A Girl Scorned

by Rachel Rust

  “I know.” He scanned my head, face, and shoulders, and then his gaze stopped at my bright red dress. “We need to find you some different clothes.”

  He was right. Against the dark streets of New York, my red dress made me look like a walking tube of lipstick.

  I reached under the hem of my dress and grabbed the leggings that were pushed up over my knees, pulling them down to their proper capri length.

  “You wore pants under your dress?” Eddie asked.

  “Yes.” I yanked the dress up over my head.

  It was time to enact what I had thought was going to be my super-secret plan to follow Eddie to Rapid City. Now, however, it was a saving grace. A plan of survival rather than deception.

  Eddie cast an eye over my body that was now covered by only skin-tight leggings and a black bra. “This is even more noticeable than a red dress.”

  “That’s why I have this.” I untwisted the black material from around my swept-up hair, having to shake off bits of glass. The tunic was loose-fitting, perfect for a warm evening. But I was more interested in its boring shape and dark color. Compared to the red dress, it was much more suitable for someone wanting to remain unseen.

  “You brought a whole new outfit,” Eddie said, watching as I pushed my arms through the lightweight material. “You really didn’t have any intention of staying in New York, did you?”

  “I’ve had a plan in my head all along. I wasn’t going to let you take me to that other hotel. I was always going to go to Rapid City with you. So, I brought a change of clothes.”

  “And if I had said no?”

  “I wouldn’t have listened. I snuck into your car once before, and I’d be able to do it again.”

  “You nearly got yourself captured last time you followed me like that.”

  “Doesn’t matter. My mom’s in trouble. Would you stay here if your mom were in trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t know why you ever expected me to.”

  Eddie’s lips pursed. He didn’t answer because I suspected he didn’t have a good one. At least not one that would make a difference. He knew me well enough to know I wasn’t going to stay put while my mom needed help. He could boss me around all he wanted, but in the end, I always did what I wanted to do. And I knew that made him crazy.

  “Besides,” I continued with a lump in my throat. “Without Luke, I can’t go to the Hyatt anyway. He’s the only one who could have snuck me into that hotel room. You’re all I have left and you certainly can’t walk in there and drop me off with the FBI milling around.”

  Eddie grabbed the red dress from me, stuffing it into a garbage can nearby. “All right, you’ll come to Rapid City with me, but only for your own protection. But once we’re back in Rapid, you fall back. I’ll find you a safe place and you stay there. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” Maybe.

  “Take this.” He held a black handgun—the same one I had trained on in the hotel room. “From now on, you carry it. Always.”

  I shoved the gun into the back elastic of my pants. The cold metal and polymer sent a chill up my spine, but the bulky piece was a welcomed load.

  He peeked out from our alcove and grabbed my hand. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “I don’t know. Guess we’ll find out.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  We walked several blocks in a methodical way—darting quickly from shadow to shadow, pausing now and then so Eddie could stare and watch the streets around us. We didn’t talk. Not about our plan. Not about Luke.

  My mind concentrated on the hard concrete under my feet. Each step, each crunch of street debris under my weight. Anything to keep my brain from settling on the image of Luke’s slumped body and bloodied head.

  Eddie moved through the streets like a man highly trained to ignore the tearing of his heart, and maintain, above all else, a purely physical survival mode. But I knew a part of him was dying inside. Suffocating under the weight of Luke’s death and the double loss of his father. Humans could only take so much and it was only a matter of time until Eddie’s tough façade cracked.

  At the next intersection, we crossed diagonally, stopping under the shadow of a dry cleaner’s awning. The lot next door was fronted with a tall chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire. Eddie spent a few minutes peering through the diamond-shaped metal loops, studying the business inside. A mechanic shop from the looks of it. Oil and grease permeated the air and the front parking lot was littered with dilapidated cars that appeared ill-suited for driving.

  “What are we doing here?” I finally asked.

  “We need a new car.”

  My eyes widened. “You’re going to steal one?”

