Lucy stared at him, hesitating.
“What?” he asked. “After your whole ‘kill together, die alone’ speech, you still don’t want to tell me?”
“All I’ve got left is a pair of scissors. I had the chance to take a Glock, but I didn’t.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Lucy. This isn’t the time.”
The car continued to coast.
Donaldson glanced at the speedometer.
Fifty miles per hour.
Forty-five.
Forty.
The car behind them closed the gap.
“I’m not fucking with you, D. I didn’t take the gun, because I didn’t want to accidentally kill you and spare you all the pain I had in store. I’m sorry. Frisk me now if you don’t believe me.”
Donaldson grunted something noncommittal.
The headlights were riding their back bumper now.
“There!” Lucy said. “There’s a dirt driveway.”
She pointed out her window, and Donaldson squinted to see through the darkness.
“Is that a barn?” she asked.
“Can’t tell. But it’s better than being out in the open.”
Donaldson nudged the Honda onto the shoulder and made a quick right. The tires sank into dirt, then caught, carrying them fifty yards down the road toward the building, gradually slowing until all momentum ceased.
The car that had been following them crept past and then stopped twenty yards ahead. It was a black sedan. Its taillights burned for a minute more, and then went dark.
“What would someone who isn’t in law enforcement want with us?” Lucy asked.
“Why don’t you hop out and ask?”
“What are they waiting for?”
“I don’t know.”
Whoever was in the black sedan stayed put.
“You have any weapons, D?”
“I figured the gun would be enough.”
“So what do we do? Can you sneak up on him, maybe?”
Donaldson shook his head, flipping on the interior light. “Check out my legs.”
Lucy looked down. The bandages had sloughed off in bloody strips.
Wait. Those weren’t bandages.
That was his skin.
“Grafts. Prick named Lanz told me to limit my movement, or they wouldn’t take hold. Guess he wasn’t kidding.”
“Cool. Is this, ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?’ I’ll play.”
Lucy pulled a pair of surgical scissors out of her scrubs and snipped a tiny cut into the bandage of her right leg. She pulled back a piece of black foam while Donaldson took a quick glance at the car in the distance. It hadn’t moved.
“I have to warn you,” Lucy said. “I haven’t had the skin grafts yet.”
Her shinbone shone through a hole below her knee.
Donaldson seemed mesmerized by the wound.
“I had to go off my morphine to escape. They gave me a nerve block shot in my spine, but it’s wearing off. The pain is…spectacular.”
Donaldson couldn’t take his eyes off her leg. Lucy folded the bandage back, grimacing as she pressed the adhesive into another filthy bandage in an attempt to make it stick.
“You’re full of shit.”
“Huh?”
“You can’t feel a damn thing. You’re paralyzed, aren’t you?”
“We aren’t safe in here, D. We need to do something. Now.”
“Do what, little girl? I can barely walk and I only got one good arm. And I bet you can’t walk at all. We’re outta gas in the middle of bumblefuck.”
“So we just wait?”
“This guy wants something. Eventually, he’ll show us what it is.”
They waited.
No one moved.
“You said you killed a hundred and thirty people?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah.”
“I killed twenty-nine. One for every year I’ve lived.”
“I admire a woman with pluck.”
“We’ve both been on the news. People knew we were at that hospital.”
Donaldson’s face scrunched up. “What are you saying?”
“Maybe one of our victims has family. Family who are pissed off.”
Through the windshield, they watched the driver side door of that car swing open.
A dark figure stepped out.
“Guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Donaldson said.
The driver was tall and thin. He stood for a moment next to his car, a waxing gibbous moon behind him, the Honda’s headlights washing out his features.
Then he began to walk toward them, his black boots kicking up little spirals of dust in his wake.
“Want to hand me those scissors?” Donaldson asked.
The man’s face shone pale in the moonlight. And razor thin. The night air blew wisps of his long black hair, causing it to wrap around his face and stick to his thin, colorless lips.
Lucy dug the pair of scissors out of the waistband of her scrubs and handed them over to Donaldson.
“He looks familiar,” she said.
“You sure you killed twenty-nine? Maybe it was twenty-eight, and the last one is just pissed off.”
She let out a trembling breath. “No way. This can’t be him.”
The man was ten feet from the front bumper, and neither Donaldson nor Lucy could take their eyes off of him.
“Now would be a good time to fill me in,” Donaldson said.
“When I was fifteen, I ran away from home to a mystery book convention in Indianapolis to see my favorite author, Andrew Z. Thomas. While I was there, I killed for the first time. It was messy. I didn’t know what I was doing. I would’ve gotten myself caught, but these two guys…the ones I was telling you about earlier? They found me out. They came into the hotel room and-”
The man stopped at Donaldson’s window and rapped hard against the glass.
“Just tell me…is he a friend or foe?” Donaldson whispered.
“I’m not sure.”
Keeping the scissors palmed, Donaldson pressed the button on his door.
The window lowered halfway.
“Can I help you, buddy?” Donaldson said.
The man ducked down to look inside.
When his face appeared, Lucy said, “Holy shit, you’re-”
“Luther. Luther Kite. That you, little Lucy? Last time I saw you, you didn’t even have a driver’s license. Now look at you, on the TV, getting yourself into all sorts of trouble.”
Lucy’s face scrunched up. “Luther?”
Luther stuck the barrel of a gun into the car. When he pulled the trigger, it sounded like a hard blast of air.
Both Lucy and Donaldson stared down at the dart sticking out of Lucy’s chest.
She took a deep, sucking breath, like the wind had been knocked out of her.
