“I’m not whoever that woman was who screwed you over. I’m not her, and I’m not like her. I promise.”
I can almost feel my face harden, my voice lashing out like a whip. “Go, get on a bus, and get out of town.”
She glares at me for several long seconds, her bottom lip quivering perhaps from anger, perhaps from some other emotion, before she says, “Sheridan didn’t think about the betterment of the world. He thought about the betterment of himself. I gave up everything to protect you, and it.”
“The bus,” I repeat, not willing to be swayed by the passion in her voice that could be truth or fiction.
“If you—”
“Get out, Gia, or I swear to you, I’ll put you out.”
She inhales, clearly shaken by my threat, and it works. She shoves open the door, exiting quickly and sealing me inside, alone. I rev the engine, backing out of the parking space before she can return, eyeing her in my rearview mirror, the bag clutched to her chest. She looks defeated, when she’s already proven she’s a small package that packs a big punch. I refuse to feel guilt. I simply want the answers I’m about to get.
Exiting from the driveway, I turn into the hotel parking lot across the street and pull into a spot that is obvious—out of sight but also right in front of Gia’s nose—and park. And now I wait. She’s too smart not to figure out the bus station is dangerous, a place that Sheridan will look for her. That means she’s either going to go inside and call someone who will come and get her, or she’s going to start walking, looking for safety. What it won’t tell me is if she’s looking for escape from Sheridan’s anger at her failure, or Sheridan’s anger at her betrayal. But either way, I’ll know she’s no longer loyal to Sheridan.
Grabbing the phone from the door pocket, I dial Jared, and curse when I get his voice mail. “I’m alive,” I say after the beep. “So break out the confetti, but not until you call me back. And my sister better be alive and well, too, or soon you won’t be.” I end the call and dial again, thinking a woman is my weakness: my sister. Jared’s voice mail picks up again and I’m about to redial when Gia comes walking out of the parking lot on the opposite side of the road.
I set the phone to vibrate, stuff it in my pocket, and watch as she scans the area, passing right over me as she does the rest of the parked vehicles. Seeming to make a decision, she crosses the road between us and begins walking down the one to my right, toward the mall. I crisscross the two remaining duffel bags over my shoulders and exit the truck, intending to follow her, then ducking when she appears to consider going into the hotel itself. I curse at the idea of it, certain she’s either foolish, or planning to wait on Sheridan’s people there. She hesitates, though, and then starts walking again, headed toward the dark, deserted strip mall parking lot. On any other occasion, I’d say a woman alone headed toward a dark, empty parking lot was foolish. But when hiding from Sheridan it’s smart.
The minute she fades into the black hole of the night—her target obviously the shelter of the mall, though I’m fairly certain she’s ultimately going to the front of the building and the highway—I start my own wheels into motion. Trekking through the hotel parking lot I find another unlocked truck, toss the bags inside, and hot-wire it, certain whoever it belongs to won’t miss it until morning, by which time I’ll be long gone.
By the time I’m driving along the access road by the mall, I see Gia’s outline moving toward a twenty-four-hour breakfast joint. I hang back, making sure she enters before I turn into the parking lot and grab a spot at the curb just beyond the restaurant’s private lot. I climb out of the truck, shoving the bags into the back seat of the four-door vehicle, wishing like hell I could lock the door.
Tracking forward, I jump the curb and take long strides toward the side door of the restaurant. Inside, I find the hostess is not at the stand, and I scan the dining area to find Gia nowhere in sight. I cut to my left and follow the signs toward the bathroom, specifically the ladies’ room, and I don’t stop, shoving my way inside. I find her standing at the sink of the two-stall room, the bag open, her stockings missing as she doctors the many cuts on her knees.
I stalk toward her, crowding her against the sink, hands shackling her waist.
Her hands press to my chest. “Let me go.”
“Did you call Sheridan?” I demand, gripping her knee where it rests against my leg.
“What? Why would I call Sheridan?”
