Miles lets out a loud “Ba ba ba,” and she glances at him in the mirror. He babbles a lot now, and it’s startling how quickly it has happened, as if he’s discovered his voice can be used for something other than screaming.
Skipper stops what he’s doing, leans over so he’s in front of Miles, and says, “Ball”; then he holds up the baseball they bought at Walmart. “Ball,” he repeats. Miles’s face lights up, and he reaches for the white sphere. “Ball, say ball,” Skipper encourages.
Skipper is determined to make Miles’s first word ball, and he’s been working on it all day, repeating it to him with such frequency Grace is fairly certain he will get his way. Hadley, on the other hand, is just as determined to make his first word mama, and she mouths it to Miles every time Grace holds him. “Mama. That’s your mama. Say mama.” Grace pretends she doesn’t care, but secretly she does.
All of this makes her think of Jimmy—she’s desperate to call him and tell him about all the new developments—and each time, she needs to remind herself what he did that’s made that impossible. Over and over she tells herself, Stop thinking about him, but it does no good. Ever since she walked in on Hadley and the agent in the archaeological trailer, he has taken up permanent residence in her brain and refuses to leave.
They roll into the downtown, and Grace reduces the speed to the posted thirty-five miles per hour, a creeping crawl through the deserted ski village. They are nearly through when blue and red lights fill her rearview mirror.
“Hadley,” she says, the name coming out a croak.
Hadley looks over, notices the light show reflecting off the windshield, glances over her shoulder, and says, “Oh crap. Were you speeding?”
“No. Not even a little.”
Without hesitation, Hadley says, “I’ve got this,” and before Grace can answer, Hadley is climbing from the truck with her crutches.
Grace watches in her mirror as Hadley hops toward the police car. The officer is still in his seat and talking on his radio. When he notices Hadley, he steps from his car and, standing behind the door, says something Grace can’t hear. She rolls down her window.
“Ma’am, I need you to get back in your vehicle,” he repeats.
“Grace, are you and my mom going to be arrested?” Mattie says, her voice tight.
Grace shakes her head, her foot hovering over the accelerator as thoughts of flooring it and leaving Hadley behind spiral through her mind. Her next thought is to throw the truck in reverse and ram it into the cruiser, hopefully disabling it. But Hadley is in the way. Move, she encourages, the idea glowing bright.
She also thinks of the gun, Frank’s revolver a foot away, in the front pouch of the backpack. She thinks of anything that will stop what is happening from happening, from her being arrested and hauled off to jail, where she will await trial for multiple federal offenses, including firing at a federal officer, stealing his car, and kidnapping him. All of which will put her away for the rest of her natural life.
Miles gurgles, “Geggggg,” and her eyes snap to him in the mirror, her mind whirling with panic, and she reaches into the backpack and slides the gun onto her lap.
“What are you doing?” Mattie hisses.
Grace moves it beneath her sweatshirt and ignores the question, her eyes on Hadley, watching as she continues toward the officer.
“Ma’am, you need to return to your vehicle,” he says firmly.
Hadley tilts her head as if she doesn’t understand, then says, “Oui, the ve-heck-el, that is car, no?” her French accent very thick and very fake.
The policeman, a bald middle-aged man with a thick mustache and wide face, cracks a smile and steps from behind his door. “Yes, ma’am, the vehicle is the car.”
Hadley hops backward until she is against the tailgate of the truck. “Now you frisk me?” she says, causing Grace’s eyes to bulge from her skull.
“Are you kidding me?” Mattie says, clearly as unimpressed as Grace.
Not only is the act entirely unconvincing, it is also ridiculous. Who, French or not, asks a cop if they are going to frisk them?
Grace’s foot returns to hovering over the accelerator, ready to peel away, certain the officer is going to pull his gun and demand to know what drugs Hadley is on.
“No, no, no,” the officer says, his hands waving in front of him and his smile now spread cheek to cheek across his face.
