Nico pulls away from the curb, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. My mind starts running through logistics. What happens now? Donny needs to be registered as dead somehow, right? Will the cops show up asking questions? Will they search the property?
Donny must have planned for this. He had cancer, so as far as the medical world is concerned, he could have been preparing for end-of-life care. Plenty of patients decide to die at home—at least, that’s what I remember happening with my grandma, because Dad brought Rosie and me to visit her before she passed.
I hold my breath until my lungs burn and then breathe in a little more, doing the exercise the way Mom taught me. The question sits on my tongue for a long time before I can make myself ask it. “What happens to the team now?”
“We keep operating,” Nico says, keeping his eyes on the road. “That was always the plan for when he died. His wife died fifteen years ago, and he has no children. There’s nobody left to ask questions. We…” He swallows. “We became his family.”
My tears blur the streetlights into streaks of gold as I turn my face toward the window. I press my palm over my mouth to keep any sound from escaping.
Each pothole jostles the cargo behind me. The cargo that used to be Donny. Used to be a person who had a cup of tea for every occasion and gave me a chance when I had nothing.
The Game Master stripped away Donny’s humanity and strung him up like a display, not an actual human. The same way Stanley Daniels did to Rosie.
The anger that surges through me is so sudden it takes me by surprise. I want to find the Game Master and make him hurt the way he hurt Donny. I want to drag him into the vault and string him up by the neck with an ironchain.
What I can’t understand is why he brought us all the way to the warehouse if it wasn’t to take Griffin or me. Maybe he did believe me when I told him he was wrong about us. What if he only stayed interested in us because we revealed ourselves as ghost hunters, and then we led him to Donny, who consulted on his case?
Could he have killed Donny purely out of revenge, and it’s no longer about Griffin and me at all? It’s not unheard of for serial killers to change up who they target. Stanley Daniels did.
Or maybe I’m deluding myself into thinking Morrow isn’t targeting Griffin and me anymore. It may just be that we ruined his plan by both of us coming after Donny, but then splitting up.
Nico takes a sharp turn toward the on-ramp, and I see DJ’s Jeep ahead of us getting onto the highway. But the light turns yellow at our intersection, and Nico eases to a stop. He’s drumming his fingers on the steering wheel when blue and red lights flash in the side mirror.
I twist in my seat to see a police cruiser pulling up behind us, and quickly face forward again.
“Don’t panic,” Nico says, glancing over at me. “Stay calm.”
Since when has being told to stay calm ever made a person feel calm? “But he’s going to find Donny.”
“I won’t let that happen.”
“What are you going to do?” I ask. “Kill a cop?”
Nico passes the on-ramp and pulls up to the curb, his body radiating calm in a way I could never replicate. He rolls down the window as the cruiser stops behind us. The cop takes his time getting out. I watch him approach, cloaked in shadow, through the side mirror.
The cop leans into Nico’s open window. He has to be thirty or forty with a good amount of pudge on him, and a soft face that makes him look like he’d feel bad giving you a parking ticket. Buzzed red hair stands up almost straight, and a small mustache clings to his upper lip.
I don’t know what Nico did to get pulled over, but I have a feeling it won’t be hard to get off with a warning. One ‘sorry officer’ and we should be on our way.
He peers at the two of us with a disapproving stare.
“License and registration,” he orders.
Nico pulls the documents from the visor and passes them through the window along with his driver’s license.
“You know why I pulled you over?” the cop asks, examining the documents with painful slowness. His words are much tougher than his face.
“No, sir,” Nico says.
“Your taillight’s out.” The cop’s eyes narrow on the license. “Alexander Wyman?”
Nico nods.
The cop’s expression doesn’t change, but I catch the smallest hint of a smile. “Where are you headed?”
“Back to our warehouse.” Nico’s hands rest on the steering wheel at perfect ten and two. “We do mold remediation.”
In the middle of the night? That explains the smell of bleach, at least. I know as much about mold remediation as I do about how to send a tiny robot to Mars, but I guess itisfive in the morning, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that we got an early start.
