by TAYLOR ADAMS
“I was lying. Until now. I misdirected the investigation into her death. I kept my romantic involvement with Cambry under wraps, because I have a marriage and a career to protect.”
Romantic involvement. The words went straight for Lena’s gut, as heavy as a roiling mass of maggots. Squirming, shivery revulsion.
“Think about it. Just please, hear me out, and think about what I’m telling you. Think about all the lost time in Cambry’s path, between when she robbed Blake in Florida and June, when she died on this bridge. That’s four months unaccounted for. She lived nomadically, stealing, using, paying with cash, and giving her name to no one. What does someone do with all that time?”
“She drew. She read. She smoked. She enjoyed the solitude.”
“For four months?”
“She was traveling.”
“No, Lena, she was traveling until March. But I promise you: April, May, June, she lingered in the greater Howard County area. Black Lake. Rattlesnake Canyon. Magma Springs. The investigation didn’t conclude this, because I scrubbed the evidence.”
I scrubbed the evidence. Uttered so casually.
She couldn’t believe it. He had to be lying. She felt herself getting flustered, her tongue thick in her mouth. Her thoughts refusing to fire.
“Why would I lie about this, Lena?”
None of these new pieces fit together. Cambry’s Corolla had been minimalist and sparse, yes, but so was her sterile bedroom all throughout Lena’s childhood. Her stuffed animals were ignored. Her Barbies were turned faceless. Cambry didn’t collect objects. She collected sights and sounds.
She forced herself to speak. “You . . . you admit, right there, that you destroyed evidence.”
He nodded. “Anything that connected her to me, and to this region. Receipts. Her knife. Her stolen gun. My number in her flip phone. Her—” He stopped himself.
Her drawings. Her heart squeezed with rage.
Still, it didn’t make sense. A big question: “How did she die, then?”
“I told you. She jumped—”
“Bullshit, Ray. My sister would never talk to you. She sure as hell wasn’t your girlfriend.”
“I’ll prove it, Lena.”
“Yeah? This’ll be good.”
“I can.” Twisting his cuffed wrists, he slipped his fingers into his back pocket. “Right now. I’ll show you a photo I have of Cambry and me fishing on Black Lake, taken the day before she—”
“I’m supposed to believe you keep a photo of a dead woman in your wallet?”
“It’s all I have left.”
His voice wavered with something that sounded like heartbreak. It was the best acting she’d seen from him all day. It halted her. What if he was telling the truth? Was he really one of Cambry’s trademark Terrible Guys, to be used up and discarded?
Unthinkable. She couldn’t reconcile it.
The handcuffed cop was still struggling to produce his photo from his pocket. His fingers fumbled behind his back and then a wallet dropped to the concrete with a dry clap.
He looked back up at her. Almost apologetic. “I loved her.”
I loved her.
Her stomach swirled. Nausea now.
“Our grief isn’t the same, Lena, but please know I lost her, too.” Raycevic swallowed. “And I’m sorry I lied to you about my involvement with her before her suicide—”
I loved her. His words looped in her mind, awful echoes: Why would I lie about this?
The wallet rested on the pavement at his feet. It was right there. Right there. Reach for it? She urged herself not to, reminded herself that it was almost certainly another evil trick. That he’d seize on her moment of distraction, knock the Beretta from her fingers, stomp her skull in with his boot—
“Two steps back,” she ordered. “Give me space.”
He did.
Keeping the Beretta trained on the cop and her finger on the trigger, she quickly knelt and picked up the wallet. The moment passed; he didn’t attack. She opened the billfold one-handed. A taco-stand punch card fluttered out. A few loose receipts.
He watched. “In the back. The very last photo.”
But now another problem: She couldn’t swipe through the tightly packed cards one-handed. She had to keep the Beretta in her dominant hand, aimed at Raycevic. This was non-negotiable. She couldn’t let her guard down.
She wouldn’t.
That echo again: Why would I lie about this?
