How to Disappear (22 page)

She says, “Keep your hands on your head!”

I sit there, frozen, not wanting to spook her. I keep trying to look at her through the slit between my eyelids, remembering the part of the equation I’d rather not remember—Connie Marino with her throat cut.

I make an inventory of the parts of my body that don’t hurt, in case I need them later: my left leg, my hands, my right arm up to the elbow.

She says, “How were you planning to do it?”

“Do what?”

“Shoot me? Push me over the edge? Shoot me and then push me over the edge?”

“I wasn’t.”

“Were you going to rape me first?”

“You think I’d
rape
you?” I rub my left shoulder, which is starting to throb.

“Keep your hands on your head! Just if you value them.”

“You’re going to shoot up my hands?” I can’t stop marveling at the strangeness of this conversation, how fast everything tanked.

“I grew up in Cotter’s Mill, Ohio, asshat. I know the dates of hunting season. I can shoot a Canada goose out of the sky and gut it.”

“Really?” I don’t know why I’m even asking. Skills with a knife is one talent I’ve always known she had. I just didn’t know how she acquired it.

She does one of her little sighs. “How hard could it be to gut a goose? I’ve watched enough times.” She’s using that tone she gets when she’s admitting to something. How cute I thought it was—not so cute now. “Here’s the thing, J, or whatever your name is. I can shoot up any part of you I feel like shooting up. I have a pretty good idea of where I’ll start.”

I don’t like where I think she’s looking. “Cat—”

“Nicolette. And I could blow the slider off your zipper at twenty-five yards.”

The fact that she says twenty-five yards, not some other number, but exactly twenty-five, makes her a target shooter. Shit. I’ve been disarmed by a cute, cheerleading target shooter. Shit, shit, shit.

“I didn’t mean to insult you. Sorry. I didn’t realize you were—I’m sorry.”

“Do you think I care how sorry you are?” she shouts, rising, approaching. I’m so fucked. “Do you think I believe
anything
you say? All I care about is how to get you tied up in the car without taking this gun off you so I can turn you in.”

“Please don’t do that.”

“Why not?” she shouts. “Do the police already know about you? Am I just one in a string of girls you hooked up with and threw off cliffs?”

My head hurts, my shoulder hurts, and I think I’m a lot closer to getting shot than I was five minutes ago.

She screams, “Answer me!”

“No! Cat. And I swear on my father’s grave, there was a change of plan. I was trying to save you.”

“I don’t believe you! And
don’t
call me Cat.”

“Okay. I don’t see why you
should
believe me. But the hitch with turning me in is you’ll have to turn yourself in.” There’s silence from the armed girl. “Think about it. Even if you get off in the end, do you want to spend the next decade on death row in Ohio?”

In a gritty voice, she says, “Open your eyes.”

She’s just a couple of yards away now, still aiming at me, and even if her reflexes were below average, if I took a run at her, I’d have a hole in my gut.

“What do you think you know?” she says.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
I tell her the truth, which is short and pretty simple, or I draw it out all day until it’s dark and I can take her: maybe.

I say, “Connie Marino.” She’s stone-faced. “I know what you did to her, how you stabbed her.” I sound like a bad guy on TV, like the bozos in my apartment, like the guy who pulls you out of the story because he needs acting lessons. I try again, “She shouldn’t be dead.”

“Somebody told you I
stabbed
someone?”

“Shit. Do you even know who Connie Marino is?”

Her face is screaming before anything comes out of her mouth. “I don’t know who
you
are!” She aims down at me. “And I didn’t stab anybody! So I won’t be on death row anytime soon.” She sighs. “Unless I shoot you.”

Her arms look so muscular from this angle, and so at ease with that gun. She probably could take down a duck in flight. Or bag a guy.

My gut is a rock, rolling into my throat, defying gravity and my will.

She doesn’t have a clue. I’ve brought the wrong girl to ground.

Or maybe the point was for me to take out an innocent, know-nothing girl, hiding for reasons I might never know if she takes me out before I ask her.

