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Billie glanced over at the crimson puddle they’d pried him up from (it took four of them to lift the fucker), a pool of blood now concealed by the night mist thickening on the road.
At the open trunk, Kate and Billie backed off to allow Carmine and Tonya to fix the tarp over the corpse. Silence had wrapped them all up tight.
The girls didn’t speak. But some feet away in the shadows,shedid—
“I’m not doing this.”
The trembling voice came from behind Billie. A shaky whisper strained with restrained tears, frail violin strings pulled too tight.
Billie turned to face the girl who was as small as her voice. Gigi.
It was Kate, though, who turnedonher. She made a point of that distinction when she dropped her narrowed eyes on the mouse of the group, a sneer twisting her mouth, and took a single determined, somewhat threatening step closer to Gigi.
Kate hissed through her clenched teeth. “Excuse me?”
Gigi shook her head. Glossy crimson hair—now free from the high bun she’d had fixed atop her head—was as distressed as her grimly twisted face that she shook and shook and shook. Stuck in her denial. “I can’t.”
Kate advanced on her. Two determined, brisk steps.
Paler than usual, Billie’s sickly complexion appeared transparent under the bright moonlight above. She did nothing in her numb daze but fist her blood-slicked hands at her sides and watch as Kate towered over Gigi.
“You’re not doing this?” Kate echoed; a dark edge sharp like a knife in her tone. “You’re not doingwhat, Gigi?”
Bat outta hell, Tonya came staggering around the bloody hood of the idling car, near slipping onto the crimson Ford badge plastered red at the front. Delirious, maybe, from the murder—or the shit ton of drugs she’d snorted earlier.
Before Tonya could come to her twin’s defense, Carmine came in hot on her heels. She grabbed her by the shoulders, grips like vices, and yanked her back. The silent warning didn’t go unheard.
Tonya needed reminding.
It was the reason Billie stayed quiet.
The reason Carmine stayed quiet.
And the same reason Kate loomed over the shaking girl, a quiet fury whirling beneath the surface of her eerily calm face.
“Tell me, Gigi.” One step closer. Too close.
Gigi shrunk back.
Kate pressed, “What is it that you’re refusing to do?”
Gigi had staggered back so far towards the edge of the road now that she and Kate were practically swallowed whole by the shadows of the night. Darkness danced over their faces, and it was all Billie could do to just… watch.
“Gigi, do you want to call the police? Find the nearest payphone…” Kate, with a suddenly false blank look, turned to Billie, stone-cold in her silence, and blinked. “Where would that be?”
“Closest one is at the bar. In town.”
“Great.” Kate snaked her attention back onto Gigi, her muscles slinking like she was ready to strike. “You want me to drive you there? We could call the cops, tell them that we—all girls from Southside—killed Henry fucking Maxwell.”
“It was an accident!” Gigi’s shout trembled with her own doubts, the same uncertainties found in the shift of her eyes from one to another. “We can’t get in trouble for that. But if we go to Mr. Fix It, that makes this a hit and run. We’ll be fucked.”
“Itwasan accident. You’re not wrong, Gigi.” Billie’s voice was little more than a croak. But all heads turned to her, even Kate’s. And they listened. “Manslaughter, they call it. I’ll get at least fifteen years, and you know it. Drink driving, whatever that gets me. A few more years?”
Shaky. Unsure. Lying to herself, Gigi whined, “You don’t know that.”
Billie’s crystalline eyes were bloodshot as she lifted them and looked right through Gigi with a stare like the glint of a sword. “And what about you?”
All eyes turned, slowly, on Gigi. The girls might have all been the same age, but if there was a baby in the group, it was her. The mother, undeniably Kate, the one who took the charge they all needed, even if they didn’t want to hear it. She was the brains.
