I’m in the driver’s seat, the gun at the base of my skull. My head feels as if a grenade just burst between my ears.
“The only reason you’re not closed in the trunk is I’m afraid you’d figure out how to trip the latch. But I could change my mind,” she says.
I hope she realizes that, on a road like this, if I die driving, she dies.
I start the car and shift into gear.
She pounds on the back of my seat. “That’s too jerky!”
“Sorry, there’s a gun pointed at my head.”
“Whose idea was it to bring a freaking .45 on our big romantic getaway?” Christ, she knows the caliber of it. She probably knows how to disassemble it blindfolded. “If you hadn’t been such a jerk all the way up here, I would have thought this was your big romantic move. Ha!”
I say, “My big romantic move was going to be to save your life.”
A minivan comes barreling around a curve, straddling the center line. I swerve onto the narrow shoulder between the road and the sheer drop and hear Nicolette bump against the inside of the rear door. She yells, “Don’t do that!”
“Did you want a head-on?”
“Do you want to live?”
I’m trying to control my breathing, the thin line between hyperventilation and uncontrollable shaking. “I was going to fake your death—that was the plan. I was going to tell my slime brother it was done and take him a trophy, and you were going to do a better job of hiding. Or maybe”—the embarrassing component of all this, but what the hell—“if you wanted, I was going to go with you.”
Nicolette’s ability to remain withering under stress is stellar. “Tell me why I believe this again?”
“Because if I wanted to kill you, why aren’t you killed?”
She doesn’t even pause to think. “Because you’re incompetent? Have you ever even shot a moving target? And you didn’t want to get caught.”
“Right. I spend all this time hanging out with you, shed cells all over your apartment, and make a bunch of phone calls from California. I wrote the textbook on how not to get caught.”
More silence.
I say, “Why are you running?”
“I thought you already knew why. Because I stuck a knife in someone.”
“That someone was buried a quarter of a mile from your house. Her name was Connie.”
This is when she starts to cry again. She’s crying so hard, I want to pull over and hold her. But more than that, I want her finger off the trigger of Don’s gun.