  Eddie glanced at me. “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”

  I tried to think of a less worrisome, and more legal option. We couldn’t fly back to Rapid City. That would require ID and Eddie was in the wind—he couldn’t pop up at an airport. And I was supposed to be on campus—or at a midtown hotel, depending on who was checking in on me. We were both in hiding, in our own unique ways. Which meant we needed to stay under the radar. Way under the radar.

  But Rapid City was nearly two thousand miles away. We needed wheels.

  “Okay, but how are we going to drive a stolen car halfway across the country without getting caught? It’ll get called in the second someone realizes it’s missing and then every cop from here to there will be on the lookout for that specific car.”

  “No worries. Criminals don’t report stolen goods to the cops because they’re stolen to begin with.”

  “Huh?”

  Eddie nodded to the building through the fence. “It’s a chop shop. They bring in stolen cars and either strip ’em and sell the parts, or fabricate new identities and resell them on the regular market.” Eddie pointed to the far right side of the lot. “See those cars back in the corner?”

  Nestled against the building, near the back perimeter, sat three cars all burnt to a crisp.

  “Car fires?”

  “Looks like it. You see, they’ll take the VIN numbers from cars that have been destroyed by fires or bad accidents and put them onto identically stolen cars that are in good condition. They doctor up fake paperwork saying the destroyed cars have been fixed up, and then sell the stolen cars on the legal market.”

  I raised an eyebrow. It was kind of brilliant, minus the lawless risk.

  “And look next to the building,” he said. “Those big canisters are acetylene, for the torches they use to cut up the cars.”

  “How do you do know so much about chop shops?”

  “It’s in the FBI’s How to Spot a Chop Shop handbook.”

  I shot him an unamused look. “Okay, smartass, how are we going to get one of those cars out of the lot?”

  He reached around me, lifting my shirt and pulling the gun from the back of my pants. He shoved it into my hand. “Stay here, in the shadows. If anyone approaches, shoot first, ask questions later.”

  “Did they teach you that in the FBI, too?”

  He pulled the ski mask back down over his face. “No.”

  The fence was about ten feet tall and Eddie scaled it in just two swift moves. He took his time moving carefully over the razor wire. When he dropped down onto the ground on the other side, he disappeared within seconds. My eyes scanned the quiet street as the thumping of my heart drowned my head in the sounds of fear. I waited for any movement, any signs of a retaliatory buddy of Gunnar’s coming to end my life. Oh, how that would get him into good graces with Sergei Romanov—maybe it would even get him a promotion as the man who finally killed that annoying, bitch of a girl, Natalie Mancini.

  Impatience got the best of me after several minutes passed with no Eddie and no getaway car. I stepped out of the shadow to peek through the fence. A rattle against the metal chain link startled me, forcing me back a step. The fence’s front gate was closed with a large chain and padlock. Kneeled down in front of it on the inside
was Eddie. He picked the lock, then opened the gate.

  A minute later, a small black SUV pulled in front of me.

  “Get in,” Eddie said. He hopped out, and closed and relocked the gate. When he returned to the vehicle, I was still standing on the sidewalk. “What are you waiting for, me to open the door for you? Get in.”

  I shot him a nasty look and put my fingers on the door handle. It was one thing to stand around and keep watch while my partner-in-crime stole a car. It was another thing to actually get into the car and drive away. That would be putting my stamp of approval on grand theft auto, and I was a bit squeamish about that.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, removing the ski mask.

  “Are you sure there’s not another way? We could use a fake name to rent a car, or—”

  “Rental car companies require an ID and credit card. We don’t have those things in a fake name and we don’t have time to get them. Besides, that’d be illegal too.” He reached out and opened the passenger door of the waiting black car. “We need to get back to Rapid City. This is our best option and only option.”

