Love and Gravity (6 page)

“My father was an officer in the
Army and we moved around constantly. He didn’t have a choice; he had to support
me alone. My mother died when I was being born.” Margot paused and sighed
heavily. She was beginning to feel tired again.

“I loved my dad, I mean we were
really close. But as I got older I started resenting him for moving us so
often. I felt isolated. I was always the new kid, getting picked on. I never
had time to make any friends. Until I met this one guy. His name was Alex and
he was really popular at this new school I was going to. He noticed me, and
treated me like I was special. He introduced me to his friends and suddenly I
was popular. It was the first school I went where I wasn’t the outcast.

“So I started falling madly in
love with Alex for all the wrong reasons. My father hated him. He could see
that he was a deadbeat, but that just made me cling to Alex harder. One day I
was driving Alex to a get a bite to eat. We’d been dating about four months
then. I got pulled over for a broken brake light. This cop takes one look at
Alex and tells us to get out of the car. He and Alex obviously had some kind of
history. He starts searching my car and finds this brick of cocaine in the
glove box. I had no idea it was there. I still don’t know how Alex got it in
there without me seeing.

“So the cop takes us in and puts
us in different interrogation rooms. They start pressuring me to give them
information about Alex’s dealing, like who sold to him and who he sold to. I
didn’t even know he did that, he never told me. The cops offered me a walk if I
ratted on him. I didn’t have any information to give them though. They thought
I was just being obstinate and uncooperative. They said they were going to teach
me a lesson. I was seventeen when they arrested me, so they charged me as an
adult with ‘possession with intent to sell’ and threw me in prison for three
years. They didn’t have a case against Alex, so they argued that the drugs were
mine, found in my car, etc…”

“So how did you end up working for
Pop then,” Jack asked?

“While I was in jail my father was
killed in a car accident. I didn’t even get to attend his funeral. When they
let me out I had just turned twenty. I’d gotten my G.E.D. while I was incarcerated
but even with that I wasn’t able to get a good job anywhere because of my
record. I moved around a lot trying to find a better situation for myself. I
didn’t have any family left or any idea of what to do next. That’s when I
landed in Gravity and Pop saw me living on the street. He offered me a job
tending bar. It was the first job I’d been offered that didn’t involve
stripping, or hooking, or practically no pay.”

Jack realized then how close she
must have come to losing herself these last few years. He had an awful image of
Margot working the street corner, the same street corner with all those girls
Pop had killed. Pop had already killed far too many girls. He snapped himself
out of this depressing reverie by focusing intently on Margot, on her still
youthful, flushed, freshly showered face. She looked delicate, and thoroughly
alive.

“So I took the job he offered me.
I worked for him there the last two years. I could see that he was a bad guy
the longer I worked for him, but he gave me free room and board and pretty fair
pay. Let me keep my tips. He never asked me to do anything illegal. My plan was
to save as much money as I could to get out of there. Maybe save enough for
rent while I went back to school for something else. Anyway, it doesn’t matter
now.”

Margot felt dark while telling him
about this part of her past. It was something she normally dealt with by not
thinking about it. But she felt it was only right to answer him. She grabbed a
plastic cup full of water off the corner table and took a long sip.

“That’s quite a history. I had no
idea. I can see it’s hard for you to talk about. Thank you for telling me.”

“Thank you for all of your help. I
probably wouldn’t be able to talk to anyone ever again if it weren’t for you.”

“I needed a vacation from Gravity
anyway,” he said smiling.

Margot smiled too, feeling a bit
lighter. She was comforted by his humor. It made her feel more like things were
normal and less like they could be shot at any second.

“Well, we should think about
turning in,” Jack said. “It’s getting late and I want to be back on the road by
morning. Think you can get some sleep?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

Margot knew they would be sleeping
together in the same bed and ordinarily this would have made her question just
how much sleep she would be able to get. This night though, she was too tired
to resist unconsciousness.

“Alright,” Jack said. He took the
pizza box off the bed.

 Margot got under the covers. The
bed felt like it was made of cardboard, but Margot could feel the siren call of
sleep beckoning her before her head even touched the pillow.

Jack was still fully clothed as he
got under the covers. He wanted to be ready in case anything happened. He was
willing to let himself sleep because he was a light sleeper, but he kept his gun
ready beside him on the table. He turned off the light after getting beneath
the sheets. He could feel Margot shifting in the bed in the dark, trying to get
comfortable. When she stopped moving and silence pervaded the room he could
hear her gently breathing. He followed the sound of her light, rhythmic breaths
into the thick fog of sleep.

Margot woke to feel a hand shaking
her shoulder in the darkness.

“Margot, wake up,” Jack whispered,
insistently but quietly into her ear.

She came back into her body, back
into the bed, back into the hotel room, and a terrible fear followed her there.
She could hear a scratching at the door as someone jiggled the handle.

“We have to go out the bathroom
window. There’s someone at the door. Don’t touch the lights.” Jack got out of
the bed, grabbing his gun and walking towards the bathroom.

 Margot followed him there,
feeling around in her shopping bag by the bathroom door until she grabbed her
boots and purse. She put the boots on her feet hurriedly while Jack opened the
small window above the toilet for them to escape from.

Jack shut the toilet lid after
opening the window.

“Step up and crawl through,” he
told her.

She did as she was told. The
window was small and it was a tight squeeze as she wriggled through it. When
she’d gotten her waist through she grabbed at the grass outside and pulled
herself the rest of the way out by it. She moved to the side and let Jack
through the window behind her. He quickly got to his feet and grabbed her arm.

