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“To . . . ?”
“Wherever,” he said brusquely. “And don’t give me any crap about talking to the cops again.”
“They’ll find you. And they’ll think you ran.”
“I am running.”
“But you need to talk to them,” she said, catching his eye again. “To tell them why you were at Margrove’s trailer.”
“Sure I do,” he said sarcastically, his smile—cold and deadly—visible in the mirror’s reflection. “My first priority.”
“You have to explain.”
“Explain what? That I was supposed to meet him up there? It was all arranged. And I showed up and he was dead, his damned throat cut ear to ear?”
“Yes!”
“Like they would believe me.” He snorted his disbelief as Kara took the first part of an S curve a little too fast. She hit the brakes for the opposing turn and felt the back end of the Jeep shimmy before straightening out. “Hell, you don’t even believe me.”
She opened her mouth to say something and he cut her off, leaned forward so far that his breath ruffled her hair. “I didn’t kill him. You got that? I didnotkill him. He was dead when I got there. I knocked. He didn’t answer. I figured maybe he got wasted or something; it’s not like that’s been unheard of. I saw that the TV was on and that the door was open, so I let myself in. Like you. And I found him on the floor. Already dead.”
She glanced again in the mirror as a phone rang. Not her cell. Jonas’s. He already had a phone? And someone was calling? Who? She watched in the mirror as he answered, thought about the text she’d received from the unknown number.She’s alive.From Jonas?
“Hi. Yeah . . . I’m on the road,” he was saying in a hushed voice. “Yeah, yeah, Iknow. . . Look, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you when—” He glanced up then, caught Kara looking at him, and his face flashed with anger before his expression turned to horror. “Watch the damned road!” he yelled. “Holy shit, Kara, watch the goddamned road!”
From the corner of her eye she spied a deer bounding from the woods. It stopped, poised for a split second in the piled snow at the side of the road. Ready to leap. “No!” Kara said. “No, no—!”
A flash of movement. The forked-horn buck sprang—a blur of brown fur, big eyes and long legs.
“No, no!”
Kara stood on the brakes!
The deer landed in front of her.
Kara screamed.
Cranked hard on the wheel.
The Jeep started to spin.
The deer leapt into the oncoming lane.
“Fuck!” Jonas swore from the back seat. “Kara! Are you nuts?”
Still the Jeep rotated, almost as if in slow motion.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh God!Kara was shaking, her pulse pounding, her fingers curled over the steering wheel as she tried to drive away from the oncoming lane, where the cliff, beyond a low barrier, dropped deep into the river’s gorge.
“Get control!” Jonas said, panicked. “Turn into the slide, turn into the fucking slide!”
Through the windshield, she spied the semi. A huge monster of a rig bearing down on them.
“Oh, no!” She eased up on the brakes, hoping beyond hope there was enough time to get out of the huge truck’s path.
“Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh shit!” Jonas was screaming. “Kara! Pull over!”
Headlights, two huge glowing eyes, closed in on them.
