"Because it feels like you and Daniel have an infinite capacity to screw things up. It"s making me a nervous wreck."
"Well, it"s been lovely chatting-"
"Don"t get mad, Oleander, you know I mean Daniel. I just wish you could somehow put a leash on him."
"He"s new. He"ll get it."
"Before he kills himself?"
"You know I can hear you, right?" Daniel asked.
"No one likes an eavesdropper," Kevin said loudly. "Give the girl some s.p.a.ce."
"Here, just talk to him yourself. I"m going to sort our things out so we"ll be ready to go when the sun sets."
She handed the phone back to Daniel and freed herself. He didn"t stay on much longer with his brother. They just exchanged a few insults while she walked back to the Humvee and surveyed the damage. The cargo hold was still total chaos. Well, she had plenty of time on her hands now and not much else productive to do. She pulled the PPK from the small of her back and put it away inside a Ziploc bag in her backpack. Next, she rolled up the sleeping bag and stashed it out of the way on the pa.s.senger"s seat so she could locate all the stray ammo.
She heard Daniel climb in beside her. He went to work combing the s.p.a.ce for loose objects.
"I am sorry," he said while he worked, not looking in her direction. "It"s just, you were sleeping and Einstein was restless, and we seem so alone here. It felt normal. I guess that should have been my first clue that I was committing a crime."
She kept her eyes on her work, too. "Imagine if you had woken up here alone."
"I should have thought of that."
"I remember someone recently promising me that he would ask if it was okay before he breathed."
He sighed. "Kevin"s right, isn"t he? I"m terrible at this."
She started organizing the different magazines into Ziploc bags and then sliding each into an outside duffel pocket.
"I see what you"re doing there," she told him. "You"re making it so I have to either agree with Kevin or forgive you."
"Is it working?"
"Depends. Did anyone see you?"
"No. We saw no signs of life aside from a few birds and squirrels. You know how most dogs chase squirrels? Einstein catches them."
"That might come in handy if we have to live out of this Humvee any longer. I"m not much of a hunter."
"One more night, right? We"ll survive."
"I truly hope so."
"Er... do you want to save these?" Daniel asked, sounding confused. "Are they... walnuts?"
Alex glanced up to see which Ziploc he was referring to.
"Peach pits," she said.
"Trash?"
She took the bag from his hand and tucked it into the duffel she was reorganizing.
"Not trash," she said. "I use them for the sodium cyanide that occurs naturally in the inner kernel of the pit. There"s not much in each-I have to collect hundreds of pits to get a usable amount." She sighed. "You know, I used to like peaches. Now I can"t stand them."
She looked over and saw that Daniel was frozen in place, eyes wide. "Cyanide?" He sounded startled.
"One of my security systems. When it reacts with the right liquid acid, it creates hydrocyanic acid. Colorless gas. I make ampoules large enough to saturate a ten-by-ten room. Pretty basic stuff. I don"t have access to high-end materials anymore. It"s a lot of bathtub chemistry for me these days."
Daniel"s expression evened out and he nodded like everything she"d just said was perfectly sane and normal. He turned back to collecting stray ammo. She smiled to herself.
Alex had to admit she felt a little calmer when their gear was all organized and neatly stowed; the best thing about obsessive-compulsive disorder was the cozy high you got from a tidy s.p.a.ce. She took stock of all the weapons that remained to her and was comforted by that as well. The earrings could not be replaced, and she was low on several compounds, but the majority of her arms were still in working order.
For dinner they had granola bars, Oreos, and a bottle of water they shared as they sat on the back edge of the open Humvee; her legs dangled a good foot off the ground, but his toes touched. At his insistence, she took more Motrin. At least the over-the-counter pills were easily replaceable. She didn"t need to be such a h.o.a.rder with those.
"When do we leave?" Daniel asked when they"d cleaned everything up.
She judged the position of the sun. "Soon. Fifteen more minutes, and I think it will be dark by the time we meet the main road."
"I know I"m in terrible trouble and probably deserve, I don"t know, to be in solitary confinement or something, but do you think I could kiss you until it"s time? I"ll be more careful with your face and your clothes, I promise."
"Careful? That"s not very tempting."
"Sorry. It"s my best offer currently."
She sighed with mock reluctance. "I guess I haven"t really got anything else to do."
