
She muted the sound. She sat down at the table. She opened the Styrofoam box.
Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, a cornbread muffin. She should’ve been disgusted, but her stomach sent up a noise like the Hallelujah Chorus.
There was no silverware, but Andy was no stranger to this dilemma. She used the chicken leg to eat the mashed potatoes, then she ate the chicken, then she used her fingers to go after the green beans, then she used the cornbread like a sponge to clean up any edible pieces of fried chicken skin or green bean juice that she had missed. It wasn’t until she closed the empty box that she considered how filthy her hands were. The last time they’d been washed was in the shower of her apartment. The cleanest thing she’d touched since then was probably the desk in Laura’s secret storage unit.
She looked up at the television. As if on cue, the story had switched from the hurricane to her mother. The diner video was paused on Laura holding up her hands to show Jonah Helsinger the number of bullets.
So weird, the way she was doing it—four fingers on the left hand, one on her right. Why not hold up just one hand to show five fingers for five bullets?
Suddenly, the image switched to a photograph. Andy felt her heart do a weird flip at the sight of Laura. She was wearing her standard going-out-to-parties outfit of a simple black dress with a colorful silk scarf. Andy knelt in front of the TV so she could study the details. Laura’s chest was flat on one side. Her hair was short. There was a lighted star behind her, the topper on a Christmas tree. The hand on her waist must have belonged to Gordon, though he’d been cropped out of the image. The photo was probably from Gordon’s most recent office Christmas party, which Laura had never missed, even when they’d wanted to kill each other. She smiled at the camera, her expression slightly guarded in what Andy always thought of as her mother’s Gordon’s Wife Mode.
She unmuted the sound.
“. . . on the off-chance that it might happen. Ashleigh?”
Andy had missed the story. The camera cut to Ashleigh Banfield, who said, “Thanks, Chandra. We have breaking news about a shooting in Green County, Oregon.”
Andy pressed the mute button again. She sat on the edge of the bed. She watched Ashleigh Banfield’s face go into a split scene beside a run-down looking house that was surrounded by a SWAT team. The banner said: Man kills own mother, two kids, holding injured wife hostage, demanding pizza and beer.
Another shooting.
Andy flipped the channels. She wanted to see the photo of Laura again, or even to glimpse Gordon’s hand. MSNBC. Fox. The local news stations. All of them were showing the live stand-off with the man who wanted pizza after murdering most of his family.
Was that a good or bad thing—not the man killing people, but the news stations covering it live? Did that mean they’d moved on from covering Laura? Would there be another killing machine to profile?
Andy’s head was shaking even before she asked herself the obvious question: where was the story about the body of Samuel Godfrey Beckett being found in Laura Oliver’s beachside bungalow? That was big news. The victim had been felled by a frying pan, ostensibly by a woman who had hours before killed a police officer’s son.
And yet, the scroll at the bottom of the screen contained the usual headlines: another senator resigning, probably because of sexual harassment, another gunman shot by cops, interest rates going up, healthcare costs on the rise, stock market drops.
Nothing about Hoodie.
Andy felt her eyebrows furrow. None of this made sense. Had Laura somehow managed to keep the police out of the house? How would she even do that? The 911 text Andy had sent provided legal cause for them to break down the door. So why wasn’t Killing Machine Strikes Again being shouted about all over the news? Even with the SWAT stand-off happening in Oregon, the last photo of Laura should have been her mugshot or, worse, video of her entering the jail in handcuffs, not a photo from a Christmas celebration.
Andy’s brain was overloaded with all the whats and whys.
She let herself fall back onto the bed. She closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was no light coming from around the closed curtain. She looked at the clock: nine thirty in the evening.
She should go back to sleep, but her eyes refused to stay closed. She stared at the brown spots on the popcorn-textured ceiling. What was her mother doing right now? Was she at home? Was she talking to Gordon on a jail phone with a thick piece of glass between them? Andy turned her head to look at the television. Still the SWAT story, even this many hours later. Her nostrils flared. The bedspread smelled like a bear had slept on it. Andy sniffed under her arms.
Ugh.
She was the bear.
She checked the lock on the door. She closed the hotel latch. She wedged one of the chairs underneath the doorknob. Someone could still break the large window to get in, but if someone broke the window to get in, she was fucked anyway. Andy peeled off the jeans and polo shirt and underwear. Her bra was disgusting. The underwire had rubbed the skin raw underneath her armpit. She threw it into the sink and turned on the cold water.
The hotel soap was the size of a pebble and smelled like the last vestiges of a dying bouquet of flowers. She took it into the shower and between the soap and the shampoo, the tiny bathroom took on the scent of a whore house. At least what Andy thought a whore house might smell like.
