Page 16

Duke Dolce

“Where are we going?” Jane asks, balking in the sandy gravel parking space in front of our cottage. Baron doesn’t let her leave the house, so you’d think she’d be making a run for it the second she steps out, but she’s not even grateful.

“I’m taking you for a drive,” I say. “Unless you’d rather stay here.”

She twists her lips to one side, hugging herself and turning back and forth slightly, like she’s seriously considering going back into Baron’s basement dungeon.

“Suit yourself,” I say, opening the door of the Lotus. I slide in, but by the time I’ve turned on the car, she’s already opening the passenger door and climbing in. She snaps her safety belt and then looks at me with a shy look that makes a flicker of déjà vous pass through me, though I’m not sure why. There’s something disconcertingly familiar about her, but I can never quite place it.

“Where are we?” Jane marvels when I’ve backed down the driveway and turned onto the narrow, one-lane drive that leads through the neighborhood of rentals and summer houses sitting on soft swells in the land that mimic the dunes beyond. I forgot that Baron drugged Jane most of the drive here, so she wouldn’t signal out the window for help.

“We’re in Maine, baby,” I say. “Almost to Canada. Wanna make a run for it?”

I shoot her a grin, but she looks contemplative as she stares out the window. “No,” she says. “I don’t think so.”

“You ever been to the beach?”

“No.”

“Damn,” I say. “Then we gotta go there first. The beach here isn’t much, though. In the Caribbean, the water is smooth as glass and the color of blue velvet.”

“That’s a pretty description.”

“Life is like a box of crayons, baby,” I say, turning onto the even narrower, sandy road to the small beach near our cottage. “You gotta use all the colors.”

I pull alongside the road and park. A few other cars are parked there too, people coming to watch the sunset, even though we’re facing east. I get out of the car and come around to open the door for Jane and help her out. I keep hold of her bony hand as we walk onto the soft sand. The sky is a mild pink, and an older couple is strolling toward us along the water’s edge, holding hands. Another younger couple is walking the other way with a dog, throwing a ball into the waves for it to dive after.

“You’re not going to cause any trouble, are you?” I ask quietly, since Baron would kill me if I failed so spectacularly.

“No,” Jane says, drawing a little closer to me, staring at the water with big eyes, like she’s scared. She hangs her head as the couple passes.

“Good evening,” the woman says, smiling.

I smile back. “Nice night.”

“Sure is,” says the man.

They keep walking, and we get closer to the water. “Wanna dip your feet in?” I ask Jane.

“Do I?”

We sit on the edge of the dry sand and remove our shoes, roll up our pants, and then walk over the wet, hard sand to the edge of the water. The waves are small, but they still rush in quick. The second or third one rolls over our feet, and Jane gasps in shock.

“It’s so cold.”

“You’ll adjust,” I say.

We walk along for a few minutes, letting the waves drench our feet in the frigid Atlantic every time they crash. I glance over my shoulder and see only the young couple, far down the beach, their backs still turned. I could do it here. Wade into the waves and hold Jane under. She’s so malnourished that she wouldn’t have the energy to put up a good fight. It would be quick, probably painless. Actually, I’m not sure about that last part. I imagine being held under the icy water, holding my breath until my lungs ached, the panic and terror as I realized I was going to die, the desperate fight with not only the person holding me down but my own body. Losing that fight at last, opening my mouth, the water rushing in, invading my starving lungs.

I shudder and pull Jane back up to the dry sand, so we can sit. I notice an angry sore on her calf, about the size of her palm. I think it’s a burn, but I can’t be sure. Maybe Baron removed a patch so he could stick his dick under her skin, tearing it away from the muscle and fucking between. I wonder how that would feel, but I unlike him, I’m not brave enough to find out.

“That looks gnarly,” I say, nodding toward it.

“Maybe I should see a doctor,” she says, and it takes a second for me to realize she’s joking. A tiny smile lifts the corner of her mouth, and that wave of déjà vous crashes over me again. I swear I know this girl from somewhere.

“Dr. Baron’s not doing it for you?” I tease, since she seems to be in a good mood.

“He’s doing something,” she says with a grimace.

“So, what do you think?” I ask, nodding at the ocean, where one lone, pink loud is stretched along the horizon like a lazy cat. “Pretty great, huh?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It is.”

“Glad I brought you here?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “Thank you.”

I smile with satisfaction and lean back on my hands. “Everybody should see the ocean at least once before they die.”

