On the spur of the moment, Simone buys black tape. It isn’t what she wants to do. It isn’t even really a quick fix, but it’s something. She hides it in her shorts as she leaves.
She stands back in front of the car, which still remains in the shadows, away from CCTV, and looks out at the wide expanse of the desert. They can’t go anywhere on foot. They can’t steal a car – how would they? All they have is the hire car, and all they can do is disguise it as well as possible.
Simone bends in front of the number plates, insects acrobatic in the headlights’ beams, and rips the tape, adding a single black block to an F to make it an E. It’s simple. It won’t buy them forever, but they might be able to get to Terlingua without triggering number plate recognition. She does the same at the rear.
She gets back in the car, and asks Lucy where Terlingua is.
‘It’s back in the direction we’ve come from,’ Lucy answers. ‘The coaches from camp went there all the time. Took a few hours.’
It’s a risk, but all misdirects are.
Simone’s hope is that the authorities will assume a straight line from the shooting, through this petrol station, and onwards to Albuquerque. Meantime, they double back on themselves, their car not triggering ANPR. They left the phones here, but no one will expect them to go backwards. It’s a bodged plan, but it’s still a plan.
They drive. A car appears in the distance but passes them normally. Inside is a man in sunglasses even though it’s dark. Simone thinks it could be him. Anybody could be him. They know nothing about him.
She leans back and accelerates, dreaming of a little dodgy motel in Terlingua, anywhere with four walls and a window they can shut the curtains against, just for a little while. It sounds so ridiculous to Simone that she can’t help but say, ‘Well, here’s to hiding from the law.’
Lucy cracks a grim smile, but then her face sets into seriousness quickly after it. ‘And who knows who else,’ she says softly.
CHAPTER 34
Lucy dozes as they drive towards Terlingua in the murky end-of-night hours, and Simone wonders what her daughter is thinking. Has she yet grasped the magnitude of what has happened to them? Is she dreaming of Damien, whose name Simone doesn’t want to speak, in case it brings to life everything they might have lost? Will they ever see him again?
Simone gulps as she thinks it. She, aged forty-three, can’t think about it, so how can she expect the teenaged brain to? Lucy is still years off full maturity, whatever the world thinks. Simone knows herself that she took until at least thirty to grow up.
She lets a sigh out as she thinks of herself that age, one child in. They’d always thought they’d have a second but, every time Damien had brought it up, Simone found she couldn’t bear to. When it came to it, she simply couldn’t do it, however much of a failure that made her.
But something else had happened, too. The love for Lucy had become loaded. An only child carries a high burden; they are everything to their parents, and don’t even know it.
Lucy turns and looks directly at Simone, interrupting her reverie, and something seems to happen as their eyes connect. Lucy cannot know Simone was thinking about the indecision that blighted – for Simone – much of Lucy’s childhood. Andyet Lucy looks suddenly mournful. Troubled. It’s …something. Simone looks closely at her.
But that is when they hear it: a noise, as clear as anything. Sirens.
Faint at first, but nevertheless there. She and Lucy lock eyes again.
‘Shit,’ Lucy says.
‘Yep.’
‘I thought the tape – the number plate – shit, shit, shit,’ Lucy says again, and Simone can see the emotion building in her daughter. Too much trauma stacking on top of trauma.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says, staying deliberately, and falsely, calm. ‘They won’t be for us.’
‘Fuck,’ Lucy says, fiddling with her seat belt, tugging at her hair. The sirens are getting louder. ‘If the kidnapper is working with the police, won’t he be …? It could be …’
Simone can’t bear the panic in her daughter’s voice, sees something looming up ahead, and swerves without thinking.
‘What are you doing?’ Lucy says.
It’s an abandoned building by the side of the road, and Simone thinks it might have been sent from God himself, the parallels with Mexico apparent: sirens, empty buildings, maybe saying that last time she got away with it, but this time she won’t.
It’s large, a shutter door at half mast, just like the place she found the bag in, seemingly abandoned.
‘There,’ Simone says. ‘Fast. Now.’
Louder and louder the sirens get, multiple noises within the red shift, and Lucy is so smart, so quick, she is out of the car and wrenching up the roller immediately.
Simone drives into the garage, and Lucy brings the door down and gets back in the car. They sit for several moments, just waiting, and then the sirens come, and then the sirens fade, and they are alone again, undiscovered, for now, once more.