“Did you call Sheridan?”
“No. I don’t have a phone, nor do I plan to call and invite him to torture me like he did you. Did you call Sheridan?”
“Why the fuck would I call Sheridan?”
“Isn’t that why you left me at that bus station? So he’d find me? Why’d you bother to give me real money?”
“I left you there to see what you would do, and you damn sure didn’t go to New Mexico like I told you to. What was your plan?”
“I’m not getting on a bus, where Sheridan is sure to find me. Thanks for that death sentence of a suggestion, but no thanks.”
“I repeat: What was your plan?”
“Walking to a twenty-four-hour Walmart to buy supplies.”
“Walking? Do you know how far that is?”
“Yes, but a cab is like a bus, a direct link to radios and records I don’t want any part of tonight. Or, I guess, for pretty much the rest of my life.”
“After Walmart, then what?”
“Then I walk to a used car lot to sleep in a car and buy one with cash in the morning, with a big tip for the paperwork getting lost.”
Her answers are perfect. I wonder if they aren’t even a little too perfect. I study her, looking for a blink, a flinch, anything I missed in Meg that I might find in her now. She’s cleaned up the melting mascara from under her eyes and tamed her hair, clearly trying not to draw attention to herself, but she still has a tissue in one obviously injured hand.
My jaw flexes, my lips setting in a thin line. I believe she’s running, and I can’t know her motivation. But I know what’s important at this point: Whatever their relationship may be, she was close to Sheridan Scott. She can help me take him down. I snatch her bag, interlace her arm with mine, and start for the door. She grabs the wall. “No. Stop. I’m not leaving with you without an explanation. Where are we going?”
“Wherever I say we’re going.” The door opens and a woman enters. “Get out,” I bark at her. Looking startled, she backs out of the room, and I turn to Gia. “Don’t make me carry you out of here, because I will.”
“That’ll get attention we don’t need.”
“I’ll do whatever I have to do. You don’t seem to get that. If Sheridan is the devil, then I’m his redheaded stepbrother who has been locked away in hell for six years. I’m very cranky and very pissed off.”
“You’re not worse than Sheridan, so if you think that scares me, it doesn’t.”
I turn her back against the wall, flattening her against the hard surface. “You should be scared. Because if I find out you had anything to do with what happened six years ago, I’ll kill you.”
She swallows hard. “I didn’t even know Sheridan six years ago, I swear. If you hate me this much, why would you want me to come with you?”
“Because it’s not you I hate. It’s him, and you’re going to help me take him down.”
“You left me at the bus station to die.”
“I needed to know if you’d contact him. Now, are you walking, or am I carrying you?”
“I want him to go down, too. You don’t have to threaten me to do it, but I’m not his whore, or yours either. Don’t treat me like I am, or I swear to you I’ll fight you like no one ever has. And the answer to your question is I’m walking.”
I give her a look that has to be cynical. It’s all I can be anymore, besides pissed off. “Then let’s walk.” I grab her wrist and waste no time leading her out of the bathroom and down the hallway to the hostess stand, where the woman who’d tried to join us in the bathroom is talking to a man
in a suit who I assume to be a manager. “Bathroom’s all yours,” I say, continuing to the front door and shoving it open.
I pull Gia forward, in front of me, and she glances over her shoulder at them and calls out, “Have a good night.”
I snort as we fall into step together on the sidewalk, her strides keeping remarkable pace with mine as we travel to the back of the restaurant. “ ‘Have a good night’?” I ask. “Really?”
“I didn’t want them to call the police and risk Sheridan monitoring the police frequency, which is why you should hold my hand or let me go. Right now, I look like your prisoner.”
I stop walking, dragging her in front of me, towering over her by nearly a foot. “You are my prisoner, and you’ll stay that way until I’m done with you.” I start walking again.
She double-steps to keep pace, and instead of fear in her voice, there is disbelief. “ ‘Done with me’? Then what? You’ll kill me? Or hand me over to Sheridan so he can do it?”