“I’m going to throw up. Don’t shoot me.” I barely finish because I’m puking into a bush, gagging and wiping my mouth, heaving some more. I’m going to be a vomit-crusted carcass, devoured by cougars and maggots in the Sierras.

“You must think I’m an idiot,” she says. “You find me, you con me, and I just
leap
into your car.
Oh, J, I’ve never felt this way before. Oh, J, do you want to kill me now or later?
”

“It wasn’t like that. I swear.”

“On the imaginary grave of your undead dad?”

“I’m going to toss you my phone, all right? Google him.”

“You think I’m going to let you pitch your phone at my head? I’m going to take my eyes off you to play Candy Crush? You must think I’m so stupid.
Oh, J, why don’t I take off my bra so you can strangle me with it?
”

“Please, baby, don’t—”

“I’m
not
your baby! Put your hands back on your head. What kind of moron gets turned on by a guy who’s there to kill her? I don’t exactly trust my instincts right now. I have such bad impulse control.” She sighs. “Which is
not
great for you.”

Here we have a girl who would tear my heart out with her bare hands if she could do it without giving up her weapon.

“I’m sorry.”

She just glares. “So what should I call you?”

“Asshat works.”

“I mean it! What’s your name? And when I look in your wallet, that better be your name.”

“Jack. It’s in the pocket of my rucksack. My license. The one that’s in my wallet says I’m twenty-one, and it says ‘Gerhard Rheingold.’ ”

“
Ger
hard
Rheingold
?”

“My friend’s older brother is Gerhard, all right? My name is Jack.”

She’s resting her hands on a rock, aiming low. “J wasn’t very imaginative.”

“I’m not that good at this.” This isn’t what I’d intended to say, but once it’s out there, it sounds true. “I started to say ‘Jack,’ and I was stuck with the
J
sound. Remember in the park?”

She hisses, “I remember Every. Single. Second. I thought you were the one good thing in what you were
trying
to turn into my very short life.”

There’s a silence, and then in a flat voice she says, “How much was he paying you, anyway? What was I worth dead?”

“It wasn’t for money. I have a shit ton of money from the not-undead dad.”

“
What did he pay you?
Or is this your hobby? Hunting girls for fun because you’re so rich and macho?”

“My name is Jack Manx. My dad was Art Manx. Is this ringing any bells?”

“I don’t care who your dad is. I
hate
you!”

“Will you let me explain? I have a brother in prison in Nevada, okay? He’s been locked up off and on since he was fourteen. He’s a bad guy.”

“You’re the
good
guy?”

We’ve come a long way from her running her finger along the scar and getting me—me telling her things I’ve never told anybody else—to this. It occurs to me that I don’t want her to hate me, and not just because she has the gun. “My brother, he said…” How do I even say this to her? “He told me you cut somebody’s throat. And you knew some things this thug Karl Yeager didn’t want you walking around knowing.”

Her face keeps vacillating between skepticism and pure horror. “So you’re
attracted
to girls who kill people and know things about thugs? I’m so not buying this.”

“But you didn’t do it.”

“You didn’t know that! Maybe I’m a really good actress and a total liar. Maybe I . . . you know . . .
cut her throat
, and now I’m going to cut
your
throat. Ha!”

Damn fucking Don.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My brother said you did, and some bad things were going to happen if I didn’t find you first.” Finally, her hand is shaking. “But I wasn’t going to do it! I was starting to tell you so we could fake it. People would think you were dead. You could get away.”

“There are no
people
.” She’s screaming and holding the gun out with rigid arms, waving it at me. “The only person I have to worry about is
you
.”

“
Nicolette, listen to me.
Two guys came to my apartment last night. Do you see the side of my neck? I’m going to pull down on my shirt, don’t freak—”

“Don’t patronize me!”

“That’s why it had to be tonight.”

“Save your story with your imaginary bad guys! How much am I worth to Steve dead?”

“Who’s Steve?”

“Steve! The guy who hired you. The guy I thought was my
dad
.” Her voice cracks on this final syllable.

I figure if I try to put my arm around her, she’ll misinterpret, and I’ll end up dead. I say, “Steve is Esteban Mendes?”

