Chapter 1 #2
The thing about walking away from a fire is that the dark gets darker fast. Ten steps and the laughing goes thin behind me.
Twenty steps and it’s just my own breathing over the crunch of sand under my sneakers, the little circle of phone light bouncing around at my feet.
The cold finds me out here away from the flames, because my jacket is back at the fire keeping Crystal alive.
Great instincts. Freeze to death for a girl in a crop top.
I tell myself I won’t go far. I’ll go just far enough that nobody catches a moonlit glimpse of my bare butt for the group chat.
The desert at night convinces you you’re the only living thing for a hundred miles. No traffic, no music, only wind moving over the scrub under that enormous black sky. It should be peaceful. Instead it makes the back of my neck prickle, and the prickle is telling me to hurry up.
I go too far.
I know I go too far because I come up over a little rise in the sand, and down on the other side, where there shouldn’t be anything, there’s something.
Headlights.
Two sets of them, pointed at each other across a flat stretch of nothing, throwing harsh white light onto a patch of desert a good two hundred yards from where my friends are getting drunk and arguing about movies.
My first thought, the hopeful one, is that somebody else came out here to party.
My second thought, half a second later, is that nobody parties standing that still.
There are men down there. Three of them standing, and they’re not partying. They’re not lost, either. One of them isn’t standing at all.
One of them is on his knees in the dirt with his hands behind his back.
I should leave. Every cell in my body is screaming it, leave, you idiot, turn around right now. But I’m three cups of wine deep, my brain a second behind my eyes, so I stand there frozen, watching.
A fourth man steps into the light.
He’s wearing a suit. Out here, in the middle of the worst nowhere in Nevada, surrounded by cold dust and scrub, this man has on a suit that fits him like it was poured on.
Dark, expensive, the kind of thing I only ever see on men who tip in hundreds and never smile.
He’s tall. Not tall like a normal tall guy, tall like a building, broad through the shoulders and narrow lower down, moving the way water moves downhill, easy, like nothing in the world has ever made him hurry.
And here’s the part I’m not proud of. Even from here, even with my heart doing something nervous and my brain screaming that this is wrong, some idiot part of me notices that he’s gorgeous.
The way he holds himself. The size of him.
The careless, unbothered power coming off him like heat off asphalt.
He’s the most dangerous-looking man I have ever seen.
I work in a place where dangerous-looking men are basically the house special, and not one of them has ever made my mouth go dry from across a dark stretch of desert.
I hate that. I’ll hate it properly later, when there’s time.
I can’t hear what he’s saying. The wind takes most of it, but the shape of it carries, low and even.
Russian, I think, or something close to it.
He crouches down in front of the man on his knees.
Brings himself right down to eye level, almost gentle about it, one elbow on his thigh, like a guy talking a kid down off a tantrum.
For a second I actually relax. I tell myself this is a talk. A scary talk, sure, a weird-place-at-a-weird-time talk, but a talk.
Then he lifts his arm. There’s a gun in his hand I didn’t even see him draw. He puts it against the kneeling man’s forehead and pulls the trigger.
The sound reaches me a beat after the flash, this flat, ugly crack that rolls out across the desert and keeps going, bouncing off nothing.
The kneeling man just drops. No drama. No slow-motion movie fall.
He’s a person, then he’s a thing on the ground, and my whole body goes cold from the scalp down.
I don’t breathe. I genuinely forget how. My lungs quit, my hands have gone numb around my phone, and somewhere in the very back of my skull a tiny calm voice that I’ll thank later says, very clearly, turn off the light.
I turn off the light.
The desert goes black again. I drop into a crouch behind the creosote, heart slamming so hard I can feel it in my teeth, telling myself it’s fine, it’s fine, they’re too far away to see me, there’s no way they saw me, I’m just a girl in the dark and the dark is everywhere.
Down in the headlights, the suit man straightens up.
And he stops.
He goes still in a way that’s worse than any sudden movement could be.
His head turns, slow, scanning the dark in this smooth arc.
I watch the line of his attention sweep across the desert like a searchlight, and I keep telling myself there’s no way, the light’s off, I’m nothing, I’m nobody, I’m a smudge in a creosote bush two hundred yards away.
His head stops turning.
It stops pointed right at me.
There’s no possible way I can see his eyes from this distance in this dark.
But I swear on my dead grandmother and every cup of bad wine in my body that I feel him see me.
It goes through me, this awful click of contact, like the moment in a dream when the thing in the room finally looks up and knows your name.
He has seen me.
I don’t know how. I don’t care how. There’s one clean thought left in my spinning head, sharp enough to cut straight through the wine and the fear.
Run. And do not let them know which way the girls are.