I don’t know what he’s waiting for, but whatever it is, I refuse to give it to him. I’m shaking so hard my teeth knock together, and the tears are coming whether I want them or not, but I do not beg. I don’t know where the steel comes from.
Some stubborn, last-ditch piece of me decides that if this is it, if this freezing patch of nowhere is where I die in my work sneakers, I’m not spending my last seconds groveling to a man in a nice suit. So I just look back at him. I hold his stare, furious, terrified, tears running, and I refuse to look away.
Something changes.
I feel it more than I see it, the air going different between us, his attention sharpening to a point. His eyes move over my face, then lower, and there’s nothing in it of a man pricing out a bodyto get rid of. It’s a look I know, because I get it a hundred times a night at work.
I’ve just never felt it like this, hot and low in my stomach. I hate it on contact. He’s looking at me like I’m a person. Worse than that. He’s looking at me like I’m a person he wants. Right here, with a dead man cooling in the dirt, gunpowder still sharp in the air, the scariest man I’ve ever seen is looking at me like that. The very worst part is how fast my body answers before I can shut it down.
When he finally speaks, his voice is low and even, nothing like what I’m braced for.
“You picked a bad night for a walk,” he says.
I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. World-class wit, me.
“You saw something you shouldn’t have.” He says it almost gently, like he’s explaining a parking ticket. “That man who ran off, his name is Timur. He saw your face. You understand what that means?”
I don’t, not really, but I nod, because nodding is all I’ve got.
“It means you’re a marked woman now.” His head tilts, just slightly. “His people don’t leave loose ends. Doesn’t matter that you’re nobody. Doesn’t matter that you were out here peeing in the dark like an idiot. He saw you, so they’ll come, and they’ll be thorough about it.” A pause. “The only thing standing between you and a shallow grave, starting now, is me.”
This is the part in the movie where the girl says something brave. I say, “Okay,” in a tiny voice, like he’s offered me a ride home.
And then he does the thing that scares me more than the gun, more than the dead man, more than any of it.
He stands up. He lets me go.
He doesn’t grab me. He doesn’t haul me to a car. He just rises to his full ridiculous height, brushes the dust off one knee, and tips his head toward the orange smudge of the fire in the distance. I can just make out the girls back there, shrieking about something, somebody yelling that the fireworks were awesome, do it again.
Fireworks. They think the gunshots were fireworks. I could cry, except I’m already crying, so I guess I’m just adding to it.
“Walk back to your friends,” he says. “Finish your little weekend. Smile, laugh, roast your marshmallows. And tell no one what you saw out here. Not them. Not the police. Nobody.”
“Why would you?” My voice cracks, so I try again. “Why would you let me go?”
He studies me a second, and I swear there’s almost something like amusement at the corner of his mouth, which on this man is its own kind of terrifying.
“Because I’ve decided you should keep breathing,” he says. “For now. That’s the only reason you are, so don’t waste it.”
I should run. I don’t. I just stay there on my knees like an idiot, staring up at him, and he must see the question I’m too scared to ask, the obvious one, the what’s-stopping-me-from-running one.
“In case you’re feeling brave,” he says, reading me like a cheap magazine, “there’s nowhere out here I don’t own. Every road. Every gas station between this sand and that city. You won’t outrun me in a desert that belongs to me.” He starts to turn. Then he stops, and the last thing he says, he says soft, almostkind. It closes around my wrist like a hand. “I’ll be watching you. And you’ll be seeing me again. Very soon.”
Then he’s gone. He walks off into the dark the same unbothered way he walked up. The night swallows him, suit and all, like he was never here. The only proof he existed is the shape going cold in the dirt and the gunpowder smell fading off my clothes.
I don’t remember standing. I don’t remember the walk. One second I’m on my knees in the freezing sand, and the next I’m stumbling into the firelight on legs made of wet paper. Crystal looks up at me with her smudged mascara and her big dumb grin, the jacket still wrapped around her shoulders.
“There she is. We thought you fell in a hole.” She squints. “You okay? You look like you saw a coyote.”
A coyote. Sure. Let’s go with coyote.
“Was it big?” Crystal wants to know. “They get big out here.”
“It looked right at me.”
“They do that.” She nods, sage, handing me a cup I don’t drink from. “You’re supposed to make yourself big and loud.”
Too late, I don’t say. I crouched in a bush and prayed. It’s the only reason anybody’s roasting anything tonight.
