Chapter 11 #3
“Oh, sorry, I was… No, I don’t recognize that one, but how hard can it be to find out?” She tapped her screen. “There’s an app online. Several, actually. A hundred bucks and we can know in five minutes and…oh. We’d need to know the state.” Christine tossed the phone onto the seat of the car.
“I don’t think we’d want to enter a credit card online for that either, if the owner of the plate is about to…” Palms up, Diane opened the fingers of both hands, which Bonnie thought meant “vanish,” but could’ve also meant “explode.”
“We have to find this son of a bitch,” Christine said. “He tried to kill our best friend.”
Diane nodded hard. “And if he knew about Rosa, he probably knows about all of us. He won’t stop now.”
“It might be Sally or Sadie next,” Bonnie said. Darkness had descended over her heart. She could hear it in her own voice, like a deep reverberation beneath her normal register. “Are we saying…we have to do the same to him?”
“It sounds crazy when you say it out loud,” Diane said.
Bonnie shook her head. “There has to be another way.”
“I don’t think so,” Christine said. “He knows enough to send us all to prison, and he’s already proven he’s not only capable of violence, but in the process of it. Rosa agrees. That’s what she was telling us tonight.”
They shared a heavy sigh.
“Well,” Diane said at length. “At least we know how to get rid of a body.”
They were silent for a moment as Diane drove through the night. Christine reached out and snapped on the radio and it blasted the closing words of an ad.
“For an honest deal too good to be real, come see me, Dangerous Dan, the used car man!”
Diane quickly lowered the volume, shaking her head. “Sorry. The sound system is really nice. I was blasting Fleetwood Mac earlier.”
Christine laughed, but Bonnie wasn’t laughing. Bonnie was frozen. And when the other two stopped laughing to look at her oddly, she said, “That was him.”
Christine looked at her, her smile dying. “What, now?”
Diane glanced at her in the rearview.
“That’s the voice on the recording. The only one that wasn’t altered. The one that threatened me. That was the voice. Dangerous Dan.”
“Are you sure?” Diane asked.
Bonnie nodded.
“Are you murder-sure?” Christine added.
Bonnie blinked. “I’m pretty sure.”
A light rain began to fall and every set of headlight beams they met caused the droplets to sparkle on the windshield until Diane turned on the wipers.
“Wait!” Bonnie said suddenly. “I have an old Visa gift card in my wallet.” She fished her wallet from her beach bag, located the card, and held it up.
“I don’t think those can be traced,” Diane said.
“Brilliant.” Christine spoke to her phone. “Hey Siri, can gift cards be traced?”
The phone replied, “Gift cards are not tied to an individual user and are impossible to trace. According to the—”
“Siri, shut up,” Christine said as she began tapping her phone to purchase the license plate lookup, using the gift card.
“You can only buy them in pairs. I’ll use New York and Florida, where the net says Dangerous Dan has another location.
It’s a hundred bucks, tax included. How much is the gift card for? ”
“A hundred bucks,” Bonnie said. “From Sam for my birthday.”
“Your birthday was in February,” Christine said as she finished entering the info and made the purchase. “And you still haven’t used it?”
“Why is he giving you Visa gift cards for your birthday?” Diane asked. “He usually gets you such thoughtful gifts.”
Bonnie shrugged. “Probably just got busy. I don’t mind a gift card for my birthday, anyway.”
“We can tell by how fast you used it,” Christine teased.
Diane snorted.
“Well, it’s coming in handy, now, isn’t it?”
Mark had been an amazing gift-giver. He’d always been surprising her with some little thing she’d mentioned once, months earlier. She got misty, the loss of Mark blending in with the specter of losing Rosa too.
Then Diane shocked her right out of it.
“The next question is how we should do it, I suppose.”
“If we have to do it,” Bonnie said. “We have to be a hundred percent certain.” Then she shrugged. “But if we do it, poison would be the easiest. Some of the stuff growing wild locally can be deadly. I’ll have to do some research.”
“Not on your own computer,” Diane said. “They can trace that.” She shook her head rapidly. “I just can’t believe we’re talking so casually about this. It’s weird that I don’t feel…anything. I mean nervous, but…cold. I feel like I could do it. That shocks me, you know?”
“I see it the way I’d see plucking weeds from Bonnie’s garden,” Christine said.
“Or that tumor from Rosa’s brain,” Diane added. “When something’s harming your body, you cut it out. When something’s harming innocent children—”
“You cut it out,” Bonnie said.
Christine’s phone pinged. “Results are in.” She tapped the screen, and said, “New York plate was a hit. Daniel Fitzpatrick.” She tapped some more then turned the phone around.
Dangerous Dan the Used Car Man, with his trademark orange hair, smiled at Bonnie from the screen with his name, Daniel Fitzpatrick in the caption. In the photo, he stood in front of a fancy sporty car with the license plate in plain view: N0TP00R.
“Certain enough for you?” Christine asked.