She turned off the shower. She dried herself with the hotel towel, which had the consistency of notebook paper. The soap came apart in her hands as she tried to clean the stink out of her bra. She spread the crappy hotel lotion on her body as she walked into the bedroom. Then she wiped her hands on the towel to get the lotion off, then she washed her hands at the sink to remove the fuzz from the towel.
She unrolled the sleeping bag on the bed. She unzipped the side. The material was thick, filled with some kind of synthetic down, and with a nylon, waterproof outer layer. Flannel liner. Not the kind of thing you’d ever need in Belle Isle, so maybe Laura hadn’t pulled Idaho out of thin air after all.
Andy opened the suitcase and picked off the top row of twenties. Ten across, three wide, times $2,000 was . . . a lot of money to hide inside of a sleeping bag.
She laid the stacks out in a flat row along the bottom of the bag. She smoothed down the nylon and pulled up the zipper. She started to roll the sleeping bag from the bottom, but the money bunched into a lump. Andy took a deep breath. She unrolled the bag again. She reached into the bottom and pulled the stacks to the center. She rolled the bag carefully from the top, secured it with the Velcro strap, then stood back to judge her work.
It looked like a sleeping bag.
Andy hefted the weight. Heavier than a sleeping bag, but not so that you’d become alarmed and think there was a small fortune inside.
She turned back to the suitcase. A third of the money was left. Bad guys in movies always ended up in train stations, which had lockers, which made it easy for them to hide money. Andy doubted there were any train stations in Florence, Alabama.
The best solution was to split it up. She should probably hide some of it in the car. There would be space inside the spare tire well under the trunk. That way, if she got separated from the sleeping bag, she could jump in the car and still have some cash. For the same reason, she could put some of the cash in her purse. Except that her purse was back in her apartment.
Andy found the hotel notepad. She wrote purse at the top, then soap, lotion, bra.
She dumped out the white tote bag. Flashlight. Batteries. Three paperbacks, unread, the titles popular approximately eleven billion years ago. The plastic first aid kit had some Band-Aids. Andy covered the scrape on her shin, which she suddenly remembered was caused by the pedal on her bike. She used the alcohol wipes to clean her blisters. It would take more than Band-Aids to get her feet into something more than Crocs. There was a cut on the side of her foot that looked pretty bad. She slapped on another Band-Aid and prayed for the best.
The Ace bandage gave her an idea. She could wrap some of the cash around her waist and secure it with the bandage. Driving would be uncomfortable, but it wasn’t a bad idea to keep some of the money as close to her as possible.
Or was it? Andy remembered an NPR story about cops in rural areas pulling people over and confiscating their cash. Civil forfeiture. The Canada license plate would make her the proverbial sitting duck.
Andy unzipped the make-up bag. She opened the phone. No calls.
She pulled the Daniela Cooper driver’s license from the black vinyl bag. Andy had taken the Canadian ID, health insurance card and car registration with her when she left the storage unit. She studied her mother’s photograph. They had always looked like mother and daughter. Even strangers had commented on it. The eyes were a dead giveaway, but their faces were both heart-shaped and their hair was the same color brown. Andy had forgotten how dark her mother used to keep her hair. Post-cancer treatments, it had grown out in a shockingly beautiful gray. Laura wore it fashionably short now, but the Laura in the driver’s license photo wore her hair down to her shoulders. Andy’s hair was the same length, but she always kept it in a ponytail because she was too lazy to style it.
She looked at the mirror across from the bed. Her face was ragged. Dark circles were under her eyes. Mirror Andy looked older than her thirty-one years, that was for damn sure, but could she pass for the woman in the photo? Andy held up the driver’s license. She let her eyes go back and forth. She scrunched her wet hair. She pulled down the bangs. Did that help or hinder Andy’s ability to look twenty-four years older than she actually was?
There was one way to get an honest appraisal.
Andy rinsed her bra in the sink. The hotel soap had made it smell like Miss Havisham’s asshole, but that was actually an improvement. Patting it dry with the towel transferred white fuzz onto the material. She used the hairdryer until the bra was only slightly damp. Then she dried her hair messier than usual, pulling it forward, styling it close to the way Laura wore hers in the Canada license photo. She put on another pair of jeans, another white polo shirt. Andy cringed as her feet slid into the Crocs again. She needed socks and real shoes. And she needed an actual written list to keep track of everything.
She grabbed a $2,000 brick of twenties, split it in two and shoved one half into each of her back pockets. The jeans were old, from a time when manufacturers actually sewed usable pockets into women’s wear. Still, the bills stuck out like large cell phones. She transferred some layers into her front pocket. She looked at herself in the mirror. It worked.
