by Zoe Chant
He was so warm.
“I can’t see,” she managed to say. “I can’t see them at all.”
“Neither can I.” He leaned forward, resting his forehead briefly against hers. With his hands still cuffed in front of them, this was probably just the easiest way for him to comfort her; she couldn’t even know that it meant anything to him. But the intimacy and tenderness of it shook her to her core.
This was a bad time to be shaken to her core, considering the situation. She tried to clear her head. “If we can’t hit them, we can’t fight. That leaves flight.”
“Flight,” Cooper repeated. He looked almost wistful. Then he nodded, back to normal again. “Got it. You get back in and I’ll follow you.”
“They’re running!” one of the men yelled, and the barrage of gunfire only intensified. The dizzy, muddled part of her vision got closer and closer as she heard footsteps grate across the snowy asphalt.
The shooters were coming for them.
“Don’t wait for me,” Gretchen said. She moved in a duck-walk towards the driver’s side door.
Cooper completely refused to get in before her. He was still covering her, making sure any bullet meant for her would have to go through him first.
She slammed the car door behind her and saw Cooper fling himself in the backseat.
Something was strange about all this. Well, everything was strange about all this, but there was something that was on the tip of her tongue:
The men in the car had her in plain sight before she’d been able to get behind the car door. Unless they were the world’s worst shots, they should have killed her by now. And they weren’t the world’s worst shots. She wasn’t riddled with bullets, but the car door was. If it hadn’t been reinforced for law enforcement work, it would have given up the ghost already.
These men were perfectly good shots—which meant that she hadn’t been who they were aiming at.
Cooper.
Someone had tried to kill Cooper in prison—and they were still trying to kill Cooper. This was all about him. Their plan hadn’t worked inside prison, so now they were trying it on the outside, and considering the length of the drive, they had a nice, long time to make it work.
She shifted into drive and slammed on the gas. The car fishtailed as it lurched forward, the smell of burning rubber filling the air as the tires screeched against the road.
“They’re getting back in their car too,” Cooper reported, craning his neck to look out the back window.
“Let them. I have the best pursuit record in the whole office.”
“We’re going fast,” Keith observed. By the look of him, he’d tried and failed to get his gun out of its holster. The head injury had been even worse than she’d thought: his face was covered with blood, and he sounded like he was dreaming.
To her surprise, Cooper was the one to answer him, and he sounded gentle, as if he were talking to a little kid. “Yeah, we’re breaking all kinds of speed limits.”
Keith nodded as if that satisfied him. “Good. We can outrun the snakes.”
“Sure, buddy,” Gretchen said.
She liked him a lot more with the concussion, actually. He was kind of adorable.
But not necessarily helpful...
“Keith, did you call for backup?”
Keith nodded again and then winced. “Chief Powell and 911.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Shooting,” Keith explained. “Bang.” He paused. “I forgot to mention the snakes.”
“That’s okay.” She patted him on the shoulder. She guessed that for him, the visual distortion must have looked like squirmy bits of light and color, things his concussed brain could only process as snakes.
Gretchen hated snakes. Give her guys with guns any day.
“They’ll triangulate the cell phone location anyway,” Cooper said, and to Gretchen’s surprise, he had an appealingly roguish grin on his face. He must have been enjoying the adrenaline high. “He didn’t have to say much more than ‘bang’ to get people interested.”
“I’m definitely interested,” Gretchen said. She still had the gas pedal pressed all the way into the floor, but she could no longer see the car in her rearview mirror. All she could see were snowflakes. It almost looked peaceful.
Cooper followed her gaze. “I think they took the exit. The roads are so deserted right now that maybe someone will catch them, but—”
But they had a magical color-changing car, so Gretchen didn’t think it was too likely.
Whatever they’d encountered today, they’d never be able to explain to local law enforcement. She could bring in her team, who would believe her, but that was it.
They were on their own.
8
Gretchen couldn’t stop shaking.
“I’m freezing,” she said.
“It’s the aftermath of all the adrenaline,” Cooper said quietly. He stretched out his hands, showing her the way his own fingers were trembling. “I’ve got it too.”
His hands were still cuffed together. More and more, that fact appalled her.
The hospital had cleared out a break room for them to sit in while they waited for the update on Keith. The ER was overcrowded at the moment, and the most they’d been able to spare for him was a bed in an open hallway, which hadn’t left Gretchen and Cooper with much room to stand around.
The administration’s biggest concern had apparently then become getting Cooper out of sight: a tall, strong-looking federal prisoner in chains didn’t have a good effect on the patients’ blood pressure numbers. It was nice to have the privacy, but the lack of distractions left Gretchen with nothing to think about but the stressful, frightening carousel of worries currently turning around and around inside her head.
Cooper. Keith. The men who had shot at them. The unexplained magical powers of the men who had shot at them.
There was a knock at the door, and then Keith’s nurse entered to give them another update on Keith’s progress.