“No?” Hadley says. “You not do that here? This my first time pushed over.”
“Pulled over,” he corrects.
Hadley tilts her head, and Grace cannot see her expression, but she imagines it—her catlike eyes wide and her brows askew as she looks up innocently through them.
“I am pulling you over, not pushing you over,” he explains.
“You not say this a pushover?”
Mattie and Grace guffaw together. “Really?” Mattie says.
Miles answers, “Aa, aa, aa, aa.”
Skipper, seemingly as immune to the stress around him as Miles is, holds the ball out and says, “Ball. Say ball.”
“Champ, not now,” Mattie says.
Obediently, Skipper hands the ball to Miles, and Miles laughs with delight and puts it in his mouth, then drops it, and Skipper hands it back to him.
Grace returns her attention to the mirror. The officer is now a foot from Hadley, his posture relaxed, his large belly jiggling in amusement over something else Hadley has said.
“So why you push . . . I mean pull me over? My friend drive too slow? She drive like old lady. My ninety-year-old aunt drive faster. How you say, nervous ninny? She nervous ninny.”
Annoyance bristles through Grace’s fear.
“‘Nervous Nellie,’” the officer says. “But no, that’s not why I pulled you over. Broken taillight.” He points to the left-rear bumper.
Hadley hops to stand beside him, slightly closer than necessary, her head tilting as she looks at the offending light. “You give me ticket for that?”
“Technically, I give your friend a ticket, since she’s the one driving.”
“But it not her truck. It my brother’s truck.”
“But the way it works is she gets the ticket; then she needs to give it to your brother, and he needs to make sure he gets it fixed. It doesn’t cost any money. It’s what’s known as a fix-it ticket.” He explains it very deliberately, as if he is a professor teaching a particularly slow student.
Hadley shakes her head, and her face grows serious. “No,” she says. “You cannot give ticket to give my brother.” Her voice trembles, full of fear. “You give me ticket. Give me ticket for speeding or whatever. I not care. But you not give ticket to give my brother. He kill me.”
Grace has almost forgotten Hadley is acting, her emotions caught up in this poor immigrant woman’s plight of getting a ticket she will need to give her ogre of a brother.
“Hey, settle down. You’re okay,” the officer says, and Grace realizes Hadley might actually have turned on the waterworks.
Hadley’s head continues to shake, and she is trembling, her whole body quaking as she says, “Not okay. You not know my brother.”
The officer sighs, and Grace nearly cheers, knowing what is coming. “Tell you what,” he says. “How about I let this one slide?”
Grace does a small fist pump as Hadley looks up at the officer through her brow with an expression that’s a cross between seduction and worship. “You do that? You not push over?”
“Yeah, I do that. I not push you over,” he says with a self-congratulatory grin. Then with the tip of an imaginary hat to Grace, he returns to his cruiser, his shoulders pulled back heroically.
As he drives past, he waves, and Grace manages to lift her hand to wave back.
Hadley climbs in, a cat-ate-the-canary grin on her face as she wipes the wetness from her cheeks. “Eight for nine,” she says, raising her hand for Grace to high-five.
Grace leaves the hand hanging there, her heart clattering in her chest.
Mattie says, “Eight
for nine what?” as she reaches over to slap her mom’s hand.
Hadley says proudly, “Your mom has been pulled over nine times, and the only time I got a ticket was when I tried to hit on a woman cop, and she really didn’t appreciate it.”
Grace is irrationally upset, her blood pumping with residual panic and inexplicable anger. She should be overjoyed with Hadley’s perverse talent for flirting, acting, and concocting convincing fiction on the spot, but instead her vision is red and her knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Great lesson you’re teaching your daughter,” she snarls.
Hadley looks at her, her head cocked to the side. “What’s your problem?”
“What’s next—you going to teach her how to lap dance her way to a free drink? Or maybe you should just move on to the ultimate lesson and teach her how to marry for money?”
Hadley blinks, and Grace turns from her, throws the truck in gear, and pulls onto the road.
