Chapter 2
CINDY
Here is the one smart thing I do all night.
I run the wrong way.
Every cell in my body wants to bolt straight back to the fire, back to Crystal, the wine, the half-roasted marshmallows.
But the fire is exactly where I can’t go.
Going there draws a big neon arrow at four drunk girls who have no idea the world just turned into a horror movie.
So I peel left, away from the tents, out into the open black nothing.
I run like the desert is going to crack open and swallow me whole.
But it doesn’t.
I make it maybe forty yards before an arm comes around my throat from behind. It yanks me back into a body that smells like sweat and cigarettes. Something cold presses into my temple, and I know exactly what it is, because I’ve watched enough TV to recognize a gun against my skull when I feel one.
So that’s new.
“Stupid little bitch.” The voice is low and ragged against my ear, the accent so strong I can barely parse the words. He’s breathing hard, this jagged, furious breathing, like he ran to get to me. “You have no idea what you just did.”
I do, actually. I just don’t say so, because my voice is somewhere down around my knees and my whole body has gone stiff as a board.
“A year,” he hisses, and his arm tightens until I see white at the edges. “A year of work. One shot. One. And you walk into it like a cow into a road.”
A year of work. One shot. My brain finally catches up to my eyes, and what it hands me is very bad news.
This guy wasn’t with the suit man down in the headlights.
This guy was out here in the dark like me, watching, waiting, except the thing he was waiting to do was put a bullet in the suit man.
I wandered into his sightline and wrecked it.
Two different monsters, and I found both of them in one night.
I should buy a lottery ticket. I’m just not sure I’ll live long enough to scratch it.
The most random thoughts go through your head when you think you’re about to die.
I think about how I never called my landlord back.
I think about how Crystal’s going to blame herself for picking this spot.
I think about my mother, who I haven’t spoken to in six years, who’ll probably hear about this on the news and tell people we were close.
None of it helps. It’s just the junk drawer of my brain dumping itself out while a stranger decides whether to pull the trigger.
“Please,” I finally manage, which is humiliating, but I’m not above it. “I didn’t see anything. I swear, I didn’t see your face, I don’t know anything.”
“Shut up.” He says it almost bored, like I’m a kid interrupting grownups. He’s not even talking to me anymore. He’s watching the suit man come, his whole body wired tight as a tripwire, and I realize I’ve stopped being a person to him entirely. I’m just the wall he’s hiding behind.
Out past the rocks, over his shoulder, I see the suit man.
He’s coming toward us. Not running, not even hurrying, just walking across that flat stretch of desert with his hands loose at his sides, taking his sweet time.
He could be strolling up to a valet stand instead of a man holding a hostage.
It hits me all at once, sick and clear, that I’m about to be a bargaining chip in a fight between two men who would step over my body without slowing down.
The arm around my throat goes tighter. The guy shifts the gun against my head, steadying himself, getting ready to say something, make a demand, do whatever you do when you’ve got a girl and the other guy’s walking up.
He doesn’t get to.
The suit man’s arm comes up, easy, almost lazy, and a flat crack splits the night in half.
The arm around my throat jerks loose. The man behind me staggers back with a sound I’m not going to forget any time soon, this wet, ugly grunt, one hand flying up to his face, and then he’s gone, scrambling off into the dark, just a shape the black swallows before a second shot can find him.
And then it’s just me. Me, the desert, and the man who shoots people for fun, walking the last few steps to where I’m standing.
My legs quit. I go down into the cold sand on my knees.
My body doesn’t consult me on it. The sand is so cold it burns through my jeans.
Some far-off employee in my head files a note that I will never wear these jeans again.
He stops in front of me and crouches down.
He brings himself right to my level, slow, the same way he did with the man he killed back there, one forearm resting on his thigh, and he looks at me.
He doesn’t reach for his gun.
That’s the part that throws me. He should reach for his gun.
I know how this goes, I just saw the demo.
You don’t watch a man execute someone in the desert and then stroll home to tell the story over brunch.
A witness is a problem, men like this solve problems, and the solution is the same one bleeding into the dirt back there.
I can see him thinking it. I brace for the moment he decides, for his hand to go for the gun.
It never comes.
I don’t know what he’s waiting for, but whatever it is, I refuse to give it to him. I’m shaking so hard my teeth knock together, and the tears are coming whether I want them or not, but I do not beg. I don’t know where the steel comes from.
Some stubborn, last-ditch piece of me decides that if this is it, if this freezing patch of nowhere is where I die in my work sneakers, I’m not spending my last seconds groveling to a man in a nice suit.
So I just look back at him. I hold his stare, furious, terrified, tears running, and I refuse to look away.
Something changes.
I feel it more than I see it, the air going different between us, his attention sharpening to a point. His eyes move over my face, then lower, and there’s nothing in it of a man pricing out a body to get rid of. It’s a look I know, because I get it a hundred times a night at work.
I’ve just never felt it like this, hot and low in my stomach.
I hate it on contact. He’s looking at me like I’m a person.
Worse than that. He’s looking at me like I’m a person he wants.
Right here, with a dead man cooling in the dirt, gunpowder still sharp in the air, the scariest man I’ve ever seen is looking at me like that.
The very worst part is how fast my body answers before I can shut it down.
When he finally speaks, his voice is low and even, nothing like what I’m braced for.
“You picked a bad night for a walk,” he says.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. World-class wit, me.
“You saw something you shouldn’t have.” He says it almost gently, like he’s explaining a parking ticket. “That man who ran off, his name is Timur. He saw your face. You understand what that means?”
I don’t, not really, but I nod, because nodding is all I’ve got.
“It means you’re a marked woman now.” His head tilts, just slightly.
“His people don’t leave loose ends. Doesn’t matter that you’re nobody.
