Chapter 16
sixteen
BILLIE
The barn stinks, and is too small. As a woman from Chicago, I am not equipped to deal with living, breathing animals in a farm setting, but here I am, crouched behind a cow.
The cow has turned her enormous head towards me, and is looking at me with a resigned expression that says she can’t wait to turn me in at the first opportunity.
I was able to run for about two more minutes before my legs started to burn. I think I heard on one of the survival shows Tyler watches that if you can’t run away from danger, you should hide instead. That’s how I ended up in the barn.
Besides the cow I’m currently bunking with, there’s four others arranged in stalls, and they’re tan-colored rather than black-and-white. The floor is straw and packed earth.
My breathing is loud. Too loud. I am trying to make it quiet, which only makes it louder.
I hear the barn door.
Not a creak— it was already open. Just a shift of light at my back, the way a shadow changes when someone steps into it. I go very still. The cow in front of me continues being a cow. I’m learning that cows are incredibly unhelpful.
“There you are,” says Alana.
She’s standing in the middle of the barn, her hair still immaculate, as if she has been for a stroll and not pursuing a fugitive through rural Spain.
There is a smear of what might be dust on her left shoe.
This appears to be the full extent of the inconvenience I’ve caused her.
Meanwhile, I’m covered in dirt, out of breath, with straw poking out of my hair.
I am sure she sees me, because the stalls have no coverings, and she is staring right at me.
I do the only thing that makes any sense in this moment. I try to blend in.
“Moo?” I say.
It comes out smaller than I intended. The cow nearest to me turns its head again and regards us both with disgust.
Alana looks at me.
She looks at the cow.
She looks back at me.
“Really, Billie?” she says.
I glance at the cow with disdain. “Couldn’t have helped me out there, could you?”
Alana’s hand moves to her waistband. She produces a gun and holds it at her side, not pointed at anything in particular, just present. Just a gun, existing in a barn in Spain next to unhelpful cows.
“Are you done?” she asks.
I stand up slowly. Straw falls off me. Dignity does not return. “I was going to say yes,” I say, “but then I thought about it and I think the honest answer is I’m about sixty percent done.”
“You ran out of a moving car,” she says.
“It wasn’t that fast.”
“It was going thirty kilometers an hour.”
“Which is very slow, actually, when you consider?—“
“You hid in a barn,” she says.
“It was available.”
“Behind a cow.”
“She’s a new friend,” I say defensively. “And I felt we had an understanding. Shockingly, she has not drugged and kidnapped me yet, which means she’s the best new friend I’ve managed to make, recently.”
Alana is not laughing. She is doing something more like a giggle, which is worse.
“You said moo,” she says. “To me. As a strategy.” I think she’s making fun of me for a second, but then she grabs my hand and pulls me out of the hay, patting me on the back.
“You’re amazing, Billie. You’re such an badass.
You’re going to do great negotiating with the Twin Ledger. ”
“Really?” I look at her sideways.
“I mean it,” she nods. “You have a sense of humor even in times of danger. And you’re creative.
An innovator! I mean, the courage it took to look at me—” she points at herself like she’s the President of the world— “La Diabla, holding a gun, and to say … moo?” Alana cackles again.
“Grown men have cried in this situation and you just made a hilarious joke instead. You’ve got courage, Billie. ”
I pause, trying to take all this in. “La Diabla,” I repeat.
Alana waves the gun in the air as if this is small information. “Oh, that’s just my nickname. It means she-devil. We’ll have to get you a nickname, too! Oh my gosh!” She jumps up in the air and grabs my arm. “Twinsies, am I right?!”
I think about my job. I think about seven years of answering emails and sourcing marble tile and being good while no one is watching. Maybe I should have gone into arms dealing instead of real estate.
“Come on, let’s go,” Alana nods at the exit to the barn. “The Uber driver is still waiting for us. I told him you have sudden psychotic breaks where you think you see an old lover from many years ago and chase him across the road.”
“Can you make the next story about me less tragic, please?” I roll my eyes. “Also, wait.” I stand my ground, holding a hand in the air. “If you really want me to do this for you— if you want me to negotiate on your behalf in an incredibly dangerous environment— I am going to need my phone back.”
The air seems to thicken. Alana looks at me— gun still in her hand— and crosses her arms, blinking slowly so that her long eyelashes flutter. “Go on…” she says.
She’s asking me to make my case. I clear my throat. “We don’t have anything if we can’t trust each other,” I try.
“I don’t trust anyone,” Alana interjects.
“Sure—” I nod. “You don’t trust anyone with everything.
But you have to trust some people with some things.
And right now, you want me to do a big job for you.
I need that phone to brush up on—” I pause, inventing— “negotiation strategies. If you want me to do a good job for you, you have to give me the tools.”
Alana chews on the inside of lip as if considering, then smiles.
“You are a good negotiator, Billie” she says. She puts the gun back. Just like that. Back in her waistband, disappeared, as if it was never there. “I need you, Billie. Not as a hostage. As someone who can get this done.”
Then she reaches into the canvas bag and produces my phone.
I actually reach for it before I’ve processed what’s happened. She lets me take it, which is its own kind of test. I unlock the screen— my background, my apps, my whole portable life— and I feel, for exactly three seconds, something like rescue.
Then I try to call Melissa.
No signal. I try to pull up the map. Greyed out.
Messages— I can open the app, but the send button doesn’t function.
I scroll through what remains: a weather app that still loads.
A flashlight. An app that makes your phone sound like a lightsaber, which I downloaded as a joke two years ago and never deleted because I am who I am.
A meditation app I have opened exactly once. The camera.
Alana has left me the camera.
I hold the phone. I hold all its warm uselessness. “You stripped it,” I say.
Alana pats me on the back. “Like you said, Billie: I don’t trust anyone with everything. Now, let’s get you some new clothes. You can’t negotiate looking like that.”
“Where are we—” I start to ask, but Alana cuts me off.
“We’re going shopping.”
I hate looking for clothes, but then I remember that Rodrigo is somewhere in this city, and that he might— somehow, by some miracle— see me. The thought of running into him covered in hay makes me so embarrassed that I follow Alana out of the barn, and toward whatever danger lies ahead.