I step over the curb leading to the mall parking lot and she stumbles, forcing me to wrap my arm around her waist and catch her. She is tiny against me, soft and womanly, and I feel a warmth deep in my gut that I do not want to feel. I set her away from me and lead her to the truck, then quickly release her wrist, and it’s like ice on fire, a swift, welcome relief.
I yank open the door and motion her forward. She steps toward the cab but then whirls on me, the moon peeking from behind clouds, casting her in a warm glow. “You didn’t answer my question,” she whispers. “What are you going to do with me whenever you’re done with him?”
My hand comes down on the top of the window and I step closer, crowding her. “The same thing I was going to do for you with that fifty thousand dollars, but better.”
“You set me up to fail back there.”
“I told you. It was a test. Don’t stand in the way of me and Sheridan and we won’t have any problems.”
“Why doesn’t that answer make me feel any better?”
“It’s the only one you’re going to get right now.” I motion to the truck cab. “Get in.”
“If I say no?”
“You won’t.”
“I was doing just fine in that bathroom. I had a plan.”
“A fifty-thousand-dollar plan won’t help you escape Sheridan long term, and we both know you have one of two reasons to hide: Either you really betrayed him, or you let him down when you couldn’t fuck me into stupidity. Either way, you need me. If the latter’s true, you’ll still try to fuck me into stupidity.”
“I’m not—”
“Save it.”
“I’m not his whore, or yours,” she hisses. “Maybe if I keep repeating that, you’ll get it. You want information from me, and I want a real escape that doesn’t get me killed. The end. There’s nothing more to this story.” She climbs inside the truck, but her words linger in the air. Nothing more to this story. Suddenly, I’m transported back a year in time to the New York subway station where I’d met Meg.
I step off the car, trying to get to Amy’s job before she gets off work, keeping her close even if she doesn’t know I am. It kills me not to be able to talk to her, but I don’t dare. I am poison. I’m the reason she’s going through this hell in the first place. And she’s doing fine. She doesn’t seem to need me, but if she ever does, I will not fail her again, the way I did so long ago. The way I did our parents. Sometimes I just need to see her alive and well.
I push through the busy Grand Central crowd, about to exit to the street when a woman tries to go up the stairs at the same time as me. Our shoulders collide and I grab her arm and it’s thin, and she is petite and blond, like my sister, and I have to see her face, but she won’t look at me. She murmurs an apology and tries to move away. I hold onto her. “Are you okay?”
“Yes. I—” She seems to look at me despite trying not to, the mascara smudged on her cheeks, one eye black. She is small, fragile. Lost. I can’t leave her without helping her.
I jerk myself back to the present and blink Gia into view. She won’t look at me. But Meg did. She looked me straight in the eyes and lied without a blink, and I never guessed the “more” of her story. After five years of staying off Sheridan’s radar, I didn’t make mistakes, she became my one and only mistake, and I didn’t even love the bitch.
Angry, I slam the door shut and round the truck. I won’t be played by another devil in high heels. Once is enough. And I won’t start thinking Gia deserves a hero for what she did tonight. Even if she does, there’s a reason I’ve stayed away from my sister. I’m nobody’s hero.
Inhaling, I climb inside the truck and shut the door, the powerful crackle of Gia’s anger a brutal contrast to the soft scent of woman that teases my nostrils with punishing precision. I don’t remember Meg ever working me over like this.
I glance in Gia’s direction and she stares forward, refusing to look at me, further proving she is not planning to play the wilting flower. Nope. She is not playing the victim like Meg at all. The question remains though, is she a lying bitch like Meg?
Flipping on the overhead light, I lean down to reconnect the wires in the dash when Gia makes a soft sound and says, “You know what’s pathetic?” I still, waiting for an answer, not sure what to expect as she adds, “I don’t know you or trust you any more than you do me, but I trust you more than anyone else I know right now.”