“Maybe someday I’ll be able to show it to my little sister.”

“Maybe,” I say, though I know she won’t. I pull out my flask and take a swig, then pass it to Jane. She takes a drink and winces, then takes another.

“Atta girl,” I say, laughing when she takes a third swallow before handing it back. I take another drink and then screw the cap on and pull out my cigarettes.

“You smoke?”

“Used to,” she says, eyeing the pack. “Nothing that fancy.”

“Why’d you quit?” I ask, drawing out one of the white sticks and holding it up. I close my eyes and inhale, dragging it under my nose from filter to tip. I like the smell of the organic tobacco. It reminds me of the inside of Colt’s truck, the smell of his skin when our lips were pressed together, the angle of his chin when he’d tilt his head to light up instead of bringing the flame to the cigarette.

When I open my eyes, Jane is watching me, her expression inscrutable. I notice she’s shivering, even though she’s wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt along with her leggings. I peel off my hoodie and hand it over, and she pulls it on without protest, her little face poking through before her shorn head emerges. She’s so tiny the thing swallows her, and she huddles down into it and thanks me, which makes me feel good.

“Want one?” I ask, offering the pack. “I probably shouldn’t ask, right? It must have been hard to quit.”

She didn’t answer when I asked before, but now she takes one and says, “Baron won’t let me have them.”

“What he doesn’t know won’t kill him,” I say, shooting her a wink before holding my lighter for her. We both have to cup our hands around it to get it to light, since there’s a pretty good breeze coming off the ocean. When we finally get it lit, we do the same for mine. Then we both take a deep drag at once, watching each other from the corner of our eyes.

The spell is broken when Jane starts coughing. “Sorry,” she says, wiping at her eye. “It’s been a while.”

“Probably shouldn’t have given you one,” I say. “I’m a bad influence.”

“Do you think he’ll punish me?” she asks, staring glumly at the bright glint of the cherry when I take another drag.

“Nah,” I say. “He won’t care.”

She won’t be coming home smelling like smoke, but she doesn’t know that yet. I figure I’ll let her have a few happy moments before she goes. Smoking a cigarette on the beach at sunset with a hot guy while wearing his hoodie is probably the best she’d ever do for herself, even if she wasn’t about to die. She’s a runaway, after all. A throwaway, as Baron calls her. He says no one will miss her, that she’s basically no different from trash you’d pick up along the side of the highway. A dog that no one ever wanted, so they dropped it off somewhere, and no one will adopt it, so even the shelter won’t take it. That’s what he said when he was convincing me to do this. He said I’m putting her out of her misery, like putting down an old dog that’s suffering.

Jane stares at her cigarette a long moment, then shrugs one shoulder and sucks hard on the filter. “Worth it,” she says, blowing out a long, thin stream of smoke. “God, I’ve missed these.”

I imagine her life before. A homeless teenager, maybe a junkie, maybe turning tricks for cigarettes. And I gave her one for free—an organic one, at that. I’m not even going to ask her for a hand job when I take her out to eat, either. Everything’s on me tonight.

We sit there a while longer, until the couple with the dog drives off, until the sky is a deep shade of twilight, and the coals at the ends of our third cigarettes are the only light on the beach. One bright white star appears, and I nudge Jane.

“Make a wish.”

“I don’t know if I believe in that.”

“Me, either,” I admit. “But I always do it. Maybe if you wish for something that’s actually possible, it’ll come true.”

“Is that what you wish for?” she asks. “The impossible?”

“Every time.”

We walk back to the car, and I take her to the nicest restaurant in Havoc Harbor, where I let her order anything she wants from a menu on my phone. I can’t be seen sitting inside with her, of course. That’s too risky, even if no one is looking for her. The waitress might remember us. It’s much less likely that the people on the beach would be able to identify me, even the couple who spoke to us. And much less likely the police would be able to track down some random beach walkers than someone who comes to work here every day.

I go in to get the takeout, and we drive up the road past Mrs. Darling’s house to a lookout, where we eat sitting on the hood of the Lotus, looking down on the ocean. A sliver of moon hangs over the horizon like the blade of a sickle. I guess I’m the grim reaper tonight, harvesting one life.

While we sit there, a car cruises slowly by once, then twice. I look back over my shoulder, not surprised to see Mabel’s Volvo, pale in the scant moonlight. Of course they’re checking up on me. I don’t know which one of them is in the car. Maybe both. Either way, they’re making sure I go through with it. They don’t think I know what’s going on, but I do. This is a test.

