CHAPTER 31 Simone
Simone
Lucy looks at Simone. ‘I shot a cop.’
‘You didn’t mean to. You shot … you shot at him.’
‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t see it was a police officer. Why are they saying I did?’ She pauses, then, different emotions flickering across her features.
‘He was a cop.’
‘What if he was there because he was in on it?’ Lucy asks, her gaze direct. ‘What if he was there because he was checking on how it went?’ Another pause. ‘The sheriff. He was immediately suspicious … don’t you think?’
‘You think the kidnapper’s in with the police – all of them?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Lucy says, raking her hair back so her forehead strains. ‘I just got – I thought I was fucking dead and now – now this. How can we trust anyone?’ she says, turning to her mother.
‘I don’t know.’
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Lucy says, looking around. ‘They know our names.’
‘We can’t run.’
‘We already have.’ A pointed stare, tinged with irritation.
‘We can’t go to the airport, Luce,’ Simone says softly as the wind whips around them. The car gently shakes and rocks with it. It’s so surprising to feel such strong gusts in the heat. ‘Our passports will be on a no-fly list. Our faces and names are on the news.’
Lucy stares down at her feet, then up at the sky, makes a kind of futile gesture. Her eyes are shining, which she tries to hide. ‘We can’t go to the police. We look so guilty. And we don’t know if he works with the police. The kidnapper could be police.’
It’s too late. That is what Simone finds herself thinking; it’s too late to hand themselves in, now that they have run, now that the story has broken.
But she hesitates, there in the petrol station with her daughter, standing just in the shadow of the bright lights.
There is no taking this back. Might they be able to persuade a police officer, a judge, a jury …
? They would have Lucy’s account, though it contains no evidence. Never even heard his voice.
‘We cannot hand ourselves in,’ Lucy says, once again speaking Simone’s mind. ‘It’s Texas,’ she says. ‘It’s drugs. It’s murder.’ Her hands are shaking.
Their eyes meet. ‘I …’ Simone says, thinking of everything Lucy’s endured.
‘It’s – it’s Texas,’ Lucy says again, with a meaning Simone is missing. Until Lucy spells it out for her. ‘They have the death penalty.’
Simone closes her eyes.
Lucy makes a panicked grab for the phone and starts looking at the articles, showing one after another after another to Simone. ‘Look,’ she is saying. ‘Look at how their minds are made up about us. I didn’t even …’ she chokes out. ‘I shot at the car, not him.’
‘I know,’ Simone says. The us is correct. Simone has committed the more serious crimes, but only just. Lucy would get time for shooting at a police officer and then leaving the scene. Probably almost as much as Simone. Or Simone might get no time at all, instead put to her death.
They are both wanted.
‘We don’t need to hand ourselves in or go on the run,’ Lucy says, and Simone’s head snaps up, looking at her daughter.
In the glare of the forecourt, her eyes look strange, wild and impassioned.
‘We could just – lie low, get our case together,’ she says, and Simone latches on to this in the way one does when a situation is hopeless.
‘Get everything straight. What happened, find what evidence we can, what we can prove, to demonstrate to the police what happened to us. Then, when we’ve got all that, tell different police.
A few towns away. Just in case,’ she says.
‘His DNA will be on you now,’ Simone tells her. ‘If we leave, we lose that.’
‘They’ll say it doesn’t prove anything. Could be from anywhere. Could have been in the taxi before me.’
‘I know.’
And that’s all it takes: a nod from Lucy, and then Simone nods, too, their heads bobbing in unison, one the parent, one the child, out there in the tiniest patch of civilization in the vast, vast desert.
One believing absolutely that they will figure this out, one pretending, or maybe that’s both of them, Simone can’t tell.