That statement reaches inside me and burns me in places I keep telling myself can’t be burned anymore. No one understands what “trust no one” means more than I do. No one. If Gia is telling the truth, if she’s ultimately the innocent victim that she’s trying not to be in a world she doesn’t belong inside of, then maybe, just maybe, I do have a chance to be her hero. The truth shall set me free. And her, too. “Then you’re a fool,” I tell her, “because even I don’t trust me.”
FOUR
“HOW LONG ARE WE GOING to be on the road?” Gia asks about thirty minutes after we hit the highway, the first thing she’s said since my warning about trust. But then, I get the feeling she chooses her battles cautiously, which tells me her decisions tonight, no matter what their motivation, weren’t made lightly. She knew the magnitude of every choice she made, including getting in this truck with me instead of screaming for help.
I glance at the dash that reads midnight, calculating the drive to our Lubbock destination. “Five hours.”
“I can take a shift driving.”
I snort. “Not a chance in hell.”
“There’s no way you’ve had any sleep,” she argues, clearly not intimidated by her role as captive.
“Staring at the walls of the interrogation room wasn’t exactly exciting.”
“Bleeding while tied to a chair doesn’t count as sleep.”
“I’ll sleep when I can actually close my eyes.”
“It’s not like I’m going to stab you to death with my finger while you sleep and I’m trying to drive this monster of a truck.”
I give her an incredulous look. “Are you daring me to kill you?”
“If I was, I’d just let you drive without complaint.”
“You do remember me saying you’re my prisoner, right?”
“I also remember you saying you need my help. That makes me pretty safe until you don’t need me anymore.”
“You have big balls for a woman, but then, I guess that’s what it takes to set off a bomb like you did.”
“They’re called brains, not balls, as my mother used to love to tell my father.”
“No one likes a smartass,” I comment dryly, not missing the past-tense reference, and reluctantly admiring her fearless determination, even if it is irritating as hell.
“Then you, Chad, must not have any friends.”
“You think I’m a smartass? Well, fuck me. I was shooting for asshole, not smartass. I’ll try harder. And I don’t keep friends around to stab me in the back. Or prisoners, for that matter.”
“Oh, you’re an asshole, but from what I overheard when I wa
lked into that warehouse tonight, Sheridan’s crew seemed to think you’d taken smartass to epic proportions while they questioned you. They hated you; they were plotting to cut one of your toes off so the injury wouldn’t show. It was the head of the chemistry department who chose the truth serum option. He has a weak stomach.”
“I guess I should thank him the next time I see him—right before I kill him.”
“Don’t bother. He’s a bigger asshole than you. And what you said about friends—friends don’t stab you in the back. Real friends are family, and you can count on family. They don’t let you down.”
Until they do, I think, her declaration like acid burning through an open wound, leaving me ready to end this conversation. Reaching behind the seat, I snag the bag I’d given her earlier and set it between us. “Your fifty thousand dollar pillow. Never let it be said I don’t know how to treat a lady. Lie down and rest.”
“You told me not to trust you,” she argues, curling her feet onto the seat toward the door and staring out of the windshield. “So I don’t. That means I’ll have to make sure you stay awake. We’ll just have to talk for four hours. Or five, right?”
“Forget it. We are not talking for five hours.”
“Not about anything important, of course,” she says, as if I haven’t spoken, “since we don’t trust each other. How about football? I personally think the Cowboys will never win again until Jerry Jones retires and hands over the leadership to someone else.”
I don’t do random conversation. It’s dangerous. It makes you give away little details, like Gia’s past-tense reference to her family—but I have to give it to her. Every male born and raised in Texas has an opinion about the Cowboys, and I fight the ridiculous urge to give her mine now by turning up the radio. A Garth Brooks song, “Friends in Low Places,” instantly transports me to Jasmine Heights. To home and family. To a white-painted wooden house, green grass, and family barbecues. A few lines play in my head and then those images go up in flames, the house on fire, and I am living the part of my history I don’t want to relive. The part I’m always reliving.