I have to prove myself worthy of being the third corner of the triangle. Worthy of the two of them. Because the truth is, they’d be fine without me, a regular Sid and Nancy. They could be a couple. They don’t really need me. They just said that to be nice. If I want to be part of it, I have to do my part, prove I’m as ruthless as they are, that I can keep up and won’t fuck it all up like I do everything else.

I set aside my takeout container and take out the whiskey again. I’m stalling now, but I need some liquid courage. Sure, I’ve hurt people before, but mostly by accident. I’m not a killer. Unlike Baron, I don’t want to be, either. Suddenly, I’m pissed at him. Why do I have to do it? She’s his project. He picked her up. I wasn’t even around for most of the time he had her, and I’ve never fucked her. She’s his mess to clean up. And he’s always wanted to kill someone. This is his chance. Why is he making me do it for him?

Jane finally finishes her own food and puts all our trash back into the paper bag the restaurant gave us.

“Do you think I could have one more cigarette?” she asks.

I hand her the flask and take out my smokes, and we both light up again.

“Where are you from, anyway?” I ask, trying to distract myself before my thoughts can turn too dark. It’s not the demon edging his way to the surface this time. It’s the shadow, the ghosts, that dark cloud that followed me after Dad died, that still creeps back over the sky sometimes and blots out everything except doubt and bitterness.

“I’m from Arkansas,” Jane says, flicking at her cigarette.

“Really?” I ask, surprised. “I thought you were from Tennessee.”

Baron said she was hitchhiking, and he picked her up on his way. He didn’t say where. It comforts me to know it was before he even left the state, that he didn’t want to be alone either. Despite his seeming indifference, he’s been with me all his life too, since we shared our mother’s womb. Maybe it’s not so easy for him to be on his own after all. Maybe he really does need me.

“No,” Jane says. “Faulkner, Arkansas.”

“Have we met?” I ask. “Maybe fucked?”

“No,” she says, flicking an ash off her cigarette.

But I’m sure she’s wrong. That’s why she looks familiar. We must have hooked up at a party sometime over the past three or four years, when I was fucked up and she wasn’t emaciated and bald. Not that I’d have cared much even if she was, but I wouldn’t want anyone else to know that. I fucked hot girls because it proved I was hot, just like I’m doing this to prove a different point.

Far below, the waves crash on the shore, coming closer and closer to the cliffside as the tide comes in. I remember sitting up at the quarry with Colt, smoking and drinking whiskey with him on a different edge on a different night. If he’d just said yes when I told him we could be together, I wouldn’t be here now. I’d probably be in his bed right now, lying there with one sweaty leg thrown over his, having a post-coital smoke while watching some dumb shit on TV and drinking whiskey from this very flask.

I wouldn’t be sitting on a cliffside in the biting wind, wondering if I can do what has to be done. If I should just push Jane off the edge instead. Sure, her remains would be found sooner than if I follow Baron’s plan, and yes, the police would definitely notice her body is banged up more than it would be from the fall, but still. Their investigation would lead nowhere, and since no one is looking for her, they wouldn’t waste resources by keeping it open.

Like Baron said, no one cares about a mangy, stray dog. It’s best to just put it down.

It’s Colt’s fault as much as Baron’s. If he’d wanted me, everything would be different. But he didn’t, and now Jane has to die because of it.

I crush my cigarette out on the hood of Baron’s car with some satisfaction. “Let’s take a walk.”

Jane hesitates a long moment before she reluctantly slides off the hood. Maybe alarm bells are going off in her head. Maybe she’s realizing that was her last meal. It took her long enough. At least she’s smart enough not to argue while standing on the side of a cliff with a guy who’s big enough to punt her skinny ass off into the ocean.

If she’d been smart to begin with, I wouldn’t have to do this. What kind of girl is dumb enough to get in a car with a strange man? Now I’m stuck with the consequences of her stupidity, and Colt’s rejection, and Mabel’s jealousy, and Baron’s clinical detachment. It’s all their faults I have to do this. It doesn’t seem fair. I’m the only innocent party, and yet, I’m the one stuck with the dirty work. It’s like I’m being punished for being too nice.

“Where are we going?” Jane asks when we’ve crossed the winding road and entered the woods on the far side.

“I told you, we’re taking a walk.”

