And I will never, ever make the choice he wants.
I bump the crevice with my heel and think again of the tunnel, the guns resting so close below us.
Dylan rises and stretches the kinks out of his arms and legs, gentling his sore right knee. The one he banged climbing into the mine. “I told you,” he says. “One of us leaves here—me or your friend.”
With the moon rising higher, he’s abandoned the flashlight. My hand darts out and closes on it; pulls it behind me as I get up, too. I shuffle, testing the surface of the ledge. Narrow but level.
“If I don’t have a gun, I don’t have a choice,” I say.
My voice is steady now, because my mind is focused elsewhere. I edge sideways so Dylan can’t face me without turning his back to the drop-off.
“I can’t give you a gun.”
His form blocks the moon, top-heavy with its sturdy shoulders and long, skinny legs. He’s sure-footed, but the cliff edge is inches from his heels. “What if I asked you to kill yourself?” I say. “Would you?”
My brother nods.
“You’re full of shit.”
He touches my arm, his fingers simply pressing their warmth into my skin. “No. I mean it. But Nina, there’s something you should know. If I did kill myself, you’d be alone.”
I force myself not to yank away. Eyes darting to his right knee, gauging a trajectory. “I’ve lived seventeen years without you. I can manage more.”
“I mean at night. Mom told me our aunt Denise killed herself because she couldn’t sleep after Dad died.” His voice quivers, and he pauses. “I think she saw our dad at night, just like you see me. When he was gone, she saw…nothing.”
I scrub my free hand over my eyes and find them wet, remembering what Steve kept telling Becca in jail. “Nothingness.”
It would be strange to fall asleep alone—like missing a routine you’ve had forever, a beloved pet, even a limb. But I don’t think it scares me.
I let my body sag against his arm. “I can’t let you hurt Warren. Nobody can die tonight.” Tears blurring my vision, blink hard. “Nobody.”
Dylan’s voice goes big-brotherly, reassuring. “It’ll all work out.”
Sure it will. I raise my wet eyes to him. “Yes. Okay. No more fake choices. Please?”
“Okay,” he starts to say, when I whip the flashlight sideways and bring it down on his right knee.
He yelps and hops. Before he can regain his footing, I jab my heel viciously into that same knee. Then I lean forward and use my weight to topple him off the ridge.
Already unbalanced, Dylan tries to grab my shirt, but it slips through his fingers as he falls, twisting in midair. An instant of flailing, and he’s gone. Rocks slide and grind.
A groan from below.
Get to the cabin. Run for it.
I head for the way we climbed up—but there’s scrabbling behind me, movement. I dash back to the edge of the precipice and peer over.
The muddle of struggling shadow turns into Dylan on his knees. One foot braced on the sand, he’s getting up, nothing broken in the short fall. By the time I get down there, he’ll be back at the cabin waiting for me. Or maybe he’ll decide I’ve already made my choice and—
I need to lead him away from Warren. Or if it’s a race to the cabin, I need an advantage. A weapon.
No time to fear the dark. I’m already down on the ledge and then on my belly, flattening myself to slither into the mine.
The first drop is the hardest, backward into blackness. My Chucks smack sandy rock, and I gasp and nearly drop the flashlight.
Yet it’s all familiar. I could do this with my eyes closed.
I switch on the flashlight, praying for it to work. A wobbly circle of radiance shows me the ladder flush to the rock wall and the chamber below.
Any second Dylan could scramble his way up the ridge. In here, I may not hear him.
After the first three rungs of the flimsy ladder, my toes find nothing to hook into, and I grunt and jump.
I’m prepared for the impact, my knees bouncing. The flashlight jitters on rusty rock.
Now to find that tunnel.
I sweep the light over the wall. Warren is immobilized, no threat to anyone. Dylan will come after me.
I’ve rejected his choice, refused to play by his rules. Before, he wouldn’t hurt me. Now I don’t know.
The beam catches the ancient bench. I kneel, grasp the splintery seat, and hoist it up to reveal the hollow compartment beneath.
The long metal box. My hands shake so much I can barely unlatch it.