Andy scooped up more handfuls of strapped twenties and hid some between the mattress and boxspring. Others got folded into her wet towel, which she artfully arranged on the bathroom floor. The rest lined the bottom of the tote bag. She put the paperbacks on top along with the first aid kit and make-up bag.
All of her machinations had left one row of bills on the bottom of the suitcase. Ten across, three wide, times $2,000 was . . . a lot of money to have in a suitcase. There was nothing to do but zip it closed and leave it out in the open. If someone broke into the room, they hopefully would be excited enough by the cash in the Samsonite to not look for the rest of the money.
Andy slung the tote bag over her shoulder as she walked out of the room. The night air slapped her face like the sudden blast of heat from an oven door. She scanned the parking lot as she walked down the stairs. There were a few Serv-Pro vans, a red truck with a Trump sticker on one side and a Confederate flag on the other, and a Mustang from the 1990s that had the front bumper held on with duct tape.
The diner was closed. The motel office lights were still on. Andy guessed it was about ten in the evening. The clerk behind the desk had his nose in his phone.
She got behind the wheel of the Reliant and moved the car to the far end of the parking lot. There were security lights on the building, but several bulbs were out. Andy walked to the back of the station wagon and opened the hatch. She checked to make sure no one was watching, then pried open the bottom of the cargo area.
Jesus.
More money, this time hundreds, stacked all around the spare tire.
Andy quickly pressed the floor cover back into place. She closed the hatch. She kept her hand pressed to the back of the car. Her heart was jackrabbiting against her ribs.
Should she feel good that her mother had split up the money the same way Andy had intended to, or should she be freaked the hell out that Laura had so carefully thought out an escape plan that there was over half a million bucks stashed in the trunk of her untraceable car?
This was the part where Andy wondered where she would’ve fit into Laura’s disappearance, because everything Andy had found so far pointed to only one person being on the lam.
So Andy had to wonder: which Laura was her real mother—the one who’d told Andy to leave her alone or the one who’d said that everything she’d done in her life was for Andy?
“Okay,” Andy mumbled, acknowledging the question had finally been asked, but fully prepared not to do any more thinking about it.
The new Andy who did math and planned driving routes and considered consequences and dealt with money problems was wearing the hell out of the old Andy, who desperately needed a drink.
She carried the tote like a purse as she walked toward the bar across the road from the motel. Half a dozen pick-up trucks were in the parking lot. All of them had signs on their sides—Joe’s Plumbing, Bubba’s Locksmith Services, Knepper’s Knippers. Andy took a closer look at the last one, which apparently belonged to a gardener. The logo on the side, a mustachioed grasshopper holding a pair of shears, promised, We’ll knip your lawn into shape!
Every set of eyes inside the place looked up when Andy walked through the front door. She tried to pretend like she belonged, but it was hard, considering she was the only woman. A television was blaring in the corner. Some kind of sports show. Most of the guys were sitting one or two to a booth. Two men were standing around the pool table. They had both stopped, pool sticks in the air, to watch her progress through the room.
There was only one customer sitting at the bar, but his attention was squarely focused on the television. Andy took a seat as far away from him as possible, her ass hanging off the stool, the tote bag wedged between her arm and the wall.
The bartender ambled over, throwing a white towel over his shoulder. “Whatcha want, babydoll?”
Not to be called babydoll.
“Vodka rocks,” she requested, because for the first time since college, her student loan debt didn’t dictate her drinking habits.
“Gottan ID?”
She found Laura’s license in the make-up bag and slid it over.
He gave it a quick glance. “Vodka rocks, eh?”
Andy stared at him.
He mixed the drink in front of her, using a lot more ice than Andy would’ve liked.
She picked one of the twenties off the brick in her back pocket. She waited for him to leave, then tried not to set on the vodka like a wildebeest. “Personality shots,” her roommates used to call the first drinks of the night. Liquid courage. Whatever you called it, the point was to turn off the voice in your head that reminded you of everything wrong in your life.
Andy tossed back the drink. The fiery sensation of the alcohol sliding down her throat made the muscles of her shoulders relax for the first time in what felt like decades.
The bartender was back with her change. She left it on the bar, nodded toward the glass. He poured another, then leaned against the bar to watch TV. Some half-bald guy in a suit was talking about the possibility of a football coach getting fired.
“Bullshit,” the man at the end of the bar mumbled. He rubbed his jaw, which was rough with stubble. For some reason, Andy’s gaze found his hand. The fingers were long and lean, like the rest of him. “I can’t believe what that moron just said.”
The bartender asked, “Want me to turn it?”
“Well, hell yeah. Why would I want to keep listening to that crap?” The guy took off his burgundy-colored baseball cap and threw it onto the bar. He ran his fingers through his thick hair. He turned to Andy and her jaw dropped open in shock.