Unlike the jungle-like Arkansas swamp where we left Harper to die, these are sparse pines with only a bit of underbrush growing in the hard, sandy dirt. If Jane was half as feisty as Harper, she’d make a run for it, and with how silent the pine needles are underfoot, she could probably hide behind the thick trunks and maybe sneak away.

“We won’t be coming out of here, will we?” Jane asks after a time.

“Probably not,” I say, gesturing a direction with my flashlight. Our feet whisper in the carpet of needles, but the wind sings loud in the ones overhead, the boughs tossing in the gusts. We walk in silence for another few minutes, Jane in front, as if I’m marching her to her death.

I guess I am.

“Can you get a message back to my sister?”

“Sure,” I say, stewing in my thoughts and not paying much attention to her. I know I can’t send a fucking letter to her sister, who probably doesn’t care about her anyway. If she did, she would have sent the police out to look for Jane already.

I hear a car out on the road, and I wonder if it’s Baron driving up and down again. From out here, I can’t tell how fast it’s going. I switch off the light anyway. I don’t know if someone could see it through the trees. I hear a soft snap somewhere off to the right, and I quickly turn the light back on, swinging the beam in that direction, but there’s nothing there.

“You don’t have to do this,” Jane says, her voice soft in the darkness.

“You think I want to?” I demand. “Why do you think I convinced Baron to bring you? I knew you’d die if he left you at home. I wanted to save you.”

“You still can.”

“No, I can’t,” I say, and I hate that my voice breaks the slightest bit. At least Baron’s not here to hear it. He wouldn’t call me a pussy. No one in my family would, now that Dad’s not here to be honest. But they’d all be thinking it.

Suddenly, I want to hurl the flashlight. I want to turn and run, back to the lookout, over that edge, into the water, like Colt was trying to do that day at the quarry before I stopped him.

I didn’t have to. My whole family hated him, and no one would have blinked twice if I let him fall. It wasn’t like I pushed him. There’s literally no rule that says you have to rescue someone who’s dying, but I did. I did that.

Even though he made my life hell for three fucking years, even though looking at him was like having my eyeballs ripped from my head and rolled in iron shavings before being shoved back in their sockets, and the smell of him was like breathing broken glass. I knew it wouldn’t go away until he was gone, but I still did it. I still saved him.

It wasn’t the first time, either. That’s the kind of guy I am. Not the kind who takes an innocent girl out in the woods and kills her for absolutely no reason.

“I don’t know how much further I can walk,” Jane says.

We’ve slowed considerably already. We’re on national forest land, and there are no hiking trails in the area. The next house is a few miles up the road, where the cliff peaks at the house of some mega-rich guy who disappeared from the public eye a few years back. I doubt he goes wandering in the woods, and if he does, he won’t come this far. No one will find her body here. It’s as good a place as any.

“We can stop,” I say, sagging against a tree. I’m so morose I wish I could be the one laying down in a grave right now.

“You could let me go,” Jane says, crossing her arms. She’s still in my hoodie, and she looks so small standing under the big trees in the moonlight, almost like a kid. In the shadows, I can almost picture Olive standing in her place.

“You have to understand, this is the last thing I want to do,” I say miserably.

“Then don’t,” she says.

“I have to,” I say, my tone pleading. “That doesn’t mean I want to. You understand, right? I’d trade place with you if I could. I really would.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Do you hate me?” I ask.

“How are you going to do it?” she asks, and it kills me that she couldn’t answer my question.

“I have a gun. I’ll make it quick. You won’t suffer at all.”

“You’ve been planning this all along, haven’t you?”

“Just tonight,” I say. “I swear.”

She nods, looking thoughtful, and leans against a thick pine. The moon grazes her shorn hair, making the angles of her delicate face stand out, and I think she might have been pretty once.

“When did you catch on?” I ask.

“That girl told me,” she admits. “She snuck down and talked to me.”

“Huh,” I say. “I wonder if Baron knows.”

“I wasn’t sure I trusted her,” Jane says. “But when you took me out of the house, I had a bad feeling. Around the time you gave me a cigarette, I knew I was going to die tonight. If you brought me back smelling like smoke, Baron would kill me. But I didn’t know you were going to do it until you wanted to walk. I thought you were taking me for my last meal and then he’d do the execution. I didn’t expect it from you.”

“I’m not like him,” I say, scowling at her. “I know you think so, but I’m not. It actually hurts when people think that. Like I can’t be my own person.”

“You can,” she says, her tone gentler now. “You don’t have to do what he says. You’re not a prisoner.”