His rifle’s gone. Maybe it’s the one I saw in the cabin. But the compact black Beretta is exactly where he left it, wrapped in a blue velvet scarf.
I scoop up the heavy chunk of metal and plastic in my free hand, stagger upright, and run for the jagged opening that leads into the second room, the one where he dug the grave. I know where the hole is before my beam jogs the dark lip of disturbed earth. Still empty.
Light darts from wall to wall, my hand unable to steady its source. The mouth of the tunnel must be in here, or else the entrance to a third chamber. But I see only sandy rock, support beams, and a cluster of rotting wooden barrels.
Behind them. That’s where the passage must be.
Something echoes above me, boot on rock.
I flick the light off and scuttle behind the barrels, my dad’s Beretta pressed to my chest. Last option. Last chance.
So dark. The air is moist, heavy, nothing like outside. The wall against my back feels solid—am I trapped?
Think. Think. I blink, willing my eyes to adjust. Dylan reloaded the Beretta after he cleaned it. Did he chamber a round?
Rack the slide, quick. At worst you’ll waste a round, says Warren’s voice in my head.
“Nina?”
He’s close but still above me. Maybe on the ladder.
I squat and fumble with the pistol, willing myself to become the Thief. Letting him fill my mind. He can chamber a round in pitch-dark. He’s shot hundreds of rounds from this gun.
“Hey, Nina.” He doesn’t sound angry, just dog tired. “My knee hurts like hell. You got me good.”
Light bounces off the walls of the first chamber. Of course he’s got another flashlight down here. The Thief is always prepared.
I’m tugging on the slide, and it isn’t budging. Obstinate metal, reminding me I’m not a gun person, not a killer. Not even in self-defense.
“That was a pretty bad-ass move, actually.” A chuckle that sounds like grudging admiration. “You keep surprising me.”
My palms are suddenly so moist I have to wipe them on my shorts. He thinks I’m out of options. He thinks he’s in control.
I shift my grip, pull again, and something catches. Metal slides, lovingly lubricated by Dylan’s own hands. Snaps back with a satisfying click.
Footsteps, light sweeping the doorway. Did he hear that?
I have five seconds before he reaches me and wrenches the Beretta from my hand. This time I can’t just point it at him. He does not fear this pistol like Kara Ann Messinger did.
I rise to my knees behind the barrel farthest from the entrance, watching his dark shape appear. His light arcs over my head.
My brother, holding only a flashlight. Unarmed.
The Beretta shudders so hard I almost let it go. I vise my trigger hand with the free hand and steady it. Nice and easy, Warren says. Get everything lined up. No limp wrists.
“Nina?”
You can do this.
Dylan pauses, doing another flashlight pass, and Warren says, Don’t wait.
I pull the trigger.
The crack deafens me. The gun kicks hard; the casing tinks. Oh God, oh God, easy, easy, hold on. Don’t let it drop.
The pistol’s wobbling. I must’ve missed. He’s still coming—brisk, businesslike steps. Now he knows where I am.
Two seconds till he gets the gun. I stagger to my feet, clamp my trigger hand, and brace myself against the wall, smelling a cent
ury of decay. The sweat of miners and bootleggers embedded in the timbers. One last chance for Warren.
“Stop,” I say.
When he freezes, just for an instant, I shoot. The sound cracks the space between us wide open.
This time I don’t hesitate. The slide racks itself back, beautifully efficient, and I pull the trigger again, barely sighting now. Again.
Still my brother comes toward me, a dark mass outside the flashlight’s circle. He lurches against the barrels and shoots out an arm, trying to grab me or steady himself. His fingers graze my blouse, and I skitter sideways.
He sits down heavily on the floor. “Shit.”
I edge along the wall, the Beretta still tight to my chest, ears ringing.
“Shit,” he says again, his voice guttural. And then he laughs, or maybe coughs. “Pretty bad-ass, Nina.”
I dart forward and snatch the flashlight he let drop. Raise it.
His posture is too loose, his head drooping. Darkness spreads on his shirt.
