“Were you going to rape me first?”
“You think I’d rape you?” I rub my left shoulder, which is starting to throb.
“Keep your hands on your head! Just if you value them.”
“You’re going to shoot up my hands?” I can’t stop marveling at the strangeness of this conversation, how fast everything tanked.
“I grew up in Cotter’s Mill, Ohio, asshat. I know the dates of hunting season. I can shoot a Canada goose out of the sky and gut it.”
“Really?” I don’t know why I’m even asking. Skills with a knife is one talent I’ve always known she had. I just didn’t know how she acquired it.
She does one of her little sighs. “How hard could it be to gut a goose? I’ve watched enough times.” She’s using that tone she gets when she’s admitting to something. How cute I thought it was—not so cute now. “Here’s the thing, J, or whatever your name is. I can shoot up any part of you I feel like shooting up. I have a pretty good idea of where I’ll start.”
I don’t like where I think she’s looking. “Cat—”
“Nicolette. And I could blow the slider off your zipper at twenty-five yards.”
The fact that she says twenty-five yards, not some other number, but exactly twenty-five, makes her a target shooter. Shit. I’ve been disarmed by a cute, cheerleading target shooter. Shit, shit, shit.
“I didn’t mean to insult you. Sorry. I didn’t realize you were—I’m sorry.”
“Do you think I care how sorry you are?” she shouts, rising, approaching. I’m so fucked. “Do you think I believe anything you say? All I care about is how to get you tied up in the car without taking this gun off you so I can turn you in.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Why not?” she shouts. “Do the police already know about you? Am I just one in a string of girls you hooked up with and threw off cliffs?”
My head hurts, my shoulder hurts, and I think I’m a lot closer to getting shot than I was five minutes ago.
She screams, “Answer me!”
“No! Cat. And I swear on my father’s grave, there was a change of plan. I was trying to save you.”
“I don’t believe you! And don’t call me Cat.”
“Okay. I don’t see why you should believe me. But the hitch with turning me in is you’ll have to turn yourself in.” There’s silence from the armed girl. “Think about it. Even if you get off in the end, do you want to spend the next decade on death row in Ohio?”
In a gritty voice, she says, “Open your eyes.”
She’s just a couple of yards away now, still aiming at me, and even if her reflexes were below average, if I took a run at her, I’d have a hole in my gut.
“What do you think you know?” she says.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. I tell her the truth, which is short and pretty simple, or I draw it out all day until it’s dark and I can take her: maybe.
I say, “Connie Marino.” She’s stone-faced. “I know what you did to her, how you stabbed her.” I sound like a bad guy on TV, like the bozos in my apartment, like the guy who pulls you out of the story because he needs acting lessons. I try again, “She shouldn’t be dead.”
“Somebody told you I stabbed someone?”
“Shit. Do you even know who Connie Marino is?”
Her face is screaming before anything comes out of her mouth. “I don’t know who you are!” She aims down at me. “And I didn’t stab anybody! So I won’t be on death row anytime soon.” She sighs. “Unless I shoot you.”
Her arms look so muscular from this angle, and so at ease with that gun. She probably could take down a duck in flight. Or bag a guy.
My gut is a rock, rolling into my throat, defying gravity and my will.
She doesn’t have a clue. I’ve brought the wrong girl to ground.
Or maybe the point was for me to take out an innocent, know-nothing girl, hiding for reasons I might never know if she takes me out before I ask her.
“I’m going to throw up. Don’t shoot me.” I barely finish because I’m puking into a bush, gagging and wiping my mouth, heaving some more. I’m going to be a vomit-crusted carcass, devoured by cougars and maggots in the Sierras.
“You must think I’m an idiot,” she says. “You find me, you con me, and I just leap into your car. Oh, J, I’ve never felt this way before. Oh, J, do you want to kill me now or later?”
“It wasn’t like that. I swear.”
“On the imaginary grave of your undead dad?”
“I’m going to toss you my phone, all right? Google him.”
“You think I’m going to let you pitch your phone at my head? I’m going to take my eyes off you to play Candy Crush? You must think I’m so stupid. Oh, J, why don’t I take off my bra so you can strangle me with it?”
“Please, baby, don’t—”