Page 38 of Hellbent

“You change out here. I’ll clean up.”

They passed awkwardly, giving each other a wide berth. In the bathroom he leaned close to the mirror and studied his face, nicked in several places from the shattered windshield. The sterile light caught a dab of dried blood at the corner of his mouth. Only then did he become aware of a throbbing above his right incisor. He lifted his upper lip, saw that the tooth was outlined in crimson. Above it a dot of safety glass speckled in his gum line. He worked it free with his fingers, dropped it in the trash.

Then he rinsed out his mouth and nose, brushed his teeth using Joey’s toothpaste and his finger, and went back into the room.

She was in bed, facing away, her breathing already slow and steady. She’d left a pillow on the floor for him.

He lay down on the carpet near the door and closed his eyes.

* * *

He awoke to movement in the room. Stayed perfectly still. Kept his eyes veiled, mostly closed.

Joey continued to ease out of bed, moving so slowly she didn’t even creak the hair-trigger coils.

Two silent steps, and then she hunched over her rucksack, reaching for something. She rose, turned. He watched her approach. Her hand passed through a fall of light from the window.

She was holding her fixed-blade combat knife.

She moved well, floating on bare feet. He read her posture. Her shoulders were hunched, her head lowered on her neck.

Nothing in it registered aggression.

Just fear.

She leaned over him.

He made the call to let her.

He felt the carbon-steel blade press against his throat.

He opened his eyes all the way.

Her own eyes were so large, the light coming through them from the side turning the irises transparent. The vivid green of them jumped out of the dark, the eyes of a great cat that no longer knew itself to be great.

“Don’t hurt me ever,” she said. “Please.”

“Okay.” He felt the word grind against the knife edge.

She nodded and then nodded again, as if to herself.

The pressure eased.

She withdrew as silently as she’d approached.

He lay there and stared at the water-stained map of the ceiling, the whole world laid out in its darkness and complexity.

16

The Turn to Freedom

A four-sided Romanesque Revival clock tower adorned with lit signage staked Portland Union Station to the west shore of the Willamette River. Evan hustled Joey beneath the GO BY TRAIN flashing sign and into the glossy Italian-marble waiting room, where he bought her a ticket under an alias on a train heading for Ashland, Kentucky, because the choice struck him as sufficiently random. The route ran through Sacramento and Chicago. Between travel time and layovers, that would keep her on the move for nearly three days.

He steered her out onto the chill of the platform, handed her the Amtrak tickets and a wad of cash.

“My email address is [email protected],” he told her. “Say it back to me.”

She did, her first words in nearly twenty minutes.