Chapter Fourteen
Katy
The heat hit me the moment I pushed through the glass doors. Mid-afternoon Missouri, the kind of heat that sat on your skin like something alive, and I shifted the paper bags in my arms and squinted across the parking lot toward the SUV where it sat baking in the sun.
Three days of nothing. Three days of the clinic feeds showing empty parking lots and quiet service roads.
Three days of Cotton at the gate with his green eyes and his two-finger wave, three days of Dread coming home from work and checking the deadbolt and not saying the words we were both thinking because saying them made them real, and somewhere in that stretch of ordinary caution, I had started to believe it was over.
That he’d given up. That the man in the gray hoodie had looked at the compound fence and the brothers on rotation and had weighed the odds and found them wanting.
The grocery bags were heavy. Bread, the kind Dread liked with the seeds in the crust. Milk.
A carton of orange juice because Ellie had finished the last one at breakfast and left the empty box in the refrigerator door, same as always, as if the carton itself were a request. My purse hung from my right shoulder, the strap cutting into the cotton of my T-shirt, and I adjusted it with my elbow and kept walking.
The parking lot was mostly empty, its asphalt cracked in places where tree roots had buckled the surface.
A county maintenance truck sat near the far entrance, nobody in it.
An elderly woman loading bags into a sedan three spaces down, her movements slow and deliberate in the heat.
The sky above was white-blue, cloudless, the kind of sky that offered no shade and no apology.
I heard the engine before I saw the truck.
A low rumble from somewhere behind the storefront, the note of an American V8 idling too slow for the heat, and something in my lower back went tight, same reflex as always when a sound didn’t belong.
I didn’t turn. Kept walking. My keys were in my right pocket, my hand already moving toward them, and the SUV was twenty feet away, both too far and not far enough.
The truck rolled into my peripheral vision as I reached the driver’s door.
Dark blue. Chevy pickup, older model, the kind with the rounded wheel wells and the chrome grille that had gone dull with road salt and neglect.
It came in behind my bumper at an angle, slow, deliberate, the front tires stopping six inches from my rear quarter panel in a way that left no room for the SUV to back out.
Blocking me. The positioning of it was so exact it had to be rehearsed.
The passenger mirror was cracked. A spiderweb fracture across the glass, the kind that came from an impact hard enough to leave a pattern. That detail lodged itself with the perfect, useless clarity irrelevant things get in a crisis -- and then the driver’s door opened and Marcus stepped out.
He was thicker. Not fat. Built. The kind of thickness that came from five years of prison iron and nothing else to do with your hands, his shoulders broader than I remembered, his arms carrying a definition that hadn’t been there in Indiana.
His face was the same. That was the worst part.
The same jaw, the same flat affect around the mouth, the same eyes that had looked at me across an Indiana kitchen while his hands found my throat.
He didn’t run. Didn’t shout. Just walked around the front of the truck with his hands at his sides and his pace unhurried, the particular economy of a man who had all the time in the world and knew it.
His fingers closed around my upper arm. Four points of contact, his thumb digging into the bicep, his other three fingers finding the tricep from behind, and the grip was so sudden and so precise that the paper bags dropped from my hands before I could stop them.
They hit the asphalt with a soft thud. The orange juice carton split along its seam, the cardboard giving way, and bright liquid spread across the hot pavement in a fan that reached the tires of both vehicles and kept going, thin and viscous and orange in the Missouri sun.
“Let go of me.” I forced the demand through clenched teeth, barely above a whisper, every syllable sharpened by the effort to stay controlled.
He didn’t let go. His grip adjusted, his thumb pressing harder into the muscle, and he walked me toward the passenger door of the truck like you’d walk a dog that was misbehaving -- firm, directional, without excess force because excess would draw attention and we were in a parking lot in broad daylight and he knew how many witnesses too many, same as I did.
The passenger door swung open. He’d left it unlocked, or unlocked it with the fob as he walked, and the interior hit me before anything else -- the smell of fast food and sweat and the stale sweetness of a pine air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, swinging gently in the draft from the open door.
