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When the car stops, it’s still on the road but facing the wrong direction.
They sit there a moment, the car idling, the engine pinging, the headlights pointing in the direction from which they’d just come.
“Are you okay?” Josh says.
“I think so,” Charlie says before having two thoughts, right on top of each other.
The first is: If Josh plans on killing her, why does he care if she’s okay?
The second is: The driving has stopped.
Josh unhooks his seat belt. “We might have clipped that deer. I’m going to check the front of the car.”
He pauses, waiting for Charlie to say something. But she can’t say anything because that second thought she had repeats through her head like a siren.
We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving.
A third thought joins it.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
But Charlie does.
She’s known the moment they left the diner.
Josh is going to try to kill her and she’s going to try to kill him and only one of them is going to succeed.
With her hand in her coat pocket, her fingers in a death grip around the knife, Charlie watches as Josh gives up waiting for a response and gets out of the car. He crosses in front of it, his sweatshirt bright in the glow of the headlights. When he bends down to examine the front bumper, Charlie notices wisps of steam rising from the Grand Am’s hood. It takes her a second to realize the cause of it.
The engine.
It’s still running.
Ready to drive.
To end this, right now, all she needs to do is slip behind the wheel, shift into first gear, and stomp on the gas pedal.
Charlie moves quickly.
Snapping off the seat belt.
Sliding over the center console.
Grabbing the steering wheel for leverage.
She’s halfway behind the wheel when Josh catches sight of her. In a flash, he’s beside the car, flinging open the driver’s-side door before Charlie can hit the lock. As Josh pushes his way into the car, Charlie scrambles back into the passenger seat.
Josh gazes at her with regret in his eyes.
“Listen, Charlie,” he says, “I don’t want to hurt you, okay? But I can. Hurt you, that is. I’m quite capable of it. So we can do this two ways. You can be calm about it, which is my recommendation. Or you can try to fight it and I’ll be forced to get rough, which—I reiterate—I really,reallydon’t want to do.”
Shrinking against the passenger-side door, Charlie tries to put her hand back in her pocket.
“Keep those hands where I can see them,” Josh says. “Don’t make this hard on yourself.”
He plunges a hand into the front pocket of his jeans. He pulls something out and tosses it to Charlie. Unwilling to catch it, Charlie recoils and lets it drop to the floor with a rattle.
She looks down and sees it’s a pair of handcuffs.