Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(70)

God, it hurts, but at the same time I can’t deny that he’s right. Clearly, he ought to get the fuck away from me; he can’t tell who I am anymore, or even what I am. For all Sam knows I could be some secret accomplice of Melvin’s, or working against him, or some weird, psychotic combination of the two. “I understand,” I say. I mean that.

I’m off balance. The loss of my kids has taken my world away. I don’t care where he leaves me—by the side of this country road, or in the middle of a city. He could shoot me and dump me in the ocean, and I don’t think I’d care. I feel dead inside. I want my kids, and my kids don’t want me, and how do you live after that?

Sam says nothing to me for a long time. We let the miles hiss away beneath the tires as we take the turnoff away from Norton and back toward the freeway. The numbness doesn’t go away, but something else begins to grow. It’s a wild sense of recklessness. Purpose. If I can’t protect my kids one way, I will protect them another.

Absalom has made me into the worst kind of enemy: one with nothing to lose, and nothing left to fear. The only hold Melvin had on me was my kids, and if their safety is out of my hands, then there’s no longer any reason for me to be careful.

Or invisible.

I ask Sam, “How far to the next town?”

“Half an hour to one big enough to matter,” he says. “Why?”

“Drop me off,” I say. “He’ll find me.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Melvin will find me. I’ll make sure he does.” I can imagine how it would go: a moment of inattention, and suddenly he’s there. He’s on me, beating me down or shocking me senseless. I’ll wake up the way his victims do: helpless, suspended, terrified, in agony. And the pain won’t stop until I die from it. “I just need to make sure you find him and kill him. I don’t care what he does to me. I can get him out in the open for you.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. He’ll keep me alive as long as he can, so you should have time. Even if it’s too late to save me, he’ll keep my body with him, after; he won’t run until he’s satisfied. I’d be the last, Sam, even if you can’t get to me before it’s done. You can stop him. I can make him take his time, make it last until you find him. He cannot get to my kids. That’s all that matters to me now.”

He suddenly pulls the truck over to the side of the road in a rattle of gravel, and the chassis rocks as a fast-moving eighteen-wheeler blasts past, then another. He puts the gearshift in park and turns in his seat to face me. I can’t tell what he’s thinking, until he says, “Goddammit, Gwen. If you’re telling the truth about that video—” He closes his eyes for a second, and then I recognize the expression, finally. It’s a frozen, distant look of someone who’s staring into the face of something awful. I wonder if I have it, too. “You need to be there for your kids if you didn’t do those things. You know that.”

I’m doing nothing but thinking about the kids. Thinking about Lanny staring into my face and rejecting me once and for all. My children deserve my last, best effort to preserve them, even if it takes me away from them forever. I can’t prove that I’m innocent. But I can save them, whether they believe in me or not.

“This is the right way,” I tell him. “It’s the only way.”

“I can’t let you do it.”

“You can’t stop me.”

He shakes his head and says, “Your best bet is to go back to Rivard. Rivard gets to Absalom. Absalom leads to Melvin. You don’t have to do it this way.”

“That takes too long.”

“You can’t put yourself out there like some . . . sacrificial goat.”

“Why not?” I turn toward him, and I see him flinch from what he sees there. “If I’m already dead to the people I love, I might as well die for them.”

It’s bleak, and it makes perfect sense to me. I think that for the first time Sam Cade really pities me now, as if I’m broken. But I’m not. I’m forged hard out of pieces, like a bar of solid steel. There’s nothing soft left.

I’m too broken to be broken anymore.

“If you want to leave me here, then do it,” I tell him. “I’ll go it alone. But I’m going after Melvin Royal. It’s all he’s left me in the world to care about.”

He swallows. I don’t know the last time I’ve seen Sam unsure, but here it is, right now. I have a thousand-miles-away view of the desire I felt for him before, the hopeless wish that we could cross the minefield between us and let the past go, just for a while.

But the past never leaves us. It’s in every breath, every cell, every second. I know that now.

“God, Gwen,” Sam whispers. “Don’t do this. Please don’t.”

I unbuckle my seat belt, open the door, and step out into the cold, misty air. Rain’s on the way, the kind of wintry stuff that turns to ice in the blink of an eye. Black ice, the kind you can’t see coming. The kind that spins your life out of control and into disaster.

I start to walk in the direction that traffic is headed, along the side. It’s a dangerous spot to be on foot; there isn’t much shoulder between the gravel and the road surface, and on the right, the land drops in a steep curve. Nothing beyond but the sharp points of trees.