I drop the paper—the part of Daniel’s face that’s been sliced away—and shudder as it hits the seat. Sticky, sun-warmed blood slides across my right palm, and I have to fight a scream as I back from the car. Holding my bloody hand close to my side, I force a smile. I know it’s strained, but I’m just trying not to shake.
“You all right, ma’am?” the security guard asks, coming close.
“Of course, why?” My voice is a stranger’s, but then this man is a stranger too, so he has no way of knowing that.
He pauses at a professional distance, a few feet away, and tilts his head. “It’s just that you looked worried inside the casino, like you were trying to catch my eye. Is someone bothering you?”
“Bothering . . .” My laugh trills, threatens to turn manic, and I throttle it and carefully school my face again. “No. I’m fine.”
Squinting, he purses his lips. I shoot a glance around the lot and tuck a lock of hair behind my ear. What security guard follows a woman into a parking lot? It’s never happened to me before, not in all my years in Vegas, and it makes me wonder. Is this some sort of test?
“Traveling alone?” he asks, leaning to peer around me.
I angle my body, trying to make it appear as if I’m giving the guard a clear view of the car’s interior, but I also slide the door shut to block the slivered eyebrow, the blood on the driver’s seat. The tinted windows help. I step closer to the guard like I have nothing to hide, and keep my bloody hand behind me.
What can I tell him? That I’m from Las Vegas and I’ve driven forty miles to ride a roller coaster? No. What twenty-seven-year-old woman goes on amusement rides all by herself ?
Besides, I’ve heard it’s best to keep as close to the truth as possible when weaving a lie.
“I’m headed to Lake Arrowhead,” I tell him, both answering the question and not. “Fourth of July party.”
I don’t say with whom. I don’t want him to ask about my fiancé.
“The mountains,” the guard says lightly, straightening as he nods. “Get out of the heat for a bit.”
Sweat stains his dark blue uniform, and his eyes are narrowed against the sun, which seems to be throwing its rays directly at us in the day’s last-ditch assault. The light will soon disappear over the western horizon, but for now the guard has to squint past the glare, and my body, to try and see inside the car. Have I dropped Daniel’s brow close enough to the door to keep it from sight?
Is blood dripping from my hand to the asphalt?
“Well, be careful,” he finally says. “It’s sure not the most interesting drive. People tend to get bored and stop paying attention to what they’re doing. They’ll text or talk on the phone—”
“I hate that,” I say, trying to hurry him along.
He stills again. “Yeah, well . . . as long as you’re okay.”
Last chance, I suddenly realize. This conversation will come back to haunt me if I say nothing now and try to go to the police later. Surveillance tapes will show I knew that Daniel was already missing at the time I stood in this lot, with this guard, and they’ll prove that I lied to someone with the authority to help. They might even show that I had one bloody hand hidden behind my back while amusement ride screams corkscrewed in the air.
“I’m great,” I say.
The guard studies me a moment more, but finally shrugs. I tried, right? Then he holds out his right hand to shake. He notices my hesitation and his chubby lips part in question, but before his eyes can narrow again, I reach for his forearm with my left instead and give it a heartfelt squeeze.
“You’re so sweet. Thank you so much for coming all the way out into this burning parking lot to check on me.” Maybe the reminder of the heat will send him scurrying back inside.
He gives me a more open smile, rocks back on his heels. “No problem, it’s my job.”
“You have a great day,” I tell him.
“You too,” he replies, but still doesn’t leave. He’s going to watch me climb into my car. He’ll see my hand. He’ll see the slivered cross section of my fiancé’s face.
A twenties jazz tune bleats through the parking lot. I feel Daniel’s phone buzzing in my pocket, and the guard’s gaze falls there as well. “Gotta take this,” I say, half-turning, but I have to cross over my body to pull out the phone with my left hand.
The guard just stands there, forcing me to turn my back fully, and I’m unable to see where his gaze wanders. I can’t risk leaving a crimson handprint on the glossy white door, so I have no choice but to switch Daniel’s phone into the hand stained with his blood. Meanwhile, the guard must be wondering why I don’t answer.
I glance back as I pull the door wide and catch the way his gaze slides to the car’s dark interior. Shoving the butcher paper into the footwell in one smooth motion, I then straddle it with my feet. There’s nothing I can do about the blood drops staining the seat, and I imagine them soaking into my light linen shorts as I settle in, a crimson arc stamped there in the shape of Daniel’s shorn eyebrow.
I sigh audibly after pulling the door shut, but the guard still doesn’t turn away. I’m forced to put my bloody hand to my cheek, tuck my head low, and answer the phone.
Malthus’s chuckle burrows into my ear like a metallic worm. “Ready to go for another ride?”
No one would blame you.
My head shoots up, and only belatedly do I realize that the movement is too abrupt, and that my eyes are too wide. Fortunately, the guard has already turned and is ambling back to the casino.
“I said, start driving, Kristine.”
Did he? I can’t remember, or I didn’t hear, but I tuck the phone between shoulder and ear, recalling the blood a second too late. Breathe, I tell myself, fumbling the keys into the ignition. I can feel my heart throbbing in my palms, and my mouth is tacky, as dry as the desert surrounding me.
