Strike (38 page)

“Y'all head over to Crane Hollow right now and nobody gets hurt,” Tuck hollers in his mean-guy voice. Then, in his regular jolly-guy voice, he adds, “Matty misses you.”

“We're not going back,” I shout. “Leon'll kill us.”

Tuck shakes his bald head. “Not true. You took out a lot of good folks. We need more bodies. You come back now, and you can have your trailer back. I promise.”

The cars race, neck and neck, toward a red light, and I look back at Gabriela and Chance. “Raise your hand if you're pretty sure Leon's going to execute us if he ever sees us again,” I whisper.

Everyone's hand raises.

“Raise your hand if you think we need to get the hell away from that gun,” Wyatt says. Again, everyone's hand goes up. “Okay. Here we go. Check your seat belts and hold on.”

“Let's talk at the light?” Wyatt hollers, and Tuck smiles and waves like we're all friends.

Both Wyatt and the SUV slow as we reach the stoplight. It's a decently busy time of night, and even with the sweeping sense of caution Valor has inspired, cars are just doing their thing. I look ahead and do the math. And I realize what Wyatt's going to do. I lean back against my seat, test my seat belt, and turn my face sideways. Like that would help.

“Patsy, I need you to . . .” Wyatt starts, but he can't finish it. “I need you to do it. On three.”

“I'll do it,” Chance says.

“It has to be her.” Wyatt pushes his seat back, just a little, as we coast to a stop. “If you roll down your window, they'll know.”

“It's okay. I got it,” I say.

And my hands are shaking and my stomach drops out and everything is cold and bloodless. Before the car comes to a complete stop, I bite my lip, sit forward, take a good look at the Crane goon in the driver's seat, and wait for Wyatt's word.

“One . . . two . . .”

Before he can say three, Chance knocks my gun down, half
dives between the front seats, and pulls the trigger three times. I can't see what's happened, and Wyatt floors it, and the car squeals through the red light, fishtailing around a sedan. A spray of bullets pings off the car, and everyone but Wyatt ducks. Chance falls into the back, breathing hard. There's a huge crunch and a ton of honking right where we were. We're already through the light and doing ninety up the highway. I look in my side mirror and see the messy aftermath, the Crane-driven Valor SUV T-boned by a white van. I'm pretty sure Wyatt was just planning on taking out the driver, but a complete crash is even better. Tuck is standing in the street, shaking his gun at us.

“That was really effing close,” Gabriela says, breathless. “Jesus, bro.”

“I think that was the SUV we stole,” Wyatt adds.

“Lesson to self: Do not give Leon Crane new playthings.” I pick up my milk shake and suck in enough to give me a brain freeze.

“Did you get him?” Wyatt asks.

“I got the driver,” Chance says quietly. “Right in the temple.”

“I didn't need to know that,” Gabriela mutters.

I look in the mirror and see him put a hand on her shoulder. “You always need to know that. Otherwise, it stops mattering. We can't let it stop mattering. Then we become like them.”

I turn to look Chance in the eyes. “Thank you,” I whisper. “It still matters.”

Wyatt exhales, long and slow, and turns down a side street. The air in the car relaxes once we're off the highway and away from the SUV. I don't want Chance to be right, but I think he might be. It's so much easier to forget. But the more I let myself forget, the easier it becomes to kill people. I don't know why he knocked down my gun and did it himself. I don't know how to pay him back. “Thanks” does not feel like enough.

“You want a milk shake?” I ask. “It helps.”

He chooses strawberry.

We're silent for the rest of the drive home.

Back in the house, we drop all the food bags like we're returning from an expedition with unexpected and welcome treasure. The general mood is jovial and light, but I can't get there. I didn't see the driver's head, didn't see the bullet, didn't see its aftermath. I didn't even recognize him. But he's dead because I just had to stop and play rebel. And what about the people in the van that T-boned them? For all I know, it was an innocent family on their way to church to adopt a puppy. It looked like a work van, though, but why should a bunch of painters be worth any more or less than a busload of children?

No matter what I do, people die. Whether I see it happen or not, they die.

“Honey, are you okay?” my dad asks.

It throws me, at first, because how should he know I'm upset?
My mom's the one who lives with me, who understands my moods, but she's just laughing with Heather and eating a sandwich. She knew the old Patsy, but my dad's the one who recognizes the new one.

“We, um . . .” Suddenly, the fries are stuck in my throat, and I have to find a soda to wash them back down. “We ran into some Crane goons. Tuck and some other guy. In the SUV we stole from Valor. They wanted to take us back to Leon. So we ran.”

My dad puts down his sandwich and leans forward. “Did they follow you here?”

Wyatt shakes his head. “We shot the driver. They crashed about two miles away. Tuck lived, but he couldn't follow us on foot.”

I smile at him. He always knows when to use “we” to make me feel more human.

“So they're looking for us,” my dad says, and his fingers twitch like he wants nothing more than to start typing on his dumbass laptop.

“Or they were driving around and recognized a familiar car full of familiar kids,” I counter.

“Were you guys doing anything suspicious?”

A blush creeps up, and I dig through the bags for napkins. I say nothing.

“You were, weren't you?”

That accusing tone—like he's going to slap my wrist.

