Black reached up slowly and undid the chin-straps on his helmet, taking it off. I wasn't sure what I'd expected but the face behind the visor was boyish and clean-shaven. This hardboiled killer looked like he was barely old enough to buy beer. His blue eyes watered as he stared down at the bullet hole in disbelief.
“That wasn't supposed to happen,” he commented in a mildly confused voice. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he hit the ground, dead.
I picked myself off the ground, trying to hold back a groan of pain. In the twelve seconds or so that we'd fought, Black had really managed to kick the shit out of me. My chest felt like it was full of broken glass and my jaw was throbbing.
“I...I...” Jewel sobbed, the gun trembling in her hand.
“You saved both of our lives,” I said. “You did good.”
“I killed someone,” she stammered, her voice barely above a whisper. She let the pistol fall from her hands and it hit the pavement with a heavy clack. “I...don't know what I'm supposed to...do with that, how I'm going to live with it...”
“You will, I promise,” I assured her, picking the gun up. “But for now, just see if you can get the car running, okay? It's taken a lot of hits, but it doesn't have to get us too far, just off the main road. After all that, we'll probably have the cops here pretty soon. I need to search these guys to see what they're carrying.”
“Okay,” Jewel said, turning to work on the wires hanging from the dashboard. She seemed very out of it, and I hoped she'd be able to shake it off, or else we'd be back to the beginning with her freak-outs. We didn't have time for that. I hoped that giving her the car wires to focus on would help.
Sure enough, a few moments later, the car's engine roared to life. It sounded like a meat grinder and there was greasy blue smoke billowing from under the hood, but there was still a solid chance that it could keep itself together long enough to get us away from here.
I hustled over to Red and saw that he was still writhing and twitching on the ground. He'd rolled over on his belly and his gloved hands were groping helplessly for something, even though his Uzi was just a few feet away from him. I realized the shattered plastic visor had probably blinded him.
I leaned down and picked up the Uzi, holding the barrel between Red's shoulders. “Looking for this?”
Red stopped struggling.
“Roll over on your back,” I said.
Red paused for a moment, then rolled over, his right arm still under his back at an odd angle. I figured it probably got broken when he hit the ground.
With the visor broken, I could see that the Chayners had been more than just brothers—they'd been identical twins. Red had the same impossibly-young face as Black, except for the blue eyes, which were punctured with shards and bleeding heavily.
“You can still live to carry on the family name,” I offered. “You just have to tell me what you two bozos were sent to grab from The Flytrap, and hand it over.”
Red started to laugh, the blood bubbling up on his lips. The jagged spears of plastic twitched from one side to the other as his mangled eye muscles tried to move eyeballs that weren't there anymore.
“You're Rafe, aren't you?” Red burbled. “Sure you are. Jester said you might be dumb enough to get mixed up in this. He said you were a nobody.”
“Yeah? Well, I just iced your brother,” I sneered, “so I guess Jester doesn't know as much about me as he thinks he does.”
“But he...sent you to prison, right? Seven years?” Red chuckled, his lips red and wet. “Man, you should hear how he still laughs about that. Laughs and laughs. Hey, when you were up there, did you end up bending over a lot? 'Cause that'd explain the hair and the faggy clothes and whatnot.”
I knew I didn't have time to keep playing with him, so I put my left boot on his groin and started to apply pressure. Red yowled.
“Sticks and stones, Red,” I growled. “Do you have something for me, or not?”
“Oh, sure, shower-boy,” Red hissed. “I've got something for you. It's right here!”
Red whipped his right arm out from behind his back and I gasped. He was holding a grenade without the pin or spoon in it.
And he was laughing again.
I turned and sprinted for the Saab despite the pain in my body. “Grenade!” I screamed. “Get down!”
I saw Jewel duck down again a split-second before the explosion smacked my back with a hot hand, pushing me forward so I landed face-down on the highway. I felt the pavement scrape skin off my already-aching jaw, and my eardrums felt like someone had run an icepick in one ear and out the other.
