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I swipe to the third camera and there he is. Black mask. Black shirt and pants. Black gloves.
Black gun, and he’s aiming it at Jade.
“Beretta,” Nick says with a derisive snort. “Figures.”
I don’t know what he means, but I also don’t care. My wife is standing up to a masked man with a gun, staring him down. Like the pistol he’s waving around has somehow lost its menace, like it’s a plastic prop. He thrusts it at her, and Jade doesn’t even flinch.
I, however, am losing my shit. The sight of the gun explodes in my chest. I settle the phone on a thigh and slam the gas pedal to the floor, lurching us forward as far as we can go. On the other side of the windshield, traffic reaches into the semidarkness.
“How ’bout I hold the phone while you drive?” Nick says, stretching a hand. “Might be safer that way.”
The asshole’s voice fills the cab. “All you gotta do is sit there and shut up. Why can’t you just do that? Less than thirty minutes until Cam gets here, and then I’ll be out of your hair. This will all be over. I’ll leave and you’ll never hear from me again.”
“This won’t be over, are you kidding me?” Jade says, and she’s shouting. “My children are going to have nightmares for years. You get that, right? They are going to need therapy.I’mgoing to need therapy. You terrorized and threatened us for hours. You broke my cheek!”
“I’m going to kill him,” I mutter, white-knuckling the wheel. Up ahead, where the road ends in a T intersection, the light flips to yellow. “When we get there, I’m going to freaking murder this guy.”
Nick shifts nervously on the passenger’s seat, jutting his chin to the light. “You’re, uh, not gonna make that.”
I floor the gas, watching the masked man step forward on the screen. “Have you seen my back? You’re lucky this wasn’t any worse.”
A hundred feet, maybe less, and only one car in front of me. So far neither of us has hit the brakes. “Come on, come on.”
Nick grabs on to the handle above his window. “Seriously, man. You’re cutting it too close. The light’s about to—”
“Shutup.”
On my iPhone screen, the man is still talking, his voice loud in the car: “...didn’t mean to hit you that hard, but may I remind you that you started it by coming at me with a screwdriver. I was just defending myself. You don’t know me, Jade, but I don’t put up with that kind of aggression. I fight back.”
“Yeah, well, ditto,” Jade says, and I feel equal parts fear and pride.
The light changes to red, and the driver in front of me hits his brakes. I jerk the wheel to the left and swerve around the slowing car into the oncoming lane, right as another car, a red Mini, turns right into my lane.
Our eyes meet. His are big and round, a terrified teenager going up against a jacked-up truck in a doomed game of chicken. He lays on the horn, then ducks out first. He yanks the wheel and barrels into a ditch.
The lane clears. Nick curses. I blow through the light and take a hard left, a ninety-degree turn that lifts two tires from the pavement.
“Holy shit,” Nick mumbles as I work to straighten out the wheel. “You really do have a death wish, don’t you?”
What I have is exactly twenty-four minutes to get home.
I fumble for my phone, but it’s gone, flung from my lap into that dead space between the seat and the center console, the black hole where crumbs and crumpled receipts go to die. I keep my eyes on the road and dig my hand in, but I don’t get very far. My hand is too big, the slot too tight.
Nick bats my hand away. “You drive. I’ll dig out the phone.”
Meanwhile, Jade and the guy are still talking.
“If Cam were here, he’d tell you this day was coming. I swore I would take back what he took from me, plus attorney fees and interest. Itoldhim I’m not some wimpy asshole he can push around. That money is rightfully mine.”
I freeze, my fists clenching the wheel because a memory is taking shape in my head. Last year, January, in the courthouse parking deck. I was headed to my truck when he stepped out from behind a stairwell, thirty minutes after the gavel had come down on my side. I won. He lost. A Fulton County Superior Court judge agreed I didn’t owe him a penny.
Is that what this is about? The Oakhurst shop that fell through?
“Motherfucker.” I bounce on the leather bucket seat, my muscles jolting with pent-up energy. “That motherfucking fucker.”
Nick drags the phone onto the middle console, and I grab it and hang a sharp right onto a side street, skidding to a stop. I squint at the image of this asshole’s covered face, zooming in until it fills my screen.
Nick leans over the console, craning his neck. “What? Do you know this guy or something?”