A possum paused in the middle of the road. Its eyes gleamed yellow as it was caught in the beam of the van’s headlights. It abandoned whatever roadkill it had dined on and scuttled to the side of the road. Grade glanced after it. He’d driven this road a hundred times. More. The muscle memory of that much repetition meant he could probably drive it in his sleep.
Hell, he probably had back in the—
Lights flashed in his eyes, bright enough to blind and soclose, and then the pickup smashed into the side of the van. Grade felt weightless for a second as he was thrown to the side, only anchored by the seat belt that cut into his shoulder. He came back to earth, thrown into the door as the van spun around on the road. The forest and the road flickered through the windshield like a flipbook with out-of-order pages.
“Shit.”
Grade grabbed the wheel and tried to wrestle the van back under control. “Steer into the skid,” that’s what the driver’s ed instructor had always said. Maybe that was only if the road was wet, because it did Grade no good at the moment. His wrists ached as he tried to stop the wheel from being yanked back and forth, but it just spun out of his hands.
The van crashed into the barrier at the side of the road and scraped along it. Sparks flew as metal struck off metal, stripes of factory-issue white paint visible on the corrugated steel. Grade slammed the brakes on. Or tried to. The pedal just smacked down against the floor, but nothing caught.
After one last sickening lurch, the van came to a stop.
Grade grabbed the wheel. He clutched it in sweaty hands for a second and then realized that wasn’t going to help. It took a moment longer to convince his fingers of that, but he finally managed to get them to let go. He reached down with one hand to fumble at his seat belt and pushed the driver’s door open with the other. It popped free, and he half climbed, maybe mostly fell, out of the cab.
There was blood splattered over the driver’s side window. Grade panicked for a second and then realized it was his. He gingerly ran his hand over the side of his face to find the gash as he took a step away from the van. There was a split in his forehead, just over his eyebrow, where he must have bounced it off the window.
The pickup was stopped in the middle of the road, headlights smashed and bumper crumpled from the impact. As Grade squinted at it, the passenger side popped open, and someone scrambled out.
“On your knees!” the man yelled. He clutched a gun in one hand and jabbed it in Grade’s direction for emphasis as he loped forward. “On the ground. Get down on the ground.”
Grade hesitated for a second as he weighed his options. It didn’t take long, but it still made him too slow for the man on the road. He lowered the gun and pulled the trigger twice. The bullets bounced off the ground in front of Grade’s feet, splinters of concrete sharp against his ankles.
“Down!” the man snarled. “Now.”
Grade slowly did as he was told. “There’s nothing worth stealing in there,” he said as he lowered himself down onto one knee. “Just some old clothes and bleach.”
That’s what it said on the side of the van anyhow—Spare Sock Laundry. It had been on it when Grade saw the vehicle at auction, back in LA, and he’d figured that was even more nondescript than an unmarked van.
The man snorted as he crab-walked forward. He had a cap pulled low over his face and a bandana wrapped around his mouth. Grade could see the damp patches where the man’s breath had soaked into it.
“Lying bastard,” he said, and brought the gun down in a short, vicious punch. The heavy metal and plastic cracked against Grade’s skull, and he went down. He had a second to register the growl of the pickup as it raced off and hands on his shoulders as he was rolled over onto his back. Then everything went black.
§
Cheap whiskey burned Grade’s sinuses and stung the back of his throat. It tasted like the backyard moonshine one of his mom’s boyfriends used to cook up. He spluttered, choked the mouthful down, and pushed the flask away from his lips before he got another shot.
“What the—” he muttered, and then he remembered. “Shit.”
Clay took a drink from the silver flask before he capped it and tucked it into his jacket. He offered Grade one of those unexpectedly elegant hands—the knuckles now split and bruised—to pull him onto his feet. Grade stared at it for a second and then took it. The trip from prone on the road to upright made his head spin and his stomach throw sour bile up into the back of his throat. He pulled his hand out of Clay’s and stepped to the side, doubled over with his hands braced on his knees as he waited for the sick heat to pass.
“Tell me you just blew your wages tying one on,” Clay said.
Grade closed his eyes and let his head hang down. He took a moment and then pushed himself back upright.
“No such luck,” he said.
Clay stared at him for a second and then turned around, hands on hips, to scan up and down the road. He saw the same thing that Grade did.
The van was gone, along with the disassembled dead man.
“Well, fuck,” Clay drawled, slow and sticky as his accent got clotted up with the night’s bad luck. “Just when I thought this night couldn’t get any worse.”
Chapter Four
Rage made avein throb in Ezra’s temple, but he kept his voice down to a low snarl. He had the kids this weekend, apparently. They were asleep. He had been too, from the fact that all he had on was a pair of hastily dragged on sweatpants.
“You. Lost. It?” Ezra asked, each word pushed out through his gritted teeth. He stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind him. “How the hell do you lose a corpse?”
