Chapter 41
Luke
She comes downstairs in something I haven’t seen before. Dark top, jeans that fit, boots with a heel. Her hair is down. She did something to her eyes that makes them look like a different argument than the one I’m used to losing.
“You look nice,” I say.
“You’ve only ever seen me covered in sweat or someone else’s bodily fluids. The bar was low.”
She grabs her bag. I hold the door. We walk to the truck like two people who aren’t going on a date because this isn’t a date. We’ve established that. We’re clear.
The restaurant is twenty-two minutes away. Route 9 to the county line, left on Dawson, through the stretch where the trees close in and the streetlights stop.
We’re twelve minutes in when the back window explodes.
Glass everywhere. A sound like the whole truck cracked open. Marin screams—short, sharp, cut off fast. I don’t hear the shot until after the glass is in my hair. That’s how it works. The damage arrives before the sound.
“Get down,” I say.
“What—”
I push her head down. Hold it until she stays.
She folds herself on the floorboard, hands over her head, glass in her hair. I check the rearview—cracked but intact. Black pickup. Same one. Javi’s friends. Headlights filling my cab, riding close enough that I can see the passenger leaning out the window.
Second shot. Hits the tailgate. The sound is flat and heavy, like someone dropping a hammer on sheet metal.
I punch the gas. My truck is old but it’s got a V8 and I know this road. The curve at mile marker six. The dip where the county never fixed the drainage. The straightaway after the bridge where you can open it up if you don’t care about the speed limit.
I don’t care about the speed limit.
The black truck stays with me. Headlights filling my cab. Marin is wedged between the seat and the dash, knees pulled up, head down. I can hear her breathing—fast, controlled—with the focused calm of a woman who’s been in crisis before and knows that noise doesn’t help.
I accelerate into the curve. The truck leans. Tires scream. Marin slides over and grabs my leg to steady herself—her fingers digging into my thigh hard enough to leave marks.
The black pickup takes the curve too fast. I hear it before I see it—the skid, the correction that comes too late, the sound of tires leaving asphalt for gravel for air. Headlights sweeping the tree line sideways. Then a crash. Metal and wood and something final.
I don’t stop. I ease off the gas. Check the rearview. The headlights behind us are pointing at the sky, one of them flickering. They hit the drainage ditch. Or the trees. Or both.
Half a mile down, I pull onto a side road. No sign. No gate. Just a gap in the tree line Emily used to run on Sunday mornings. I pull behind a stand of pines and cut the engine.
Darkness. Total.
“Marin.”
No answer. I flip on the overhead light.
“Marin.”
She pushes herself into the seat. Slowly. Glass falls off her shoulders like snow. There’s a cut on her forehead—small, clean, already beading red. Her hands are shaking. Her whole body is shaking. But her eyes are steady and dry and locked on me with an intensity that has nothing to do with fear.
“Who,” she says, “the fuck was that?”
I hold up my knuckles.
“The job site injury that wasn’t a job site injury.”
I nod. “Those are the people.”
“Those people just shot at us, Luke. They shot at your truck. They shot at me. I have glass in my hair and blood on my face and I am sitting on a dirt road in the dark—”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I know. And I’ll explain. Everything.” I reach across and touch the cut on her forehead. Gently. With my thumb. She goes still. “But right now I need to know you’re okay.”
“No, I’m not okay. Why are they trying to run us off the road? And why do you sound like this happens to you regularly?”
“It doesn’t happen regularly.”
“Your window is gone, Luke.”
“I’ll get a new one.”
She pulls out her phone. I cut the light. She turns to look at me. In the dark I can only see the outline of her—the shape of her jaw, the reflection of something in her eyes that might be fear or might be fury or might be both.
“You have enemies,” she says as though it isn’t obvious.
“I have complications.”
“Complications don’t fire shots at you.”
I don’t answer. I’m listening. The road is quiet. They’re gone. For now.
“I’ll explain,” I say. “Over dinner.”
“You’re still thinking about dinner?”
“Unless you prefer Mrs. Mather’s chicken and rice. I’ve had it. Wouldn’t recommend.”
She stares at me. In the dark. In my truck.
On a road that Emily used to run on Sundays.
And then she laughs. Not the performance laugh.
Not even the tired laugh from earlier today.
A real laugh—the kind that comes from a place past fear, past logic, past the point where anything makes sense anymore.
“Fine,” she says. “But you owe me an explanation. And a drink.” She brushes glass off her jeans. Uses the flashlight on her phone to check her face in the visor mirror. Dabs the cut with her sleeve. Flips the visor shut. “Drive.”
I drive.
The road is empty. The night is quiet. Somewhere behind us, a black pickup is in a ditch with two men who are going to wake up sore and stupid and alive.
I’ll deal with them later. Right now I’m driving a woman with glass in her hair to a restaurant she’s never been to, and the only thought in my head is that she didn’t ask me to take her home.
She asked me to drive.