Chapter 3
TIRES SCREECH IN THE PARKING lot like horned owls flying out of hell. As Dez’s dented Nissan Sentra peels out of the lot, she realizes the gunman’s leaving in her car, with her brother.
Dez runs.
“Stop!” she shouts, chasing the car, running harder, faster than she ever has before. She doesn’t feel her body—no burning lungs, no straining muscles. She’s only aware of what she’s done to her brother. How she needs to make it right.
She sprints to where the street T’s, then barrels onto the county road.
She runs fifty manic paces before the total stillness, the utter quiet of the road slams into her.
She doesn’t understand. It’s been less than two minutes since she watched her stolen car turn right.
There are no intersections for miles. But she sees no taillights, no sign of her car.
Nothing but empty road.
She spins around. Nothing behind her either. They’re gone. Her brother is gone.
Dez throws her head back and screams until she can’t scream anymore. Then she folds, dropping her head between her knees. She is indescribably exhausted. She wishes she could collapse, right here on the road, and sleep for a thousand years.
She thinks of her mother, who’s working until ten at the nursing home.
Dez needs to call her but feels paralyzed.
Mom leaves her phone in her locker, so they’ll have to page her, which will make her panic, hurrying down so many long hallways to pick up the front desk phone.
And Dez knows her mother will have tried to convince herself that the news won’t be as bad as she fears.
And then, if Dez can speak at all, she will have to tell her mom what happened, what she did.
And in fact, for once, the truth will be so much worse than her mother’s anxious mind could have invented.
That Dez burned Mo to the edge of death, and now she doesn’t even know where he is.
“Are you okay?”
The voice comes from nowhere, like the night itself is asking. When Dez spins to face a man in a black leather jacket, sitting atop a motorcycle, she jumps back in shock.
“Where did you come from?” Dez asks.
“That’s a long story,” he says.
“There’s a car up there.” She points. “I need to catch it.”
“Somebody do you wrong?” The rider seems to be studying her face, though it’s too dark to be sure. “Or did you do somebody wrong?”
His cool amusement makes Dez want to bend him in half, then steal his bike, but he’s sitting just out of reach, and she doesn’t know how to drive a motorcycle.
“My brother’s hurt.” Dez’s words feel sharp as knives.
The rider tips his head toward the bike’s rear seat. “Hop on.”
By now her eyes have adjusted to the semidarkness of the motorcycle’s headlight.
The guy looks a few years older than her, maybe.
Still on the slick side of thirty. In the face of what she’s going through, what she just did to Mo, in the face of the revolting eyeball in her pocket—Dez finds herself offended by his radiant olive skin, his perfect shave on his model’s angular jaw.
Those cheekbones. Cobalt-blue eyes only a half shade darker than her own.
Dark brown hair the definition of bedhead.
Then he smiles, and yeah, of course, he’s been to some primo orthodontist.
Fuck this guy.
But also? The longer she looks, the more she begins to wonder. Have they met before? He seems familiar to her in some essential way. She doesn’t know him, but she’s seen him somewhere.
She stares into his eyes, trying to puzzle it out. For a while, so many bad things were happening so quickly, she couldn’t keep up. Now it feels like time has slowed. She can almost swear she’s looked into this man’s eyes, just like this, before.
But where? When? How? The memory itches the edge of her mind.
The rider holds out a napkin to her. “Dry your eyes. I’ll give you a lift.”
Dez takes the napkin, wipes her face. His smug calm grates on her. And what’s with his jacket? It looks beyond vintage, like it was made before motorcycles were invented. Cast-iron skulls stare out from the jacket’s lapels.
She knows the style of this stranger’s jacket is a highly useless thing to think about when every second her brother grows farther away. But it won’t help if she gets herself murdered on the way to find Mo, and so far, she can’t get a beat on this guy.
On his bike’s black shovelhead gas tank, the chrome word Acheron glows in the moonlight.
Under normal circumstances, Dez would never consider catching a ride on the back of some stranger’s motorcycle. But it seems likely no circumstance will ever be normal again.
“Where have I seen you before?” she asks.
“A dream?”
A police scanner crackles to life on the bike’s instrument panel.
“Got an eleven-eighty-three on County Road 89, mile marker forty-two … red Nissan Sentra … crashed into a ditch.”
“That’s my brother,” Dez says. “Are you a cop?”
She can’t immediately tell if this would be good or bad. It would help her get to Mo, but it would also require confronting her recent actions. And the trouble she’ll be in.
“Furthest thing from it,” the rider says. “Lucky for you, apparently.”
Dez scowls. “Then why do you have a police scanner?”
“You know the saying—check in every now and then on your friends. But never take your eyes off your enemies.”
Sirens sound in the distance.
They’re coming.