Alabama.
From the hospital.
She was certain of it.
“I know you.” His finger was pointing at her. “Right? Don’t I know you?”
Fear snapped her jaw shut.
What was he doing here? Had he followed her?
“You were at the—” He stood up. He was taller than she remembered, leaner. “Are you following me?” He swiped his hat off the bar as he walked down to her end of the bar.
She looked at the door. He was in her way. He was getting closer. He was standing right in front of her.
“You’re the same gal, right?” He waited for an answer that Andy could not give. “From the hospital?”
Andy’s back was to the wall. She had nowhere else to go.
His expression changed from annoyed to concerned. “You okay?”
Andy could not answer.
“Hey, buddy,” Alabama called to the bartender. “What’d you give her?”
The bartender looked insulted. “What the hell are you—”
“Sorry.” Alabama held up his hand, but his eyes stayed on Andy. “What are you doing here?”
She couldn’t swallow, let alone speak.
“Seriously, lady. Did you follow me?”
The bartender was listening now. “She’s from Canada,” he said, like that might help clear things up.
“Canada?” Alabama had his arms crossed. He looked uneasy. “This is some kind of weird freaking coincidence.” He told the bartender, “I saw this same gal yesterday down in Savannah. I told you my granny was poorly. Had to drive down to see her. And now here’s this lady right in front of me that I saw outside of the hospital the day I left. Weird, right?”
The bartender nodded. “Weird.”
Alabama asked Andy, “Are you going to talk to me or what?”
“Yeah,” the bartender echoed. “What’s up, little bit? You stalking this guy?” He told Alabama, “You could be stalked by worse, bro.”
“Not funny, man.” Alabama told Andy, “Explain yourself, porcupine. Or should I call the cops?”
“I—” Andy couldn’t let him call the police. “I don’t know.” She realized that wasn’t enough. “I was visiting,” she said. “My mother. And—” Fuck, fuck, fuck. What could she say? How could she turn this around?
Her mental Gordon offered the solution: she could turn it around.
Andy tried to make her voice strong. “What are you doing here?”
“Me?”
She tried to sound indignant. “I was just passing through. Why are you following me?”
“What?” he seemed taken aback by the question.
“You,” she said, because his presence made about as much sense as hers did. “I’m on my way back from visiting my parents. That’s why I’m here.” She squared her shoulders. “What’s your reason? Why are you here?”
“Why am I here?” He reached behind his back.
Andy braced herself for a police badge or, worse, a gun.
But he took out his wallet. There was no badge, just his Alabama driver’s license. He held it up to her face. “I live here.”
Andy scanned the name.
Michael Benjamin Knepper.
He introduced himself. “Mike Knepper. The K is silent.”
“Mi’e?” The joke came out before she could stop it.
He gave a startled laugh. His face broke out into a grin. “Holy shit, I can’t believe I’ve gone thirty-eight years with nobody ever making that joke.”
The bartender was laughing, too. They clearly knew each other, which made sense because they were roughly the same age. In a town this small, they’d probably gone to school together.
Andy felt some of the tension leave her chest. So, this was a coincidence.
Was it?
She hadn’t looked closely at the photo on his license. She hadn’t looked to see what town he was from.
“You’re a funny lady.” Mike was already tucking his wallet back into his pocket. “What’re you drinking?”
The bartender said, “Vodka.”
Mike held out two fingers as he sat down on the stool beside her. “How’s your mom doing?”
“My—” Andy suddenly felt tipsy from the alcohol. This didn’t feel completely right. She probably shouldn’t drink anything else.
“Hello?” Mike said. “You still in there?”
Andy said, “My mother is fine. Just needs rest.”
“I bet.” He was scratching his jaw again. She tried not to look at his fingers. He looked like a man, was the thing that kept drawing her attention. Andy had only ever dated guys who looked like guys. Her last sort-of almost boyfriend had shaved once a week and needed a trigger warning anytime Andy talked about calls that came in through dispatch.
“Here ya go.” The bartender placed a Sam Adams in front of Mike and a new glass of vodka in front of Andy. This one had less ice and more alcohol. He gave Mike a salute before walking to the far end of the bar.
“To coincidences.” Mike raised his beer.
Andy tapped her glass against his bottle. She kept her gaze away from his hands. She took a drink before she remembered not to.
Mike said, “You cleaned up nice.”
Andy felt a blush work its way up her neck.
“Seriously,” Mike said. “What are you doing in Muscle Shoals?”
She sipped some vodka to give herself time to think. “I thought this was Florence?”
“Same difference.” His smile was crooked. There were flecks of umber in his brown eyes. Was he flirting with her? He couldn’t be flirting with her. He was too good-looking and Andy had always looked too much like somebody’s kid sister.