“Seriously,” Hadley says, “what’s your problem?”
Grace looks at Mattie again, her skin on fire, uncertain what her problem is, only certain of her rage. Finally, she spits, “It’s not right,” the only words she can think of to describe what she is feeling. “Sex is not a bargaining tool, or at least it shouldn’t be. And for most of us, eight out of nine times it doesn’t work out. You hear that, Mattie? Unless you look like your mom and master the art of rendering men stupid by sticking your boobs in their face—”
“I did not stick my boobs in his face.”
“You kind of did, Mom,” Mattie says.
Hadley harrumphs, her arms folded over the aforementioned boobs. “I stopped us from being arrested is what I did.”
Grace yanks the wheel to steer the truck onto the shoulder and barely gets the door open in time to hurl her dinner onto the street. The gun tumbles to the ground beside the retch, and she stares at it, her breath coming in gulps and gasps.
Hadley is beside her. She holds Grace’s hair from her face as Grace spits the vile taste from her mouth.
Mattie steps from the car and holds out a bottle of water.
“Get her a wipe,” Hadley says, her voice full of concern as she rubs Grace’s back.
Grace’s eyes fill. Too much, she thinks. Between yesterday and today and what just almost happened, it’s too much. She squeezes her eyes shut and sucks air through her nose.
“No more flirting my way out of tickets. Very upsetting to Grace. Note taken,” Hadley says, and Grace manages a weak smile, then bends down to pick up the gun.
“You were going to shoot him?” Hadley says; then, reverting to her fake French accent, she adds, “Perhaps flirting work better, no?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Grace says, and she hoists herself back in the truck. And as they continue on, she imagines herself standing in front of a judge with Hadley beside her—the judge smiling down at Hadley as he dismisses all the charges against her, then his gavel coming down hard as he sentences Grace to life.
38
MARK
It’s cold now, seriously cold. The wind rattles through the window, along with other night noises. The sun went down an hour ago, and the wind picked up, sending creaks and howls and whipping dirt and sage against the trailer. Mark is too far from the heater to turn it on and, humiliatingly, too far from the bathroom to use the toilet. Herrick left him a bucket, and the stench of his waste beside him makes his stomach curl. He survived worse in the marines, but that was a long time ago, when he was a lot younger, dumber, and tougher.
The fingers on his left hand are raw from sawing at the zip ties for the past six hours with the edge of the zipper pull of the sleeping bag, which he’s repeatedly sharpened by filing it on the edge of the desk.
He has managed to cut through two of the three links Herrick tethered to his wrist, the only part of the chain not braided into an impossible rope. But now the tab is ground to a nub and barely makes any headway against the thick plastic.
As he works, his mind wanders, not able to get her out of his thoughts—her scent, her touch, her laughter—mostly her laughter, so much of it, the two of them giggling like schoolkids. He shakes his head to clear it all away, unable to believe he did what he did. Twenty years with the agency, and he’s never even come close to crossing that line.
What possessed him?
She did. She possessed him with those catlike eyes, those lips, those hands, and those breasts—silk flesh flowing from the white satin of her bra. His skin prickles with the memory, and he shakes his head against it and presses the heels of his hands to his sockets to blot it away.
When he blinks his eyes open, he returns to his task, sawing frantically, his frustration at critical mass. The blade slips and slices the skin above his wrist, creating a fresh wound around the dozen that already exist. He drops the tab and presses the cloth of the sleeping bag against it, then leans his head back against the wall. Damn her. She knew exactly what she was doing, that mischievous grin on her face as she hopped toward him. Then she kissed him, and he wanted to say no; he tried.
But hell, he’s human, male human.
He squeezes his eyes shut, wishing he could stop thinking about it.
His mind screamed in a million different directions—worry, alarm, elation, desperation—all of him ready to explode. Then they were laughing again, her giggles running over him and making him believe it was all in good fun.
