He felt her hand on his upper thigh before he heard her voice. “Hello, darling,” she said.
He looked over at her. Her blond hair was tied back at her neck, her left hand was at twelve o’clock on the wheel. She was ravishing and terrifying and strangely full of life. If it worked, it would be worth it. If not, well, what the hell.
“Hello, Gretchen,” he said.
CHAPTER
42
The dashboard of the Jag was a walnut veneer, so shiny Archie could see his reflection in it. It was blurry and he looked away from his haggard face.
“Take the bullets out of your weapon and the battery off your phone and toss them out the window,” Gretchen said. Her voice was glass, mellifluous, like music.
Archie turned to her. His heart was pounding, adrenaline pulsing through his body. It was nice. It made him feel high. “That’s littering,” he said.
Gretchen smiled sweetly. He had missed looking at her. She was thirty-four but seemed both younger and older somehow. The flawless skin. The perfect features. It was like looking at a painting in a museum after you’d only seen the postcard; the print in his memory could never live up to the original. “The police looking for you will find them by morning,” she said.
He took his phone out of his pocket, popped the back off, and removed the flat blue battery, and then lifted his gun out of his holster and let the bullets fall gently from the chamber into one hand. Gretchen pushed a button somewhere and his window slid open and he held his hand out the window and let the bullets and the battery fall to the street. The bullets bounced, snapping against the cement.
Gretchen turned left off the park blocks toward the river. “Nice car,” Archie said.
“I had some money set aside,” she said. “In another name.” She moved her hand slightly up his thigh. It was only a millimeter, but it felt farther. “Look in the glove compartment,” she said.
He opened the car’s slick glove box. Inside were five large amber prescription bottles of pills.
“Remove the pills,” she said. “And put your gun and phone inside. There’s water in the cup holder.”
Archie followed her instructions. The gun and the phone were useless now anyway. He picked up the bottle of water next to his left knee in the car’s cup holder and unscrewed the cap. Then he opened one of the pill bottles. Even in the dim light of the car, he knew what they were, the shape and feel of the pills. He tapped four out of the bottle and then swallowed them with water.
She picked up three little yellow pills from the car’s change drawer and handed them to him.
“What are they?” he asked. They were on Bill Naito Parkway now, heading south. The river was to their left. In the seventies there had been a freeway adjacent to the river, but they’d decided to tear it down and build a park that stretched the length of downtown at the water’s edge.
“We have a long drive ahead of us,” Gretchen said.
She didn’t want him to see where they were going. That was a good sign. If she had been planning on killing him right away, it wouldn’t have mattered.
“Am I going to wake up strapped to a gurney?” he asked.
“No.”
He put the pills on his tongue. They were bitter. But not like the Vicodin. It was a different taste. He took another swallow of water to wash it from his mouth.
“I’ve missed you, darling,” Gretchen said.
Archie smiled and leaned his head on the side window and watched as they pulled onto I-5 headed south. “Yeah,” he said.
CHAPTER
43
What kind of car was it?” Henry said.
Susan fumbled for another cigarette, her hands trembling. Henry had burst out of the alley door, a moment after the silver car had disappeared. And had been yelling at her ever since.
“I told you,” Susan said. “It was silver.” She thought about paint, picturing the paint samples her mother brought home and tacked to various walls for years while she decided. “But not blue silver; not glacier or metallic; not neutral.” She searched her mind for any further explanation, wanting to help any way she could. “It was silver with a splash of gray, like that silk blouse with the French-cut sleeves I sometimes wear. Expensive silver. Platinum.” Then it came to her. “A shade lighter than the Macbook Pro.”
Henry did not seem to appreciate her efforts at specificity. The veins in his forehead pulsed. “Was it a new car?”
“Yes?” Susan said. He was making her nervous. She looked at her pack of cigarettes. Only two left. Crap, why couldn’t she pay better attention to things?
Henry put a hand on her arm, so she looked up at him. “Was it an American car? A sedan? Did it have a license plate? Bumper stickers? How many taillights?”