He said, “You gonna tell me why you’re here or do I have to guess?”
Andy could have cried with relief. “Guess.”
He squinted at her like she was a crystal ball. “People either come here for the book warehouse or the music, but you got a rock-n-roll thing going with your hair, so I’m gonna say music.”
She liked the hair compliment, though she was completely clueless about his guess. “Music is right.”
“You gotta book appointments to tour the studios.” He kept looking at her mouth in a very obvious way. Or maybe it wasn’t obvious. Maybe she was imagining the sparkle in his beautiful eyes, because in her long history of being Andy, no man had ever openly flirted with her like this.
Mike said, “Nobody really plays on weeknights, but there’s a bar over near the river—”
“Tuscumbia,” the bartender volunteered.
“Right, anyway, a lot of musicians, they’ll go out to the clubs and work on new material. You can check online to see who’s gonna be where.” He took his phone out of his back pocket. She watched him dial in the code, which was all 3s. He said, “My mom’s got this story. Back when she was a kid, she saw George Michael working a live set trying out that song, ‘Careless Whisper.’ You know it?”
Andy shook her head. He was just being nice. He wasn’t flirting. She was the only woman here, and he was the best-looking guy, so it followed that he’d be the one talking with her.
But should she be talking back? He had been at the hospital. Now he was here. That couldn’t be right. Andy should go. But she didn’t want to go.
Every time the pendulum of doubt swung her away, he managed to charm it back in his direction.
“Here we go.” Mike put his phone on the bar so she could see the screen. He’d pulled up a website that listed a bunch of names she had never heard of alongside clubs she would never go to.
To be polite, Andy pretended to read the list. Then she wondered if he was waiting for her to suggest they go to a club together, then she wondered how embarrassing it would be if she asked Mike to go and he said no, then she was finishing her drink in one gulp and motioning for another.
Mike asked, “So, where’re you heading to from here?”
Andy almost told him, but she still had a bit of sanity underneath the all-consuming flattery of his attention. “What happened to your head?” She hadn’t noticed before, but he had those weird clear strips holding together a not insignificant cut on his temple.
“Weedeater kicked a rock in my face. Does it look bad?”
Nothing could make him look bad. “How did you know he was my father?”
The crooked grin was back. “The weedeater?”
“The guy with us. Driving the car. At the hospital yester—The day before, or whenever.” Andy had lost track. “You told my dad you were sorry his family was going through this. How did you know he was my father?”
Mike rubbed his jaw again. “I’m kind of nosey.” He spoke with a mixture of embarrassment and pride. “I blame my three older sisters. They were always keeping things from me, so I just kind of got nosey as a way of self-preservation.”
“I haven’t drunk so much that I didn’t notice that you didn’t answer the question.” Andy never articulated her thoughts this way, which should have been a warning, but she was sick of feeling terrified all of the time. “How did you know he was my dad?”
“Your cell phone,” he admitted. “I saw you pull up the text messages and it said DAD at the top, and you texted ‘hurry.’” He pointed to his eyes. “They just go where they want to go.” As if to prove the point, he looked down at her mouth again.
Andy used her last bit of common sense to turn back toward the bar. She rolled her glass between her hands. She had to stop being stupid with this man. Mike was flirting with her when nobody ever flirted with her. He had been at the hospital and now he was hundreds of miles away in a town whose name Andy had never even heard of before she saw it on the exit sign. Setting aside her criminal enterprises, it was just damn creepy that he was here. Not just here, but smiling at her, looking at her mouth, making her feel sexy, buying her drinks.
But Mike lived here. The bartender knew him. And his explanations made sense, especially about Gordon. She remembered Mike hovering at her elbow in front of the hospital while she wrote the text. She remembered the glare that sent him to the bench on the opposite side of the doors.
She asked, “Why did you stay?”
“Stay where?”
“Outside the hospital.” She watched his face, because she wanted to see if he was lying. “You backed off, but you didn’t go back inside. You sat down on the bench outside.”
“Ah.” He drank a swig of beer. “Well, I told you that my granny was sick. She’s not a nice person. Which is hard, because, well, as my granny herself used to say, when somebody dies, you forget they’re an asshole. But at that point when you saw me outside, she wasn’t dead yet. She was still alive and disapproving of me and my sisters—especially my sisters—so I just needed a break.” He took another drink. He gave her a sideways glance. “Okay, that’s not completely truthful.”
Andy felt like an idiot, because she had bought the entire story until he’d told her not to.
Mike said, “I saw the news and . . .” He lowered his voice. “I don’t know, it’s kind of weird, but I saw you in the waiting room and I recognized you from the video, and I just wanted to talk to you.”