“Get in.” His tone left no room for argument, and there was nothing hurried about the command. “We’re going to talk.”
My right foot found the running board. The metal was hot through the sole of my sneaker, and I braced against it and grabbed the doorframe with my free hand.
My fingers closed around the edge of the window, and I held on with everything I had.
The angles were wrong. He stood behind me, his body blocking my hips, his grip on my arm providing a pivot point I couldn’t overcome, and for three seconds I hung there braced on the running board and my hand on the doorframe and the orange juice drying on the asphalt behind us and the elderly woman three spaces down still loading her groceries, still not looking.
He pushed. One hand flat between my shoulder blades, the other maintaining its grip on my arm, and the force traveled through my spine and into my knees and I was inside the cab before my brain registered the transition.
The vinyl seat was hot. Burning hot, the kind of heat that came from hours in direct sun, and it seared through the thin cotton of my shorts and into the backs of my thighs with a pain so specific it cut through the white noise in my head.
The door slammed. The sound traveled through the frame and into my bones, a heavy metallic thunk that landed like the end of something I hadn’t finished naming.
Marcus was already around the front, his boots on the asphalt, his shadow crossing the hood in the elongated shape that afternoon sun produced, and then the driver’s door opened and he slid behind the wheel and the cab filled with his presence -- larger than the space allowed, his shoulder brushing mine as he reached for the ignition.
The engine turned over. A deep rumble, the air conditioning blowing warm air that smelled like engine and old filters, and somewhere beneath the dashboard a small electronic click sounded. I sat with my back pressed against the door and my thighs burning against the vinyl.
The locks. All four of them, engaging simultaneously, the sound so final it might as well have been a cell door.
Fast food wrappers littered the floor at my feet.
McDonald’s bags, Burger King cups, the crumpled paper of a wrapper that had held fries once.
The dashboard was cracked in two places, the plastic split along seams that stress had found and exploited.
The radio was tuned to a country station, the volume low, a man singing about lost love in a voice that didn’t know the irony of its timing.
I looked at the door handle. My right hand rested near it, my fingers inches from the plastic lever that would do nothing because the locks were engaged and the child safety was probably on and Marcus had thought of everything because Marcus had spent five years in a cell thinking of nothing else.
The truck pulled forward. Slow. Careful. Navigating the parking lot at exactly the speed limit, his left hand on the wheel, his right resting on the center console near my knee, not touching but present, a reminder of proximity that needed no elaboration.
Route 61 opened up ahead through the windshield.
Flat. Sun-bleached. Stretching east toward farmland and tree lines and whatever came after tree lines, and I sat in the burning vinyl seat and watched the Harmon’s Foods sign shrink in the side mirror until it was just a square of white brick against Missouri blue, and then it was gone.
* * *
The farmland opened on both sides like a diorama I’d seen in a museum once.
Flat, gold, stretching toward tree lines so distant they blurred into the horizon, and the truck hummed along Route 9 at exactly fifty-five miles per hour, Marcus’s left hand loose on the wheel, his right resting on the center console two inches from my knee.
Not touching. Not yet. But present, like a weapon is present even when it isn’t drawn.
I pressed my shoulder against the passenger door and felt the vinyl seam dig into my skin through the thin cotton of my T-shirt.
Didn’t move away from it -- the pain was clean and mine, a fixed point.
The rest of it wasn’t. I was in a truck with a man who had put his hands around my throat in an Indiana kitchen five years ago, and he was driving me east into Missouri farmland with the calm precision of someone running an errand.
My purse sat on my lap. Shoulder strap still hooked, the familiar heft of it against my thigh, and inside it my phone -- charged this morning, seventy-three percent according to the lock screen I’d checked in the cereal aisle, now separated from my hand by twelve inches of fabric and the physics of a moving vehicle and a man whose left hand rested two inches from my knee.
The odometer read 187,429. I memorized it. The dash clock said 4:17. I memorized that too. The fuel gauge sat at three-quarters, the needle holding steady at an angle that suggested recent refueling.