“Sometimes it’s the only answer,” she said. “It was an answer for me once, and it lasted for six years. I had a great life. But it’s over now.”
“Just like that? Isn't your life in Big Falls worth fighting for?”
“Yeah, if it was a fight I could win. But it's not, and other people will get dragged into it. They'll get hurt. They'll die. You'll die, Jason.”
"Come on, nobody's gonna die."
"People already have."
They stared at each other for a long moment. She didn't know what was in his eyes, all she could see in them was searching. He wanted her secrets. His eyes were mining for them, and she had to look away.
Eve finally broke the tension. “We can’t just sit here and wait for Brax and his boys to regroup. Let’s get the cat and our crap out of the room and get moving. Any direction is better than no direction.”
“East,” Sunny said. “Back into Texas.” And a little bit closer to Big Falls, just to see if it might ease this stretched rubber band feeling she'd had since they'd left her dusty roads behind. It was homesickness, that was all. It would pass. She wasn't going back. She wasn't going to pollute the place with her family's toxic cloud.
Jason waited with Jack until the women came out of their motel room. Eve had a bag slung over her shoulder. Sunny's hair was combed, all over to one side to cover the bandaged spot and evil tattoo. She wore jeans, a T-shirt that clung to her curves, a denim jacket, and small round sunglasses. Sunny Cantrell didn’t dress like that, unless she was maybe planning to do some freehand plumbing. Like that time last summer with the leaky pipe. He’d found her in the basement in overalls, a Rosie the Riveter band around her hair. He remembered the smudge on her cheek and the frustration in her eyes.
This was a different Sunny.
He'd thought for a minute back there that she might shoot the guy. Her brother. Imagine that. Imagine there being so much anguish in a family that a man could try to kill his own sister. Or that a woman could shoot her own brother.
It really had looked possible for a few seconds. Her eyes had been cold, and her finger, softly wrapped around the trigger. She'd closed one eye and for just an instant he knew it was about to happen. She was going to do it.
Then those boys in the pickups had shown up.
This was a hidden part she'd never shown him, a shadow side that was maybe eclipsing her light right now. There was no bounce in this Sunny’s step. No light in her eyes. Something cold had quenched the flame. She seemed hard, this Sunny. Her joy was gone.
“Jack knows a place we can hole up," he said, when she caught him staring.
“A hunting cabin,” Jack put in. “No one around for miles. Great cell reception, due to the elevation. We can hole up there, get some rest and figure out a plan.”
“We already have a plan,” Eve said.
Sunny looked at her, held her eyes and said, “No we don’t.”
“Sunny, listen–”
“I know, Eve. I know the deal. New name, new life…but that means killing the old one.” Sunny reached back into the room for the cat carrier. Griz lay inside, growling. “Either your way or Braxton’s way, Sunny’s just as dead.” She shifted her eyes and they locked with Jason’s. “There’s got to be another option. I just...I need time to figure out what it is."
Jason nodded with his eyes. “Good for you, Sunny.” Then he glanced at Jack. “What if we split up, take different routes, and meet at the cabin? We’ll have time to regroup and come up with a better plan there.”
Sunny hefted the cat carrier into the back seat of Eve’s car, then closed the door. She had a small backpack over her shoulder as she rejoined the group.
“I’ll ride with Eve," Jack said. "Your maniac brother is more likely to follow her car, since that’s what he’s been doing.”
“We weren’t followed,” Eve said. “Not by line of sight anyway. I’m too good to be followed.” She looked at Sunny and said, “But he’s right. That’ll get you out of his crosshairs for a little while.”
“I won't let you be my decoy, Eve–”
“It’s my job, Sunny. I get paid for this, and I’m damn good at it."
“She's the best,” Jack added, getting into Eve's car, passenger side.
"And I've got back-up a phone call away," Eve added, and she got behind the wheel, started it up and drove away.
Sunny still hadn’t moved.
“Come on.” Jason held out a hand.
She stared at it. “It’s not the same, Jason. I’m not the same.”
“I am very clear on that.”
Her eyes shifted up to meet his. The woman looking back at him was a Sunny he’d never met before. He'd never thought she was anything more than sweetness and light. But there was much more to her than that.
And then she said, "They've got my cat!"
"Don't you trust Eve to take care of her?"
Chapter 13
Jason watched Sunny get into the passenger side of his truck, slipping off her backpack on the way. She’d ridden in that seat beside him a thousand times. And yet this time felt entirely different.
She pulled her seatbelt on.
"When we first met, you never buckled up," he said.
"You were always nagging me about it."
"It worked." He nodded at her seatbelt.
"Nice normal people use their seatbelts," she said softly. "And that's who I was trying to be. Nice. Normal."
He was reforming his picture of who Sunny was, expanding the image to fit in every new piece she revealed. He thought he knew her, knew who she really was. Down deep. There might be stark differences between who she’d been before Big Falls and who’d she’d been in Big Falls, and who she was now.
But he thought he knew her heart. He knew her soul. The rest was just... depth perception.
“So how far is this cabin of Jack’s?” she asked.
