The Sound of Broken Ribs(61)

Belinda said nothing during the hour and a half drive from Fontana to Big Bear. She sat with her hands in her lap, staring out the windshield as if the road ahead was a movie of great interest to her. She moved once, and only then to swipe a tear from her cheek.

“Cry all you want,” Lei said. “I have no sympathy for you.”

Belinda did not respond and Lei hadn’t expected she would. Belinda would talk eventually. Lei was sure of that. With enough time and persuasion, Belinda Walsh would tell Lei everything she wanted to know. Which was much.

Oh, so very much.

*

Belinda was not scared. At least not in any way she was accustomed to. She couldn’t figure out if she was simply resigned to her fate, or if she had, at some point, finally hollowed out. Life had been whittling away at her for two-and-a-half years. She could damn near see the wood chip piled up around her.

The author no longer had the gun in her hand. It sat in the cup holder inside the driver’s side door. The author had placed it there so she could mess with her cell phone. Presently, the author was trying to drive and make a call at the same time. Belinda, worried they’d wind up veering off the mountain’s curvy roads on which they were currently weaving, offered her help.

“Can I do that?” Belinda kept her eyes on the road, as if focusing on the broken yellow line would somehow keep them on the correct side of it.

“Do you think I’m stupid? Fuck you,” the author said in a voice that might as well have been her asking the time.

“I don’t want to die.”

“Who said I was going to kill you?” Adding the proper irony to the situation, the car drifted and clipped a guard rail. The cell phone flipped from the author’s grip and landed in the center console. She hit the brake. Belinda was thrown forward until her seat belt caught. The author wrestled the wheel, whipping the car to the left and off the rail. She almost over-corrected, but managed to get the rental under control before sending them into the trees lining the road.

Once the author had the vehicle back on track, Belinda said, “You keep driving this way, you’re going to kill us both.”

“Fuck you.”

Belinda reached for the phone. The tires locked, and the car slid to a stop in the middle of the road. A black cloud puffed out behind the car like dragon’s breath.

The author reached across herself, snatched the gun from the cup holder in her door, and jammed the barrel into Belinda’s temple. Belinda mashed her cheek against the window in an attempt to crawl through it.

“Hands off!” the author screamed.

“I was trying to help you.” Belinda waited for the bullet.

“I should just fucking shoot you in both knees and throw you over the guardrail. See how you like it.”

In that instant, Belinda was snapped backward in time.

She watched herself drag the author’s wrecked body into the tree line along Highway 607 outside Bay’s End and out of sight of passing cars. Why had she done that? It had little to do with getting caught and more to do with… with what? With providing another person with as much torment as possible? Belinda thought so. She thought that was exactly what she’d been intending. But someone had found the author. Someone had come along and found her, anyway. All because of that shoe. That neon-yellow fucking shoe.

“I was actually a little broken up over your brother’s death.”

Belinda tried to look at the author, but the woman shoved the gun harder into her temple.

“What do you mean,” she asked.

“I have no idea why he got in that shootout with the sheriff. I only figure that he was trying to protect you. Odd, seeing as how he could’ve just left me alone and no one would’ve found me. Had he never come along and called the cops, I would’ve just sat there until the buzzards found me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Silence. Then: “Are you saying you didn’t know your brother was the one who found me?”

“He didn’t.”

“Yes. He did. Your brother is the reason why we’re here right now. He gave me a chance. A chance to… to right the situation.”

The author hadn’t said ‘a chance to kill you’ and that was good. Belinda thought that was the best thing she’d heard so far. As far as the revelation that Tony had been the one to—let’s be honest here—save the life Belinda had tried to snuff out, Belinda didn’t know what to think. Although she believed Tony’s actions had very little to do with prolonging the author’s life. She thought it likely had more to do with Tony wanting to see how bad the damage was. He probably hadn’t expected the author to be alive. He’d have had no trouble finding the crippled woman. He knew where she would be because Belinda had told him about the shoe—about needing to return to grab it out of the middle of the road.

And he’d told her not to worry about it. Said doing so could land her ass in jail.

But Tony hadn’t been interested in her safety. He’d been curious. He’d wanted to see what happened when a woman met a car at forty miles per hour. He’d been no different from a boy who, given a can of beans and a lighter, wanted to see if he could light his own farts on fire.

“I hate that he killed that sheriff. But you know what’s worse?” It was a question, but Belinda didn’t feel like answering it. After a moment’s silence, the author said, “I’m the one responsible for sending her out there. That’s why you got away with it in the end, you know. Because I lied to the next cop that came out. I told them I didn’t remember anything about you. I remembered, but I wasn’t going to get someone else killed.”