I’d spent the night before huddled in Jody Nimiroff’s lakeside tree house under the flannel sleeping bag she’s kept up there since we were eight, eating the dregs of last year’s Girl Scout cookies.
Every cell of me wanted to go home. I wanted to tell Steve, my stepfather, what happened. I wanted him to pull me into a bear hug, slightly pissed off but more than willing to take care of everything for me. Again.
But he already knew.
It felt like I’d been gutted by a dull knife, every idea of who I was and where I fit into the world pouring out of me like a deer’s innards when it gets cut open in hunting season.
I was in wounded-deer survival mode.
Evade hunters.
Run.
Hide.
When they came looking for me along the narrow strip of gritty sand that rims Green Lake, tracing the ground with beams from their flashlights, I was pressed against the back wall of the tree house, chewing a stale Thin Mint.
Everything was so loud.
The chocolate bits between my teeth.
My pulse thundering in my ears.
Their footsteps as they disappeared past the Nimiroffs’ dock, scanning the lake with their puny globes of light. As if they thought I was paddling a canoe through pitch-black tributaries up to Canada.
If I knew how to find true north by looking at the stars—if I’d paid more attention when Steve tried to teach me—I might have been in a canoe. That’s how desperate and lacking in judgment I was.
I had to get out of there before first light.
As soon as the men disappeared from sight, I lowered Jody’s rope ladder and bolted back into the woods that skirt Lakeshore Road. Sliding between trees in the darkness, listening for footsteps.
By the time I hit the truck stop at Bonnie-Belle Pie, it was almost dawn.
I had nothing to lose.
I climbed onto the flatbed and into the pipe.
4
Jack
Supposedly, Eskimos have fifty words for snow. That’s how many ways I keep saying no to Don. Because at first I don’t believe him. I’ve heard too many variations on the threat before. If I don’t run his errand, this dealer in Reno or that wannabe gangster from LA or the Russians will off him.
But here he is, alive and hunched over a metal picnic table.
Unfortunately, my dad snapping “Curiosity killed the cat” a hundred times immediately before smacking me when I was a kid didn’t have the result he was going for. My curiosity is the peg Don uses to hang me out to dry. Because while I’m saying, “Don’t try to jerk me around, no fucking way,” Don pulls a white envelope out from under his jumpsuit.
I know it’s a mistake before my hand touches the envelope. I say no but shove it into my jacket in the interest of not getting caught wrestling over something neither one of us should have.
“I knew you’d see reason.” Don smirks. “It’s all there. Everything about her. Good stuff. It’s from somebody’s lawyer.”
Why do they bother having guards at this place? Things slide in and out as if it were a dry cleaner: drugs, sharp objects, dossiers on girls with targets on their backs.
I say, “Whose lawyer?”
“Need-to-know,” he says, as if suddenly he’s CIA and not a lowlife enforcer. That’s what he’s locked up for, whaling the crap out of guys who didn’t pay back the loan shark he was working for. “You’re just the technician.”
I’m Don’s murder technician?
“I know you,” Don says. “You’re going to look in the envelope. Then you’re going to have to win the game. You can’t help yourself.”
All right, I’m going to look in the envelope. Who wouldn’t look?
But how can he think I’m going to do this? It’s almost May. AP exams are in a couple of weeks. Then comes Welcome Admitted Students weekend at Mercer College, twenty-five hundred miles east of Nevada, where my future’s supposed to take place. I have a life as an upstanding citizen, honor student, and varsity crew captain that I’ll be right back into as soon as I peel out of the prison parking lot.
“You know where my stuff is, right? In Mom’s garage?”
“I don’t care where your stuff is, Don!” You get good at shouting in a very quiet voice if you visit someone in prison enough. “You order me to do it and I do it? Are you kidding me? Do you even know me?”
Don stares out at the bleak landscape of the high desert. “I know what this Nicolette Holland did to Connie Marino,” he says. “Doesn’t that bother you?”
Of course it bothers me. It makes me sick.