CHAPTER 20
You’re back across the border. Bag secured?
Off the coach, Simone turns in a slow circle. Somebody knows she is here. Somebody is watching her. The British man files off the coach, too.
And then the text becomes green, and a Reply button is visible.
Yes, she replies, without thinking. Is my daughter alive?
Go to the original meeting place. Destroy this phone then put it in the trash.
No answer on Lucy. Simone closes her eyes, rushes across the car park, opens her car and is safely inside before she cries. She cries out of relief that she made it, out of nervous energy, out of fear for Lucy.
She’s done everything they have asked for. She must be only moments away from her daughter. She will hand her half of the bargain over, and she will, in return, get something back that is priceless.
As Simone drives back, she is distracted by something on this side of the road that she didn’t see on the way: a collection of buildings, a kind of strip mall, clear white blocks against the sky, anachronistic-looking palm trees around them.
And, within them, as casual as a post office: a gun shop, lit up, open twenty-four hours.
Simone’s going too fast to do anything about it, so she passes it, but then finds her foot leaving the accelerator without her permission, a physical enactment of her thought processes, the car slowing in response.
The empty highway, the straight horizon ahead, and she slows and slows and slows and then stops, thinking of that hanging rifle in the garage in Mexico.
Thinking of how she wished she had her own to face whatever is coming up for her.
Isn’t it sensible to arm herself? She is about to meet criminals, kidnappers. She, a woman who is small of stature, who is vulnerable, who wants her daughter back. She could level the playing field. Have a gun, let them know she has a gun. Show up with the gun.
Having a gun might save her daughter’s life.
She’s stopped now on the highway, skewed across it.
She looks up at the sky, trying to find some sort of answer from the universe.
But all she sees are stars. There, in a stationary car, Simone stares.
More stars come out the longer she looks, until the sky is sugared with them, a great arc clustering together like a fractured vase repaired.
She’s never seen so many, nor any so vivid, but she has no idea what they might mean.
Buy a weapon, as a law-abiding woman who would never hurt anyone unless she had no choice?
Or drive on, and regret going in exposed, soft-bodied, alone and female?
She sighs, but Simone can’t stargaze or navel-gaze here.
Maybe it’s because she’s lost too much in her life.
Or maybe it’s just being a mother. She doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, either.
She’s got to move. She is in danger, or, rather, her daughter is, but it amounts to the same thing: do anything, at any cost, to get her back.
The shop calls itself Guns Here. She will just look inside; she probably can’t even buy anything as a tourist. That is the line she tells herself, like a politician who begins to believe their own spin.
It’s a pale-coloured prefab building; looks like it might sell office supplies or furniture, double-height and bland.
A neon sign in the window simply reads GUNS – OPEN in red, lit-up letters.
Automatic doors, bollards outside, plate-glass windows.
The only thing that is unusual is, of course, the guns.
Simone feels a repulsed kind of fascination as she looks at them.
They’re on display in those windows, rows and rows and rows of them sitting like cakes in a bakery, only black and metal and deadly.
She places a hand on the warm glass, and as she does so she sees that it’s been recently broken in the bottom-left corner, a spider’s web of pieces not yet repaired.
She hesitates, but only for a second and enters. And, as she does so, she sees the other sign in the window, this one handwritten: Private Seller – No Background Checks Necessary for anybody, and that is the precise moment that Simone knows she is going to leave with a gun.