it.”
“Been no Indians living there or using it for more than three hundred years,” Kevin explained.
“Wouldn’t want to contaminate anybody’s drinking water,” said Zachary. “Federal offense.”
“Nobody’ll ever find your bodies. Maybe after your car crash, you just wandered off into the desert, got disoriented and lost in the storm, and froze to death.”
As the speed of the car dropped, eerie shapes appeared in the snow on both sides. They were low and undulant, pale formations reflecting the headlights, gliding past like ghost ships in a fog. Weathered ruins. Fragments of buildings, the stacked-stone and adobe walls of a long-abandoned settlement.
When Kevin braked to a stop and put the car in park, Martie turned toward Zachary and jammed the.45 Colt into his side so hard that his face clutched in pain.
His eyes revealed a man who was both fearless and pitiless, but not a stupid man. Without her saying a word, he dropped the machine pistol onto the floor between his feet.
“What?” Kevin asked, instinct serving him well.
As the driver sought Martie in the rearview mirror, she said, “Reach behind and put your hands on the headrest, you sonofabitch.”
Kevin hesitated.
“We have a situation here,” Zachary confirmed.
Kevin’s right shoulder dropped slightly, as he started to reach for the machine pistol on the front seat.
“HANDS ON THE HEADREST
Sitting up straight again, Kevin reached behind himself with both hands and gripped the headrest.
With the Colt jammed into his gut, Zachary was going to behave, because she could pull the trigger faster than he could move.
“You got off that plane with nothing but carry-ons,” Kevin said.
“Shut up. I’m thinking.”
Martie didn’t want to kill anyone, not even human garbage like this, not if it could be avoided. But how to avoid it? How could she get out of the car and get them out of the car, too, without giving them a chance to try anything?
Kevin wouldn’t leave it alone. “Nothing but carry-ons, so where did you get a gun?”
Two of them to watch. All that movement getting out. Moments of imbalance, vulnerability.
“Where did you get the gun?” Kevin persisted.
“I pulled it out of your buddy’s ass.
Going out of the driver’s side, she’d have to turn her back on one of them, at some point. No good.
So then ease backward out of the passenger’s side. Make Zachary slide across the seat with her, keeping the gun in his belly, looking past him to Kevin in the front.
With the windshield wipers off, the snow began to spread a thin coverlet on the glass. The motion of the descending flakes made her dizzy.
She met Zachary’s eyes.
He recognized her irresolution.
She almost looked away, realized that would be dangerous, and jammed the muzzle of the Colt even deeper into his gut, until he broke eye contact.
“Maybe it’s not a real gun,” Kevin said. “Maybe it’s plastic.”
“It’s real,” Zachary was quick to inform him.
Feeling her way backward, out of the car, would be tricky. Could hook her foot on the doorsill or hook up on the door itself. Could fall.
“You’re just damn housepainters,” Kevin said.
“I’m a video-game designer.”
“What?”
“My husband’s the housepainter.”
And after she was out, when Zachary followed her, he would for a moment fill the open door, her gun in his belly, and Kevin would be blocked from her sight.
The only smart thing to do was shoot them while she had a clear advantage. Smilin’ Bob hadn’t told her what to do when intelligence and morality collided head-on.
“I don’t think the lady knows what’s next,” Zachary told his partner.
“Maybe we got a stalemate here,” Kevin said.
Action. If they thought she was incapable of ruthless action, then
68
A winter scene frozen in a liquid-filled glass globe: the soft and rounded lines of ancient Indian ruins, silvered sage, a midnight-blue BMW, two men and one woman therein, another man unseen in the trunk — two dumpers and two dumpees — and nothing moving, everyone and everything as still as the empty universe before the Big Bang, except for the snow, a windless blizzard, which falls and falls as though a giant’s hand just shook the globe, an arctic winter’s worth of fine white snow.
“Zachary,” Martie finally said, “without turning away from me, using your left hand, open your door. Kevin, you keep your hands on the headrest.”
Zachary tried the door. “Locked.”
“Unlock it,” she said.
“Can’t. It’s the childproof master lock. He has to do it up front.”
“Where’s the lock release, Kevin?” Martie asked.
“On the console.”
If she allowed him to operate the lock release, his hand would be within inches of the machine pistol that was no doubt lying on the passenger’s seat.
“Keep your hands on the headrest, Kevin.”
“What kind of video games you design?” Kevin asked, trying to distract her.
Ignoring him, Martie said, “You have a pocket knife, Zachary?”
“Pocket knife? No.”
“Too bad. If you so much as twitch, you’ll need a knife to dig two hollowpoints out of your intestines, because you’ll never live long enough to get to a hospital where a real doctor could do it.”
As she slid backward across the seat, to a point at which she would be midway between the front headrests, Martie kept the pistol trained on the redhead, although the weapon would have been more intimidating if she could have continued to press the muzzle hard into his abdomen.
“In case you’re wondering,” she said, “this piece isn’t double-action. Single-action. No ten-pound pull. Four and half pounds, crisp and easy, so the barrel won’t wobble. Shots aren’t going to go wide or wild.”
She couldn’t see well enough into the front while sitting in the back, so she eased forward, rising off the seat, legs bent in a half squat, feet splayed and braced, twisted toward Zachary but her right shoulder against the back of the front seat, with a cross-body grip on the pistol. Awkward. Stupidly, dangerously awkward, but she couldn’t figure any other way to keep the weapon trained on Zachary and be able to watch Kevin’s hand as he lowered it to the console.
She didn’t dare reach into the front seat herself. She would be unbalanced, completely distracted from Zachary.
