“Well, Holden didn’t crawl out of the trunk with a gaping wound in his skull and drive off,” Arlo said, his voice climbing. “Did he?” The last part of his sentence sounded desperate, like he was hoping Holden had actually risen from the dead and driven himself home.
“No.”
“Do you think the cops found the car and took it? Do you think this is a trap?” Arlo jerked around to look behind them. “Are they watching us?”
Dimitri considered the possibility before dismissing it. “If the cops found the car, this would be a crime scene. We would have seen the lights and heard the sirens a mile away.”
“Are you sure?” Arlo asked.
“Yes. I’m positive,” he lied.
He picked up his phone from the console between them, pulling up his mother’s number and hitting send.
She answered on the second ring. “It took you long enough. Did you stop for breakfast?”
“Did you move the body?” he asked, in lieu of a polite greeting.
There was a long pause on the other side of the line. “What?”
The tone of his mother’s voice unnerved him. “Did you move the body? The car? Is this some kind of life lesson? Because, if it is, I think you could have saved it. My life of crime is over.”
“Dimitri, what are you talking about?”
Dimitri’s stomach churned. “The car… It’s gone.”
“Gone?” she echoed.
Was this some kind of game? “Disappeared. Evaporated. Dematerialized. Whatever you want to call it, Mom. The car’s gone.”
“Christ,” she muttered almost to herself. “Don’t move a muscle. I’ll call you back.”
Then his mother hung up on him for the second time that night. When Dimitri glanced at Arlo, he said, “She didn’t move the car, did she?”
Dimitri shook his head. “No.”
Lights appeared in the rearview mirror, temporarily blinding Dimitri. For a split second, Dimitri thought Arlo was right, that they’d driven right into a sting operation, but he reminded himself that it wouldn’t be one cop in an unmarked police car that came for them. Holden was a judge’s son. They would have had SWAT there if they knew what they’d done.
Time stretched as the car pulled to a stop dangerously close to their bumper, ensuring they couldn’t retreat. Dimitri watched in the side-view mirror as the driver’s side door pushed open and a large silhouette in a heavy coat exited, ambling towards them with little urgency.
“What is happening? Who is that?” Arlo snapped.
Dimitri shook his head. “I don’t know, but let me do the talking.”
Before Arlo could reply, knuckles rapped against the glass. Dimitri cursed himself for not carrying a weapon in his car before he slowly lowered the driver’s side window. Of all the things Dimitri expected, it wasn’t the young woman’s face that appeared behind the frosty windowpane.
She was young, probably not even thirty. She had bright pink hair, and when she stood at her full height, Dimitri realized the woman was not large but heavily pregnant.
What the fuck? “Can we help you?”
“Nope. I’m here to help you.” She handed him an envelope. “Go to this address. Don’t tell anybody. Especially not your mother.”
“What is happening here?” Dimitri asked.
The girl gave him a bright smile, like this was the most normal thing in the world. “Don’t waste time with questions I’m not going to answer. I would hurry. It’s almost dawn.”
With that, she gave a jovial wave and waddled back to her car, slowly pulling away and driving into the night, as much of a mystery as she was when she’d arrived.
“I feel like we’ve entered the fucking Twilight Zone,” Dimitri muttered.
