Chapter 7 Gwen
GWEN
Jeff.
The man who agreed to junk the car for me. His name was Jeff. He asked for mine a handful of times, but when I refused to answer, he said, “Yeah, yeah, miss. I get it.”
He probably did.
The exact reason why I was so careful to conceal my identity, he would never know. But he knew one thing. I was breaking the law. And he was okay with that, so long as he got some cash.
They always said, ‘There is no honor among thieves.’ I never agreed with that. Some of the best people I’d ever met were the ones who had the least, who’d gotten a hold of the little they did have through nefarious means and used those little scraps for survival.
The worst people I’d ever met were the ones who came from normal, happy, and healthy families.
Jeff though? Jeff was just a guy trying to survive. He didn’t want the details for the same reasons I didn’t want the details about how the ranch was run. Plausible deniability.
The two of us sat together outside the junkyard until they opened. At that point, he said he would do the job. But he wanted a down payment.
I passed him two hundred bucks and the car keys.
It wasn’t until that moment that I realized he could’ve driven off with the car.
Which wouldn’t have been ideal. Jeff didn’t do that though.
He and Felix, his dog, drove up to the gate.
After a couple honks, someone came to the passenger window, exchanged a few words with Jeff, then rolled the barbed wire wrapped, chain-link gate open.
Jeff drove through. Once inside, he stepped out of the vehicle and talked to that same man for a few minutes. After an exchange of cash, Jeff and Felix stood beside the gate. Eventually, the man Jeff had spoken to got into the vehicle and drove it into a big yellow box.
I tiptoed around the fence to see inside.
Sure enough, the tractor attached to the big yellow box rumbled to a start.
The top of the box descended slowly. Metal crunched, glass shattered, and in a few heartbeats, the evidence that could one day be used to convict me was nothing more than a crushed-up square of metal and debris.
Jeff came out a few minutes later. I gave him the remaining eight hundred and asked where I might find a cab.
It had to have been at least five city blocks before I caught sight of one. The entity must’ve come back, because I don’t remember that walk. I recall cutting through a few alleys and stripping off a couple of my layers and shoving them into my backpack, but not much else.
Eventually, I made it to a busy street. People were walking nearly shoulder to shoulder, probably for an event of some kind. Yellow cabs, several of them, lined up against the curb, waiting for customers.
I hopped in one and entered an address. Not for the ranch. It was a little country store a few miles down the road from the ranch’s private drive. Still, at least a three hour venture for the cabby. He said something about how that was far. I would’ve been better off renting a car.
In silence, I passed him a thousand in cash. He didn’t complain after that.
While I have no recollection of falling asleep in the cab, I may have.
Eventually, I recognized where I was again. The yellow cab dropped me at the old general store, and I walked.
When I got to the private driveway that led to the ranch, I didn’t walk along it. I followed the trails through the woods alongside it. One wrapped all the way around the property, including my backyard.
With my cabin finally in sight, a burst of adrenaline coursed through me. I tore up that hill like a monster was chasing me.
In a way, one was.
Because if Simone lay dead in there, all of this would’ve been for nothing.
Last night, I had locked the door on the way out. Didn’t bring my keys either. As I bent for the spare stashed under the flowerpot at the back entrance, the rear door swung open.
Simone stood in the threshold. Her one good eye wide, the other swollen shut. She no longer had on a bloody blouse. Instead, she wore my gray sweatshirt and a pair of my black sweatpants.
As I straightened, our eyes met. Neither of us spoke. For a few silent heartbeats, we only stared at one another. Her eyes flicked over me, mine over her, until tears consumed us both.
“You okay?” she asked, voice cracking.
A few steps up the stairs, I nodded. “Are you?”
Nostrils flaring, a stream of tears leaked from the corner of her good eye. She gritted her teeth and exhaled slowly. A quick nod. Because if she said anything more, that small stream would become a river.
I tossed my arms around her before it could. She did the same.
There, standing just past the threshold of the rear door in the hallway that connected my bedroom and kitchen, we held one another as tightly as our bodies would allow. I don’t know who started crying first, but one of us did, and the other joined in, and it took holding my breath to make it stop.