He took her face in his hands, placing his fingertips delicately again to avoid her injuries, and when his lips touched hers this time, they were so soft there was barely any weight to them at all. She still felt the buzz, the electricity under her skin, but there was an odd kind of comfort to the very gentleness of it. It was like before, like back in the kitchen at the ranch, only a little more cautious. Still, she remembered the morning vividly, and that shifted things. She considered changing the tempo, twisting into his lap and wrapping her legs around him, but she hesitated. It felt so nice just as it was. Her fingers found their way to his curls, as was rapidly becoming her habit.
He kissed her neck, lightly tasting the places where her pulse beat beneath her skin.
He whispered into her good ear, "One thing concerns me."
"Just one thing?" she breathed.
"Well, aside from the obvious."
His mouth returned to hers, still careful, but this time more exploratory. It had been a decade, nearly, since anyone had kissed her, but it felt longer. No one had ever kissed her like this, with time slowing down and her brain stopping and all the electricity...
"Do you want to know what it is?" he asked a few minutes later.
"Hmm?"
"The thing that concerns me."
"Oh, right. Sure."
"Well," he said, pausing to kiss her eyelids, "I know exactly how I feel about you." Her lips again, her throat. "But I"m not entirely sure how you feel about me."
"It"s not obvious?"
He leaned away from her, still holding her face, and stared at her, curious. "We seem to share a level of attraction."
"I"ll say."
"But is there anything more for you?"
She stared, not sure what he was looking for.
He sighed. "You see, Alex, I"m in love with you." He searched her face, a.n.a.lyzing her reaction, then frowned and let his hands drop to her shoulders. "And I can tell that you"re not buying that, but there it is. Despite what my recent behavior may have implied, s.e.x is not my end goal here. And... I guess I"d like to know what your goals are."
"My goals?" She looked at him incredulously. "Are you serious?"
He nodded gravely.
Her voice sounded sharper than she"d meant it to when she answered. "I have only one goal, and that"s to keep both you and me alive. Maybe, if I can do that long enough, we"ll actually have a reasonable expectation of life beyond the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Should we ever be in that happy position, I can think about having other goals. Goals imply a future."
His frown spread from his mouth to his eyes. His brows pushed down and together. "Are things really that bad?"
"Yes!" she exploded, her hands clenching into fists. She took a deep breath. "I thought that was obvious, too."
The sun was setting. They should have been on the move five minutes ago. She jumped down from the Humvee and whistled for the dogs. Einstein bounded past her eagerly, ready to be back on the road. She went to pick up Lola, but Daniel was there first.
Alex stretched and tried to focus. She felt decently rested and would probably be fine driving all night. That was all that mattered. Just making it through the night without garnering any more attention than she had to. Sending Kevin"s e-mail, and then getting her little traveling circus into a less flamboyant vehicle. That was the limit of her ambition.
They drove in silence for a while. It got dark while they were still on back roads. When they eased onto I-49, Alex relaxed a little. There hadn"t been very many cars, and everything they had seen was old and fit the countryside. For now, she was fairly certain that no one knew exactly where they were.
She knew she should be concentrating, but the dark road with the steady flow of anonymous traffic was monotonous, and she couldn"t help wondering what Daniel was thinking. It wasn"t like him to be so quiet. She thought about turning on the radio, but that felt sort of cowardly. She probably owed him an apology.
"Um, I"m sorry if I was rough back there," she said, the words sounding very loud after the long lull. "I"m not good at this people stuff. There"s really no excuse for me. I"m a full-grown adult-I should be able to hold a normal conversation. Sorry."
His sigh didn"t sound exasperated; it was more like relief. "No, I"m the one who"s sorry. I shouldn"t have pushed. My lack of focus landed us in this position. I will get it together."
She shook her head. "You can"t think of it that way. You"re not responsible for this. Look, someone has decided to kill you. It happened to Kevin six months ago and it happened to me a few years before that. You"ll make mistakes, because it"s impossible to know what is or isn"t a mistake until it"s made. But mistakes don"t mean you"re guilty for what is happening. Never forget that there is a real human being who decided to put his agenda ahead of your existence."
He thought about that for a minute. "I know what you"re saying. I believe it. But I need to listen to you more closely-act like you, keep my mind on what matters. It doesn"t help us to have me mooning around like a teenager, worrying about whether or not you like -like me."
"Honestly, Daniel, I-"
"No, no," he interrupted immediately. "I did not mean to hijack this conversation with that comment."
