“Good morning,” he said, as if we were old friends. Old friends that didn’t want to kill each other.
I glared at him. “Is the gun really necessary?”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s just fun to have one.”
“Like an extra penis,” I mused.
He smiled unkindly. “Something like that.”
I leaned over, rounding my back and letting out a moan of pain. I’d never felt so sore and stiff before. I was sure the cuffs had carved deep lines into my wrists.
“How did you sleep?”
“How do you think I slept?” I snapped without looking up at him. “You have my hands cuffed behind my back. I’m being held hostage here against my will and I have no idea what the hell you have planned for me.”
He chuckled. “You’re not being held hostage. You’re free to go. In fact...” I heard him get up and walk over to me. “You’re right. You shouldn’t be cuffed.”
I cocked my head to the side and looked up at him. He had put the gun down on the armchair, brought a pair of keys out of his pocket, and began fiddling with the handcuffs. With a joyous click, they opened up and my wrists felt sharp air and cool relief.
He removed them and tossed them onto his oak dresser where they landed with a clatter.
“There. Better?”
I examined my wrists. They were raw and stung a little but were mainly undamaged. “Not really. I suppose there’s a price for letting me go?”
He went into a wide-legged stance with crossed arms and tilted his chin down at me. “There’s a price for everything. We still have a deal, remember? You’ll help me because I need your help, and because the other two choices are…the greater of the evils. You won’t run away because I’ve got all the proof to put you behind bars ready to go at the click of a button. If you run, you’ll never escape, and all the lives you’ve tried to create will be ruined.”
So basically what he was telling me was that I was already in a prison. Sure, you couldn’t see it, but I was stuck with him, stuck within these white walls until he decided to let me go. If he ever decided to let me go.
“All right then,” I said slowly, pulling the flannel sheets up to my collarbone. From where he was standing he had a clear view down my shirt and I didn’t want my hostage-taker to be getting any special privileges. Not anymore.
“So,” I said, “when you’re finished blackmailing me, what do you plan on doing with me?”
“You mean after you help me?”
I nodded brusquely.
“Then we part ways.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And is parting ways a euphemism for something else? Say, killing me?”
He looked disappointed in what I said. “No, Ellie. It means parting ways. It means you go one way and I go another. You head east and I head west.”
“We’re about as west as we can go already,” I noted, eyeing him curiously. He seemed as sharp as ever but a lot more reasonable than last night. He was still scarily unpredictable, and I knew I’d never underestimate him again, but I felt like this was as good a time as any to find out what the hell our deal was based around.
“No. There’s more west to go.”
“So then, tell me. What’s the deal? What’s your plan? What do you need me to help you with? Is it killing people, because I don’t kill people, Camden. You might think I would because I’m a criminal, but not all criminals are the same, and I swear I do have a set of morals somewhere in my body. You might not see it, but it’s there.”
He gave me a half smile, picked up his gun, and walked out of the room, calling over his shoulder, “Let’s discuss this over coffee.”
I watched him leave, my pulse quickening at his avoidance of the subject, then eased myself out of the bed. “Can I go to the bathroom first?” I asked.
“Sure,” he yelled back from the kitchen. “You won’t find any weapons in there anyway, if that’s what you were planning.”
Actually, all I had was a bladder that was about to burst and hadn’t even thought about attacking him with razor blades or tweezers. What would be the use, anyway? Unless I actually killed Camden, which I wasn’t about to do, hence my worry over his ambiguousness, I really had no escape. He’d probably let me walk straight out of the house, but I was sure that no matter where I went, the police wouldn’t be far behind.
And Uncle Jim. I couldn’t, wouldn’t, forget about him.
When I came out of the bathroom, he was sitting around the kitchen table with a lined memo pad and pen in his hands, a French press full of dark coffee and two orange mugs beside him. The gun was nowhere in sight. He had his glasses on, the thin-rimmed ones I’d seen in his office, and he looked up at me with such apathy that he could have been an accountant about to go over some numbers. You know, if most accountants had a piercing at the end of their nose and wore fitted plaid shirts.
“Coffee?” he asked, nodding his head at the press.