“Why? So you can grab the gun?”
I take a deep breath and blow the air out through my mouth. “The only reason I want the gun is so you don’t shoot me with it.”
We drive in silence until we’re almost all the way out of the foothills, driving west toward the coast, back to civilization.
I switch on the radio.
“Turn it off.”
Then she says, “You swear you thought it was Yeager sending you out after me? Swear no one said one word to you about Steve.”
“That’s how it happened. Don said Mendes had nothing to do with it. He said it was Yeager. He knew hearing ‘Yeager’ would scare me. And it made sense it was him.”
What doesn’t make sense is that I went along with it.
I hear her fingernails drumming on something hard—the seat belt buckle, I hope. Then she says, “God, you believe anything.”
I wish I could see her face. She’s probably sorry I ever came to.
I say, “You’re lucky it’s not Yeager. Once he starts, he won’t stop until he’s dead—or you are. He’s relentless. His brother’s wife divorces his brother, she marries a dentist, his brother remarries, everybody’s happy. Three years later, she disappears. She’s gone. She’s never heard from again.”
She says, “Stop! I get you thought it was Yeager.”
“That whole Yeager clan is a bunch of rabid pit bulls.”
“I get it! All Yeagers suck. Fine.”
And then there’s absolute silence. This goes on for miles as we swing through what would be farm country if there were water. The headache she gave me when she clobbered me could be classified as blinding if I didn’t have to see well enough to drive.
I whisper, “Are you asleep?”
“You wish.”
After a long time, Nicolette says, “You’re in deep shit, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” When I think about the deep shit I’m in—beyond Don, beyond my mother, beyond the guys in my apartment and whoever set our laundry room at home on fire—I can’t believe I let this happen.
I’m Art Manx’s kid. Law enforcement has preconceived notions about me. They find reason to search my trunk when I drive, stone sober, through a sobriety checkpoint off the Strip. And now Nicolette can tell them how I chased her with a loaded gun. No one will believe that I was planning to convince her to come with me to Guyana or some other unspecified location I never revealed to her before she had a gun on me.
I say, “More like quicksand. Unless you want to run away with me.”
Nicolette laughs, but not her fun laugh. “Sure. That’s definitely on. Argentina. As if that was a thing.”
“It would save us both a lot of grief. There’s cash in the trunk.”
“You’re so full of yourself! I already tried disappearing—you think you’d be so much better at it? I’m tired of disappearing. I’m done.”
I say, “What’s your alternative? You hand me over to the police and go back to being a target? I was never going to hurt you.”
“Liar! You know you had a plan!”
“My plan was to stage it. We’d get to the crest, and I’d explain to you.”
“At gunpoint?”
“The plan was for you to believe me. Give me a bloody shoe for Don. And then we could take off.”
“What if I didn’t want to take off with you?”
Admittedly, I didn’t have that part of the equation mapped out. “I’d give you cash? You could hide better with cash, admit it.”
“So I was going to leave with your money. What were you going to do? Like, if somebody checked to see if you actually killed me.”
“I don’t know!” This is the frustrating, embarrassing truth. “Rat out Don? Kill my mom?”
“Kill your—”
“It’s a figure of speech. When I rat out Don, it’s going to break her heart.”
“Your brother said it was her or me?”
“And me. There was an element of self-interest.”
“If you think you can charm me by being slightly honest, you can’t.”
I want to charm her, but I don’t know how.
I really am fucked.
63
Nicolette
Everything’s different from what I thought. I was hiding from the wrong thing. I had the wrong plan.
This is where I make a better plan.
The plan where I stop paying for things I mostly didn’t even do, and everybody else who did terrible things starts paying up.
Big time.
Jack is lucky.
All he has to do is help me out, and maybe I’ll let him out of this. Maybe? Who am I kidding? I will. All I can think about is whether I gave him a concussion, and how bad that is, and if I should make him drive us to an urgent care center somewhere in this burned-out brown landscape so a doctor can check him out.
I wish he’d say something. Such as apologizing more. But he’s just driving along like a law-abiding maniac at thirty-five miles per hour.
I just want to hurry up and get out of here.
At least Ohio is green. This place looks like it just had a forest fire. Jack says people consider this golden. I consider it a wasteland that I’m leaving.
I hate the West.