Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  My parents laugh at me from their graves.

  Daniel suddenly sighs beside me before a hand, familiar in its gentleness, alights on my leg. The touch ignites my road burn, and pain sweeps through me, licking bone as he runs his hand up and down my shredded thigh. I cry out, eyes tearing up from the pain, and turn to find Daniel’s completely ignoring the road, attention fixed on me, something akin to pity softening his gaze.

  Something hungry too.

  “Look, I know it’s difficult,” he says gently. “But don’t worry. You won’t have to live with all your imperfections for too much longer.”

  He rubs some more, stealing my breath. I grit my teeth, even though it sends the lightning bolts at my temples into overdrive. I whimper but fight the urge to wail as he presses his thumbs into my ruined skin. I will not give him the reaction he’s seeking with that ravenous look, yet I can still only sit there, bound and writhing, and wait until he chooses to remove his touch.

  When he does, we are both panting hard.

  “Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?” he finally asks.

  I have to wait until I’ve caught my breath to answer.

  “Yes,” I say. My fists are clenched in my lap. I am no longer close to tears. “I really hate this fucking music.”

  Let’s review the incriminating evidence.

  No more talking. These are Daniel’s final words to me before he turns up the volume on Fats, and a whole hour sails by without communication as we rocket down the 15. That’s fine. This brief conversation with the monster I was going to marry just one day ago has turned my mind into unknowable terrain. Gaze drifting, I let it wander away.

  The desert is still a scribble of unpaved side roads and buff bramble, but we’re nearing Victorville, which sits tucked in a valley, an unlikely green dip that surprises me every time. After that, come the mountains.

  You can go crazy in an hour, even under the best of circumstances, and since this isn’t that—this isn’t even close to what I have imagined as the best of times with my fiancé—my mind is bursting. Bright flashes of realization keep going off behind my eyelids, same as the fireworks that’ll rupture the night sky tonight.

  Independence Day. What a joke.

  Meanwhile, my body aches from my many collisions with Daniel over the last day, and he’s bound my hands and feet so tightly that my skin bulges around the tape. My palms are red balloons, my fingertips numb and pulpy. I shift, but between the ties and the fire banked along my left leg, I can’t get comfortable.

  Daniel, though, is perfectly still. He’s so relaxed his eyes are even half-closed, lids shielding the ice in his gaze, though his jaw remains rigid. It’s so unnerving that I almost wish he’d start palming my raw, road-burned leg again. Anything to help me figure out what’s going on behind that placid facade. Anything to tell me what’s coming next.

  Because there is something more. As much pain as I’m in, I’m acutely aware that he hasn’t yet tried to crucify me or made any moves to disembowel me or run me down with a twenty-ton vehicle. We are no longer following his cryptic maps, yet I am certain this placidness means he has a firm destination fixed in mind. He’s saving me for that. He needs me for something that requires him to put his feelings for me—none of them positive, I now know—on ice.

  But that’s not the only thing keeping me alert.

  I know he’s an animal. That’s why I have this.

  Crystal’s gun.

  The memory of it in her palm flashes in neon through my brain, and I sneak a glance at Daniel, as if my thoughts alone could draw his attention. I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep my gaze from lifting to the hidden panel. Surely he’s inspected this truck.

  But the panel is a custom fit, and if he hasn’t found the weapon—and I haven’t seen any indication that he has—then it must still be there. Besides, Crystal would have used it on him if given the chance. I saw the look in her eyes when she spoke of her girls, and remembering it, I don’t even blame her for what she did to me. Who knows what he threatened to do to those children. I think of Abby, think of this Daniel even in the same room as her, breathing the same air, and it doesn’t just make me want to lunge for the gun—it makes me want to do grievous harm.

