“Your charges have been dropped. You’re free to go.” There’s something in his eyes as he says it that makes me uneasy.
“Get me out of here,” I tell Jonathan.
“Damn straight,” he answers, looping an arm over my shoulders.
I lean into him as we ride the elevator down, and ignore Cooper as he escorts us out of the building. But when I look up, Blake is just stepping through the front doors. My feet stall halfway across the lobby, and Jonathan slows to my pace.
“You okay?” he asks, low in my ear.
I nod and force my feet to move again.
Cooper peels off and Blake steps forward. “Be careful, Sam.”
“That’s it?” I ask. “That’s all you have to say? No ‘I’m sorry I screwed up your life’?”
He just nods and steps back, his expression flat and his eyes giving nothing away.
I glare at him, then Jonathan and I push through the doors into the dark of the night.
He follows us out and watches from the door as we cross the street.
I focus on breathing and force myself not to look back as we walk the few blocks to where Jonathan parked. The light drizzle cools the fever burning under my skin, but it’s not enough to quell the tumult of emotions that presses tears into my eyes and blurs the sidewalk in front of me. I stagger and Jonathan steadies me, then loads me into the van.
“You okay?” he asks again once we’re in, reaching for my hand.
“No,” I say, and the floodgates open. All the tension, and frustration, and fear from the last twenty-four hours, everything I refused to let Blake see, comes pouring out of me in tears that I can’t stop.
Jonathan pulls me to his shoulder. “I got you.” He strokes my hair and holds me tight until the tears slow.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I snivel between hiccups.
“I never would have brought you there if I saw this coming.”
I pull away from his shoulder and wipe my eyes. “What is Ben into, Jonathan?”
He shakes his head. “I don’t really know. I thought it was just minor drug stuff.”
“They want me to testify against him . . . say I saw a guy in his office that they think he killed.”
He groans a little and hangs his head. “This is so fucked up.”
I pull my foot up and hug my knee. “I was so stupid. I can’t believe I didn’t know Blake was a cop.”
He runs a strand of my hair between his fingers. “You really liked him?”
With his question, I realize I’m crying again. I tip my head and rest my forehead on my knee. “I would have slept with him right there at Benny’s. I wanted to. I just never thought . . .” I trail off, too ashamed to finish.
“It’s not your fault he turned out to be a narc, Red. He played you. The guy’s a dick. You can’t beat yourself up over it.”
Sure I can.
I click my seat belt, then crank the stereo, a Hell’s Gate demo reel, and listen to Jonathan singing about pizza toppings through the speakers as he pulls out his phone. “Ginger’s dying to see you. She was getting her legal panties all in a bunch,” he says, his thumbs flying across the screen.
He tucks his phone into his pocket and we glide away from the curb. When we hit the Bay Bridge, I lean into the window and close my eyes as the adrenaline drains from my system, trying to forget about Blake, Benny’s, and everything else.
Minutes later I realize I’m dozing when there’s a loud crunch and I’m jostled in my seat.
“What the fuck!”
The freaked pitch of Jonathan’s voice chases away any remnants of sleep and sends my heart shooting into my throat. I brace my arms against the dashboard when a car darts in front of us and Jonathan slams on the brakes. I’m thrown against the door of the van as he jerks the wheel to the left, and the screech of tires tells me we’re skidding. When we roll, it sounds like the whole world is shattering all around me. My seat belt locks me in my seat, but as we slam onto my side of the van, a rock or something smashes through the window and I hit my head hard.
It feels like we’re spinning and flipping forever before the van finally settles, creaking and groaning, in the ditch on the side of the highway. The sputtering hiss of the radiator in the sudden silence sounds like the rattle of a snake.
We’ve come to rest on Jonathan’s side of the van, so I’m dangling over him from my seat belt. My head throbs, and when I look around, it’s dark and my vision is blurry.
“Jonathan?” I croak.
I squint at his shape below me and see a dark splotch growing on his shirt. It takes me a second to realize that it’s blood. Mine. It drips in a steady stream off the tip of my nose.
“Jonathan!”
He just lays there, unmoving.
“Damn,” I say, my shaking hands trying and failing to work the buckle and free me from the seat belt. The throbbing in my right temple becomes a splitting pain with the effort. “Jonathan! Wake up!”
Adrenaline surges my bloodstream as I get my bearings. I finally manage to get the belt loose and fall out of my seat on top of him. I cry out at the stabbing pain that shoots from my right shoulder through the whole rest of me at the impact. He grunts and opens his eyes.
“We’ve got to get out of here, Jonathan!” I say, shaking him.
He blinks a few times, then seems to realize where we are. “Shit!” he groans, feeling around in the dark for his seat belt latch. “What the fuck happened?”
I snap open his buckle and untangle his seat belt from his body, then stand and reach for the passenger door above us and let out another shriek at the pain in my right shoulder. I yank the handle with my left hand and try to push it open, but it’s too heavy, or stuck, or something.
I scramble between the seats into the back, and when I reach the cargo door and tug the lever, it falls open with a groan and a thud. “Come on!”
He topples over the seat and staggers back to where I am. I get down on my belly and slither out. When I stand, I see the silhouette of a man looking down at us in the streetlights up on the road.
“Help!” I call.
My head pounds and through my double vision I see the streetlights glint off something in the guy’s hand. There’s a pop, then a chink on the door of the van at my feet. For an instant I stare up at the guy, my brain unable to register what’s happening. Jonathan drags himself through the door and is still on his stomach in the dirt when two more pops sound from up on the road. A patch of dirt near Jonathan’s face explodes.
He grunts and then sucks in a hissing breath. “Fuck! Get down, Red!” He grabs my legs and rolls me in the dirt so we’re behind the van. “He’s shooting at us!”
Chapter Fifteen
HE THROWS ME onto the ground behind the van, covering me with his body, and I’m sure my head just exploded with the impact. Shouts sound from up on the road, and my mind struggles to put together the pieces of what’s happened in the last ten minutes in a way that makes any shred of sense. I wait, disoriented and facedown in the ditch, my heart pounding and Jonathan on top of me. My eyes dart through the dark, assessing our surroundings and looking for a way out. There’s really nowhere to run. We’re in a ditch maybe ten or twelve feet below the road, with a cement sound wall behind us. It’s too high to get over. And if we run to either side, we’ll be in plain sight of the guy up the embankment.
On the road above, there’s the squeal of tires.
“Sam!”
Blake’s voice cuts through the night and my racing heart races faster with the renewed adrenaline.
“Sam!” There’s a rustling in the dead grass at the side of the road. “Sam! Are you down there?”
“Jonathan,” I say, bucking against him, but he doesn’t move. “Jonathan, let me up.”