“Okay, well, that’s a nice gesture.” Ashley glanced to Lars. “So, baby brother? Do you accept Sandi’s apology?”
Lars grinned, savoring the power, and shook his head twice.
“Please. Please, I—”
Ashley adjusted his hold on Sandi’s scalp, planted his boot higher between her shoulder blades (for leverage, Darby realized), and tugged hard.
The woman’s neck broke, eventually. It wasn’t quick, or painless. Sandi screamed until she was out of air, her face going a rotten purple, her eyes bulging before going flat, her fingers clawing, kicking. Ashley paused once, adjusting his grip before yanking her head harder, harder, harder, ninety degrees backward now, until her vertebrae finally dislocated in an audible, wet string. Like popping knuckles. If she had still been conscious, she might’ve experienced the paraplegic horror of her body going numb. It was a straining, clumsy, grunting process, and it took a full thirty seconds before the woman was visibly dead.
Then Ashley let go, letting Sandi’s forehead thud against tile, her neck full of separated bones. He stood up, red-faced.
Lars was clapping his scarred hands now, giggling with excitement, like he’d just seen the card trick to end them all.
I just witnessed a murder, Darby thought dully. Just now. In plain view. Sandi Schaeffer — San Diego school bus driver, co-conspirator to this tangled mess of a ransom plot — was gone forever now. A human life, a soul, extinguished. Whether it was door hinges or Lars’s fetal alcohol syndrome — utter a phrase that displeases Ashley Garver, even in passing, and he doesn’t forget it. He makes a note. And later, he takes his pound of flesh.
“Hey, baby brother.” He caught his breath, pointing down at the woman’s warm body. “Wanna hear something funny? Not that it matters now, but did this Jesus-freak tell you what she was planning to spend her share on?”
“What?”
“Women’s shelters. Six figures donated to battered women’s shelters all over California, like a real-life Mother Teresa. Can you believe that?”
Lars laughed thickly.
Darby glanced up at the Garfield clock, but her vision smeared with Vaseline-tears. Maybe three minutes until the cops arrived? Two minutes? She couldn’t tell. Her mind was a swirl of razor blades. She closed her eyes again, wishing desperately to be six again. She wished this was just another witching-hour nightmare she’d awoken from, before high school, before Smirnoff Ice and curfew and marijuana cookies and Depo-Provera, before everything became complicated, wrapped up in her mother’s arms, blinking away tears, breathlessly describing the ghostly lady with the double-jointed dog legs who’d strode through her bedroom— No, it was just a dream.
I’ve got you, baby. It was just a dream.
Just inhale, count to five, and— Ashley rattled the closet door. Like sandpaper on exposed nerves, a jangling, complex pain that writhed up her wrist like electricity. She screamed in a choked voice she’d never heard before.
“Sorry, Darbs. You were dozing off again.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Trust me, this was supposed to be an easy little one-off. We’d pick up Jaybird from her mansion, drive twelve hours to a storage unit in Moose Head, where Sandi had a stash of money, cabin keys, and Jay’s stupid adrenaline shots, all under a fake name and a five-digit combination lock — one-nine-eight-seven-two. We’d grab that, disappear up to Sandi’s family cabin, and spend a week or two negotiating a sweet ransom payoff. Right?”
He rattled the door again — another violin-screech of pain.
“Wrong. After we surprise-adopted Jaybird, and we were halfway across the Mojave, we learned there was a breakin at Sandi’s stupid Sentry Storage place, and all of the combination locks had been compromised. Figures, right? So they were back to using default keys, which only Sandi had, all the way back in California. And problem two — Mr Nissen called the cops, even though our instructions explicitly told him not to, and now Sandi was under all kinds of scrutiny since she’s the goddamn school bus driver who saw Jay last. Meanwhile we’re out here in the Rockies without a place to stay and a sick kiddo in the van, puking up a storm. What were we to do? Huh?”
He reached forward, as if to rattle the doorknob again — Darby winced — but he showed a flash of compassion and didn’t.
“So, Sandi cooked up a last-minute family Christmas trip to Denver as a cover story for the police, so she could meet up with us at a public place and give us the storage unit key so we could access Jay’s meds, and our supplies. Which brings me to problem three.” Ashley pointed outside. “This goddamn winter wonderland.”
The pieces clicked together in Darby’s mind: Snowmageddon trapped them all here at the handoff point. With poor Ed as Sandi’s unwitting prop.
And then I showed up.
The sheer scale of it dwarfed her, and made her head swim. This viper’s nest she’d wandered into at seven p.m., strung out on Red Bull and exhausted. She watched the long, beady drip of her own blood. It almost touched the floor now.
“I’m not stupid,” Ashley said. “I’ve seen enough movies to know everything leaves a digital fingerprint. Since the police are involved now, collecting Jaybird’s ransom from Mommy and Daddy is pretty much impossible. And the cops are all over Sandi, too. She stole Jay’s cortisol shots from the school nurse’s office a few months back, so they’ll pin that to her pretty quick. And then she’d probably squeal on us, which makes her a liability. So we came up here to kill her after she gave us the key. Make it look like a robbery-gone-wrong, gunshot-to-the-face deal. But I wasn’t expecting the blizzard, or for her to bring Cousin Ed. And I wasn’t expecting you, obviously.”
It all interlocked and made a macabre sort of sense. Except for one last unknown, burning in the back of Darby’s mind with unresolved tension. “Then . . . if there’s no ransom money, what’re you going to do with Jay?”
“Hey.” Ashley snapped his fingers in her face again. “Answer mine first, okay? Where are my keys?”
“What are you going to do with her?”
He smiled guiltily. “It’ll just make you uncooperative.”
“Yeah? What the hell have I been all night?”
“Trust me, Darbs. Just trust me on this one.” He stood up, hefting the orange nail gun, and paced across the room. “Because, hallelujah, I’ve figured you out. I could slam that door on each of your fingers until the sun comes up, until you have nothing but bloody hamburger-hands, and you still won’t tell me what I need to know, because you’re just not that kind of person. You’re a hero, a bleeding-heart. Your whole night went to hell because you broke into a van to save a stranger. So guess what? Here’s your chance to save another one.”
He crouched beside Ed and pressed the nail gun to his forehead. The older man’s eyelids slid groggily half-open.