“Two hundred and thirty miles.”
“That’s a drive.”
“It’s a drive and a half, with the route we’re taking.”
“That’s a lot of car time.”
“Truck time,” he corrected, tuning the dial to a mellow country station, and adjusting the volume low. He tried to gauge her mood by her face.
“You and your truck.” The old Sunny beamed out for just a second when she smiled. And then she stopped herself.
But he’d seen it. He’d seen the old Sunny, his Sunny. She wasn’t gone. She hadn’t been an act or a game. She’d been real. She still was.
“We could talk,” he said. “You could tell me about your past. Before Big Falls.”
She took a deep nasal breath and nodded. “I'm working up to it. For now, suffice it to say I was a horrible person, born into a horrible family. And then one day I wasn’t.” She cranked up the radio.
He drove the first three hours, then had to stop for gas. “I have a limited amount of cash, but we can get a sandwich or something," he said.
“I have an unlimited amount of cash,” Sunny said. “Well, my entire savings. I cashed everything out. I know how all this works.”
“You’ve done it before. You did it when you came to Big Falls.”
She nodded and got out. “Pump gas. I’ll get food. I need the restroom anyway. Then I’ll drive for a while.” She walked away.
“Is your real name Mary Hayes?”
She stopped walking, but didn’t turn around. “It was once.” And then she continued into the convenience store.
He pulled out his phone, kind of reluctantly looking at the screen. There were fifty-two texts from the family loop. Jimmy’s messages came from both his chief of police and step-brother-in-law capacities.
He skimmed past them all, stopping when he came to one from Riley Everett and tapping it.
It was long.
“Mary Sunlight Hayes, that's her real name. Three arrests, no convictions. Charges were unlawful assembly, resisting arrest, destruction of public property. All happened at white nationalist rallies. She was on th
e wrong side of those, I hate to tell you."
There was a photo next. A young girl, maybe sixteen, head shaved on one side and died black on the other. She wore black eyeliner and a “white pride” T shirt and stood near the front of a crowd of ignorant buffoons waving torches and racist signs. Idiots.
She was Sunny, that girl. And yet she wasn’t. Her eyes were angry, but behind the anger, hollow, almost soulless.
A chill went through him. He shivered, it was so real. This was not the woman he knew. God, this was surreal, he felt like he’d fallen into some alternate reality where the most wholesome person in all of Big Falls was…was this. This angry teenage hate-monger.
He had to scroll past the photo just to stop looking at it. Riley had written more. “Her father was the head of a hate group called The Power. He was convicted for ordering his followers to drive a car into a group of protestors, killing a young man who had been targeted, specifically. Her brother, Braxton, was convicted of a lesser charge in connection with the same crime. He was the top suspect for driving the car, but there wasn't enough evidence to prove it. He did his time for harassment, assault, etc. Then he took over as leader of his father’s group. Mary falls off the map after her father’s murder conviction, before her brother’s trial. I’m digging into that. More soon.”
He texted back “Thanks” and then deleted the conversation, photo and all. He never wanted to see that thing again.
He pumped diesel into his truck, and watched through the store’s wide front windows, catching glimpses of Sunny every now and then.
Eventually she came out, loaded down with two plastic shopping bags, a large fast food bag, and two gigantic cups of coffee.
He replaced the pump handle, then the gas cap, and then he wiped his hands on the provided paper towels before relieving her of some of her load, and opening the door for her.
She set her bounty on the seat between them and he drove the truck to the parking lot behind the building, out of sight from the highway. Sunny started unpacking his favorite McDonald’s combo, like they used to do every now and then while running errands together in Tucker Lake.
She'd got her usual, too.
He put their coffee cups into the cup holders. “I really need you to tell me.”
She closed her eyes, lowered her head. She nodded at the food. “I know I do. Eat your sandwich. We’ve gotta go.”
“Yeah. We do.” He ate his sandwich.
She ate hers, too, then they hit the highway while the fries were still warm.
She looked at him. He kept steeling sideways glances, to find her eyes on his face. Still working up to it, he thought.
Then she said, "My mother used to hold me and dance me around the room singing Little Mary Sunlight. That was my name. Mary Sunlight Hayes. I had a baby brother, Braxton. But my mother died before he learned to walk. I was never told how. She got sick and she died. End of story. My father had this group of friends who got together all the time and drank beer and complained about the state of the world. It evolved into a white nationalist group. My father was its leader."
"Did you believe in it?"
"I believed what my father told me. I went to the rallies. I did everything I could to win his approval. But the whole time, I had another life, a secret life of my own. I had my softball for part of the year. And the rest of the time, I baked. Inside my head, I pretended to be my mother, a nice, normal person. The kind who baked cookies and pies."
"The kind who wears pastel skirts and little sweaters with pearl buttons," he said.
"You notice everything, don't you?"
"No. No, I never noticed how much of you I wasn't seeing."
She sighed, was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "When I went to college, the blinders came off."
"I bet that was a shocker."
