He sighs his you’re-an-idiot-but-I-know-everything sigh. “Could be those guys who let me have it in El Molino put on a tracker. You wouldn’t see them.”
I want to smack him. I swear to God, the self-control it takes to keep my hands on the wheel and off him could keep the entire Cotter’s Mill Unified dance team virgins until marriage. We’re in a car in the desert with no one around. I can’t keep hitting him, but I can scream all I want. “You took me in a car with a tracker?”
He’s so out of it, he can’t even shout back. “I just thought of it. But let up—even if I’d thought of it before, do you have a better alternative to offer?”
Duh.
“How about, we could have ditched the car in Bakersfield? Taken a bus. Gotten on a train. Gone camping. Rowed a boat to Canada.”
He just looks confused. “Jesus, maybe this was stupid.”
“You need to drive faster! We need to get away from that car! If you’re going to wuss out at sixty-five, get out of the driver’s seat.”
He keeps going speed limit, taking the curves like he was driving a school bus.
“Jack!” I punch him on the arm. Not hard, just to get his attention. He doesn’t need two arms for an automatic anyway. “Pull over. I have to drive.”
Jack says, “You’re like a three-year-old. Use your damn words.”
“My words are pull over!”
“Why don’t you sleep? We can alternate. Do us both a favor.”
He sounds completely wasted in a sloppy drunk way even though all I’ve been feeding him is Coke from gas station mini-marts.
“Do you have slurred speech?”
“This isn’t the concussion, doc. I just spent the night driving in the back of a Japanese mini-car with an armed toddler.”
“Do I call you names? No. I’m totally nice to you. Go faster! I want to get to the other side of Utah and crash at a motel.”
“We can’t go to a motel.”
“Why not? They don’t know what car we’re in anymore. For all they know, we stopped for a Big Mac and now we’re having a picnic.” I feel brilliant for accidentally parking at McDonald’s and getting more fries while he bought this noisy piece of whatever.
“Come on, Jack. Please. You’re crazed. I’m crazed. Let’s find a motel and sleep. On a bed. With pillows. I want to take a two-hour shower.”
70
Jack
I wish she’d talk about Mendes and what, exactly, she hopes to accomplish on this cross-country expedition, but she won’t. Half the time, it feels as if she’s playing Bonnie and I’m supposed to be Clyde. The other half, I wonder if I’m supposed to be her bodyguard or a family therapist when we get there.
When I bring up reasonable objections—for example, the unlikelihood of her having an enlightening conversation with a man who wants her dead—she yells. Mostly she yells about how I have to do it because Mendes has to pay.
I can’t argue with her there. If Mendes is the guy who started all this, I wouldn’t mind asking him what happened to Connie. I wouldn’t mind making him pay. But getting Nicolette killed by playing along with the insane idea that me standing there with a gun will make her safe while she confronts the guy is a poor form of payment. Every time I try to convince her that this isn’t a plan, she intones, “Said the guy who was supposed to kill me.”
By the time we hit Nebraska—Nicolette, still white-knuckled from being driven back through the Colorado Rockies in the slow lane, terrified, not bothering to deny it, grabbing my arm—you’d have to be stupid to think that a rational conversation on this topic was going anywhere.
“Baby, please rethink,” is my new tagline. “Think” would be more technically correct, but I don’t relish the blowback—not after I called her a toddler and she’s responded to half the things I’ve said to her since by sticking her thumb in her mouth, posing, and refusing to acknowledge me.
Nicolette says, “I know exactly what I’m doing.” She seems to be channeling Wonder Woman, but without the stunt person standing by to leap from building to building for her. Apparently, her role model is Xena, Warrior Princess. “Why can’t you just trust me and drive?” she says. “Just do what I say, and we’ll be totally safe.”
When we pull into the motel against my better judgment, she says, “Wait, Jack.” She sounds like Cat, the girl who thought I was a great guy, and not like Nicolette, the disappointed, pissed-off one. “I know you don’t agree with this. I get you could have taken off and left me to deal, and you didn’t. Plus, there’s what I did to your head. Total idiot. I’m sorry, and I hate apologizing. But you kind of owe me. I was fake to you and you were fake to me, but it was also real. Which makes it worse. Not that getting grabbed by a stranger would have been a trip to Disney World.”
“Nick, I’m losing the thread.”
“The point is, stop trying to talk me out of it,” she says. “Please. It’s not going to work.”
“Fine.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“You don’t own the word ‘fine.’ Other people say it.”