It stops pointed right at me.
There’s no possible way I can see his eyes from this distance in this dark. But I swear on my dead grandmother and every cup of bad wine in my body that I feel him see me. It goes through me, this awful click of contact, like the moment in a dream when the thing in the room finally looks up and knows your name.
He has seen me.
I don’t know how. I don’t care how. There’s one clean thought left in my spinning head, sharp enough to cut straight through the wine and the fear.
Run. And do not let them know which way the girls are.
2
CINDY
Here is the one smart thing I do all night.
I run the wrong way.
Every cell in my body wants to bolt straight back to the fire, back to Crystal, the wine, the half-roasted marshmallows. But the fire is exactly where I can’t go. Going there draws a big neon arrow at four drunk girls who have no idea the world just turned into a horror movie. So I peel left, away from the tents, out into the open black nothing. I run like the desert is going to crack open and swallow me whole.
But it doesn’t.
I make it maybe forty yards before an arm comes around my throat from behind. It yanks me back into a body that smells like sweat and cigarettes. Something cold presses into my temple, and I know exactly what it is, because I’ve watched enough TV to recognize a gun against my skull when I feel one.
So that’s new.
“Stupid little bitch.” The voice is low and ragged against my ear, the accent so strong I can barely parse the words. He’s breathing hard, this jagged, furious breathing, like he ran to get to me. “You have no idea what you just did.”
I do, actually. I just don’t say so, because my voice is somewhere down around my knees and my whole body has gone stiff as a board.
“A year,” he hisses, and his arm tightens until I see white at the edges. “A year of work. One shot. One. And you walk into it like a cow into a road.”
A year of work. One shot. My brain finally catches up to my eyes, and what it hands me is very bad news. This guy wasn’t with the suit man down in the headlights. This guy was out here in the dark like me, watching, waiting, except the thing he was waiting to do was put a bullet in the suit man. I wandered into his sightline and wrecked it. Two different monsters, and I found both of them in one night. I should buy a lottery ticket. I’m just not sure I’ll live long enough to scratch it.
The most random thoughts go through your head when you think you’re about to die. I think about how I never called my landlord back. I think about how Crystal’s going to blame herself for picking this spot. I think about my mother, who I haven’t spoken to in six years, who’ll probably hear about this on the news and tell people we were close. None of it helps. It’s just the junk drawer of my brain dumping itself out while a stranger decides whether to pull the trigger.
“Please,” I finally manage, which is humiliating, but I’m not above it. “I didn’t see anything. I swear, I didn’t see your face, I don’t know anything.”
“Shut up.” He says it almost bored, like I’m a kid interrupting grownups. He’s not even talking to me anymore. He’s watching the suit man come, his whole body wired tight as a tripwire, and I realize I’ve stopped being a person to him entirely. I’m just the wall he’s hiding behind.
Out past the rocks, over his shoulder, I see the suit man.
He’s coming toward us. Not running, not even hurrying, just walking across that flat stretch of desert with his hands loose at his sides, taking his sweet time. He could be strolling up to a valet stand instead of a man holding a hostage. It hits me all at once, sick and clear, that I’m about to be a bargaining chip in a fight between two men who would step over my body without slowing down.
The arm around my throat goes tighter. The guy shifts the gun against my head, steadying himself, getting ready to say something, make a demand, do whatever you do when you’ve got a girl and the other guy’s walking up.
He doesn’t get to.
The suit man’s arm comes up, easy, almost lazy, and a flat crack splits the night in half. The arm around my throat jerks loose. The man behind me staggers back with a sound I’m not going to forget any time soon, this wet, ugly grunt, one hand flying up to his face, and then he’s gone, scrambling off into the dark, just a shape the black swallows before a second shot can find him.
And then it’s just me. Me, the desert, and the man who shoots people for fun, walking the last few steps to where I’m standing.
My legs quit. I go down into the cold sand on my knees. My body doesn’t consult me on it. The sand is so cold it burns through my jeans. Some far-off employee in my head files a note that I will never wear these jeans again. He stops in front of me and crouches down. He brings himself right to my level, slow, the same way he did with the man he killed back there, one forearm resting on his thigh, and he looks at me.
He doesn’t reach for his gun.
That’s the part that throws me. He should reach for his gun. I know how this goes, I just saw the demo. You don’t watch a man execute someone in the desert and then stroll home to tell the story over brunch. A witness is a problem, men like this solve problems, and the solution is the same one bleeding into the dirt back there. I can see him thinking it. I brace for the moment he decides, for his hand to go for the gun.
It never comes.