  I stuck my bottom lip out and blew away a wisp of hair that had clung to the outer edge of my eyelashes. “Fine, I guess it’s not the first illegal thing we’ve done tonight.” I glanced up at him only to see his face remain unchanged. No twitch of muscle, no pain or regret glimmering in his eyes. The exercise, the gun training, the lock-picking—hell, even his knowledge of chop shops—I could understand. He had been trained in a multitude of different ways by the FBI. But his shut down of emotions I didn’t get, and I didn’t know if it had been taught or if it was his natural response to severe stress and pressure.

  I got into the car and he did the same.

  “I’m sorry about Luke,” I said in barely more than a whisper. Words put out simply as feelers, testing the conversational waters. “I know you guys were friends and—”

  “Put your seatbelt on,” Eddie said as he put the car into drive. The tense grip of his hands at the top of the steering wheel said the rest—no more talk of Luke.

  I clicked my seatbelt into place and we didn’t speak of Luke—or anything else—for nearly two hundred miles.

  The city disappeared behind us. Multi-lane highways full of traffic narrowed into two-lane roads with few cars. Occasional headlights pierced the dark road in front of us, zooming past in the other direction, headed toward the city or a coastal destination. People in cars they owned. People who hadn’t seen death that night. People unlike us.

  When the silence between Eddie and me finally broke, it wasn’t with words. He reached across the front seat and grabbed my hand, slipping his fingers between mine and squeezing tight. It was far better than any verbal communication.

  With my hand in his, I drifted off to sleep. Sergei Romanov waited for us at the end of our long journey. I needed to rest while I could, because I had already made myself a vow—the man who had taken my mother and killed Eddie’s father was going to be taken out. And I was prepared to do it myself.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We stopped at a small gas station in western Pennsylvania. Eddie passed several larger stations, the kind with huge signs, attached fast food joints, and a dozen or more pumps. They also had a lot of cameras, according to Eddie.

  The fuel needle hovered at an eighth of a tank when we finally stopped. Eddie gassed up and I used the bathroom—a grime-covered space which hadn’t seen a bottle of bleach in years. But it served its purpose, and the cool water I splashed against my face did a fair job of refreshing my senses. Though normal was still a long ways off.

  I returned to car and waited until Eddie came out of the small store with beef jerky and bottles of water. We hit the road once more and it was another four hours before we stopped again. Four hours of snacking and watching the landscape change. Almost like a real vacation—minus our cache of weapons.

  We had five handguns. One for me, four for Eddie. I didn’t ask if he had any other kinds of weapons, like knives, because he wouldn’t have given me a straight answer.

  His silence remained as our illegal SUV continued down dark highways and, eventually, sun-scorched asphalt. He answered simple questions with a ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and sometimes only a grunt or huff of unamused laughter.

  I didn’t know if it was nerves or determination that kept his mouth from moving, but whatever it was, it persisted halfway across the country. And nearly twenty-five hours after we left New York, we rolled into the gentle hills of Rapid City. It was nearly three AM and the town was asleep, with only occasional cars, probably driven by underpaid shift workers, guzzling coffee to keep themselves going until the morning light.

  It had been only ten days since I last saw Rapid City, but it may as well had been an unknown town in a foreign country. New York had, in just one week, sucked me into a whirlwind and spit me out on the other side a different person. One who had seen death with her own eyes and felt the icy breeze of mortality rush across her skin. I was no longer that same girl Eddie had met just a few months ago. Hell, I wasn’t even the same person who had moved naively into her dorm room last week. Everything was different. I was different. Even the familiar sights of my hometown were warped through my new lens of cynicism and forced maturity.

  We had returned to where it all began. Rapid City. Kennedy High and Mr. Kellen’s government class. Little Bobby and The Barber. Brody Zane and his cute face and asshole secret identity. The locations of that fateful night were laid out in front of us, all within the lights of my little city. The city I had known so well, or so I had thought.

  We rolled slowly through the streets, stopping at all stop signs, obeying all speed limits. The last thing we needed was a cop on our ass. From high on top of a hill, large green dinosaurs watched over us from Dinosaur Park.

  I glanced at Eddie in the driver’s seat. “Too bad the chop shop didn’t have an old Trans Am.”

