She tilted her head forward.
“Good. Forward makes it clot. Backward, and it all pours down your throat and you get a stomach full of blood.” He brushed snow from his shoulders. “And use those napkins. They’re free.”
“Thanks.”
As Ed moved past, Darby glanced over to Sandi, bridging a moment of shaky eye contact. Sandi was suspicious now, eyes wide, glancing between the two brothers. The outline of Lar’s concealed pistol was plainly shadowed in the overhead light.
Darby raised an index finger to her lips: Shhh.
Sandi nodded once.
At the same time, Ashley must have been making a hand signal to Lars. Darby turned back and only caught the end of it, but it looked like a frenzied hand-to-throat gesture: Stop, stop, stop. That was it; the room had just been a split-second from exploding into violence. Ed had no clue that he might have just saved everyone’s lives by bumbling back inside when he did with a bag of instant coffee.
Now, he reached through the security shutter and dispensed hot water. “It’s not quite boiling, but it’s hot enough for tea. Should be okay for some shitty coffee.”
“Mana from heaven,” said Ashley. “Sweet, sweet caffeine.”
“Yep, that’s the idea.”
“You’re my hero, Ed.”
He nodded, his patience for Ashley’s chatter clearly wearing thin. “Good to hear.”
Sandi backed up and sat on the corner bench, where she could monitor the entire room. Darby watched her lift her paperback, but hold it in her lap. Her other hand tucked carefully inside her purse, behind the embroidered letters of Psalm 100:5. Gripping a canister of pepper spray, perhaps.
Please, Sandi, don’t say anything.
The Wanapani rest area was a powder keg. All it would take is a single spark — and this room was full of friction. Carefully, out of view, Darby opened the IF YOU TELL THEM, I KILL THEM BOTH note in her lap, beneath the tabletop, and wrote another message against her thigh. She capped her pen and folded the napkin tightly again, leaving a bloody thumbprint.
“Who else wants coffee?” Ed asked.
“Me,” said Lars.
Sandi nodded, but didn’t speak.
“Me, too,” Darby said as she stood up, gripping her sore nose and handing the note to Ashley, then turning to face Ed. “No sugar, no cream. And make it strong, please. Tonight is going to be one hell of a long night.”
Behind her, she heard Ashley greedily unfold the napkin.
He was reading her message now.
1:02 a.m.
YOU WIN. I WON’T SAY A WORD.
Ashley smirked — she had no idea how right she was.
This CU-Boulder girl was an unexpected complication, but he’d already figured her out. He’d seen her type before, although never in the flesh. See, Darby Elizabeth Thorne was a bona fide hero. She was one of those bystanders on a Shell Station CCTV tape who goes for the robber’s gun, or renders aide to a bleeding clerk. She was the type who’d throw herself under the meat-grinder-wheels of a train to save a total stranger. Protecting others, doing the right thing, was an instinct for her, whether she knew it or not.
Contrary to popular belief, that’s not a strength.
It’s a weakness, because it makes you predictable. Controllable. And sure enough — with just a thirty-minute conversation, a half-round of circle time, and an aborted card game — Ashley already owned her.
Breaking her nose? That was just a fun little victory lap.
And he’d been surprised by how much he enjoyed watching Darby fight tears in front of Ed and Sandi, her nose a spurting red faucet. There was something great about it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. She was humiliated, suffering in public, like some of his favorite porn. He loved the ones where the girl was secretly wearing vibrating panties in a street or restaurant, trying not to show it. Trying to hold back.
It helped that Darby was undeniably pretty, too, in a feral way. She had a ferocity to her; a vicious streak to go with her fiery auburn hair. She didn’t know how tough she could be, if pushed to the edge. He’d love to take her there. He’d love to take her up in Rathdrum, to drive her out to the gravel pit and teach her how to fire his uncle’s SKS. Brace the wooden Soviet stock up to her little shoulder, guide her painted fingernail around the trigger, whiff her nervous sweat as she aligned the notched iron sights.
Such a bummer, then, that he’d have to kill her tonight.
He didn’t want to.
Ashley Garver had never technically killed anyone before, so tonight would be a definite first. The closest instance he could think of was still more manslaughter than murder. And not via direct action — but inaction.
He’d been a kid when it happened.
This was a year or two before he nearly lost his thumb at Chink’s Drop. So he’d been five, maybe six. Back then, his parents used to offload him and Lars (just a toddler then) in the summer months with Uncle Kenny, who lived in the dry prairies of Idaho. He called himself Fat Kenny (Hey, hey, hey!), which Ashley only now understood was a riff on Fat Albert. He was a jolly man who huffed when he climbed stairs, smoked clove cigarettes, and always had a joke on hand.
What do you tell a woman with a black eye?
‘Shoulda listened.’
What do you tell a woman with two black eyes?
Nothin’. She’s already been told twice.
Each year, Ashley had returned to grade school armed with an arsenal of killer jokes. Every September he’d been the most popular kid on the playground, letting them go viral. By October or so, the school district had always held an emergency assembly about tolerance.
But there was a lot more to Uncle Kenny than his rip-roaring funnies. He also owned an onsite diesel station on a single-lane highway south of Boise, popular with truckers and nobody else. Ashley used to climb the apple trees with Lars and watch the eighteen-wheelers roll in and out. Sometimes they parked on Kenny’s land, chewing muddy divots in the yellow grass, arriving late at night and leaving early in the morning. They rarely entered Uncle Kenny’s house, though — they went to his storm cellar.
It was like a fallout bunker, a single hatch door protruding from the weeds twenty yards from the laundry room. This submarine door was always, always padlocked. Until one morning when, under a gauze of damp fog, he’d found it wasn’t.
So he’d gone inside.
Ashley remembered few details about the dark room at the bottom of the long, rotten staircase. Mostly just the odors — a musty, sweet staleness that was simultaneously putrid and oddly alluring. He’d never smelled anything like it since. Cold cement under his feet. Electrical cords on the floor; big lights set up on tripods. Indistinct shapes, lurking in the dark.
He’d just been leaving, climbing back up the stairs when a woman’s voice called out to him: Hey.
He’d turned, nearly tripping. He waited for a long moment, half-on the stairs, half-off, gooseflesh prickling on his arms, wondering if he’d just imagined it, until finally, the female voice spoke again.