Andy had no words.
“I’m not a creep.” He laughed. “I understand that’s what a creep would say, but this thing happened when I was a kid, and . . .” He was leaning closer to her, his voice lower. “This guy broke into our house, and my dad shot him.”
Andy felt her hand go to her throat.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad. I mean, shit, I was a kid, so I didn’t realize how bad it really was. Plus it turned out to be the guy he shot was dating one of my sisters, but she had broken up with him, and he had all this shit on him like handcuffs and a gag and a knife, and, anyway—” he waved all of that off. “After it happened, I had this sick feeling in my gut all of the time. Like, on the one hand, this guy was going to kidnap my sister and probably hurt her really bad. On the other hand, my dad had killed somebody.” He shrugged. “I saw you and I thought, well, hey, there’s somebody who knows what it feels like. For, like, the first time in my life.”
Andy tilted the vodka to her lips but she did not drink. The story was too good. Somewhere in the back of her head, she could hear warning bells clanging. This was too much of a coincidence. He had been at the hospital. He was here. He had a story that was similar to her own.
But he had the driver’s license. And the truck outside. And this was obviously his local bar, and coincidences happened, otherwise there wouldn’t be a word called coincidences.
Andy stared at the clear liquid in her glass. She needed to get out of here. It was too risky.
“—doesn’t make sense,” Mike was saying. “If you look at the part where—”
“What?”
“Here, let me show you.” He stood up. He turned Andy’s barstool so that she was facing him. “So, I’m the bad guy with the knife in his neck, right?”
Andy nodded, only now realizing that he was talking about the video from the Rise-n-Dine.
“Put the back of your left hand here at the left side of my neck like your mom.” He had already picked up her left hand and placed it in position. His skin was hot against the back of her hand. “So, she’s got her left hand trapped at his neck, and she crosses her other arm underneath and puts her right hand here.” He picked up Andy’s right hand and placed it just below his right shoulder. “Does that make sense, crossing all the way underneath to put your hand there?”
Andy considered the position of her hands. It was awkward. One arm was twisted under the other. The heel of her palm barely reached into the meaty part of his shoulder.
One hand pushing, one hand pulling.
The calm expression on Laura’s face.
“Okay,” Mike said. “Keep your left hand where it is, pinned to my neck. Push me with your right hand.”
She pushed, but not hard, because her right arm was mostly already extended. His right shoulder barely twinged back. The rest of his body did not move. Her left hand, the one at his neck, had stayed firmly at his neck.
“Now here.” He moved her right hand to the center of his chest. “Push.”
It was easier to push hard this time. Mike took a step back. If she’d had a knife sticking through the back of her left hand, it would’ve come straight out of his neck.
Mike said, “Right?”
Andy mentally ran through the motions, saw Laura with the knife, pushing and pulling—but maybe not.
Mike said, “No offense, but we both know your mom knew what she was doing. You don’t catch a knife like that, then your next move is to tweak the guy on the shoulder. If you’re gonna kill him, you’re gonna shove him hard, center mass.”
Andy nodded. She was starting to see it now. Laura had not been pushing Jonah away. Her right hand had reached for his shoulder. She was trying to grab onto it.
Mike asked, “Have you looked at her feet in the video?”
“Her feet?”
“You’d step forward, right? If you were planning on yanking out that knife, you’d counterbalance the movement with one foot in front, the other in back. Basic Einstein. But that’s not what she does.”
“What does she do?”
“She steps her foot out to the side, like this.” He slid his feet shoulder-width apart, like a boxer, or like someone who does not want to lose their balance because they are trying to keep another person from moving.
Mike said, “It’s Helsinger who starts to step back. Watch the video again. You can see him lift his foot, clear as day.”
Andy hadn’t noticed any of this. She had assumed that her mother was some kind of cold-blooded killing machine when in fact, her right hand had gone to Jonah Helsinger’s shoulder to keep him from moving, not aid in his violent murder.
She asked, “You’re sure he was stepping back on his own? Not stepping back to catch himself?”
“That’s what it looks like to me.”
Andy replayed the familiar sequence in her head. Had Jonah really stepped back? He’d written a suicide note. He’d clearly had a death wish. But was an eighteen-year-old kid really capable of stepping back from the knife, knowing what a horrific death he would be giving himself?
Mike asked, “She said something, right?”
Andy almost answered.
Mike shrugged it off. “The geeks will figure it out. But what I’m saying is, everybody’s been watching the faces in the video when they should’ve been watching the feet.”
Andy’s head was reeling as she tried to process it in her mind’s eye. Was he right? Or was he some kind of Belle Isle truther trying to spread conspiracy theories, and Andy believed him because she so desperately wanted another explanation?