Then two things occurred to Lena Nguyen, like twin thunderclaps inside her skull. The first: their positioning had changed gradually over the past thirty seconds. Raycevic now stood five paces to her left. He’d been edging gingerly away ever since he first dropped his billfold on the pavement. This hadn’t been a fumble. It had been deliberate, as careful as a chess move. He was edging away from her, as if anticipating a lightning strike.
The second: an answer, finally, to Raycevic’s question. It chilled her spine.
He’s trying to distract me.
She had her back to the parked SIDEWINDER truck now. This had been necessary, because Raycevic’s subtle repositioning had guided her away from it—He’s distracting me—and she couldn’t see the semi’s darkened cab and didn’t dare turn around, because that would blow perhaps the only advantage she had left—He’s distracting me—and reveal she knew his girlfriend story was all a ruse and recognized the hidden gunsights tingling on the back of her neck at this very instant.
He’s fucking distracting me.
She held a swollen breath in her chest, looking at Raycevic. His wallet in her left hand, the Beretta in her right. Afraid to exhale. Afraid to move.
He’s distracting me so his buddy in the truck can shoot me.
Chapter 14
Cambry’s Story
“Help!”
Cambry doesn’t know if the stranger inside the truck heard her. She’s almost at the cab now, her heart thudding in her throat.
Behind her, Raycevic slams his brakes.
Here, now, the scream of tires on gritty road as the pursuing Charger slides to a rocky halt. The siren still wailing. The red-and-blue light bar still throwing wild shadows. She knows the cop has that wicked rifle resting in his passenger seat, ready to lift and aim at her back.
She reaches the cab.
With a running leap, she hits the footrail and catches the silver handlebar under a sky-splitting flash of lightning. She pulls herself up on aching biceps, reaching the driver’s side window and squinting inside. The interior is pitch black. She can’t see the driver. She slaps the dirty glass.
“Help. I need help.” Just an urgent slap. Trying not to look threatening.
A sharp metal clap behind her. It’s Raycevic, opening his door and climbing out. His boots click to the road in rapid sequence.
To hell with it. She pounds the glass with her fist.
“Cambry,” the cop shouts. “Stop—”
Despite being outside his car, his voice sounds oddly muffled, but she knows why—He’s leaning back inside to grab that rifle.
Out of time, she tries the handle. Unlocked! She wrenches the door open, nearly losing her balance on the rounded footrail.
Inside, perfect darkness. Still no driver.
“Hello?”
No answer. Worse, her night vision is fried by the police lights. But she knows she can’t stay here, hanging on the side of the cab, or Raycevic will pick her off with the semiautomatic rifle he’s almost certainly lifting from his car and aiming at her, right this second.
She lunges inside.
Inside is a heated, stuffy atmosphere. She catches herself with her palms on a leather seat cover, clammy with moisture. A dense locker-room odor. Like stale sweat and socks. And something else, something both sweet and putrid, which she can’t identify. It’s organic, heavy, animal. She blinks, rubbing her eyes, catching her frenzied breaths.
Yes, the cab is empty. No driver. Too dark to see anything else.
Where did the driver go?
&nb
sp; She knows this is impossible. Where the hell did he go? He didn’t just disappear. The truck wasn’t just driving itself. Her mind darts back to Death waiting patiently in that Siberian cave.
I was told you’d be here.
Outside, Corporal Raycevic’s siren cuts. The sudden silence is overpowering. She can hear her racing heartbeat. Her eardrums full of blood.
Frantic now, she gropes for the ignition—no dangling keys. The truck’s driving lights are on. The dashboard display is lit up, a wan orange glow behind a contoured steering wheel. Again, this is impossible. A man was just in here, his body occupying this still-warm seat, driving and breathing and sweating, just moments ago. Where did he go, if not thin air?
What were you doing at Mardi Gras?
The driver door bangs shut behind her, startling her. Just the wind. She wishes for another strobe of lightning to light up the cab. In the dark, she feels defenseless. And that odor hangs in the air, dank and musty, like a dog blanket.
The radio, she remembers. Truckers have CB radios, don’t they?
Yes, they do.
The seats are covered with crunchy paper. Newspaper? Magazines? It’s still too dark to see, but as her retinas adjust, she finds a lumpen mass on the truck’s dashboard. To the right of the steering wheel, a few feet away. A black shape with no lights or visible details. A radio?