He was self-conscious and distracted, worried about her ankle, then wishing he had a blanket to put down beneath her, or better yet, a bed. Alcohol to ease the awkwardness. Air-conditioning so he wouldn’t be so aware of his smell.
All this spiraled through his head when her fingers closed around him, and then he was no longer thinking at all, his thoughts obliterated as she did things to him that had not been done in such a very long time.
His skin flames with the recollection—he’s stunned and mortified, unable to believe he allowed it to happen, unable to believe it happened at all. Terrible and astounding.
He looks down at the cut. The trickle of blood has stopped. He picks up the blade and returns to the task, sawing and trying not to slit himself again.
Women, they make men stupid. She slept with him, messed with his head, then left him tied to a desk with a bucket for a toilet. And women are considered the fairer sex.
He’s going to have a serious talk with Ben when he gets home. The kid’s only nine, but it’s never too early to learn how dangerous women can be, about the power they wield over men, how they can drive you insane and how ruthless they can be after, leaving you bewildered and broken down . . . chained to a damn desk. He won’t leave that part out, the part about how ruthless they are. Ben needs to know so he will be prepared.
He switches the grip so he’s holding the makeshift blade between his thumb and middle finger instead of his forefinger, which is now bloody and raw.
He was worried about crushing her, his arms trembling as he held himself above her, his focus split between his struggling muscles and trying to make it last, immediately wanting a redo when they were done, a chance to prove he could do better—a bed, liquor, not so much retention . . . his hands not bound together by his tie.
The blade slips again, barely missing his vein, and he squeezes his eyes shut and takes a deep breath.
The after was as amazing as the sex, maybe even more so, her head on his shoulder as she ran her nails over his chest. He was staring at the ceiling. One of the fluorescent bulbs flickered, adding to the strange surrealism of the moment. He told her about his life, and she talked about hers.
I believed in love. In marriage. We were a family, and . . . I don’t know, I guess I just sort of believed in the idea that you stick it out—you know, through thick and thin—and that love is permanent, flaws and all. How those words pierced him. It’s exactly how he felt . . . feels. It’s why he would have stayed with Marcia forever, simply out of his staunch conviction that that’s what love is.
He couldn’t hold her the way he
wanted, but he managed to wrap her fingers in his, his desire to help her building with each second that passed until he felt like he was going to go mad. He tried to talk sense to her, but she wouldn’t listen, shushed him each time he started.
Damn woman. He’s going to tell Ben that part also, about women not listening and not using one damn bit of common sense, how they think with their hearts instead of their heads. How does she think this is going to end? With her and Herrick riding off into the sunset with Frank’s ill-gotten millions?
Frustrated, he yanks hard on the zip tie, and it snaps.
39
GRACE
They are staying at a motel on the outskirts of Lake Tahoe. Grace’s exhaustion weighs on her like a heavy cloak, every fiber down to her fingernails done in from the day.
She gave Miles a bath, fed him and changed him, then collapsed beside him. But tired as she is, she cannot fall asleep. Each time she closes her eyes, Jimmy weaves in and out of her restless thoughts. Part of it is the changes Miles is going through and how much she wants to share them with him, knowing how much he would want to hear about it, asking her to tell him again and again and mining for details, begging her to send pictures and videos so he could brag to his buddies.
She looks at Miles sprawled on the bed, his hands above his head like a champion and his mouth hanging open, and she smiles, marveling as she always does in these moments when they are alone, stunned that she’s created something so incredibly beautiful and perfect.
Part of it is what happened between Hadley and the agent. All day Hadley has been smirking, silently reveling in a dreamy state of postcoital bliss that has caused a physical ache in Grace so intense it hurts. And now, lying here, staring at the ceiling, the feeling has grown particularly acute, making it impossible to sleep.
Jimmy has always been a snuggler—a wedger, a warmth snatcher. And when they sleep together, he is always touching her in some way, his foot tucked between her calves, his arm draped across her shoulder, his fingers entwined with hers.
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