I blacked out for a moment. When I came to, everything seemed like it was vibrating. Jewel was helping me off the ground. I heard a high-pitched whine and thought it was ringing in my ears, until the pitch steadily lowered into a warble and I realized it was sirens approaching.
“We need to get out of here now!” Jewel yelled. Even though her face was just a few inches from mine, her voice sounded like it was coming from deep underwater.
I looked over my shoulder at the blackened smear of limbs and clothing that had been Red just a minute earlier. I had no way of knowing whether Red had been the one carrying what Jester wanted, but if he had, then whatever it was, it had been blown to pieces.
“Not yet,” I croaked. “Gotta search Black.”
“We don't have time!” Jewel moaned. “We have to go, Rafe!”
“Black might...have it,” I slurred. “Can't...leave...without it...”
Jewel looked at Black, then back at me. “Okay, fine,” she said. “You just get yourself to the back of the car, okay? I'll go search him.”
“You don't know...what you're...looking for.”
“Yeah, well, neither do you,” Jewel snapped back. “Now get a move on, unless you miss prison food more than you let on.”
I staggered back to the car and collapsed in the back seat. All I wanted to do was close my eyes and go to sleep, but some part of my brain screamed that I probably had a concussion from the blast and dozing off was the last thing I should be doing.
A few moments later, I felt Jewel's hands pushing my legs farther into the car and shutting the door behind them. The driver's side door slammed shut, and I felt the world around me moving, drifting, shifting.
We were going forward at high speed, but somehow, I was still lying face down on the highway. I was still in my cell in Potawatomi. I was still standing outside the house my parents had lived in, watching it smoke and shudder and fall apart as it burned with them inside of it, and they screamed and Jewel screamed and the sirens screamed as I disappeared into the smooth and silent darkness.
Chapter 27
Jewel
My face and arms felt miles away from me, as though I were controlling them with a remote and the signal was weak. I couldn't stop thinking about the way the gun had jerked slightly in my hands. About the hole it made in the black rider.
I had never even been fishing or hunting before. I didn't even like horror movies.
And I had taken a life.
My rational mind shrieked at me from a dim and distant place, telling me it didn't matter because the rider had tried to kill me. It was begging me to just move and get us both out of here as fast as possible before the police showed up. And then what would I say? How could I explain any of this?
Rafe was beaten and barely conscious in the back of a stolen car I'd helped him disguise. He was holding what was probably a very illegal kind of gun. He had a hole in his right bicep from a bullet that had gone through the Saab's trunk and the upholstery of its back seat—Rafe hadn't noticed the wound himself, but I had.
There were exploded pieces of a man still flaming and dripping on the highway.
And I had taken a life.
But there was no time to think about that now.
I kneeled down next to the black rider and my stomach lurched as my eyes fell on the hole in his chest. The hole I put there. I had aimed and pulled the trigger and felt the recoil and...
No, I told myself. Stop that. Remember what Rafe said. You're tougher than you think. And when the bullets start flying, you dig inside you and do what needs to be done because there's nothing else to do but die.
Do you want to die? No? Good. Then search this asshole and let's get the hell out of here.
I ran my hands over the rider's overalls, feeling for anything in his pockets. In one, I felt something hard and round, and gingerly reached inside to confirm that it was another grenade. A little more searching and I felt something long, metal, and rectangular that turned out to be a spare clip of ammunition for the gun he'd been carrying. Next to that was a gold money clip with a driver's license and a few hundred dollars in it.
The sirens were getting closer.
I was about to give up and head back to the car when my fingers found a small piece of plastic, about the size of a thumb. I took it out of its zippered pocket and looked at it.
It was a memory stick for a computer.
As a cloud of dust started to appear in the distance and the wail of the sirens became deafening, I stowed the memory stick in the waistband of my leggings, hoping it was worth everything we'd been through for it. I lunged for the car, tucking Rafe's legs into the back and shutting the door before driving off. I prayed that by the time the cops pulled up, I'd be far enough away that they couldn't follow the cloud of smoke the car was trailing.