“We’ve got to get a different
car,” he said.

 The parking lot was on the other
side of the building, with whoever was trying to break into their room. They
couldn’t go that way. In front of them was an empty grass lot that faded into
darkness away from the hotel lights. Jack knew they didn’t have any other
choice and began leading Margot off into the darkness.

Once they were away from the hotel
Jack’s eyes began to adjust to the dark. It was still hard to see, but not
impossible. Away in the distance he could see more street lamps. It looked like
a residential area. He kept pulling Margot along as fast as he could. The
darkness would help cover them from sight, but they still needed to hurry.

Eventually they got to the street
lights, hovering above a street full of parked cars. Jack looked for one that
didn’t have an obvious alarm system. He found a beat up Volkswagen Beetle that
had the windows rolled down. He opened the door and started hotwiring it.
Margot got into the passenger’s seat as the car coughed itself back to life and
Jack put it in drive. Jack could see there was no way off the street that
didn’t take them back past the hotel.

“Margot, you need to keep your
head down, okay?”

“Okay,” Margot said, hunkering
down as far as she could in her seat. She could feel her stomach cramping with
anxiety. She looked over to see Jack with one hand on the wheel and another
still holding his gun. He was looking hawkishly over the dashboard and speeding
the Beetle up as quickly as it would allow.

Jack rounded a corner and reached
the straight road that would take them past the hotel parking lot and back onto
the highway north. As he began to pass the parking lot he could see two guys
with guns in hand, arguing animatedly under the parking lot lights. He
continued picking up speed. He almost began to think they wouldn’t see him,
until he began to drive past them. One of the men stopped arguing, his head
craning around to follow the Beetle. Jack saw him hit the other guy on the
shoulder and point to their car. He knew they were made.

Jack already had the pedal down to
the floor but the old car wasn't as fast as he could have wanted. They were
barely hitting sixty as they reached the on ramp to the empty highway. It was
still early enough that there were no other cars on the road.

"Are we okay," Margot
asked from her balled up position beneath the dashboard?

"No, they saw us. We need to
get as far away as we can, as fast as possible. They're probably going to
follow us. Just stay down."

A few minutes later, as the small
Beetle barreled ahead on the road, Jack saw the car from the hotel parking lot
appear in their rear-view mirror.

"Damn it," he said. He
watched as the car gained on them. The Beetle was giving its all already. There
was no avoiding them. Jack heard gunshots, and a metallic ping as one of the
bullets made contact with the back of the Beetle.

"Margot, take the
wheel!" Jack took his gun off safety. Margot popped out from her seat and
grabbed the wheel, trying to orient her eyes on the road. She felt a horrible
mixture of fear and adrenaline begin surging through her.

As soon as she had the wheel in
her hands, Jack was leaning out of his window, his foot planting the pedal
firmly down into the floor of the car. He fired his gun at the wheel of the car
pursuing them, but missed on his first shot and ducked back into the car as two
bullets whizzed by his window. He twisted himself back around and out the
window and shot at them again with no luck. He came back to his seat a second
time. He opened the barrel of his gun. He only had one bullet left.

"Goddamn it," he said,
this time taking a deep breath and shutting the barrel of his gun.

He took another breath to calm
himself, and then whirled around and out the window again. Jack focused on
their front tire as hard as he could before squeezing the trigger. He watched
as the car behind them swerved violently off the road, flipping over onto the
grass beside it. He'd hit his mark. They were safe for now.

When Jack got back behind the
wheel he looked over at Margot. She looked terrified.

"It's okay, we're okay. You
did great."

He wanted to reassure her, but
Margot just sunk back into her seat, shaking a little and looking at him
through wide, worried eyes. Jack refocused on the road in front of him. She
needed some time, and he needed to make a plan. Pop's guys knew what car Jack
and Margot were in, so they'd need to ditch it once they got some road behind
them. The only needed to make it one more day before Frank could meet them.
They needed to hide. They needed more bullets.

Jack braced his hands on the wheel
as they continued to rush headlong into the faded grey morning. The sun was
rising on them for the second time now. Only one more sunrise to go.

They drove for most of the day
after they’d made their getaway in the Beetle. They stopped once in a little
town to get gas and bullets, where the shopkeeper had eyed them suspiciously
before they left to get back on the highway.

Jack called Frank on his cell
while he drove to catch him up on their position and situation, and Frank gave
Jack an address where to meet him at two p.m. the next day.

Finally as darkness began to draw
upon them again Jack exited the highway and parked under a bridge near a wide
river and a large, lively city. They were about two hundred miles from the
state lines now, and only fifty miles from where they were expected to meet
Frank.

Once they were out of the car,
Jack picked a hammer up out of a pile of trash and hammered the license plate
off, throwing into the river beside them. They would walk into the city, hole up
in a room for the night again and hope for the best. It seemed unlikely that
anyone would be able to find the car where they left it, and there were enough
hotels in the town to provide some obscurity. They wouldn’t be easy to find
this time.

Back in Gravity word got around
that Malone and the broad he was carting around had slipped past Pop’s boys
again, and another cop had passed this information along to Detective Mueller.
Mueller was more than a little relieved at their failure as he drove up the highway
after them. He knew everything. What Malone had on Pop, Margot’s track record,
what they were doing together. Malone had kept a digital copy uploaded to a
cloud sharing site that Mueller had hacked into ages ago. He’d launched a full
blown technical assault on Malone when they were first assigned to be partners,
tapping his phones, hacking his accounts, even reading his credit card
statements in case he could ever get some insurance on him.