Simone pauses. She doesn’t know what to say. In the end, she simply replies, ‘I know.’
‘He would’ve killed us.’
‘I know.’
Simone closes her eyes for just a beat.
She turns to look at Lucy, light and shade flaring across her features as Simone drives. ‘We ought to go straight to the police, now.’
‘Yes,’ Lucy says.
‘What does this look like?’ Simone says, and she almost whispers it, there in a quiet car that fires through the night like a silent rocket. ‘We’ve shot – we’ve shot twice. And we’ve left.’
‘No, but – we …’
‘There isn’t any evidence you were kidnapped.’
Lucy’s eyes widen, and she shifts uncomfortably in the seat. ‘I beg to differ.’
But Simone is too panicked to parent well. The pieces of their version of events are falling all around her. It makes her reveal too much to Lucy and insensitively. ‘I destroyed the ransoms. I told someone there was a business opportunity.’
‘Was there?’ Lucy asks, confused.
‘I trafficked drugs to get you,’ she tells her. Lucy goes still on the passenger seat, and Simone is glad she didn’t add that the kidnapper threatened to kill Lucy. She doesn’t need to know how close she might’ve come to death. ‘I broughtcocaine in from Mexico. That’s what I was trying to bury. And then I killed a man.’ Simone pauses. ‘What does that look like?’
Lucy says nothing for several moments, stunned. ‘I didn’t know my proof of life video was – he passed me a script to read. I didn’t know you were asked to do that. But I was kidnapped. I can tell the police that.’
‘Could you identify him?’
‘No. He put a hood on me before I saw him. But I can tell them that it happened.’
‘The sheriff specifically said people blame kidnaps around here. They say they were forced to commit crimes.’
‘But we were.’
‘We could leave,’ Simone tells her. ‘Refuse to take the risk of not being believed. We’d be charged with … murder, drugs offences.’ She doesn’t add Lucy’s own ill-advised shooting, nor that they have already left the scene, which makes it so much worse for them.
‘I know.’
‘No one knows it was us. We didn’t say our names. We used the payphone, not our mobiles,’ Simone tells her; they were unknown callers. She checks the rear-view mirror. There’s nobody, just empty highway. ‘Did the kidnapper ever use your name?’
Lucy blinks, tucks her legs up underneath her, thinking. ‘No,’ she answers eventually. ‘No, he didn’t.’
‘Did you think he might know who you are?’
‘I don’t know. But he didn’t use my name. All his demands were notes or using a distorted voice thing. He would untie me, briefly, so I could take my blindfold off myself. So I never saw him. I didn’t know him, and I think he didn’t know me.’
Simone nods, her jaw set. They might be able to get away. She would’ve told the police when it was just her. But now it’s Lucy, too. A second shooting at a second car.
Here is another hand dealt, a shitty one full of low cards, but they have to play it as best they can. Two poor options sit in front of them: stay, and risk an arrest and trial for multiple offences, or go, now. The kidnapper let himself into an anonymous lodge. That is what she thinks.
And maybe he was able to track Simone on the flip phones, but she doesn’t think he knows her name. He never used it. Simone wonders if she’s kidding herself, but she thinks of the trauma of Lucy going to trial over this, and she can’t, she can’t. What are they supposed to do, except try to run?
‘What do you think would happen?’ Lucy asks.
‘I think they’d arrest me for cocaine supply and murder.’ Simone once again omits Lucy’s crime.
‘Go to the airport,’ Lucy says. ‘Go. Now.’
