Page 9 of The Triangle

My grin back says everything she needs to know. I’ll be there for you, that grin says. I got you.

I love her. It’s dumb because she’s almost like my little sister. I’ve been taking care of her since she was ten years old. The minute I turned eighteen I busted her out of that last foster home and she never looked back once.

Almost like my little sister. But almost doesn’t count in biology.

Right now she’s my number-one partner in crime. She’s the main reason I get up in the mornings. Maybe the only reason.

We live together now. With Alec. It’s actually one of his dad’s places, but that guy is never here. Always flying somewhere. I swear to God, Alec talks about taking planes the way most people talk about taking buses.

But there’s a price to pay if we want to stay with Alec. And that’s why we’re standing here in this alley looking over at the house across Race Street.

“You’re sure about the safe?” she asks him.

“I’m sure,” Alec says, petting her hair like she’s his favorite pet. It makes me angry when he does that. Like he’s got a claim on her. Like she’s his when she’s mine. “And don’t worry. I’ll distract him.”

His South African accent is thick. His t’s come out like a machine gun. His skin is still tanned from the rays of some faraway sun. Everything about him is exotic compared to the cold, gray day in this upper-class city neighborhood.

“Just get the diamond,” he says. And then he does something that will change her life forever. It might be the most formative moment she’s had in all fourteen years of formative moments.

He lifts up her dirty t-shirt and tucks a pistol into the waist of her pants.

TODAY

“There,” I say, pointing to the floorboards. “Get the sniper rifle. I’ll get the shotgun in the closet, and you stuff that pistol under the pillow into your pants like old times, and let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I pull my jacket aside so she can see I’m carrying too. Her eyes don’t move, but she sees it. I’m sure of that.

“Christine,” I say. “You need to trust me. Don’t keep making the same mistake over and over again. You just know his name right now, but pretty soon all the other things you know about him will come crashing back. And then you’re gonna thank me.”

CHAPTER FOUR - CHRISTINE

We don’t go to my place. If I actually have a place I don’t know where it is and even though Danny asks me over and over again to try to remember, there’s nothing there. It’s just dark. Just black and empty.

But I feel like my name is Christine. The pill bottle in my hoodie pocket says so. And Danny says so. And even though I don’t know who Danny is, I feel him to be Danny just as much as I feel me to be Christine.

He’s driving an old Willy’s wagon that’s outfitted like a tank. Four-inch lift kit, thirty-five-inch tires, and glass thick enough in the windows that surround me to be bullet-resistant.

We end up across town in some dumpy garage filled with custom motorcycles. The sign on battered metal door says Fortnight’s with a picture of a skeleton riding a chopper through flames underneath the name. Mad toothy grin on his skull face like he’s about to challenge Satan for control of Hell.

It’s cold inside. Empty too, except for the bikes. There are seven workstations but today must be Sunday because it all looks very much put away.

He closes the door behind us, locks it, then arms an alarm system that looks way too state-of-the-art for this dump. Then he leads me across the large space to a beat-up old metal staircase and we go up to a door, deal with another alarm system, and enter what must be his apartment.

We didn’t ditch the guns. Turns out the sniper rifle was all packed up in a convenient carrying case, the shotgun was sawed off, and the pistol was a suppressor-ready CZ in urban gray that just looked pretty. We placed them on the cheap coffee table and looked them over with the same expression.

Nice.

That’s what our silent voices said in our heads.

Too nice to ditch and too difficult to replace.

So I took the rifle and pistol, he stuck the sawed-off into his leather jacket, and that was the end of it. Old habits dying and all that shit, right? It’s hard to let go of a nice piece of equipment, even if it could be your downfall.

His apartment is warm.

That’s the first thing I notice. It’s fuckin’ freezing outside and I’m only wearing a dark gray hoodie over the threadbare t-shirt I woke up in.

So I breathe in the heat as he tucks the shotgun away in the coat closet—I think that’s where all shotguns live—and then takes the sniper rifle from me and goes in the bedroom to put it somewhere safe.