  A smile cracked Eddie’s face. “I didn’t think you liked that car,” he said.

  I shrugged. “The car was fine, I just didn’t like you very much back then.”

  “Then why’d you kiss me?”

  “I—” Whatever retort I thought I had dissolved away, leaving me stuttering for a clever answer. “I didn’t … I just … you know what? Shut up.”

  He laughed and the sound filled the car. The casualness of his sudden amusement was like a wash of normalcy, and a rush of joy lit up my bleak mind and body. But I forced the wonderful moment away. I couldn’t be caught up in feeling relaxed or happy. Those emotions would make me weak. I needed a steel spine. I needed to focus on keeping myself and Eddie alive. That was the only way I was ever going to laugh again.

  Eddie drove us to a small motel just off Mt. Rushmore Road, the same road that led happy-go-luck tourists out of Rapid City and into the heart of tourist country. Except those tourists didn’t stay in fleabag motels with blinking, buzzing neon lights installed decades ago. They stayed in campgrounds, or chain hotels with free breakfasts.

  The EZ Motel was a one-story, L-shaped structure with a front parking lot, complete with a hole in the ground that was apparently once a functioning swimming pool, but was now a web of cracked concrete and weeds. It was the kind of place that didn’t require IDs or credit cards. Enough cash would get you a room key and no questions.

  We were given room thirteen, which didn’t sit well with me even though I was not a superstitious person. The lock and doorknob were loose, barely catching in the door jamb when closed.

  Once inside, Eddie flipped the deadbolt. “Keep this locked as long as you’re in here.”

  “Which will be for how long?”

  He turned and gave me a deadened stare. “I don’t know, and don’t ask me every five minutes.”

  I crossed my arms and literally bit my lip to keep from asking him again that very second, just to be a pain in his ass.

  The room itself was cleaner than the outside of the building, with a blue and cream comforter on its double bed, which matched
the blue and cream curtains, and blue carpeting. A small TV was fastened to the far corner of the wall, near the bathroom.

  I turned on the TV, channel surfing while Eddie showered. By the time I settled on a rerun of Family Guy, Eddie exited the bathroom, shirtless, with wet hair dripping onto his shoulders. He motioned for me to move off the bed. As soon as I did, he had the comforter on the floor and a second later, he was stretched out on the bed, one hand on his stomach, another tucked up under the pillow beneath his head. Eyes closed, he breathed rhythmically, as though forcing calm throughout his body.

  I turned off the TV and placed my gun on the small side table. Lying down, I studied him. A million questions swirled in my head about our next steps, but they could wait. We needed sleep before we planned a bad guy takedown.

  The lamp next to the bed turned off with just one twist of its small black switch. Darkness encompassed us. Eddie didn’t even react to the change of lighting. Maybe he was asleep already. Driving didn’t take much physical exertion, but I had always found the mental acuity of it exhausting, and I couldn’t imagine driving twenty-five hours straight. I had offered to drive a few times on our excursion, but those offers were met with a back off grunt. Eddie was on a mission and even through exhaustion wouldn’t give up the driver’s seat—literally or figuratively.

  Eddie rolled over, pulling me up against him. After an entire day of not talking while he drove us across country, he now was in the mood to snuggle? The wishy-washy nature of his personality was growing old, making me dizzy. But I was too tired to argue and I liked having his warm presence next to me, so I nestled against his chest and inhaled his familiar scent.

  He kissed my forehead. “Get some sleep. We’ll get to work in the morning and figure it all out.”

  But what if we can’t figure it all out? The question rang loud in my head, but I didn’t speak it. I couldn’t, because I already knew the answer and didn’t want to hear it out loud. Even if we managed to defeat Sergei, there was no way Eddie would be a part of my life if he couldn’t clear his name with the FBI. I could never have a future with a fugitive. Even if I wanted to be the Bonnie to his Clyde, he’d never allow it. He’d dump me in the middle of the Columbia campus and then disappear. For good. Breaking my heart and saving my future all at once.