She reaches for it.
Her outstretched fingers touch a cool surface. It’s studded with tiny bumps. It feels like soft leather—much softer than the cab’s damp and crusty upholstery. And there’s something wrong about the shape, too. There seem to be no defined edges or corners. Instead, her fingers trace smooth slopes. Curves. Almost what she’d describe as coils.
Raycevic’s voice outside. Muffled by the door.
Cambry keeps exploring with cautious fingertips, searching for dials or knobs or a receiver on a spiral cord, for anything recognizable, and finds only more smooth curvatures. She’d sell her soul for a flash of lightning now. Her index finger stops at the uppermost ridge of one and follows the raised edge. She feels a sequence of tiny bumps. Like bones under hairless skin. Vertebrae.
Too small, and too numerous, to be a hairless cat or a dog.
Outside, Raycevic shouts again, louder, still muffled—
And now Cambry hears a low wheezing sound inside the cab with her. It originates just inches from her face. She feels it on her cheeks. The breeze lifts her hair. Like a stream of air escaping a punctured tire. She wouldn’t describe it as a hiss. Not at first.
It’s a snake.
She freezes, her fingertips flat against cool scales.
You’re touching a giant fucking snake.
It strikes at her from the dashboard, a violent whipcrack. She feels the sting of displaced air on her face and screams, recoiling backward into the leather seats. Spilling some unknown beverage in the console, scooting away, away, away, all animal terror, her nerves ablaze with adrenaline, until her back slams against the truck’s driver’s side door. Toward Raycevic.
In a single frantic moment, the cop outside and his black rifle are completely forgotten. Her entire world is this snake, this goddamn nonsensical snake that was just inches from her face in the darkness, and the sickly nightmare logic that brought it here, into the cab of this derelict semitruck. It’s like a hallucination, all of it. Bad shrooms.
She screams again. Swears at it. Is it venomous? Was she bitten? She doesn’t think so. She touches her cheek. No blood.
But yes, it’s a giant impossible snake coiled up on this trucker’s dashboard, still hissing at her. It must live here. She hears the dry friction of its scales as it repositions. It must be ten or twelve feet long, a python or a boa or an anaconda, coiled up in a black heap on this trucker’s dashboard like an ornament. She almost laughs at the silly terror of it. Seconds ago she’d been blindly feeling it up, rubbing her hands all over its scales. Molesting it.
Incoming footsteps on the road. Raycevic, coming fast. He shouts again, something desperate.
Cambry Nguyen is desperate, too, because she’s inside a truck with no keys and a goddamn python. This is not an improvement over her previous situation. She needs to move. The driver’s side door leads back to Raycevic and instant death. So she crawls toward the passenger door, over the knobbed stick shift, over crunchy papers.
The hissing intensifies. The snake strikes at her again from the left.
She hits the passenger door. Gropes for the handle, twists it open. The door swings outward, giving way to free fall. She spills outside into the cold night, reaching for the handrail in midair, missing it, and hitting her hands and knees on the packed-dirt shoulder.
The footsteps change. Raycevic is running now. On the truck’s other side.
Go, go, go!
She scrambles upright and backs away. The semitrailer is a tall black rectangle against the police lights. The forest is snarled and thick with junipers here at the road’s edge. The pines are tangled forms, some man-size, some towering. She can ditch her Corolla and flee now, and she has a decent head start to vanish into the low foliage with her life.
She hears a metal creak—it’s Raycevic opening the cab’s driver’s side door. He doesn’t know she’s already outside. That’ll cost him precious seconds. Even more, if the snake bites him in there. Yes, she has the lead on him.
Too slow, asshole.
Whirling away from the truck, she launches into a sprint—
And slips.
There’s an alien plastic surface underneath her feet. As slick as pond ice. Greasy, squealing. She hobbles and twists an ankle, confused and off balance.
Finally, the pulse of lightning she’s wished for.