  Yet I realize in one of those searing flashes of clarity that if I shoot Daniel now, it’ll look as though I’ve done everything that he set in motion. And let’s review the incriminating evidence: the security cameras back at Buffalo Bill’s show me riding a roller coaster, carefree and fun, before chasing down a security guard and driving him to his death. Just down the interstate, in the next town over, is a waitress named Lacy who will be happy to tell her story to the first cable news crew to shine a camera her way. Lacy’s earrings will swing, winking in the flash of bulbs as she sadly shakes her head. Kristine Rush propositioned that man, and told him, verbatim: I’ll effing kill you if I can’t have you inside of me.

  Henry will then be found in a blood-soaked ambulance linked to my hospital.

  Crystal will be found in a closet, holding her most intimate organs.

  A motorcyclist, holding a stray dog with a broken jaw, will be linked to the bike found near a crushed patrol car and the bits of the officer who’d been driving it.

  Some of this has likely already happened. Some of it is yet to come. But all of it will be pinned on me.

  Maybe that’s why Daniel cruises on, silent and still, knowing there’s no way out for me, even if I were to escape this truck. I suppose I know it too, and I’m tired enough and hurt enough and shocked enough by my stupidity and my not-fiancé’s evilness to give up hope altogether . . . but for one thing.

  Abby.

  So, broken and burning, I bide my time while Daniel drives me toward some unknown impending doom. Fats Waller has been replaced by Ella, who warbles from the console between us: Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days. It seems that trouble’s going to follow me to my grave.

  Daniel sails through Victorville like it’s not even there. I’m not wearing shoes, and I’m still tied up, but I have to fight to keep from giving in to the despair that sweeps over me as I watch the small town recede in the rearview mirror. I tell myself it’s stupid to feel bad about losing options you never had. Still, I think Victorville was my best shot at freedom.

  Then, seven miles later, Daniel suddenly swerves, and my head jerks up. I search for signage along the rocky feeder road and in another twenty-five feet I see it: KOA. We roll past billboards touting showers and free Wi-Fi and right into the campground, kicking more dust atop a limp hedge of hack bush separating the parking lot from an empty playground clutching two swings and a torn teepee. I look over at Daniel, note the light press of his thumbs on the steering wheel, and know that—just like Buffalo Bill’s and the motel in Baker and the abandoned water park—he has been here before.

  Daniel edges the stunted semi around a cluster of campers, eyeing them icily from under the low brim of the cap he donned as he swung onto the off-ramp. At the far end of the compound is a concrete picnic table already baking in the morning sun, and he wedges the cab between it and the rest of the campground before killing the engine. Ella falls silent.

  The leather seat squeaks as Daniel turns to me and pulls out the knife he used to kill Crystal. “Kick me in the face and you know exactly where this blade is going.”

  Forget moving, I don’t even breathe. I’ve assisted Daniel in the OR. This is a hunter’s knife, but he is amazing with a blade of any kind.

  He rises, looming over me in the crowded space as he edges into the footwell where I sit, and then kneels before me. Placing his left hand atop my knee, he shifts on his haunches and begins working on the tape that binds my knees together first. His thumb slides along my inner thigh as it gives. The blade’s point leads the way as he works the tape, and his fingers widen on my thigh, massaging just above the crook of my knee. My muscles tense beneath his
touch, and for a moment his grip tightens. He makes a familiar noise deep in the back of his throat. I close my eyes because I know that sound. It means he’s hard.

  The tape gives with a jerk and the blade tip nicks my left calf. I hiss, jerking reflexively, and my knee barely misses Daniel’s nose. He glares up at me, but after a moment he frees my ankles, and then pushes back into the driver’s seat. He does not undo my hands.

  Turning, he lifts a cooler into his lap and deposits the knife inside. “If you yell for help, if you scream, if you call attention to yourself in any way at all—”

  “Yeah, I know.” I say before he can finish. I won’t make it twenty feet on this blistered earth without my shoes, and I’m certainly not going to cry out to the unsuspecting campers for help. Not after the security guard and Henry. Crystal. Besides, I want to sound compliant. I am still thinking of Crystal’s gun. “Okay, yes.”