The sorrow was like a vacuum in the center of my chest, ripping me into it and shredding all the scars that had healed over the last year.
We’d run like our lives depended on it, because they had.
Simone had left David, and I’d left Troy, because even if we’d managed to survive their violence, we were dead in their company.
They had taken our sense of self, sense of confidence, even our sanity.
They had taken it all, and Rhiannon’s Ranch had given it back.
Last night, we were faced with the harsh reality that all this could be gone in an instant. Each of us here were dominoes. If one of us fell, we all could.
When I killed David, I thought that I caught Simone in her rapid descent. In a way, I had. And yet, the two of us were weeping in one another’s arms, toppling to the ground, comforting each other in crumpled balls on the floor, yet again, through the chaos of a man’s violence.
It took us a while to get up off the floor. Not long after, with a couple cups of coffee in hand, we settled in on the sofa. Honey jumped up between us and cuddled against my thigh. Stroking my fingers through her fur served as the tether to reality I had lost in Great Falls.
We sat in silence for a while. I looked around the room for some signs of what had happened last night.
There were none. Any of Simone’s blood that had spilled on the floor, she’d cleaned up.
I’d left my bloody boots on the floor by the door last night, dripping with crimson and melting snow.
Now, they rested on the kitchen table, sparkling as if they were brand new.
I wasn’t sure what Simone remembered, but she’d known enough to clean the blood off my boots.
I looked at my friend, her face still swollen, and broke the silence. “How did he find you?”
Tucking herself deeper into the corner of the sofa, Simone eased out a breath. “I’m an idiot. That’s how.”
“You did open the gate for him,” I said, “so I’m not going to disagree with you there.”
She shot me the bird.
“Junie,” Simone said. “Junie got sick at school the day before yesterday. Her fever was 103. I was in the middle of an appointment with a client who had hair down to her ass and wanted to go platinum.” In other words, a very long appointment.
“I missed the school’s call. She didn’t even seem sick when I’d dropped her off that morning.
But they asked Junie if there was another number they could reach me at, and I guess she remembered David’s. She must’ve given it to them.
“When I called the school back an hour later, they told me to come pick her up. I did. And the nurse said something about how she talked to Junie’s dad on the phone.
” She shut her eyes, her breath shaking.
“She said he would’ve come to get her, but he wasn’t on the list of people who could.
She must’ve told him where I worked, because yesterday, he was outside the salon. ”
Simone reached up to rub her eyes, wincing when she touched the black and blue one.
“We argued outside. It was messy, and stupid, and embarrassing. But some bystanders saw it going down and threatened to call the cops on him. He hauled ass. I figured that would be enough to scare him off. Last time I googled him, he had a mile long list of warrants. And it’s not like he knew where I lived.
“He must’ve called the salon and asked to set up an appointment or something to get my number, because he started blowing up my phone. Literally, every five minutes from 5 o’clock on he was calling me.
“Finally, I answered at 11:30. I was going to tell him to go to hell, but he said he was at the gate. Must’ve followed me home.
” She gritted her teeth and shook her head.
“I thought I could go talk to him. Just get him to leave, you know? At least until I figured out how to tell Rhiannon about it. But there’s no talking to guys like him.
He started saying that I was keeping his kid from him, and he was gonna send me to jail for violating the court order, which I don’t even think they would do.
But maybe they would. I guess, technically, when I brought Junie here, that was kidnapping.
Either way though.” With shaking fingers, she rubbed her forehead.
“We were fighting, and then you were there.”
“If he followed you, wouldn’t he have caught up to you on the road?” I stroked my fingers through Honey’s fur, hoping it would ease the tremble in them that hadn’t stopped all night. “I mean, when you come up the driveway to the ranch, you’re pretty much on top of whoever is nearby.”
“I don’t know how else he would’ve found it,” she said.
“What about an AirTag or something? Did he see you get out of your car at work? Could he have planted a tracker under it?”
Simone shook her head. “He’s a paranoid drug dealer, Gwen. All he uses are burner phones. You have to connect accounts to credit cards and shit for trackers and air tags. He followed me here. I guarantee it.”