"I just want to explain. If you"re a teenager, I"m a toddler. I"m emotionally backward. Defective, even. I don"t know how to do any of this, and while survival is obviously the priority, I"m also using it to deflect questions I should be able to answer. I mean... love? I don"t even know what that is, or if it"s real. Sorry, it"s just... foreign to me. I evaluate things based on needs and wants. I can"t deal with anything... fluffier."
Daniel laughed his funny heh-heh-heh laugh and all the tension bled right out of her. She laughed with him, and then sighed. Everything felt less awful when she could laugh along with Daniel.
He released one final chuckle, then said lightly, "So tell me what you need."
She thought it through. "I need... you to be alive. And I would like to be alive, too. That is my baseline. If I get more than that, I would prefer to have you close by. After that, anything else is just frosting."
"Call me an optimist, but I think we may just be dealing with nothing more than some semantic issues here."
"You could be right. If we get a few more weeks together, maybe we"ll figure out how to speak the same language."
He took her hand. "I"ve always been a quick study with linguistics."
CHAPTER 22.
Alex chose the gas station outside Baton Rouge based on the age of the cashier. He was eighty if he was a day and she had high hopes that his vision and hearing were past their prime.
Once she ascertained that he was paying her absolutely no attention at all, despite the fact that her thick makeup was far from convincing, she did some thorough shopping. More water, lots of nuts and jerky-any kind of nonperishable protein she could find. She grabbed some cans of V8, though she wasn"t a fan, as the convenience store didn"t have a fresh produce section. She acknowledged to herself that she would have to go to an actual grocery store at some point, but she hoped they could wait it out a bit longer. Every day her bruises faded a little more.
There was no drama at the twenty-four-hour Internet coffee place, either. It was near the university, so it had no shortage of late-night seat fillers. She kept her hood up and her face down, sat in a secluded corner, and asked for a plain black coffee without looking at the barista who came for her order. She wished she had time to do this from somewhere not on the trail to their destination, but the first priority had to be exchanging the Batmobile. It was currently her biggest disadvantage.
She created a brand-new e-mail account registered to a name that was no more than a random combination of letters and numbers. Then she tried to channel Kevin.
You should have left it alone, Deavers. You shouldn"t have involved a civilian. I"m not here to do your dirty work, but I took care of the little interrogator for you. Texas was a nice way to say you"re welcome. Enough is enough.
Not a specific threat, but plenty implied. She hesitated for a second with her finger over the mouse, the little arrow touching the Send b.u.t.ton. Was she giving them anything they didn"t have? They would know by now that Daniel wasn"t among the dead back at the ranch. She couldn"t try to fool Deavers on that point. Was there some way she wasn"t seeing for this to come back at them? Could this make things worse?
She hit the b.u.t.ton. Things couldn"t get that much worse, anyway.
As soon as it was sent, she was on her feet. The Humvee was parked in the alley around the back, behind a couple of dumpsters. She walked quickly with her head down, hood up, and a syringe in hand. The side street was mostly empty, just one small knot of people huddled close together in the darkness of a recessed emergency door. She studied the trio for a second before she climbed into the dark vehicle.
Einstein touched his nose to her shoulder. Daniel took her hand.
"Do you know where the night-vision goggles are?" she murmured.
He dropped her hand. "Is something wrong?" he whispered back. He turned to rummage between the seats.
"Nothing new," she promised. "Maybe something helpful."
He handed her the goggles. She switched them on and took a better look at the little conference.
It was just breaking up. This wasn"t a particularly rough area of town, and all three partic.i.p.ants were expensively dressed, though their clothes were casual. A dark-haired man was holding hands with a blond girl who had so many showy labels on the different pieces of clothing she wore that she looked like a NASCAR driver sponsored by midlevel luxury brands. These two were walking off now, their path angling away from the Humvee. The blonde bobbled and swayed a little as she walked. The man with her was stuffing something into the pocket of his hoodie.
The third person stayed in the dark door frame, leaning against it casually like he was expecting more guests soon. His clothing was what she would describe as upmarket frat boy.
She thought about what she"d just been feeling inside the cafe before she pushed Send-that things couldn"t get much worse. She supposed there were ways this spontaneous idea of hers could go south, but she couldn"t think of any that she wouldn"t be able to handle quietly. And it would be a big help if the frat boy was what she thought he was.