She nods, miserable and ferocious.

“You think Esteban Mendes wants you dead? That makes no sense.”

This is when she hits me on the head.

The second I hit him, I know I shouldn’t have.

I mean, I’m armed, and he’s already on the ground. A gash in his forehead. Blood on his face. I’m so freaking angry at him, I want to kill him.

So I bash him on the head?

Not hard enough to put him out of his misery, either.

Just enough force to pause the conversation.

Not that it was a totally irrational act, even if it had
terrible impulse control
written all over it. Every second he was woozy was a second I didn’t have to worry about him jumping up and tackling me.

He was a lot more manageable woozy.

I got him to fork over the car keys and walked him,
half-staggering, to the car. I told him to climb, semiconscious, into the trunk. I left it all the way open. So if anyone says I wanted him dead, I didn’t. Or I would have let him asphyxiate in there like those poor pet dogs whose owners leave them in cars in shopping mall parking lots in the summer. Whose owners I actually
do
want dead.

I sit down under a tree so dried out that it barely provides shade, and I wait for him to come to.

I drink a can of warmed-over Coca-Cola I packed with the peanut butter sandwiches. I come close to pouring in the rum I brought that J or Gerhard or Jack or whoever he is carried back from South Dakota or wherever he really went.

But I don’t.

I’m in the stay-alert, don’t-get-drunk, don’t-lose-control, don’t-die track.

I’m on the numb, not-feeling-much-of-anything side. A good thing, because I’m in an isolated part of a forest I don’t know how to find my way out of. Although aiming the car downhill would probably work.

I’m with the guy who was supposed to throw me off a cliff.

I’m in the driver’s seat, the gun at the base of my skull. My head feels as if a grenade just burst between my ears.

“The only reason you’re not closed in the trunk is I’m afraid you’d figure out how to trip the latch. But I could change my mind,” she says.

I hope she realizes that, on a road like this, if I die driving, she dies.

I start the car and shift into gear.

She pounds on the back of my seat. “That’s too jerky!”

“Sorry, there’s a gun pointed at my head.”

“Whose idea was it to bring a freaking .45 on our big romantic getaway?” Christ, she knows the caliber of it. She probably knows how to disassemble it blindfolded. “If you hadn’t been such a jerk all the way up here, I would have thought this was your big romantic move. Ha!”

I say, “My big romantic move was going to be to save your life.”

A minivan comes barreling around a curve, straddling the center line. I swerve onto the narrow shoulder between the road and the sheer drop and hear Nicolette bump against the inside of the rear door. She yells, “Don’t do that!”

“Did you want a head-on?”

“Do you want to live?”

I’m trying to control my breathing, the thin line between hyperventilation and uncontrollable shaking. “I was going to fake your death—that was the plan. I was going to tell my slime brother it was done and take him a trophy, and you were going to do a better job of hiding. Or maybe”—the embarrassing component of all this, but what the hell—“if you wanted, I was going to go with you.”

Nicolette’s ability to remain withering under stress is stellar. “Tell me why I believe this again?”

“Because if I wanted to kill you, why aren’t you killed?”

She doesn’t even pause to think. “Because you’re incompetent? Have you ever even shot a moving target? And you didn’t want to get caught.”

“Right. I spend all this time hanging out with you, shed cells all over your apartment, and make a bunch of phone calls from California. I wrote the textbook on how not to get caught.”

More silence.

I say, “Why are you running?”

“I thought you already knew why. Because I stuck a knife in someone.”

“That someone was buried a quarter of a mile from your house. Her name was Connie.”

This is when she starts to cry again. She’s crying so hard, I want to pull over and hold her. But more than that, I want her finger off the trigger of Don’s gun.

I tell him how it was sunset, and then it was dark.

Voices and then nothing.

I tell him how I was supposed to stay in my room, but Gertie wasn’t there.

I whistle for her, but she doesn’t come.

The screen door is banging in the wind.

Downstairs, the lights are out, Steve’s office dark.

I call Steve’s name. Nothing.