The Guest Room(60)

We had ridden the subways before, but I had no idea where we could go. And while Sonja had started thinking about what she wanted to do the minute they told us that Crystal was dead, I was a little nervous about her maybe. Maybe they’ll never find us? Seriously, that was her plan?

We had a lot of cash, because Pavel and Kirill always carried big rolls of money in their pockets. But I guessed we had also made another four thousand dollars in tips. Richard had given me nearly a thousand when we were upstairs. I almost didn’t take it because he hadn’t let me finish him, but in the end I did. I knew if I didn’t, Pavel would have thought I was hiding money from him. He never would have believed that some dude had just decided not to finish. And after they’d killed Crystal, there was no way I was going to risk getting him mad at me. Besides, I had held up my end of deal. I had earned the money. Still, I had felt a little guilty when we were upstairs in the bedroom and he gave me all that cash. But now in the car, when Sonja and I were running who knew where, I was very glad I had it. I was very glad I had all those extra fifty-and one-hundred-dollar bills.

“Where are we going on the subway?” I asked her when we got to the train station maybe two minutes later.

She didn’t answer. “You have the money?” she asked me instead.

“I do.”

“And the gun?”

“Yes.” I knew she had one, too. They were both Makarovs. She had eight rounds in hers—full magazine. I had six left in mine.

When we were on the platform, she pointed at a train schedule under glass. “See?” she said. “See? There will be train in seven minutes.”

“Seven minutes,” I repeated.

“That will f*cking teach them,” she said, and she wiped some of the mascara off her cheek. I knew it was running because she was crying, but we had also gotten soaked when we had raced to the car and then a second time when we had climbed the steps to the train platform. Her eyes were red and her makeup was a mess. I was relieved the platform had a roof. “God, I’m glad they’re dead. I am so f*cking glad they’re dead,” she said.

“Tell me: Where are we going?” I was going a little crazy myself not knowing.

She looked at me, but her face was blank behind all that messy makeup. Still, I could tell she had heard me. It was just that she was so lost in her own thoughts that she couldn’t answer me that second. And the seven minutes until that train came felt like forever. I kept looking for police cars or one of the cars that we’d seen in Richard’s driveway—but I thought a police car was more likely. Those guys from the party were too scared to follow us. They weren’t coming. God, one of them was crying when I was getting into my jacket. Another begged me not to shoot him when I put on my skirt. At one point Sonja and I heard a siren when we were waiting on the platform, but to this day I don’t know if it was an ambulance or police car. I don’t even know if it was going to the party for the bachelor. In the end, no one came after us that night. No one tried to find us. No one came to stop us. In my mind, I saw the men from the party back at the house, and they were staring at Pavel’s and Kirill’s bodies, and wondering what they were going to do. I saw Richard. Poor sad, sweet Richard.

When Sonja and I had our seats on the train, we made a list of what we had. We had just under eight thousand dollars in cash, which we knew would not last as long as you might think, and we had the credit cards in Pavel’s and Kirill’s wallets, which we did not believe we could ever use because that would tell people where we were, and we had the two guns and the fourteen bullets inside them. We had that big kitchen knife, but Sonja said she had only brought it because it was evidence. She said she would throw it into a garbage can in the city. (And later she did.)

She turned to me. “Fuck. I left something at the house.”

“We left lots of somethings at the house.”

“No. Something important. A phone number. I hid it inside a condom wrapper.”

“Whose number?”

She put her finger on my lips to shush me. “It will be fine. I can remember enough of the numbers. Trust me. It’ll be fine.”

She closed her eyes and tried to look calm. We were the only people in that train car. We knew that later the conductor would tell the police about us, but there was no one else who saw two pretty girls whose makeup was a meltdown disaster.

…

Sonja, it would turn out, was full of surprises. When we got off the train in New York City, we took the shuttle to the Times Square. There she bought us blue and red knit caps for a New York football team to cover our hair, and sunglasses at a late-night souvenir shop. She bought knapsacks for this football team, handing me one.

Then we went to a twenty-four-hour store and bought two cell phones that were called “prepaid.” She said they were “burners.” We hadn’t had cell phones since we had been abducted, but sometimes we’d used Catherine’s or Inga’s or even one of the men’s. So we knew how much they had changed. But I was still impressed that Sonja knew that “burners” were the kind we wanted, because no one would know who we were or where we were. There was no contract, she said. We would use them and throw them away. Then we would buy more. She didn’t let me come into the store with her, because she didn’t want the man behind the counter to remember seeing two women together. She wore the knit cap but not the sunglasses, since sunglasses after midnight would look suspicious.