“I’ll be careful. Look, drop me off a few blocks away, then go home. I’ll meet you at your apartment.”
Alix sent me a long look. “And if you don’t show up?”
“Forget you ever knew me.”
“Jesus!”
“Look, Arnaud may know of you. In fact, he probably does. Your life may be in danger now. Shit, maybe I shouldn’t have called you.”
Taking her hand from the steering wheel, Alix gripped mine. “I’m your friend. I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
The car tried to skid on the slushy pavement, forcing her to put both hands on the wheel again. “And that means I’m stayingwith you. We’ll get what you need, your car, you follow me to my place.”
“That’s really not a good idea, Alix.”
“You’re not facing this asshole alone. And that’s the end of it.”
What could I say? Not a helluva lot. Truth was, I needed her. I was scared, alone, hunted. Having her at my side, loyal, risking her life to help me, I needed someone I could turn to. Someone I could hug, whose shoulder I could cry on, who loved me when no one else would.
Tears burned my eyes. “You get killed, don’t blame me. I told you to stay out of it.”
“Your old man gave you money? Enough to skip the country?”
“Yeah. But it’ll take time to get into my account. A few days.”
“Then once you get it, we’ll leave.” Alix nodded to herself. “You and me. We’ll go to some English-speaking country, lay low, change our names, get jobs.”
Staring out at the blowing snow, the traffic, the stores, a few pedestrians walking with their heads down, I pondered her idea. True, I knew I’d be forced to leave. I never gave thought that Alix would go with me.
“What about your family? Your folks? Your S.O.?”
“That’ll be tough,” she admitted. “I’ll miss them, and they’ll miss me. Things are off with the S.O.. He asked a chick from my work out, can you believe that? Dumb shit. Anyway, we can come back in a few years. By then, the heat will be off.”
Hope, that dangerous emotion, seeped into my soul. I wouldn’t face Arnaud, GQ, and their goons by myself. I wouldn’t run into an unknown country alone. “Where do you want to go?”
Alix chuckled. “New Zealand. Spectacular scenery, beaches, nice people.”
“New Zealand it is.”
With growing excitement, we talked about packing up and getting on an airplane, the challenges of living in a foreign land, speculations of getting busted as illegals.
“We’ll go as tourists with visas, then vanish into the population,” Alix commented. “It’s done all the time.”
“We may not be able to get jobs unless we prove we’re citizens,” I objected.
“Illegals get jobs here in the States all the time.”
She drove into the parking lot of my apartment building and stopped beside my car. It sat where I’d left it before going to the bar last Friday night, the snow beginning to cover it. So much had happened since I’d parked it, not knowing what I’d soon face, and how close I came to not coming back at all.
“Let’s get inside,” I said, opening the door. “They might be watching.”
Our heads down against the blowing snow, we rushed up the cement stairs to my unit on the second floor. As GQ had taken my keys along with everything else I had on me that night, I fumbled for the spare I’d left on the top of the doorframe.
Once inside, I locked the door behind us, and switched on lights. “At least I left the furnace on,” I commented, rubbing my arms.
Alix went around the sitting room and closed the curtains. “How’d we know if anyone’s out there?”
“We keep our fingers crossed they haven’t discovered I escaped yet and get out of here fast.”