  My ready agreement seems to satisfy Daniel, and he nods. “Good, I’m fairly sure we understand each other by now.”

  He points to the passenger’s side door, and crowds me so that I don’t even have a chance to reach up and test the panel. The gun will have to wait. Now my bare feet are hitting hot ground and I’m wincing at the stretch to my road burn, already crusting over. I’m stiff and sore enough not to have to exaggerate the moan that escapes me as I shuffle forward. Daniel sails past me to claim the small square of shade bestowed on the concrete bench from our truck’s shadow. No one else is in sight.

  Thighs burning, I tuck into the bench and draw my feet up beneath me as I squint past the morning sun to study Daniel. His cap is drawn low to hide his features, and his shoulders are tense and drawn back like a bow gone taut with arrow. It is a new stance to go with his new face, yet it fits him perfectly. He opens the cooler and begins to unpack: cheese and bread and grapes.

  “Were you planning on killing Henry all along?” I blurt as he lines up the food just inside that square of shade. Out come bottles of water beaded with ice. Apples, already sliced.

  “Who?” He does not pause in his unpacking. A cloth napkin. A reusable plate.

  “Henry,” I say slowly, and have to elaborate when he only flashes me a blank look. “The man you crucified back at that abandoned water park?”

  Daniel rolls his eyes, like I’m crazy to expect him to remember the names of everyone he has killed.

  I loved this man, I think, too stunned to even shake my head. This was the man I had loved. The other—the kind man with talented, healing hands—was like the heat haze on this godforsaken road. He was an illusion brought to life by the perfect conditions. He was a shimmering fantasy that only appeared tangible from a distance. He wasn’t real at all.

  “Hold on a minute,” the new Daniel—whom I do not love—says now. “I mean, you killed Henry. You lured him into the parking lot with that map. Same way you lured the guard to follow you from the casino.”

  “You can’t blame that on me.”

  “Nobody else was there,” he says, uncapping one of the icy bottles. Water drips down his wrist. He tilts it back, emptying it in almost one gulp, watching me the whole time. He knows exactly what dehydration is doing to my body, and that my mouth is made of cotton. He watches me like he can see the honed pulse at my temples. Small lightning bolts continue to batter my skull.

  “You were there.”

  “No,” Daniel wipes at his mouth. “I was in the motel.”

  “Where Henry was butchered.”

  “Where you so carelessly sent him to his death. The one now littered with your DNA. Geez, Kristine.” He pops a cold grape in his mouth. “Get your facts straight.”

  I try to swallow, but can’t manage it past the dryness of my throat. The sun is starting to burn on my shoulders and arms. My injured leg festers. Yes, that’s exactly what it’ll look like. Ten months of planning has given Daniel enough time to envision every scenario. He has my back pushed so far against the ropes he might as well be wearing gloves. But what I still can’t figure is . . .

  “Why?”

  “Why.” Daniel flares his eyes. “That’s such a boring question. I’ve always hated it. Sometimes there is no why. Sometimes ‘natural selection’ simply needs a little hand. A slight flick of the scalpel and, oops, that drunk driver did himself in. A microscopic slice to an artery and, damn, the suicide was successful. A sliver of something infectious pushed deep into the body, just because, and when you sew it all back up, nature takes its course.”

  I think back through all my assists, studying his past behavior through the clear lens of hindsight. It’s a mental blooper reel of everything I missed.

  But I don’t believe him. Daniel’s need to set me up didn’t spring from nowhere. This “treasure hunt” is an escalation. Something set him off.

  Come on, you were there. You should have seen.

  I mentally skim the last few weeks like a dragonfly over water, until something jumps out at me. His disappearance two weeks earlier. My eyes pop open. “The splenic laceration.”

  Daniel just smiles. He’s been waiting for me to put it together.