A seizure of light reveals a slippery sheet has been laid out on the ground here on the road’s shoulder. She’s walked right out onto it. Creased gray tarp, unfolded to the size of a room. And, six feet away, to her immediate left—one of the short trees isn’t a tree at all.
It’s a man.
He’s turning to face her with equal surprise. In a blurred flash of brightness, he looks like an astronaut. Only after darkness has fallen again and the image is seared into her retinas do the details emerge, and she comprehends what she just saw.
The stranger was cloaked head to toe in plastic. Like a raincoat, but shiny and colorless. It clung to him in wrinkly folds. Blue surgical gloves on his hands. Little plastic booties on his feet. Only his face was exposed—and only because he’d been affixing a respirator mask the instant the lightning struck.
Operating scrubs, she manages to think. Like a surgeon.
And now, again swimming in blind darkness, she can’t see him. But she can hear him. He’s coming for her, less than six feet away and lurching closer, the squeaky, squelching sounds of plastic flexing and hugging skin as he moves—
The Plastic Man.
She screams in a hoarse voice. Suddenly all of tonight’s horrors, the pursuing cop, the four pyramids of ritual fire, even the python in the truck, melt away. Her stomach has turned to water, the world spinning as she staggers backward in a dizzy rush. She should run—she should pick a direction and run now, but her hiking boots lose traction on the slick plastic and her knees turn to mush.
And those creaking, wrinkling sounds draw closer in the blackness, quick but unhurried, as the Plastic Man comes for her.
Chapter 15
Lena
Every night, Cambry, you die in my dreams.
Each time, a little different. Sometimes you’re strangled by some variety of taut plastic. Sometimes you’re executed by gunshot. Sometimes you’re gagged and raped and hurled off the bridge like garbage. Sometimes, more exotic—you’re decapitated by a swift stomp of a shovel, or eviscerated, your guts unrolling from your belly like glistening black snakes.
I know most of these deaths are impossible—the churn of an overactive mind. But I’m trapped in them. I sink into them. If nothing else, I hope whatever I learn from Corporal Raycevic tomorrow will replace imagined ho
rrors with real ones.
Stop thinking about it, people tell me. Just stop, Lena.
As if I could turn it off?
Don’t remember the bad, they say. Remember the good instead. Don’t dwell on the nightmares of your own making, the glistening intestines and trapped screams, or the possibility of a rape going unnoticed by the medical examiner. Focus on the happy memories you have with your twin, before she became a pancake. But I’m always tugged to the bad, and an even worse truth: I don’t have that many memories of Cambry at all.
Good memories? Bad memories? There’s just not much there. I have another confession to make here, dear readers, and this one hurts: I was never close to my twin.
That’s awful, right?
Twins are supposed to be inseparable.
I know it’s awful. But we weren’t much alike. Or maybe we were too much alike—like the negative ends of a magnet—and we repelled each other all through our eighteen years of living under the same roof in Olympia. And socially, we ran in different circles—mine played Magic: The Gathering in game club, while hers tipped porta potties and pissed in the fuel tanks of construction vehicles.
Forget the bad, Lena. Remember the good.
And I just have to smile back at them like a stranger behind the windows of a locked house because no one understands that there isn’t any good. Or there is, but whatever’s there is a precious resource as scarce as fucking unobtanium. My sister was a stranger to me, a stranger I desperately wish I knew. Now I never will.
Isn’t that pathetic? I’m the grieving twin, and I’m driving all the way to Montana to risk my life and solve her murder, and all the while no one realizes that I barely even knew her. Aside from sporadic text messages, we hadn’t spoken in well over a year.
If her ghost could see me now, she’d probably wrinkle her nose. Why do you care so much, Ratface?
I’m gone. Just let me go.
I’m afraid to, I guess. It’s hard to let go of someone you only half know. She’s an accumulation of traits and observations, like used carbon paper in my brain. She loved classic rock. Her favorite holiday was Halloween. She always tried to put cilantro on everything. She hated being indoors. As a girl she’d run away into the woods behind our house—sometimes all afternoon, to our parents’ exasperation—and come back dirty, mosquito-bitten, with a jar full of slugs, centipedes, and garter snakes.