How many times did I hit him? I flick the flashlight from side to side, looking for something to restrain him with, not wanting to turn my back.
“Nina. I’m gonna move.”
I pull the beam back to him, the Beretta with it, my voice harsh with terror. “Stay.”
Now that I’m no longer just a sighting eye and trigger finger, I seem to be drifting off in several directions. My gaze hovers somewhere in midair, my heart bounces from wall to wall of my chest, my legs are lead.
Dylan raises both hands, pale and spectral in the light, and that’s when I start shaking so hard I have to lower the gun.
His face is paper white. Bloodless. He’s changed.
“I’m gonna scoot over here,” he says in that thick voice—and, before I can lift the gun, he crabwalks to the hole in the ground, his mouth writhing with effort.
The grave. His legs dangle in it.
“Now,” he says, each word coming like sludge, “you can put one in the back of my head. I’ll fall in there, and you fill it in. Nice and easy. No worries. No one ever finds out.”
Without warning, I’m sobbing aloud.
I see Dylan’s eyes meeting mine at the Home Depot cash wrap. His wide grin as I swiped his beer bottle on the deck. His sly smile as he ducked into the adobe house in Sky City.
My mouth makes senseless sounds as I mourn the brother I almost had.
The whole time he stays still.
Steady. Focus. Could he be tricking me after all? Playing more wounded than he is?
“Please,” he says. “Do it now. Make me disappear.”
I circle the grave till I face him across it. “No.”
I want to see justice done. Real, molasses-slow, deathly boring, humiliating justice—the kind our dad got, not the frontier kind.
“It’s easy. Nobody will ever find me here. Leave the Sequoia at the airport. Make it look like I skipped town.” A long, rasping breath. “It’s a gut wound. It could take me days to die, Nina. Infection. Nasty shit.”
“You won’t be here. You won’t die.” Back in the cabin, I will call nine-one-one. The cops will follow on the paramedics’ heels.
He must know I won’t shatter his skull and silence his brain, its sanity and its insanity. At the thought of extinguishing everything he is—every hair, gesture, impulse—something buzzes behind my eyes, and I taste bitterness, my fingers slack and slick on the gun.
But neither can I rely on people who don’t know him, people who will shackle him to a table in an interrogation room and serve him coffee and danishes and fumble clumsily around in his head. He doesn’t owe those people anything. He won’t tell them anything. He owes the victims. He owes me.
And he will escape. Rather than take their deal and tell them where to find the bodies of Kara Ann Messinger, the Gustafssons, and the rest, he will imitate our dad with a bedsheet or a razor or whatever comes to hand.
I believe it. He will do whatever it takes to make sure Becca doesn’t have to visit her son behind a soundproof barrier, and Eliana and Trixie will never know.
The detectives can’t promise him what he wants. But I can—if he doesn’t rip the gun away and kill me first.
He wants silence. He wants me to choose him.
“I never wanted to hurt you,” I say. “I won’t hurt you now. If you’d confessed to me sooner, told me everything, maybe it would be different.”
It wouldn’t. I know all I need to.
“Sorry.” He grunts, coughs, his body so still—yet I know how fast he can move.
He knows I’m boxed in. I can’t kill him, not like this. Can’t just hand him over, either.
I fall to my knees beside the dark trench, still keeping a careful grip on the gun. “I like Warren. So much. But he can’t ever be as close to me as you. You’ve always been there.”
Dylan speaks like it hurts him. “You should’ve thought of that before you shot me.”
“I can’t stand this,” I whisper.
I’ll let him think I fear the nothingness, the long nights without him. But it’s not that I dread. It’s now, watching him bleed and knowing I’d shoot him again to save myself, to save Warren.
Do I want to take it back, to will the bullet out of his tender flesh? Maybe I do, just enough to make him believe it.
“You don’t have to die,” I say, very low. “We can find help for you. We can…explain.”
Dylan stares at me, but I can’t see his expression. “We,” he says.
We. Not me and Warren. I mean you and me. The word hangs in the air between us, as I add the explanation with my eyes. I remind myself that no cell will hold him, that he won’t confess to anyone else.