  “He had that comminuted femur fracture too, remember?” Daniel gives a short nod, head tilting just slightly. “His CT scan looked like blown glass.”

  “We didn’t lose him.” We’d fought for nine hours to repair the spleen and stop the bleeding in the femoral artery. We busted ass to save the guy. Or, at least, I had.

  “He was a big guy. But people often forget that, you know?” He frowns. “How fragile even the big ones are.”

  You were there. You should have seen.

  I was right there. I applied the C-spine collar while Daniel assessed the blood loss from the fracture.

  I should have seen.

  “I didn’t plan it,” he says, as if it matters now. “Every once in a while, there’s one I’m not sure of, you know? They’re perched right there on the fence between life and death. Those are the ones that really test me. I can pitch them over into the darkness or pull them back to safety . . . but how to cut the fat from society without slicing too close to the bone? I was almost done triaging when the charge nurse came in with the report.”

  Ann, who drew Daniel’s name in blue. “Twenty-two-year-old, white male, who—obviously—spent the evening performing Olympics-­caliber dives from his roof into his backyard pool. Guess the deck is harder to avoid with a blood alcohol of point-two-one.”

  I remembered.

  Daniel gives a little laugh. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind, you know? The wastefulness of it, the stupidity. You turned your back and my hand was right there, right on top of the retroperitoneal space. It was done before I even willed it.”

  Yes, he would have to be fast with me in the room. Just a few misplaced sutures. I even closed the surgery for him. “God.”

  Daniel nods, like he’s thinking the same thing. “I’ve never been that impulsive before. It shook me.”

  “That’s why you left.” And it was when he set all this up. The note in the pie. The maps. Three days, refusing my phone calls, just intermittent texts telling me to hold tight. That he’d arranged a leave of absence with the hospital. That he’d be back soon.

  Then, when he finally showed up again—exhausted, eyes bloodshot, wearing wrinkled clothes I’d never seen before, smelling musty and aged like he’d been gone years instead of days—he’d looked right through me, same as now, before going to bed and sleeping for twelve hours straight.

  When he woke, he had some cereal and acted as though nothing had happened. At first, when I questioned him, he evaded, saying only that he had to get away. When I pressed, he grew sullen, then angry, before switching suddenly to sorrow. It was the anniversary of his father’s death, he explained. He’d needed to go home, alone, and face the day in the arms of his childhood home. Then he’d wept while I held him, and that was enough for me. After all, I’d loved him, I’d
believed him.

  Besides, what did I know of tears?

  “I had to get my head on straight,” he says now, and I gape, dumbfounded, because he thinks it’s on straight now. “Make sure my impulses were under control. I mean, can you imagine being caught like that? By you? Over a man whose name I’d already forgotten?”

  “You mean a kid. He was a kid. He was just goofing off.”

  “He was oblivious.” Daniel’s voice falls flat. “Ignorant to his purpose on the planet. Thoughtless, though most people are. The world is filled with redundancies.”

  Torrey Thatcher, who played the guitar and nearly died because he stole some pretzels. The big kid . . . what was his name? God, I didn’t know his name either, but he died because he was foolish and took a swan dive from his roof.

  No, he died because Daniel thought he was foolish to swan dive from his roof.

  Daniel figured I’d eventually put it all together. That’s why he’s taken such great pains to set me up, but I can’t help thinking he gives me too much credit. I saw none of it, and that’s what really makes my head spin. It makes me believe I am as broken as he thought.

  At least I’m not a killer.

  Liar.

  “You’re hot,” I whisper under my breath. That’s what the experts call it, right? When a killer’s violent compulsion flares?

  Daniel, being a medical professional—oh, and a serial killer—is familiar with the term. He leans forward, slipping into the sun. “Kristine? I am molten.”

  He stands so suddenly that I flinch, and wipes his mouth with a near-dainty pat before dropping the napkin to the ground.

  Then he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a syringe.

  If pain means you’re alive,