Mike said, “Hey, listen, I gotta go see a man about a dog.”
Andy nodded. She wanted time to think about this. She needed to see the video again.
Mike joked, “Don’t follow me this time.”
Andy didn’t laugh. She watched him head to the back of the bar and disappear down a hallway. The men’s room door squeaked open and banged closed.
Andy rubbed her face with her hands. She was more than tipsy after all of those stupid gulps from the glass. She needed to think about what Mike had said about the diner video. And consider her own guilt, because she had assumed that her mother was a killer. No one, not Andy, not Gordon, had thought for a moment that Laura was trying to do the right thing.
So why hadn’t Laura told that to the cops? Why had she acted so guilty? And where the hell had Hoodie come from? What about the storage unit?
Every time Andy thought something made sense, the world went sideways again.
Andy started to reach for her drink.
Mike had left his phone on the bar.
She had seen his passcode. Six 3s.
The bartender was watching television. The pool players were arguing about a shot. The long hallway was still empty. She would hear the door when Mike came out of the bathroom. She had heard it when he went in.
Andy picked up the phone. She dialed in the 3s. The home screen had a photo of a cat behind it, and weirdly, she thought a man who had his cat on his phone could not be that bad. Andy tapped Safari. She pulled up the Belle Isle Review. The front page had the new photo of Laura at the party, the one she’d seen on CNN. Gordon was not cropped out this time. Andy scanned the story, which was basically the same one that had been there the day before.
She scrolled down for other news. She was more relieved than startled when she saw the headline:
BODY FOUND UNDER YAMACRAW BRIDGE
Andy skimmed the details. Head injury. No ID. Jeans and a black hoodie. Dolphin tattoo on his hip. Found by fishermen. No foul play suspected. Police asking people to come forward with information.
She heard the bathroom door open. Andy closed the browser page. She tapped back to the home screen. She clicked the phone off and had it back on the bar by the time Mike appeared in the hallway.
Andy sipped the vodka.
Unidentified body?
Head injury?
No foul play?
Mike groaned as he sat back on the stool. “Had to lift about sixteen thousand pounds of boulders today.”
Andy murmured in sympathy, but the new story was her focus now. The Yamacraw Bridge spanned the Tugaloo River. How had Hoodie’s body gotten there? Laura couldn’t have taken him herself. Even without the police watching, she only had one good arm and one good leg.
What the hell was going on?
“Hello?” Mike was rapping his knuckles on the bar again, this time for Andy’s attention. “Past my bedtime. I gotta big job to start tomorrow. Want me to walk you to your car?”
Andy didn’t think it was a good idea to stay in the bar alone. She looked around for the bartender.
“He’ll put it on my tab.” Mike tucked his phone into his pocket. He indicated Andy should go ahead of him. He kept his distance until she got to the door, then he reached ahead to hold it open.
Outside, the heat was only slightly less awful than before. Andy would take another shower before she went to bed. Maybe she would crank down the a/c and climb into the sleeping bag. Or maybe she would climb into the Reliant because wasn’t it still weird that she had met Mike here, of all places? And that he was telling her things that she wanted to hear? And that he had walked her out of the bar, which meant he would know where she was going next?
Knepper Knippers. There was lawn equipment in the back of the truck—a weedeater, a leaf blower, some rakes and a shovel. Streaks of dirt and grass were on the side panels. Mike had been in the bar when she got there, not the other way around. His truck was clearly used for lawncare purposes. He had a driver’s license with his name on it. He had a tab at the bar, for the love of God. Either he was a clairvoyant psychopath or Andy was losing her mind.
He patted the truck. “This is me.”
She said, “I like the grasshopper.”
“You’re beautiful.”
Andy was taken off guard.
He laughed. “That was weird, right? I just met you. I mean, really met you. And we flirted with each other in a bar and it was nice but it’s still kind of strange that we’re both here at the same time, right?”
“You keep saying things that I’m thinking in my head, but you say them like they’re normal instead of something I should be worried about.” Andy wanted to clap her hands over her mouth. She had not meant to say any of that out loud. “I should go.”
“All right.”
She didn’t go. Why had he called her beautiful?
“You’ve got—” he reached to pick something out of her hair. A piece of fuzz from the cheap motel towel.
Andy wrapped her hand around his, because apparently, Hand-fetish Andy was also a hell of a lot bolder than normal Andy.
“You really are so damn beautiful.” He said it like he was in awe. Like he meant it.
Andy leaned her head into his hand. His palm was rough against her cheek. The neon lights from the bar caught the umber in his eyes. She wanted to melt into him. It felt so damn good to be looked at, to be touched, by somebody. By this body. By this weird, attractive man.