“Follow the guard.” The strange instructions throw me off just enough to have me acting without question, and I head up the same aisle as the guard, back toward the casino.
“Closer.”
“What?” The word snaps from my mouth, cracking like a whip in the otherwise still car.
“Drive faster.”
I do, but just a little. I don’t want to alarm the guard. He’s only been trying to help.
The mechanical voice lowers a degree. “Maybe if I send you another sliver from your fiancé’s face, you’ll actually do what I say.”
I speed up. The guard hears the motor revving and turns. His face goes quizzical when he sees it’s me, and he gives a little wave before angling to the side of the row so that I can pass.
“Good,” says Malthus, his robotic voice buzzing in my ear. “Now run him down.”
I slam the brakes so hard my chest hits the steering wheel. The butcher paper slides forward. The phone falls from my ear. I leave it on the floor and press the BMW’s speaker function so I can keep my hands on the wheel, yet I regret it immediately. The man’s voice isn’t just piped into one ear anymore. It’s penned in the cabin of what is now a steel and glass cage, and the sound folds around me like a straitjacket.
“Krist-i-ine . . .” he calls, taunting me. “You’d better do what I say and chase that man down. You don’t want to see what I cut off next.”
My gaze falls on the butcher paper at my feet. Daniel’s face in my mind, I press the accelerator.
The guard saw my car slam to a halt and stopped at the same time I did. He’s bent at the waist as he watches me, and this time one hand is inching toward the radio at his belt. Run, I think, and angle the car his way. The casino’s sidewalk is only twenty yards. All he has to do is reach the end of the row and bolt across the perpendicular street, and he’ll be safe.
Safe from me.
I grip the wheel with both hands and rev the engine in warning, pumping the accelerator to try to scare him into a jog. It
works. His mouth falls open, and he finally whirls.
“Drive!” The word thunders through the car like a bomb.
Drive now. Drive or you will be driven.
The BMW shoots forward, straight at the guard, and I think, Please run.
But he’ll never make it. He’s already slowing, lumbering side to side, too large and unused to being chased. He reaches for the gun at his belt, but fumbles it and it skids across the burning blacktop. Moments later, it disappears beneath my wheels.
“Faster,” Malthus orders. “Bump the back of his knees.”
I lift my foot instead. The guard is close, and he can make it. There’s only ten more feet until the aisle ends.
Daniel’s scream rips through the speakers.
I punch the gas, the muscles knotting in my thigh, wheels screeching against the burning asphalt. The cry immediately breaks off, while the guard flees, arms pumping like pistons. Yet he can’t run fifteen miles an hour or twenty or twenty-five. And I am closing in.
Suddenly, he dodges. Swerving between the cars on the left side of the aisle, he escapes me, and I fight not to cheer. I’ll crash into a Toyota and an SUV if I try to follow and have to punch the brakes just to keep from sliding into the cross street.
Hearing my tires screech over the asphalt, the guard half-turns as he continues to flee. Panting visibly, sweat pours down his face as he locks eyes with me one last time.
I scream.
But he never even sees the van that crushes him from behind.
My cry scissors the air, sawing in tandem with the van’s unnatural jolt as it levers over the guard’s body. The vehicle rockets past before I even think to look at the driver, and my foot loosens on the brake so that my car inches forward. I know, yet I still need to see, that the guard was really hit.
He’s laid flat, prone in the street, a puddle of blood already widening around his skull. A scream ratchets the air, audible even from the car, and for a moment I think it’s another of mine. Then a woman half-trips from the curb, followed by a man, and suddenly the guard is disappearing behind a wall of people, bending, kneeling, all trying to help.
I might not know what to do when my fiancé is kidnapped in the middle of nowhere, but I know exactly what to do in a triage situation, and I throw the gear into park.
“Kristine?”
The flat, mechanized voice is a sharp contrast to the screams and squealing tires still floating in the air.
“Kristine. Are you there?”
My hand is on the door, yet for the first time in years, I hesitate in the face of an emergency.
“I think you’d better get out of there. Someone will have seen you stalking that man. Someone will realize that the driver of the BMW and the driver of the white van may have been working together.”
My head jerks as if pulled on a string. “W-we weren’t.”
“Oh, but the security cameras will show otherwise.” The words remain even, but there’s laughter there too. I hear it when his words go sibilant, an amused hiss. “After all, you lured him outside—”
“What?” I blink. “No, I—”
“You drove him into my path—”
“No!”
“You killed that man, Kristine.”
Blood roars in my ears. It stains my palms. It congeals at my feet.
Did I?
Just then, another security guard sprints from the casino, hand to mouth, yelling into his radio. Catching sight of someone with authority, the woman who was first on the scene rises and, as if in slow motion, points in my direction.
I jerk on the gearshift, and my tires screech as I speed off in the same direction as the van. If I am stopped now, they won’t just question my strange behavior toward the guard, they’ll find out who I am, and that Daniel has gone missing.
And who is the last person to have seen him as well?
Who will be on the phone records as having talked to him last?
Who has assured his mother that everything is okay but is now driving a car decorated with his blood?