“I was spray-painting the Haven High School boulder, and they just drove around the corner and saw us,” I say into the bag.

“Patsy, come on. That's incredibly risky and stupid. You can't do things like that.”

My head snaps up, and I'm surprised that he's not shaking a finger at me. “If you'd like to talk about doing things that are incredibly risky and stupid, what about having a daughter you can't take care of with a woman you can't marry? What about leaving me? And my mom? What about giving bombs to a psychopath like Leon Crane? What about playing around with your bullshit anarchy on the Internet? Oh, excuse me, the ‘darknet.' You don't get to show up after thirteen years and start telling me what to do. You're just a suburban hacker trying to get back at his daddy.”

I stand up and rub the fry salt off my hands.

“Patsy, stop. The most important thing right now is keeping you safe.”

“All I ever wanted was to find you. And I was so worried you'd be disappointed in me. But you know what, Dad? I'm disappointed in you. And I'll spray-paint whatever the hell I want.”

I stand, grab a lantern, a random food bag, and the drugstore bag. “Gabriela?”

She stands, too, following me to the grand, echoing marble stairs. My dad watches us, and I would say he lets us go, but nobody “lets” me do anything anymore.

My mom just calls out, “Honey?”

“I'll be fine, Mom.”

The last thing I hear from them when we're upstairs is my dad muttering, “I just don't get her at all.”

And Wyatt, a little louder, a little angrier, saying, “Yeah, and how could you?”

I find the master bedroom and close the door behind us. It doesn't have a doorknob—none of the doors do. Gabriela turns on the lantern in the corner so that we're each carrying one, both our faces eerily lit from below. It's so weird to be this far from light, from streetlights or fluorescents, surrounded by a dark forest and endless nothing. I feel so far from home, from humanity. I want to be the child of one of those happy idiots sitting in the restaurant drive-through tonight, oblivious to anything but a loving daddy who brings treats.

“Will you wash my hair?” I say. “I don't know if it's dirt or blood in there.” Realizing what I've just said, I add, “Or I can wash it and you can just help pour the water, because that sounds gross.”

She smiles, a gruesome monster face, distorted by the lantern. “No, it's fine. I used to work for a vet's groomer and had to wash the nastiest, angriest dogs. Not to say that you're a dog—just that I don't mind.”

We set out the supplies in the bathroom, and there's a painter's
bucket of cistern water and a rough towel by the sink. My dad says that the polite thing to do in a safe house is to leave it like you found it while adding value somehow. I guess whoever was here before us thought towels would help us feel like humans again, and I wonder what we'll leave behind. I don't have anything extra, anything that would bring comfort to anyone else. Maybe we'll leave this shampoo and conditioner so someone else can enjoy the fleeting feeling of cleanliness to go with their rainwater.

I hop on the long granite counter and lie back with my hair in the sink, and Gabriela opens the gallon of water from the drugstore.

“You ready?” she asks. I nod.

The water is colder than I expected, possibly because we're in an unheated house in November. I hiss and try to turn my head to help the water soak in. I guess I never thought about how much water it takes for a simple task like washing blood out of your hair. At this point, I can't even remember how it got there. From rifling Hartness, maybe? I don't think there's enough water in the world to make me feel clean again, even if I just walked into the ocean and lived there. Soon Gabriela is massaging shampoo into my scalp and scrubbing me clean.

“You have nicer hair than most of the dogs I bathe, if that makes you feel any better,” she says.

“Can I ask you a question?” She nods. “Are you glad you went with Chance?”

She snorts. “I wasn't, at first. It was horrible. I felt like some superhero's sidekick, but my superhero turned out to be a villain. And then we went back home, when he was all done, and our house was gone. Just . . . a black crust. And then I was real glad. I can only pray that our parents and the other kids weren't there when it happened.”

“Your . . . ?”

“Yeah, I guess we never explained that. Our parents were this older couple who took in troubled teens who were getting hassled in the foster care system. Good people, not like the ones you hear about on the news. Chance and I, we got there about the same time, when we were both thirteen, and made a good team. Some kid at school made fun of my hair, and he just about ruined that kid's life.”

“So he didn't ask you to help him?”

A laugh. “Oh, hell no. He begged me not to. But our parents would never have forgiven either of us if he hadn't come home. They turned him from a junkie into a good kid. Really cared about him. About us both.”

“What about that bag of drugs?”

“It's not what it looks like. He was a dealer, a few years ago. But he wasn't lying about what he does now. Medical marijuana, pain meds, prescriptions. These days most of his customers are old folks with no insurance.” She pours water over my hair and says, “You
asking all this because you're curious, or because you're worried about Wyatt?”

“Both,” I admit. “I'm just trying to . . .” I choke down a sob. “Does Chance have a hard time living with himself?”

“Talking about feelings is not his jam. But it bothers him more than he shows.”

I sit up to towel off my hair. “Has it changed him, what he had to do?”

She turns away, looking out the picture window into what can only be more darkness.

“Of course it did. It changed us all.”

“You think we'll ever be okay?”

She takes the towel from me and starts rubbing my head roughly but efficiently, like I'm a rogue poodle. “I've lived with seven different families and never met my folks. Been on the street, in the system. I've never been okay. But at least this way, anybody who tries to hurt me gets killed. That's more than America ever gave me.”