“Hide our bodies,” Curtis said again. “Me and these two guys. Put us in their car and hide it someplace. It has to stay lost for a long time.”
The kid’s burst of alertness was leaving him. The skin of his face was paper white. His voice was back to a whisper.
Dryden said, “But this Tahoe—”
Curtis shook his head. “Can’t be traced to me. I was already careful about that. Stolen plates. Filed off the VIN. Just burn it.”
He took a deep breath. It looked like it hurt.
“Do it,” Curtis sighed. Then a strange little smile crossed his face. “I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.”
The odd smile stayed on his face as his eyes went still.
Gone.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When Aubrey Deene pulled into the carport in front of her apartment, one of the maintenance guys was mowing the lawn. Her eyes fixed on the mower: an old Husqvarna, like the kind her father had beaten to hell every summer of her childhood back in South Bend. Sometimes a fouled spark plug would set him off, and he’d burn up a day’s worth of anger in five minutes of wrench throwing in the garage. Other times the mower would only get him warmed up, and then Aubrey and her sister and her mother would have a long night in store for them. Rod Deene had been dead for five years now—heart attack a month before Aubrey finished undergrad at Iowa State—but the damnedest things could shove him right back into her head.
The engine of her ancient Miata coughed and threatened to die. She killed the ignition and pocketed the key, then turned and rummaged through the textbooks and folders on the passenger seat. Any day now, the car was going to give up the ghost and leave her hitchhiking. Which would be fitting, in its own way. Her life had taken on a distinctly hitchhiker kind of feeling lately. Like her future was no more plotted than that of a paper cup in the wind.
Not so far off the mark, you know.
That internal voice had an irritating, teen-angst edge to it. If there was anyone less welcome in Aubrey’s head than her father, it was her own younger self, two months out of high school, pulling out of her parents’ driveway in her rusted-to-shit VW Beetle. Leaving South Bend and heading for the world. Iowa State, then MIT, then whatever Ph.D. program looked right. The girl with all the answers, all the dominoes lined up and ready to fall.
They had fallen. For a while. Iowa State had gone swimmingly, and MIT had played out like a well-rehearsed dance number, exhilarating and challenging, leaving her winded but with her feet right on the intended marks. She’d had her choice of doctoral programs, and she’d picked Cornell, and for a time, things there had followed the game plan, too. She could remember feeling like it was all still clicking along. There were beautiful afternoons on the plaza, maybe her favorite place in the whole world. Sometimes she would take her textbooks and sit inside Sage Chapel, though she had never been religious and never would be. Most of the time the chapel was empty except for a few tourists, moving in little groups, whispering, taking pictures of the beautiful architecture. Aubrey had sat in the shadowy pews, way back from the lit-up altar, and let the silence of the place envelop her like water.
She supposed the doubts had started creeping in around that time. Little uncertainties that gave her pause now and then, like static lines flickering in the movie of her life. There were social issues, for one. She was twenty-four and had never had a boyfriend—nothing that’d lasted beyond a few weeks, anyway. She knew she was pretty, and it wasn’t hard getting the attention of boys. Yet the few times she’d let someone in—nice guys from her classes who didn’t push for things to get physical right away—had ended horribly. Three or four dates along, she would make the first move. Things would happen, enjoyable things if a little clumsy and brief, and then she’d find herself lying awake all night next to a sleeping body, her mind trying like hell to avoid the unwelcome truth: that she felt nothing for this person; that she wished she was back at her place, alone with her books and her lab notes; that she had no idea what to say in the morning.