And then he kissed her.
Mike was tentative at first but then her fingers were in his hair and the kissing got deeper and suddenly all of Andy’s nerves went collectively insane. Her feet left the ground. He backed her into the truck, pressed hard against her. His mouth was on her neck, her breasts. Every single inch of Andy’s body wanted him. She had never been so overcome with lust. She reached down to stroke him with her hand, and—
“Keychain,” he said.
He was laughing, so Andy laughed, too. She’d felt up the keychain in his front pocket.
Her feet went back to the ground. They were both breathing hard.
She leaned in to kiss him again, but Mike turned away.
He said, “I’m sorry.”
Oh, God.
“I’m just—” His voice was rough. “I—”
Andy wanted to disappear into the ether. “I should—”
He pressed his fingers to her mouth to stop her. “You really are so beautiful. All I could think about in there was kissing you.” His thumb traced across her lips. He looked like he was going to kiss her again, but he took a step back and tucked his hand into his pocket instead. “I’m really attracted to you. I mean, obviously, I’m attracted to you, but—”
“Please don’t.”
“I need to say this,” he told her, because his feelings were the most important thing right now. “I’m not that guy. You know, the one who picks up women in bars and takes them to the parking lot and—”
“I wasn’t going to,” Andy said, but that was a lie because she’d been about to. “I didn’t—”
“Could you—”
Andy waited.
Mike didn’t finish his sentence. He just shrugged and said, “I should go.”
She kept waiting for more because she was stupid.
“Anyway.” He pulled his keys out of his pocket and looped the keychain around his fingers. And then he laughed.
Please don’t make a joke about me giving your keychain a handjob.
He said, “I could—I mean, I should walk you to—”
Andy left. Her face was on fire as she crossed the road. He was watching her leave again the same way he had watched her leave outside of the hospital. “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” Andy whispered, then, “What the fuck? What the fuck?”
She felt disgusted with herself as she climbed the stairs to the motel. Mike’s truck was pulling onto the road. He was looking up at her as she walked across the balcony. Andy wished for a bazooka to blow him away. Or a gun to kill herself with. She had never hooked up with a stranger. Not even in college. What the hell was wrong with her? Why was she making such stupid decisions? She was a criminal on the run. No one could be trusted. So what if Mike had an Alabama driver’s license? Laura had one from Ontario, for fucksakes. She had a fake car. Mike could have a fake truck. The sign with the grasshopper was magnetized, not permanently stuck on. The bartender could’ve been friendly with Mike because bartenders are always friendly with their customers.
Andy jammed the key in the lock and threw open the door to her room. She was so upset that she barely noted the suitcase and sleeping bag were where she’d left them.
She sat on the bed, head in her hands, and tried not to burst into tears.
Had Mike played her? For what purpose? Was he some freak who was interested in Andy because he saw her on the diner video? He’d sure as hell spent a lot of time figuring out what had happened between Laura and Jonah Helsinger. At least what he thought had happened. He probably had a conspiracy blog. He probably listened to those crazy shows on the radio.
But he had called her beautiful. And he was right about being excited. Unless somehow between opening the front door of the bar and walking to his truck he’d shoved a can of Coke down his pants.
“Christ!”
That stupid keychain.
Andy stood up. She had to pace. She had to go through every single fucking stupid thing she had done. Kissed him too deeply? Too much saliva? Not enough tongue? Maybe her breasts were too small. Or, God, no—
She smelled her bra, which carried the scent of the disgusting hotel soap.
Did guys care about that kind of thing?
Andy covered her eyes with her hands. She sank back to the bed.
The memory of her fingers stroking that stupid keychain in his pocket made her cheeks radiate with heat. He had probably been insulted. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to take advantage of someone who was so painfully inept. What kind of idiot thought a rabbit’s foot keychain was a man’s penis?
But what kind of grown-ass man kept a giant rabbit’s foot in his pocket?
That guy.
What the hell did that even mean—that guy?
Andy dropped her hands from her face.
She felt her mouth gape open.
The truck.
Not Mike’s grasshopper truck or the dead man’s truck, but the beat-up old Chevy she had seen parked in the Hazeltons’ driveway early this morning.
This morning—
After Andy had killed a man. After she had run down the beach looking for the dead man’s Ford because Laura had told her to.
There had been two trucks parked in the Hazeltons’ driveway, not one.
The windows had been rolled down. Andy had looked inside the cab. She had considered stealing the old Chevy instead of taking the Ford. It would’ve been easy, because the key was in the ignition. She had seen it clearly in the pre-dawn light.
It was attached to a rabbit’s foot keychain, just like the one that Mike Knepper had taken out of his pocket and looped around his fingers.