Page 65 of Fire
She’d only given this number to two people, and she was still fucking surprised to hear Jake Hawthorne on the other end, sounding as testy and pissed as the last time they’d met. “Who else would it be? You check out that flash drive I gave you?” Maybe he or Tobias had finally looked at what she had put together and would be willing to work on a solution.
“Yeah. I got a proposition for you.” His tone was aggressive and challenging. Alice’s heart rate kicked into high gear, but she kept her voice steady.
“What would that be?”
“How would you like to burn Freak Camp down to the last brick?”
The shock that went through her tasted like adrenaline and triumph and panic, like a firefight she was sure she would win, or a press conference when she knew what the worst question would be and had her response perfected down to the last syllable. “That sounds... pretty damn good,” she said. “What changed your mind?”
“I saw the tapes.”
She couldn’t stop laughter bubbling up, but she kept it to one sharp, brutal, exclamation. “The interrogations? If I’d known that was all it would take, I would have played them for you months ago.”
“Did you send them?” Jake’s voice was tight and infinitely more dangerous.
Alice snorted. “Everything I gave you was on that flash drive.”
A long pause. “So. You in?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “What do you need?”
“We need a plan where we make it out alive. And without getting thrown in the slammer.”
Alice felt the grin growing on her face, and she knew it came through in her voice. “I think I can help with that.”
12
Tobias sat, hands clasped tight in his lap, while Jake paced the small room.
Step. Step. Step, shuffle, and turn.
Step. Step. Step. Huff, step, shuffle, turn.
Tobias closed his eyes and thought very hard about breathing and nothing else. That simple act was harder than it should have been, and not just because of the bulky and unfamiliar vest he wore or the stuffy darkness of the room.
When the burner phone chirped cheerfully from the tiny motel room table, Tobias flinched and Jake stumbled.
“Toby,” Jake said.
“Yeah.” Tobias grabbed the phone and checked the text, marveling at how his hands remained steady on the cheap plastic.
GO.
The message was brutally brief, for everything it meant.
Tobias didn’t trust himself to speak, with the shaky rush of adrenaline and fear now coursing through his system. Instead, he just gave Jake a short nod.
They left their bags, already stripped of any identification, and Jake tucked the motel key deep in his jacket pocket. Either they would return later that night, or they wouldn’t.
Their “borrowed” crossover, a battered Honda CR-V more dust-colored than white, was already loaded with everything they needed. It had been packed since they’d left Roger’s and the Eldorado behind. Tobias eased himself into the passenger seat, while Jake took the driver’s side, swearing under his breath as he hit the windshield wipers while reaching for the lights. Dawn was still an hour away.
He might have fumbled less were it not for the explosives in the back seat. Draped in a battered tarp (as though that would really help them if the cops pulled them over), it looked like they had a body back there.
Not yet, Tobias thought, and then returned to thinking about his breathing.
The surrealism only grew as they drove the hour and a half from Argenta, past Winnemucca, to their final destination. The car was too new to have a tape deck, so Jake had been stuck flipping through the radio stations on their drive down from South Dakota. His latest oldies station was playing Zeppelin, and Tobias could almost imagine they were anywhere but here.
Except for Jake’s tight-lipped silence. And the unfamiliar rumble of the CR-V’s engine. And how, for Tobias, nothing felt real, down to the press of the seat behind him, the blue sky above, and his own hands folded in his lap.