I fly out of the sprawling lot, racing yet barely keeping up. I can’t help but stare in my rearview mirror. That poor man. I feel the same way as I do when a patient codes, the consolation of knowing there’s nothing more I can do melding with queasy guilt because the last thing I should feel is consoled. Worse, this is a direct hit. I attracted the guard’s attention, and in doing so, threw him directly into the path of that van.
Oh God. I killed that man.
The feeling that wells in my chest is concussive. I jerk with it as I remember the cries of another doomed man.
“Good girl,” the voice says when I blow through a stop sign. “You’re learning. Now head back to the I-15, but pull over before the north ramp. Don’t you fucking dare get on that freeway.”
I blink against the order and the sweat now finding its way into my eyes. I try to focus on the road ahead of me, but shock has my mind going in reverse, replaying the way the guard’s eyes widened on mine and pausing on the word that didn’t register then.
It screams in memory now.
Please.
The whimper escapes me as I ease to a halt just before the four-way stop that sits between me and the northbound on-ramp. I’m grateful for the reprieve—it’s a chance to catch my breath—but these instructions don’t make sense. This is the road leading back to Las Vegas. Why would Malthus make me drive all the way out to the state line just to have me turn back again? Why not send me back to Vegas directly after abducting Daniel from the rest stop?
Why kill an innocent man?
Please.
Malthus’s voice pokes at me, too soon. “What’s the matter? Are you crying, Kristine? Boo hoo hoo?”
“No,” I whisper.
I don’t tell him that I never cry. This man would see it as a challenge.
“Good. Pick up the map.”
I glance over at the passenger’s seat, blinking. I’d forgotten about the map. It’d become inconsequential, innocuous, as soon as I saw the carving of Daniel’s face. I fumble it twice and finally manage to prop it between steering wheel and thighs.
“Five stops, Kristine. All on I-15, all well in front of your Lake Arrowhead destination, and lucky you, the Desperado was the first. Only four more to go. Make it to the fifth within twenty-four hours, and you’ll see Daniel again in just about one piece.”
A game. All I can think as the roar builds in my ears is that he wasn’t just ready for this trip—he’s been planning it for ten long months.
Another thought slaps me: Lake Arrowhead is less than three hours from here by car.
So why so much time?
“You’ll stop only where I’ve indicated. And you’ll speak of this to no one. Otherwise, you can count on someone getting hurt.”
Someone already had.
“I don’t know if you can tell, but I’ve done this before.”
“And if I play this game,” I finally ask, swallowing hard. “If I make it out of the desert, you’ll let Daniel go?”
“If you make it out of this desert . . . all will be well.”
That’s no answer, and we both know it. His words are too cryptic to mean what I hope, but what choice do I have?
He reads my mind. “Of course, you can always go home.”
My gaze whips to the northbound on-ramp. I can’t help it. Home, like I wished. Home with Abby. Home, where I wanted to be all along.
“No one would blame you,” Malthus is saying. “And you could go back to sleep. Back to surrounding yourself with all your things, piling them up high so that they bury today’s events, numb you to what you did. You’ll be able to forget all about it. But . . . ”
But.
“You’ll have to forget him too.”
Daniel, with his unending patience, brilliant mind, clever hands,
and kind nature. Daniel, with his lopsided smile, throaty laugh, sweetly curved cock, wide feet, and warm cocooning flesh. Daniel, who lined up the labels in his medicine cabinet, yet forgot coffee cups in every room.
Daniel gone, and I would have to forget him too.
I close my eyes.
“Maybe you need a little help to decide.”
“No!” I jerk upright, spine cracking as I listen for Daniel’s scream.
But it’s Malthus’s tinny voice that crawls into the car again. It takes me two whole breaths to realize he’s no longer speaking to me. “Yes, hi, I’d like to report a suspicious vehicle.”
My gaze darts to my rearview mirror.
“It’s a white BMW parked on the side of the road just beyond your property,” he goes on, and even though his voice still sounds mechanized to me, I know now that he has two phones, and the masking device is attached only to mine.
“No, I can’t make out who’s inside,” he says, “but there seems to be blood on the front grill. And a big dent.”
The lie cuts through my sense of disbelief and I jerk the car into gear.
“Oh, really? He could be dangerous?” My tormentor inhales, the sound sizzling in the car. I catch a break in the oncoming traffic and swing out onto the asphalt. “No. No, I won’t go any closer. Of course. You’re welcome. Hope you catch them.”
I pull even with the stop sign.
“You better hurry,” Malthus tells me. “They’re coming.”
It’s a four-way stop, and the driver to my left waves me through. I ease my foot off the brake, inching forward, then panic and jerk to a halt. A horn blares behind me. The cars are stacking up, but if I move even five feet forward, the Las Vegas exit will be lost to me. Shaking his head, the other driver shoots me the finger and lead-foots it through the light. I just stare at the road in front of me, so bright in the afternoon sun that it blinds me.
“C’mon, Kristine. Don’t choke now. Not if you want to see him again.”
I need more time.
Yellow-white strobes flash into view in the rearview mirror. A white security truck is four cars and five hundred feet behind me. I bite my lip and taste blood.
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