“Not directly,” Dev said. “You said yourself, he wasn’t meant to die. And a jail term for Nora won’t bring him back.”
He didn’t look it, but Dev had always been too forgiving. The people he loved could treat him like a dog, and he’d make excuses for them—his mom, his brother, even Becca when they’d been younger. Simon wasn’t like that. The only person he’d ever forgiven was Jacob.
“I’ll try,” he said.
He didn’t say how hard. Dev seemed to accept it anyhow.
“Call me when you get in,” he said.
The phone went dead. Hopefully he’d just hung up. Simon grimaced, but he would just have to have faith. He wiped the number from the phone’s memory. Done, he tossed it back to the kid with a grunt of thanks and climbed into the car.
Despite the battered appearance, the engine rattled to life without too much trouble. Simon shifted into drive, hit the gas, peeled away from the curb, and screeched out of town.
Simon had taken forty minutes to get to Marion. He wanted to see how fast he could get back to San Antonio.
IT TOOKthirty. The Chevy’s exhaust rattled like a dying smoker’s cough, and the cab was filled with the burned-toast smell of smoldering wires. Simon ditched it at his apartment building and dragged himself out. His injured leg had stiffened as he drove, and a dull ache throbbed up into his groin as he put weight on it. Blood had seeped through his make-do bandage and dried into a stiff red-brown patch on his jeans.
He had to look like shit. One of his neighbors was walking her dog, doing a circuit of the green space in a designer dress and old sneakers. She started to yell a protest about him leaving an oil-pissing wreck in the forecourt, but changed her mind when she got a good look at him.
Simon limped inside, gritted his teeth against the weakness in his leg, and took the elevator up. As he leaned back against the car, he felt the slime of sweat run down his spine to the small of his back. He let himself into his apartment and impatiently stripped off his sour-smelling, sweat-damp shirt.
The kitchen was clean, the surfaces so scrubbed down that Simon could still smell the bleach. There was also a pan handle sticking out of the garbage can, which twitched a resigned smile out of Simon. No sign of Jacob or his borrowed dog, though.
Half-naked, unbuttoned jeans hanging loose around his hips, Simon hobbled into the bedroom and grabbed his old emergency phone from the drawer. He popped it open and swapped the sim card from his smashed phone. His fingers fumbled at the delicate task.
It had buzzed twice on the drive there, but the ringtone shrieked out before it got strangled in the cracked speakers. He’d tried to answer—on the off chance it might connect—but jolts of sound was all the battered piece of tech could manage.
The plan was to make himself presentable, get to Dev, and confront Nora. That plan changed when the phone booted up and he saw two voice mails from Nora waiting for him.
He hesitated as dread settled in his gut with cold certainty, and then he tapped the icon. The first message was from someone who knew their cover was blown. The second was from someone who’d found an ace in the hole.
“I have Mr. Archer,” she said. Her voice was cool and professional, detached, as though she were scheduling a meeting instead of a hostage exchange. “We need to meet. Call me, and I’ll tell you where.”
There were a lot of things that Simon knew he should do—contact Dev, call the police, be smart, and be tactical. What he did was call Nora back.
“What do you want?”
IT WASN’Twhere he’d have chosen to meet, but it was somewhere out of the way. The red struts of the bridge stood out dramatically against the pale sky and punched through the heavy foliage that led to the Incarnate Word campus. It was strung with reams of Christmas lights that waited to be turned on at dusk.
Nora stood by the metal rail in the shadow of the trees with her arm hooked around Jacob’s.
For a second, as he stood in front of them, Simon wondered if it had all been one very elaborate double-cross. The suspicion should have dug its hooks in. Jacob was hardly above betraying him. But it couldn’t find any traction. It just skated over the surface of his brain and was gone.
“You okay?” He searched Jacob’s pale, tight face. The aging bruises stood out like paint on his skin.
Jacob looked at him like he was an idiot.
“No,” he said. “Not so much.”
He shifted his weight. In the second before Nora yanked him back into her side, Simon got a glimpse of something black and deadly looking jammed into Jacob’s ribs. He stepped forward as anger propelled him like a hand in the small of his back.
“Don’t,” Nora warned him and ground the muzzle deeper into Jacob’s ribs until he winced. “Not if you want to keep him.”
Simon stopped like someone had nailed his feet to the bridge.
“Nora,” he said. “What the fuck are you doing?”
She gave him a tight red smile that didn’t reach over her cheekbones.