“No,” I say. “I’m the Joker.”

“Does that mean Baron is Batman?”

I cast her a dark look. “Obviously.”

“I don’t think the Joker would kill someone if Batman said so,” she points out, sliding down her tree to sit on the ground, her back to the trunk. “I’m not even sure Robin would.”

“I’m not Robin,” I growl, kicking at a root beneath the pine needles. “Robin’s gay. Batman doesn’t need him. He needs the Joker.”

“He needs the Joker because the story needs an enemy who’s worse than him,” she points out. “Because he’s an anti-hero, especially in the Dark Knight rendition. He needs a foil, a villain who’s truly evil, so that we can still root for him even though he’s kind of a dick.”

“You don’t get it,” I say. “You’re talking about the story, the comic book. I’m talking about the character himself.”

“The character of Batman wants to get rid of the Joker.”

“Yeah, well, we make our own story. Batman and the Joker and our Harley Quinn. And we all live happily ever after. The fucking end.”

“That girl,” she says, rubbing her heel on the ground. “She’s your Harley Quinn? That’s the real reason you’re doing this?”

“What did you think?” I snap, reaching into my pocket and pulling out my cigarettes.

“You love her?”

“Of course I fucking love her. I did some really bad shit to her, and this is how I redeem myself. That’s what she asked for.”

Jane nods slowly, like she already knows me, and she can tell I’m full of shit. We both know I’m doing this for Baron, not Mabel.

“Just remember who Harley Quinn loves,” she says. “It’s her and the Joker, always. Batman is their enemy as much as they’re his. They wouldn’t let him join them, and if they pretended to, it would only be until he let his guard down. Then they’d kill him, just like he’d kill them.”

I stare at her as I light up and take a drag, thinking about what really happened yesterday morning. Mabel asked Baron to kill Jane. Baron’s the one who gave me the task. Mabel would never ask me for something like this. She knows I’m not a violent person, that I’m not a murderer.

So does Baron.

That’s why he made me do it.

Suddenly, I think about all those murders. The Black Widow Killer.

Mabel said the feds were watching her, that she’s a suspect. Is that why they sent me to do it? So I wouldn’t be followed? Baron said it wasn’t him, but what if it is, and he didn’t want them too close?

If they’re following Mabel, why is she out here in her car, driving up and down the road? Is Baron with her? Are they leading the cops right to me? I try to remember how many cars I’ve heard on the road out there, if any of them slowed, maybe pulled into the lookout with my car. Will a cop be waiting for me when I get back?

Mabel went to the basement and talked to Baron before they came up and asked me to do this. I thought she asked him, and he put the task on me to make me prove myself equal to each of them. But maybe they decided together. Maybe Jane isn’t the sacrifice Baron is making to keep Mabel.

Maybe I am.

“You don’t have to do it,” Jane says quietly from her spot on the ground a few feet away. She looks up at me with big, innocent eyes. “You don’t know how bad it’ll be, Duke. It’ll stay with you forever. What you did. The guilt. It will haunt you.”

I look away, up at the branches and needles, like ghostly silhouettes in some grim childhood tale. “What choice do I have?”

“You have a choice,” she insists. “Please, Duke. Just let me go. I promise, I won’t go to the police. I’ll never tell a soul. All I want is to go home to my sister.”

She crawls across the ground to me, grabbing onto my legs like she does Baron. I’ve seen him kick her when she does that, filled with disgust, but it only makes me more miserable.

“If you let me go, you’ll never hear from me again,” she promises. “You’ll forget it ever happened. It’ll be like I don’t exist.”

I look down at her, and she blinks up at me, her eyes so full of pleading it hurts.

“What do I have to do?” she whispers. “Please. I’ll do anything. Just don’t kill me.”

Holding my gaze, she reaches for my fly, slowly lowering my zipper. But when she undoes my button, I swat her hands away. She’s fucking with my head. Baron isn’t setting me up. Maybe he doesn’t need me the way I need him, but we’re two halves of the same whole. He’s not tricking me. We never lie to each other.

No matter what.

“I’m sorry,” I say, fixing my zipper before pulling the gun from the waistband of my jeans. “I can’t. You know what he’s like. Please, Jane. You have to understand.”

She sits back on her heel, shrinking down in my hoodie, her gaze full of as much misery as my own. “You’re asking me to have sympathy for you when you’re about to kill me?”

“I don’t want to,” I say, my fingers shaking as I grip the gun, aiming it at her temple.

