She stood on the brakes, slammed the gearshift into park, and unlatched her seat belt. Brian sat up halfway in the backseat as she came through the space between the two front seats and punched him in the side of the face. She had no experience with hitting someone, particularly with a closed fist—it stung her knuckles far worse than she would have expected—but she knew a direct hit when she heard one, and her fist connecting with Brian’s face made a sound as sharp and solid as any she’d ever heard. She watched his eyes water and grow disoriented.
So she hit him again. She pinned his shoulders with her knees. She punched his ear and his eye and the side of his face again. He bucked at her with his upper body, but the weight imbalance was all on her side and she knew the only rule at this point was to not stop until something forced her to. She heard his voice asking her to stop, her own voice calling him motherfucker over and over, saw his eyes scrunched up against the flurry of her fists. He squirmed his right shoulder free and that turned her awkwardly to her left, and he pushed off the foot well and the seat. She fell back through the space between the two front seats and he loomed up in the backseat, surging toward her.
She kicked him in the face.
If anything, it connected more thoroughly than her first punch. Bone or cartilage cracked, and the back of his head slammed into the window. He opened and closed his mouth several times, as if he were nibbling on the air, and then his eyes rolled back to the whites, and he lost consciousness.
I. Knocked. Someone. Out.
A small laugh popped from her mouth as she watched Brian’s eyes flutter under his sagging eyelids. Her right hand was already swelling and was slick with blood. His blood. His face, she realized with both shock and surprising concern, was battered. And she was pretty sure it hadn’t been battered five minutes ago.
I did that?
She took the car key and the gun with her and got out of the car and stood on the road. She experienced the worst craving she’d had for a cigarette since she’d quit seven years ago. She inhaled the impossibly fresh forest air instead and she couldn’t relate even a little bit to the person she’d been just hours ago, the one who’d contemplated suicide, the one who’d thought of giving up.
Fuck giving up. I’ll give up when I die. And it won’t be by my hand.
His door creaked open and his palms appeared above the window. The rest of him stayed below the roofline. “You done?”
“With what?”
“Beating the shit out of me.”
Her right hand was screaming now, but she wrapped it around the pistol just the same. “Yeah, I guess.”
He raised his head above the roofline and she pointed the pistol at him.
“Jesus!” He ducked down again.
She came around the car in three long strides and trained the gun on him. “Blanks?”
He lowered his hands from around his head and straightened from a crouch, resigned to his fate suddenly. “What?”
“Did you put blanks in this gun too?”
He shook his head.
She pointed the gun at his chest.
“No, really!” He raised his hands again. So maybe not so resigned after all. “Those are real fucking bullets in there.”
“Yeah?”
His eyes widened because he could see hers suddenly, could see what was in them.
She pulled the trigger.
Brian hit the ground. Well, he bounced off the vehicle first, trying to break to his left to escape the bullet. Bounced off the SUV, landed on the ground, hands still up in the universal, if wholly ineffectual, please-don’t-shoot-me gesture.
“Get up,” she said.
He stood, looked at the chunk of bark she’d shot out of the thin pine to his right. Blood dripped from his nose, over his lips, and off his chin. He wiped at it with his forearm. He spit red into the green grass by the side of the road.
“That looks like real blood. How’d you fake the blood in your mouth on the boat?”
“Wanna guess?” A small smile found his eyes but not his lips.
She put herself back on the boat, back in their conversation. She could see him sitting there so calmly as she confronted him about his second wife and second life. And he just sat there, eating.
“The peanuts,” she said.
He gave her a halfhearted thumbs-up. “Two of them were squibs, yeah.” He shot the gun a wary eye. “What are you going to do here, Rachel?”
“I haven’t decided yet, Brian.” She lowered the gun for a moment.
He lowered his hands. “If you kill me—and I wouldn’t blame you—you’re fucked. No money, no way of getting any, wanted for questioning in a murder, and hunted—”
“Two murders.”
“Two?”
She nodded.
He processed that and then continued. “You’re also being hunted by some very bad fucking guys. If you kill me, you’re staring down two, maybe three more days of free air and picking your own clothes to wear. And I know how you like to be stylish, honey.”
She raised the gun again. He raised his hands. He cocked an eyebrow at her. She cocked one back at him. And in that moment—what in the hell?—she felt connected to him, felt like she wanted to laugh. All the rage remained, all the sense of betrayal and fury at him for dismantling her trust, her life . . . and yet entwined with it, for just a moment, were all the old feelings.
It took every bit of muscle control she could muster not to smile.
“Speaking of stylish,” she said, “you’re not looking it right now.”
He touched his face with his fingers, came back with blood. He looked at his reflection in the window of the SUV. “I think you broke my nose.”
“Sounded like it at the time.”
He lifted the hem of his T-shirt up his chest and dabbed at his face. “I’ve got a first aid kit stashed nearby. Could we go back for it?”
“Why should I do you any favors, dear?”
“Because I’ve also got an SUV back there that doesn’t look like someone drove it off a fucking bridge, dear.”
They drove back to the clearing and then walked into the woods no more than twenty feet and there sat, perfectly camouflaged, a forest green Range Rover, early nineties vintage, some rust in the wheel wells, some dents in the rear quarter panels, but the tires were new and it had the look of something that would run another twenty years. She kept the gun on Brian as he retrieved a first aid kit from a canvas cargo bin in the back. He sat on the bed under the raised hatchback and rummaged around in the bin until he came up with a shaving mirror. He went to work swabbing the cuts clean with rubbing alcohol, wincing occasionally, scrunching his face against the stings.
“Where should I start?” he said.
“Where can you?”
“Oh, it’s easy. You came in during the late innings. I put this in motion a long time ago.”
“And what is ‘this’?”
“In the parlance of my business, it’s a salting scam.”
“And your business is?”
He looked up at her with mild hurt and dismay, like a fading movie star she’d failed to recognize. “I’m a grifter.”
“A con man.”
“I prefer grifter. It’s got some panache to it. ‘Con man’ just sounds like, I dunno, some guy could be selling you penny stocks or fucking Amway.”
“So you’re a grifter.”
He nodded and handed her some alcohol swabs for her knuckles. She nodded her thanks, tucked the gun in her waistband, and took a few steps back from him as she cleaned her knuckles.