“I can’t lose you.” The words will barely come. “I don’t know what that means, Dylan. I don’t know what we’ll have to do.”
Still he stares with glassy eyes. “Your move.”
And I raise the pistol to my own head. “Tell me where you buried the Gustafssons, or this happens. Warren will get free and call the cops, and you’ll spend your life in jail with your head full of nothingness every night.”
Is he still strong enough to get up, kill Warren, bury me? If so, all this is for nothing.
Wordless horror flickers on his face, as if his pain-fogged mind needs time to process my new tactic. Then: “Why do you want to know where they are?”
“Because I have a right.” I wedge the barrel against my right temple, my hand steady at last, finger on the trigger. “I was there with you when you did it—did you know? I have a right to know.” And so do their families.
“You won’t do it, Nina.”
“I will.” I’m threatening everything that scares him most: not death but exposure, discovery, being paraded all over cable news and the crime blogs—just another cautionary tale, another bogeyman. “Or maybe you want to be famous,” I say. “Maybe you want everybody to know how smart you are, how cold, how people are just things to you. Maybe you don’t care if Becca knows. Or what it does to her.”
“You can’t do that to me.” The defiance has bled out of his voice.
“I can. I will.”
He spits words at me that sound like curses at first, but they aren’t. “It’s a road, a road—Lone Spruce. Off One Forty-Six. Three-point-five-four miles up, there’s the cabin. Inside.”
He remembered down to a hundredth of a mile. I will, too.
I keep my voice as cold as the gun barrel resting against my temple. “And Kara Ann Messinger?”
“County Road Sixty-Eight A. West from the turnoff, five-point-nine miles. Up the bank to the left, between the scrub pines and the cliff.” His lip is bitten white as he raises his eyes to me. “Between us.”
“Yes.” I lower the gun slowly to train it on him again, and hear him release a long, wheezing breath. We’re both bone-tired. “It stays between us.”
The flashlight beam bobs on the lip of the grave, leaving his face in darkness. I swipe my eyes.
And that’s when he reaches across the
space and grabs the gun.
This time I fight. I hold on. He’s not as strong as he was, but he’s strong enough.
Almost. And he’s balanced awkwardly on the edge of the hole, his face catching the light and contorting with pain as he forces himself upright. “Damn it,” he says, yanking me toward him. “Damn it, help me.”
As he says these words, an image blooms in my mind, clear as HD. With my eyes open, my mind alert, I dream a last time:
I’m in the dingy red-vinyl seat of an old car. Yuccas fly past outside. A baby bobs in a car seat, fretting, her face red and wet. I (but it’s not me) hold out a stuffed cat, tickle her with its tail. I hum a song I just made up that goes, Don’t be such a brat, bee-na good, Nee-na.
Not me—him. His memory inside me.
My fingers loosen, and he wrests the gun away and raises it to his own temple.
“No!” I scream.
I’ll always love you.
His thought, not mine, as he pulls the trigger.
When the shots split the night, they come to me distantly, reverberating in the earthen walls.
A weapon fired underground. In the freaking mine.
I find the strength I need, finally, to wrench an ankle from the tight layers of tape and kick the other free. Skin goes with the tape, but who gives a shit now?
He didn’t shoot her. He wouldn’t.
I knee the chair viciously away from me and loop my feet through my bound hands like a contortionist. My hands are still zip-tied, but now they’re in front of me, and I can use them to ease the tape off my mouth.
Hurts like a mother. Any second I could hear his shuddering footfalls on the floor above.
No. Because that would mean—
I stumble up the stairs, mouth and ankles stinging. Here’s my Sidekick on the woodstove, clear as day in the moonlight spilling through the door.
What time is it? The night feels endless.
Revolver in linked hands, I limp out of the cabin into the night. To the east, the sky is just starting to lighten, black turning to slate blue.
When I hear another shot, I run.
The sound guides me to the mine entrance, though I fall twice and scramble up with imprints of jagged pebbles in my forearms. The eastern light is dimming the moon when I slide my head through the crevice into blackness.
The Killer in Me Page 25