"Oh my God, yes. So many people. All different kinds, but not really. The big reveal was that they were all the same. Kids away from their families for the first time, going through the same slow awakening I was. All of us, really, realizing there are other ways to see the world besides the way our parents had. I think maybe that's the biggest thing you learn at college. How to think for yourself. So I did, and I woke up. I woke up hard."
He was watching her, watching the memories play across her face. "I'm surprised your father even let you go."
"I got a scholarship. He forbade me, but I got away from him long enough to register, and before classes began, I'd turned eighteen. There was nothing he could do after that."
"That was brave. What kind of scholarship?"
"Softball."
"I'd have bet it was academic."
"I was a pitcher. I was good."
"I don't doubt it." He smiled at her, and she smiled back, but then bit her lip.
"I fell for the pitcher on the baseball team. His name was Dave Barron."
"Why is that name familiar?" Then he remembered. "Wasn't that the name of the protestor who was killed in Barrier Park?"
She was nodding, but her eyes were far away. "My father ordered it. I was there with him, a big protest march against inequality. He was standing right beside me, and then the car just plowed him into a tree. He was just rocketed away on the nose of a car, until the tree stopped it. I looked at him, and he looked back and then his eyes just blinked out. And he was gone. The car backed up fast and he fell. People were screaming and running. The car pulled a donut and sped away.
"My God."
She snapped out of the past, locked her eyes onto his. "When I saw you on the ground back there it was like living through my worst nightmare all over again. Only this time it wasn't Dave. It was you. Dead because of me."
He pulled the truck over, turned toward her. "Not because of you," he said. "None of this is because of you."
"I helped the FBI get my dad," she said. "I told him where he kept the secret laptop, the one nobody was allowed to touch, in the wall behind his headboard. And they found it."
"You must've been scared to death."
"That's the thing, I wasn't. I told Eve I didn't need relocation, a new identity. I thought I'd be okay. But they didn't get enough evidence to prove it was Braxton driving that car. He and Landry wore ski masks and latex gloves. They ditched the car, didn't leave a hair or a fingerprint. But I knew it was him. I looked up from Dave's broken body. I looked right into his eyes, and he looked into mine from that ski mask just before he took off, spitting clumps of sod and grass and soil all over me. All over Dave."
"Sunny–"
"You should've let me shoot him, Jason."
"You weren't gonna shoot him."
"Yes, I was. That's the thing, you don't know me. Not really. I was going to kill him because it's him or me. And maybe it's him or you, now that you killed his best friend.
"Landry's not dead. Not yet, and not far from it, but not dead. And I'm glad, because I don't want to carry someone's life on my conscience. Not even someone as bad as Landry Mason or your brother."
"Why not? What if killing him could save a dozen lives? Or a hundred?"
"It's not my call, that's why not. When it's his time to go, he'll go. It's not up to me."
She lowered her head. "You're the one who said I should fight for my life in Big Falls."
"And now I'm saying there's a way to fight for your life without taking his. And we'll find it, if you'll just let me help you." He cupped her face in his hands, cradling her chin, and then in spite of himself, he leaned down to kiss her.
She kissed him back, clasped his head, and kissed him silly. Then she jerked away, and slammed herself back into her seat. "Just drive."
"I'm driving."
"Don't do that again, Jason."
"Um, me? I came in for a comforting peck, and you tried to swallow my tongue, so..."
She lowered her head, her cheeks going red just like he'd known they would. "Don't know you," he muttered. "Shoot, I know you better than you do."
Eve glanced sideways at the most detestable man on the planet. And one
of the most attractive. His lies flowed smoother than twenty-year-old whiskey and his eyes would sparkle the whole time. Those baby blues testified to the purity of his soul. There was sincerity in the depths of his dimples. It all came off as real.
And none of it was.
He was a snake charmer. And she was a cobra who’d landed herself right in his basket.
“How did you do it?” she asked.
“How did I do what?” He looked up from the roadmap, which he’d managed to open fully and refold to a manageable size showing just the section he wanted.
“Who the hell uses roadmaps anymore? There’s a GPS in the dash.”
“There’s one in my phone, too," he said. "And in yours. And in your watch. And probably in your ass, given who you work for.”
“Watch your mouth. How did you find us?”
“I like to see the big picture. The dashboard thingie only shows your current location and immediate surroundings. I like to know where all the exits are.”
“Like a gunfighter in a saloon.”
“Exactly."
"How'd you know where to find me?" she asked him again.
"You told me.”
“I haven’t even seen you in years, Jack. I made this plan days ago.”
“Pillow talk. Is that what they call it? Lying in bed all sweaty from phenomenal sex, telling the gorgeous babe with her head on your chest about your dream escape plan. And then listening while she tells you hers. That's pillow talk, right?"
“You’re such an ass. Do you know what year it is? You don’t get to talk to me like that anymore.”
“I’m trying to turn you on.”
“You’re failing.” He wasn’t. She was remembering that night, just like he’d intended her to. “As I recall, you said–”
“When it all goes to hell, as it inevitably will,” Jack filled in. “I’ll cash in my wad and head to a tropical island. My own version of Margaritaville. Flip flops and salt in my beer.”
Oklahoma Sunshine Page 12
