18
I KNEW WHAT I LOOKED like as I walked calmly back to the truck. Jamie and Stella were already on their way back to find me.
“Fuck,” Jamie said when he saw me. That about covered it.
“I’m okay. Get into the truck.”
“Is he . . .”
Yes. Yes, he is.
“I have the keys,” I said. “We need to go.”
Stella reached out her hand. It was shaking. “Keys?” she asked as Jamie pulled me up into the cab. I reached into my pocket and tossed them at her.
“What—what happened?” Jamie asked.
I looked out the window, catching my reflection in the side-view mirror. She shrugged. “He made a mistake,” I said quietly. I began to notice the blood drying on my skin. I felt sticky. Dirty. I pulled my hair back into a knot. It was clotted with blood.
“Mr. Ernst?” Jamie asked. “Did he touch you?”
“He tried,” I said under my breath.
“Mara.”
I swallowed hard. “I’m okay.” It was true enough. I wasn’t hurt. “He thought I was someone else.”
Jamie’s eyebrows knitted in confusion. “Who?”
“Someone who wouldn’t fight back. Listen, we need to go.” I withdrew Mr. Ernst’s gun from the back of my boxers and shoved it into the glove compartment. Jamie’s mouth hung open, disbelieving.
“Did you shoot him?” Stella was looking at the floor of the cab. Her voice sounded hollow, like she wasn’t really there.
I shook my head. “He had the gun. He was pointing it at me. I cut him while he was trying to . . . undress.”
“I should have stayed with you guys,” Jamie said. “Fuck. Fuck.”
Stella’s chest rose and fell rapidly. Her face was pale and bloodless. “Mara helped me,” she said, as if to herself. “And then she had to help herself. It was self-defense.” She began to nod. “I saw it, most of it, before I ran to get you, Jamie. So we can call the police and tell them—”
“We can’t call the police,” Jamie said. His voice was muffled. He had put his head between his knees. “You know we can’t.”
Stella closed her eyes and squeezed them shut. “Right. Right. Okay, so, Mara wouldn’t have done anything unless she had to—and she had to.”
I had to.
“But now we have a problem.” She looked at my hands. “His DNA is under your fingernails. Yours is probably all over his body. This isn’t like Horizons. We have his truck. If we leave it here, we’re stranded. If we take it, we’ll be easy to track.”
“It can be tracked anyway, even if we leave it. But Mara’s right, we can’t stay here,” Jamie said. “I vote for ditching the truck somewhere unobvious and then we’ll figure the rest of this shit out.”
“We’ll burn the clothes or something,” Stella said, looking at my T-shirt. “Clean you up. It’ll be all right.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince me.
“Then the only way out is through,” Jamie said, and Stella started the truck.