Doesn’t matter that you were out here peeing in the dark like an idiot.
He saw you, so they’ll come, and they’ll be thorough about it.
” A pause. “The only thing standing between you and a shallow grave, starting now, is me.”
This is the part in the movie where the girl says something brave. I say, “Okay,” in a tiny voice, like he’s offered me a ride home.
And then he does the thing that scares me more than the gun, more than the dead man, more than any of it.
He stands up. He lets me go.
He doesn’t grab me. He doesn’t haul me to a car.
He just rises to his full ridiculous height, brushes the dust off one knee, and tips his head toward the orange smudge of the fire in the distance.
I can just make out the girls back there, shrieking about something, somebody yelling that the fireworks were awesome, do it again.
Fireworks. They think the gunshots were fireworks. I could cry, except I’m already crying, so I guess I’m just adding to it.
“Walk back to your friends,” he says. “Finish your little weekend. Smile, laugh, roast your marshmallows. And tell no one what you saw out here. Not them. Not the police. Nobody.”
“Why would you?” My voice cracks, so I try again. “Why would you let me go?”
He studies me a second, and I swear there’s almost something like amusement at the corner of his mouth, which on this man is its own kind of terrifying.
“Because I’ve decided you should keep breathing,” he says. “For now. That’s the only reason you are, so don’t waste it.”
I should run. I don’t. I just stay there on my knees like an idiot, staring up at him, and he must see the question I’m too scared to ask, the obvious one, the what’s-stopping-me-from-running one.
“In case you’re feeling brave,” he says, reading me like a cheap magazine, “there’s nowhere out here I don’t own.
Every road. Every gas station between this sand and that city.
You won’t outrun me in a desert that belongs to me.
” He starts to turn. Then he stops, and the last thing he says, he says soft, almost kind.
It closes around my wrist like a hand. “I’ll be watching you.
And you’ll be seeing me again. Very soon. ”
Then he’s gone. He walks off into the dark the same unbothered way he walked up. The night swallows him, suit and all, like he was never here. The only proof he existed is the shape going cold in the dirt and the gunpowder smell fading off my clothes.
I don’t remember standing. I don’t remember the walk. One second I’m on my knees in the freezing sand, and the next I’m stumbling into the firelight on legs made of wet paper. Crystal looks up at me with her smudged mascara and her big dumb grin, the jacket still wrapped around her shoulders.
“There she is. We thought you fell in a hole.” She squints. “You okay? You look like you saw a coyote.”
A coyote. Sure. Let’s go with coyote.
“Was it big?” Crystal wants to know. “They get big out here.”
“It looked right at me.”
“They do that.” She nods, sage, handing me a cup I don’t drink from. “You’re supposed to make yourself big and loud.”
Too late, I don’t say. I crouched in a bush and prayed. It’s the only reason anybody’s roasting anything tonight.
“I’m fine,” I hear myself say, and the voice that comes out is so normal it scares me. Smooth, light, like somebody flipped a switch and turned me into a girl who didn’t just watch a man die. “Just got turned around out there. It’s really dark.”
“I told you to pee close.” Crystal is smug, scooting over to make room.
“Should’ve taken the bear spray,” Stevie says, not looking up from the coals.
“Next time I’ll take the bear spray.”
I mean it so much it scares me. “Get over here, you’re freezing.”
I sit down next to her. I let her pull me into her side, jacket included, and I make myself laugh at whatever Joss is saying.
Somebody hands me a cup of warm wine. I take it, but I don’t drink it.
I just hold it, because my hands need a job that isn’t shaking.
The fire pops. The girls keep going, loud and easy, about Dale, about movies, about Stevie’s almost-text.
None of them have any idea that twenty minutes ago I had a gun pressed to my head.
I keep my mouth shut. He told me to, but even if he hadn’t, what would I say? Hey guys, fun update, I watched the most dangerous man in Nevada blow a hole in someone, and then he let me live because he liked my face. Pass the marshmallows.
So I sit there. I laugh in the right places. Apparently I’m a very good liar, which is a thing I’m learning about myself at the worst possible time.
Crystal hands me a marshmallow, raw, since the fire’s done for. It tastes like sugar and nylon. I eat the whole thing slowly, like it’s a job, while my body keeps quietly insisting we’re about to die.
The shaking won’t stop, though. It’s gone underground, this fine tremor running through me that the wine isn’t touching, and every time the fire pops I have to clamp my jaw to keep from jumping.
My whole body is still convinced it’s about to die.
Nobody tells you that part. You think the fear ends when the gun goes away.
It doesn’t. It just moves in, makes itself at home, sets up a chair in the corner of you and stays.
Crystal tucks her cold feet under my leg and tells a story about a customer who proposed to her after three lap dances. The girls howl. I laugh too, and for a few minutes it almost works. I almost believe I’m just a girl at a campfire.
Then I’ll catch myself plotting an escape I have no business plotting.
How fast I could grab the keys. Which car is closest. How long to the highway, how much longer to a town with people in it, lights, locks, a door I could put between me and the desert.
It always comes back to the same dead end.
Too far. He told me as much, and I believe that too.
There’s nowhere out here that isn’t his.
Later, when the fire’s down to coals, everyone crammed into the tents in a tangle of sleeping bags, somebody already snoring, I lie on my back next to Crystal and don’t sleep.
I watch the dark go a little less dark, hour by hour, gray bleeding into the seams of the tent.
I think about a man in a suit who came down to my level in the sand and looked at me like I was something he intended to keep.
I’ll be watching you. And you’ll be seeing me again. Very soon.
I believe him. That’s the thing that gets me. Out of this whole insane night, the part I’m the most sure of, down in my bones, is that he meant every word.
My life stopped being mine somewhere out there in the dark tonight. I just haven’t met the rest of it yet.