“You got yourself in a real mess this time, didn’t you, Dez?” the rider asks.
Dez feels her mouth fall open. “How did you know my—”
“Look, I’m headed south. And I’m kind of in a hurry. I’m sure the cops can take you to your brother. Or …”
“Or?”
He leans toward her, and she sees a vast reservoir of confidence in his deep blue eyes. “Or I could take you very far away from all of this.”
Locked in his gaze, Dez feels a pull. Like she should climb atop this motorcycle and ride wherever this stranger points it. Like it might even be fun.
It’s insane. She breaks their gaze, turning her head in the direction her brother went. The trauma of tonight has rattled her. She needs to go toward Mo, not away with some five-alarm stranger. No matter what consequences she will have to face.
“I’ll take my chances,” she says, stepping away from the bike and its rider.
“Sorry to hear it,” he calls. “I was just getting the feeling we’re each other’s kind of trouble.”
“I doubt that.”
“It’s in our eyes,” he says. He holds her gaze for a moment before he glances skyward. “You and I come from up there.”
Before Dez can argue, he kicks the bike to roaring life, then accelerates past the approaching police car at a speed that takes Dez’s breath away. She watches the bike vanish like a dream you wake up from and can’t quite remember.
And the strangest part is, when the cops pull to a stop in front of her, it’s like they never even saw the bike go by.
“Ma’am, are you okay?”
As Dez stares at the two policemen suddenly in front of her, she realizes how unprepared she is to tell the cops the story in a way that won’t implicate her brother. In a way that won’t implicate herself. She needs time to think about how to spin it. Time she doesn’t have.
“What are you doing out here alone?” The cop behind the wheel looks at her, suspicious.
She inhales and tries to steady her voice. “There was a robbery at the Dairy Barn. I was working the closing shift. A guy in a black skull mask came in—”
“Did you call nine-one-one?” he asks.
“I— He had a gun. He took my brother. Stole my car—”
“Okay, okay,” says the cop in the passenger seat, an older man with softer eyes than his partner. “Slow down. Let’s back up.”
“They’re in a red Nissan Sentra,” Dez insists, and she sees the cops trade glances. “Please. My brother’s hurt. He needs to go to the hospital.”
“You’re saying the man with the gun shot your brother?”
“No,” she says. Her breath comes short as she chooses her words. “No. There was a fight. We … I … tried to stop him. And my brother—” She breaks off before she begins to sob.
“We have an ambulance headed for the Sentra,” the second policeman says. “If your brother’s there, he’ll receive medical assistance.” He’s good-copping her, she knows, but these are words she needs to hear.
“Thank you,” Dez says.
“Can you describe the gunman?” the first cop says.
Dez closes her eyes and tries to think. She shudders, remembering their confrontation, her hand around the man’s eye. It’s still in her apron. She slips a hand into the pocket, as if to cover the glowing radioactive evidence of her guilt. She’ll throw it away as soon as she’s alone.
“He … he was masked so I—” she stammers. “Maybe five-ten. Medium build. I never saw his face.”
“Not even his eyes?”
Dez swallows the bile rising in her throat. “They were black,” she makes herself say.
“So more or less any guy off the street?” says the cop behind the wheel. “Your typical forensic sketch?”
“What? No. I’m not making this up.”
“What was your brother doing at the restaurant at closing time?”
“He was helping me. So I could get out of there sooner.”
“That’s nice,” the second cop says.
“And about how much cash do you typically close with?” the first cop asks. “Before you split it in two?”
“It’s my uncle’s place. I wouldn’t do that.”
She hasn’t lied yet. She hasn’t said Mo wouldn’t do that. And she hasn’t made up the masked man. She’s trying to stay calm, but it’s been a rough night, and this cop is starting to piss her off.
“Why don’t you come with us?” the second cop says.
“I need to find my brother—”
“I don’t think you’re going to find him by walking down the county road in the dark,” the first cop says.
“You’re not in trouble,” the second cop says. “We’re going to go find your brother.”
“Maybe some more details will get clearer on the way,” his partner adds.
Dez knows these guys are out to get her, but she needs to find her brother. She’s spent, scared, out of options. This squad car is her only hope.
She thinks of the man on the motorcycle, wonders where he is by now. He hadn’t really said her name …
The second cop opens the back door of the police car. “Watch your head,” he says as Dez slides in.
“They went that way,” she says, pointing over her shoulder.
The squad car makes a wide, clumsy U-turn before Dez can fasten her seat belt. Her head slams against the window, and when she rubs the tender spot, she realizes she’s still holding the napkin the guy on the motorcycle gave her.
In the moonlight coming through the window, she notices something sketched in ink on the napkin’s front. Her stomach rises to her throat.
It’s a drawing of a woman’s face. An unmistakable portrait of Dez.