But I don’t see any stray rifles lying around. (As if I’d shoot a dog—I wouldn’t.) What I see is a flat, wide sky, a blue lid with fat clouds stuffed underneath, pressing down, closing me into a tight Texas box.
A box I have no idea how to get out of.
I could make it over this fence so fast, but there’s razor-edged tape up there that could separate your fingers from your hands if you grabbed it.
Watch enough crime shows on TV, and you know this gruesome stuff.
Wake up caked in blood a thousand miles from the scene of the crime, and . . . what? Pray that the pickups driving by aren’t them is what.
I poke my sneakers into the fence’s unforgiving little holes and scramble toward the slim opening of the loosely chained gate. Pull it shut. Walk toward the row of trees that shields the lots behind them from the street.
Trying not to be the out-of-place moving speck that draws the hunter’s eye.
Trying to look as inconspicuous as if I were cutting fifth period back home, sneaking under the bleachers and over the fence behind Cotter’s Mill Unified High School with Jody Nimiroff and Olivia so we could get Big Macs for lunch and sneak back into school for sixth period.
That’s what seemed like life-and-death two days before.
Scarfing down fries in time to sprint back to school unnoticed.
Avoiding Saturday detention.
That life is over.
If I don’t stop crying like a helpless baby, so am I.
Over. Done with. Dead.
I have to deal.
I’m dealing.
6
Jack
It takes everything I’ve got not to gun the car past the prison gates and fishtail out of there.
Don’s envelope is pressing against my chest like a dead weight, like a rat corpse you pick up by the tail and chuck into the incinerator. It pokes me through my shirt. I’d reach down and scratch, but I won’t risk a move that could make the car jerk and give the Highway Patrol any excuse to stop me. Face it, when those guys see my name on my driver’s license, they’ve been known to come up with a bogus excuse to pat me down.
I don’t know what’s in this envelope, but I know enough not to let a cop find it on me.
I count the minutes, miles, and tenths of a mile to the first turn-off. I pull into a bar and grill that looks least likely to have electronic surveillance, as if the security cam at the Jack in the Box could see into my car and call me out me for taking step one in Don’s deranged plan.
Tearing open the envelope, I have the feeling I get when I’m crouched in the scull at the starting block, just before the starting pistol fires, waiting to pull back on the oars and launch across the water.
Bang. There she is, staring out from under the envelope’s flap. A girl with long hair and doe eyes, all narrow shoulders and collarbone and small breasts.
Hello, Nicolette.
I’ve lost it. I’m seeing thought bubbles over her head that aren’t there: “Don’t.” “You aren’t going to, right?” “Guns don’t kill people; assholes kill people.”
I think, At least she’s got a sense of humor. Then I think, Stop hallucinating.
Her face is heart-shaped, freckles across the nose, and a wide mouth. She’s not completely confident when the camera catches her eye, but she gives up the suggestion of a grin. There she is in the next picture, prancing around in a cheerleader uniform. She could be junior varsity, that’s how young she looks—young and in-your-face pretty. This girl doesn’t even look as if she’d kill a spider.
The Weedwacker that keeps me in line starts up in my gut.
This is fucked. Heavy-duty guys like Karl Yeager aren’t supposed to hand small-time hoods at Yucca Valley Correctional school portraits of future dead girls, with the girls’ addresses printed on the back. A penciled annotation says it’s Esteban Mendes’s house—surprise, surprise—with a note to stay away. I’m happy to oblige.
Why go to her house when I’ve got the address of her school, her Tumblr, her Instagram, her Pinterest board of fancy dresses, and her defunct three-year-old blog where her last entry was about Twilight? (She was thirteen. She liked it. She was Team Jacob.) I have her log-in and her password for a dozen different sites: BUTTERcup9. Apparently, no one told her it’s smart to change things up.
I unwrap her driver’s license. I don’t mean a scan of it: it. Sixty seconds later, I’m in the men’s room at the back of the lounge with my Swiss Army knife, slicing the license into pieces small enough to flush. It’s a liability. She’s a missing-killer-crazy-girl, and I have her driver’s license on me?
Think, Jack.