Bone Music (Burning Girl #1)(67)

“What do you mean,” she finally says, “get to work? What is work?”

“The world is full of bad men, Charlotte. Go find some. Show them what you can do.”

“Show you what I can do,” she says. “You and whoever you’re working for.”

“With. Working with. Try not to kill anyone. Although if you do, don’t worry. We’ll clean it up. Just make sure they’re worth killing.”

“I’ve only got three pills left.” She says these words without thinking, and he laughs gently. Laughs, she figures, because he thinks he hears a craving for more Zypraxon in her voice. Really she’s just trying to throw up a last-minute hurdle, grasping for any complication she could find. Or maybe not. Maybe it is a craving.

Or maybe Dylan’s in my head and I need him to get the fuck out right now.

“I’ll fix that soon enough,” he says. “And I’ll be in touch when we need you to come in.”

“Come in where?”

“You’ll see.”

“Yeah, well, maybe when you come for me in person, I’ll have a surprise for you.”

“Charley, the company I’m working with had over twenty-five billion dollars in revenue last year alone. They employ private security contractors who have removed dictators from power. I’m watching an image of you right now that’s giving me heat signatures of every living thing in the field you’re standing in. There’s a small animal twenty feet away from you, probably a gopher, and some deer nosing through the woods at the base of the mountains to the west. And your new friend Luke is still bouncing on his heels. Trust me—from here on out, there is nothing you can do to surprise me. Happy hunting.”

Silence.

Just silence. Just the wind rustling the tall grass around her.

Just rage.

She tries to crush the phone in one hand.

It doesn’t work.

So just wanting to pound Dylan into the dirt isn’t enough to turn me into the Incredible Hulk, she thinks. Bummer.





24

When Luke sees her approaching, he goes still. She figures his tight, uncomfortable-looking smile is meant to mask his concern.

“Do you need to go to the bathroom?” she asks.

“Um . . . no, not really. Why?”

“Can you get behind the wheel?”

“What?” he asks.

“Just get behind the wheel.”

“OK. But are you . . .”

When she walks to the back of the Jeep, he throws up his hands and gives in to her command.

She places Jason’s disposable phone behind the passenger-side tire.

“Start the engine!” she calls to him.

“Are you getting in?” he asks through the open window.

“In a minute. Just start the engine.”

“And then what?”

“Back up a few feet.”

He does. At first it looks like the phone’s going to get spit out from under the advancing tire, but then the tire catches just enough of its bottom section to crush it with a loud crunch.

“Again!” she says.

Luke rolls the Jeep forward a few feet, then repeats the action. There’s a series of soft pops as the interior of the phone gives way. When Luke pulls forward again, the tire leaves behind a spray of broken pieces that are close to being unrecognizable. She kicks them into the dirt beside the road with one foot.

Then, before she can think twice about it, she raises both hands and gives a double middle-finger salute to the empty field, the tree she stood under, and the sky overhead. She spins in place, hands up, birds out, until she finds herself standing next to the Jeep’s passenger-side door. Luke stares at her.

“So I guess the call didn’t go well?” he asks.

Forcing breath into her lungs, she slides into the passenger seat. She wants to meet Luke’s joke with one of her own, wants to look him in the eye and return his sheepish smile. But she can’t. She can’t because the world seems too small all of a sudden. Because her life, once again, has been reduced to a thin stream moving through a channel carved by psychopaths.

Before she can reconsider, she reaches into her pocket and pulls out the Post-it note with Bailey’s URL on it. She extends it to Luke. He doesn’t take it.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Your brother. It’s the URL he gave us. For when you go talk to him.”

“Aren’t we both going to talk to him?” he asks.

“No. You should leave me here.”

“Leave you here. What? That’s crazy. It’s like a forty-five-minute walk back to town. I’m not—”

“I’ll have Marty come pick me up.”

“Well, do you have another phone with you? ’Cause the last one’s kinda roadkill now.”

“No, I don’t. Maybe you could call him after you—”

“OK, you know what? Let’s just stick with the original plan and—” She grabs his hand when he reaches for the gearshift.

“Luke, if Bailey talks to me, he could end up in more trouble than he’s already in.”

“My brother’s hiding out from the FBI. Probably in a foreign country.”

“I know.”

“I’m just saying you’d be hard-pressed to make things any more difficult for him.”