"You don't believe in coincidences."
"No, I don't."
He pulls onto the highway heading east. I watch the side mirror. The truck doesn't move. Thirty seconds. A minute.
"Maybe it's nothing," I say.
The truck pulls out.
It enters the highway four cars behind us. Matching our speed. Not closing the gap, not falling back. Holding position the way you hold position when you've been trained to tail someone without being obvious, except they're being obvious because they weren't expecting me to notice new bootlaces on a man pretending to read about Kenworth engines.
"It's not nothing," Claudio says.
He reaches across the console and opens the glove compartment. Inside: the second handgun, the one he took from Emilio's duffel. A compact Glock, black, already loaded. He sets it on my lap.
I stare at it. The metal is cold through my jeans.
"Do you know how to use it?" he asks.
"Point the heavy end at the bad guy and pull the trigger."
"Close enough. Safety's on the left side. Thumb it forward to fire. Don't shoot me."
"No promises."
He almost smiles. Almost. Then the smile dies and his eyes go flat and his hands settle on the wheel at ten and two and he becomes the other Claudio. The one who killed three men in a corridor. The one who moves through violence the way most people move through a grocery store. Practiced. Efficient. Bored.
"We're not stopping," he says. "They want us to stop. They want a controlled engagement, off the highway, somewhere isolated. We're going to deny them that."
"So we just drive?"
"We drive faster."
He accelerates. The speedometer climbs. Eighty. Eighty-five. Ninety. The trees blur. The farmland smears into a brown streak. The truck behind us accelerates to match, and now it's three cars back, then two.
My hand finds the gun on my lap. I curl my fingers around the grip. It's heavier than I expected. Solid. Real. The weight of a thing designed for one purpose, and that purpose is sitting in the cab of a truck four hundred feet behind us.
"Claudio."
"I know."
"There could be more."
"There could. There usually are."
The truck moves into the left lane. Accelerating. Closing. I can see the driver now through the mirror. Not the sleeping man. The driver. Square jaw, sunglasses, both hands on the wheel. The sleeping man is awake now, sitting up, and there's something in his hands that isn't a coffee cup.
"He's got a weapon," I say. My voice is calm. I'm surprised by how calm it is. The panic is there, underneath, churning in my stomach like acid, but the surface is still. Charlotte Richardson is still. She counts things and observes things and reports things in a flat, steady voice, and she does not scream in cars.
"I see it." Claudio checks the mirrors. Ahead, behind, sides. Running calculations I can feel in the tension of his body, the way his jaw works, the way his eyes flick between data points like a machine processing inputs.
"Hold on," he says.
He cuts across two lanes without signaling. The car behind us honks. The truck swerves to follow. Claudio takes the next exit at seventy miles per hour, the tires screaming on the ramp, and the g-force pins me against the door. I grab the handle above the window and grip the gun and my teeth clamp shut so hard I taste blood.
The exit dumps us onto a county road. Two lanes. Empty. Flat fields on both sides, nowhere to hide and nowhere to run. The truck takes the exit behind us. Faster now. Closing the gap.
"There's a second vehicle," I say. Because of course there is. A black sedan, coming from the other direction, approaching fast on the county road. Coordinated. Planned. They pushed us off the highway and into a kill box.