“You want me to dig my own grave and willingly climb into it, too?” she asks. “Maybe even pull the trigger myself?”

That gives me pause. Maybe I could make her do that. Then it wouldn’t be on my conscience. At least not entirely.

“Would you?” I ask.

She scowls up at me. “No, Duke. I’m not killing myself to make it easy for you. If I wanted to die, don’t you think I would have done it already?”

“Why didn’t you?”

She looks down, her face glum. “Sometimes I wanted to,” she says. “But I have a sister. She depends on me. I promised I’d come back for her.”

A chill tingles along my spine, and I listen for what caused it, for the snap of a twig or a dog barking in the distance or the wail of a siren coming closer. But all I hear is the mournful howl of the wind in the pines and the sound of Jane sniffling as tears start to roll down her cheeks.

“She probably thinks I forgot her,” she says. “If I’d known, I would never have taken a ride. I’d never have left. I would have gone through whatever I had to, just to be there, so she knows I love her, and I didn’t just abandon her. I promised—” A hiccupping sob interrupts her, but she quickly goes on, blubbering desperately. “I would have gone through with it and just killed myself a long time ago if I’d known it would end this way anyway. I just thought, maybe if I could hold on, whatever he did to me, if one day I could get back to Olive, I could endure it.”

I stumble backwards, knocking into the tree. My head thuds against the trunk, and the world tilts around me like I drank a whole bottle of whiskey and not just half a flask. The trees stretch, grotesque as the crooked fingers of witches in those childhood tales, the ones that grabbed children and swallowed them whole. They seem to tower higher and higher, and Jane shrinks smaller and smaller as she curls in on herself, bending double where she kneels, clutching her middle as her skinny shoulders shake with sobs and the bones of her spine stand out starkly in her skeletal neck.

Voices clash and spin in my mind, so loud even the howling wind and a car on the road and the whisper of pine needles on the ground and Jane’s broken sobs of despair can’t mask them.

Olive.

I found her hitchhiking.

Olive.

I’m from Arkansas.

Olive.

She wouldn’t tell me her name.

Olive.

All I want is to go home to my sister.

Why didn’t she tell me earlier? Why didn’t she say her name? It took me too long to figure it out, for the pieces to fall into place, but now they have. Why she looks so familiar. Why I was sure I’d met her before.

“Your sister is Olive?” I choke out. “Olive Green?”

Jane looks up, little bits of broken pine needle and dirt stuck to her forehead where she pressed it to the ground. She nods, her tear-stained face ghostly in the moonlight.

I remember thinking the girl I was waiting for came back to me, but the girl Olive was waiting for never did. I can change that. I can make up for what I did, for smashing her head. Maybe even for what I did to Harper, and Gloria, and all the girls I hurt. Maybe I can be forgiven, maybe I can erase all that, by saving this one girl. Not for me, but for Olive.

I grab Jane under the arms and pull her to her feet, squeezing her against my chest with one arm. I crush my lips to the top of her shorn head, inhaling the scent of ocean wind and musty basement and antiseptic from her. Then, I turn her around and give her back a firm push.

“Run.”

I watch her go. The people who matter always leave. But maybe, for one of them who knows that as well as I do, I can make someone come back. I can’t go back, but this time, I’m not just watching someone walk away from me. I’m watching her walk back into Olive’s life. I stand there so long I barely notice that my face is cold, and it takes me longer to realize it’s wet. Until I don’t hear her crashing through the woods anymore.

Then I turn and walk back toward the car. The moon is less than a quarter, but it’s bright enough to light my way. I hope Jane has as good a sense of direction as I do. I hope she’s moving as confidently as I am, armed with the flashlight I shoved into her hand before I let her go.

I hear a snap of twigs, and I stop, listening for the crackle of a police radio, a shout, a siren.

Still nothing, just the shrieking pines.

Fuck. Is she following me back? Coming for me now that she has the means for revenge?

No, she wouldn’t lie to me.

Would she?

I take another step, moving slowly, setting my feet down carefully so as not to make a sound. My heartbeat is drumming loud in my ears.

The truth is, I don’t know the first thing about Jane. I don’t even know her real name, just the nickname her sister used and the one Baron gave her.

Plain Jane.

Fuck. I shouldn’t have given her that gun.

I stop again, and this time, I hear it. The heavy, slow approach of footfalls.

I don’t move for a long minute, and at last, a lone figure steps out of the shadows.