The nurse was a big, burly guy who looked like he could have played in the NFL and bent Gretchen’s gun into a pretzel with his bare hands, but even he hung back against the wall like he was afraid to come too close to them.
Prisoners had that effect on people. She’d noticed that before, of course, but she’d never felt it like this.
Now it was impossible for her to miss the way Cooper stiffened when the people around him suddenly started cutting him a wide berth. He didn’t like people being afraid of him, and, she realized, he did everything he could to avoid it. The second the nurse had come in, Cooper had slumped his shoulders, as if he could make himself smaller and less threatening, and he had turned his attention to the speckled linoleum of the floor.
Gretchen thought about how completely exhausting it must be to live every day knowing people were afraid of you.
And what it must be like to know those fears were unjustified—and that you could never explain that. That no one would ever believe you.
During Cooper’s trial, whatever expression he wore had been scrutinized and analyzed within an inch of its life. If he smiled, it was because he had no sympathy for the victims. If he looked sad, he was either marinating himself in self-pity or putting on an act that everyone resented. If he looked angry, he was a monster. If he looked serious or just plain blank, he was hiding something, and his lawyers had probably coached him.
From the moment of his arrest, he’d never been able to relax.
“—hold for further observation,” the nurse was saying.
She owed Keith’s status her full attention, dammit. With a surge of guilt, she refocused herself.
“I’m sorry. I’m still a little shaken up.” That was true, even if it wasn’t exactly accurate in terms of why she’d been distracted just then. “Would you mind repeating that?”
The nurse nodded. He had a warm, reassuring smile, even if he aimed it solely at her and was still avoiding any eye contact with Cooper. “Sure. Deputy Marshal Ridley has a
severe concussion. We have him on a drip right now for the nausea and the pain, and he’s resting. He should be fine with a little time to heal, but even after he’s stabilized, we’d like to hold him for a while to make sure he’s not developing post-concussion syndrome. Do you know what that is?”
She did. “That’s where the headaches and the confusion hang around for a few weeks, right?”
“That’s the one. It’s not typical, but it happens about twenty percent of the time, and with a head injury like his, we like to keep an eye out for it. Unless...” He glanced surreptitiously at Cooper. “Unless there’s some urgent reason for Mr. Ridley to get back on the road as soon as possible?”
“No,” Gretchen said firmly. Even if she’d been traveling with a prisoner who did ring the alarm bells in her head, she still wouldn’t have used that fear to justify endangering Keith’s health. She felt bad enough about him getting hurt in the first place. “My chief is on his way here, and we’ll work out what to do next. If you don’t mind us staying camped out here a little while longer...”
The answer to that came with a little bit of hemming and hawing, but the gist of it seemed to be that the hospital didn’t care what they did, as long as they, to quote Gretchen’s Nana Miller, didn’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses. Or in the halls and frighten the patients. The nurse zipped off then to attend to other matters.
Like clockwork, Cooper straightened up again, some of the tension easing out of his face.
He must spend so much time on guard against other people’s perceptions of him—and so much time twisting himself into knots to try to put them at ease.
She was glad he didn’t do that with her. But he didn’t have to. She had never been afraid of him, and she never would be afraid of him.
Because he’s innocent. I know it.
She couldn’t explain that belief yet, not even to herself. And she had no clue what to do about it.
Well, that made this problem fit in with all the other problems she’d had today, at least.
“This is all my fault,” she said.
Cooper gave her a crooked, charming half-smile. “Huh. You managed to drive that car and ours at the same time? You rear-ended us and then started shooting?”
That drew a soft laugh out of her. “Okay, maybe it’s not all my fault. But some of it is.”
He was just looking at her then, waiting to hear what she meant; his cool, clear eyes completely attentive.
Almost transfixed. Captured.
Gretchen had been loved her whole life, by her family and her friends, but she didn’t know that anyone had ever looked at her like that before, like she wasn’t just the center of their attention but the center of their whole world.
It was almost too much for her to stand.
But the little voice—the one that she had, until today, thought she’d lost for good—said incredulously, Too much for you to stand? This is what we were meant for! Screw moderation! Let’s have some excess here. Let’s go to the extremes we’ve been hiding from our whole life.
Cooper would definitely be an extreme. And he would be a very, very risky indulgence, even if she only indulged in the privacy of her own thoughts. She couldn’t afford that. With an inner sigh of reluctance, she twisted down some invisible volume knob, silencing the voice once more.
“The black car,” she said. Talking about professional matters. Because she was a professional.
Cooper nodded. “You said the car you saw at the gas station was the same one that rear-ended us. I believe you.”
“Even though the color was different?”
“If I saw a chameleon in two places, its colors would be different too,” Cooper pointed out. “And if I didn’t know how chameleons worked, I’d think it was impossible for it to be the same thing. And actually, I don’t know how chameleons work, I just trust all the biologists who figured it out. And I trust you more than a lot of biologists I’ve never met.”
It was the sweetest, strangest declaration of trust she’d ever heard, and she loved it.
It seemed like it was a lot easier for him to trust her than it was for her to trust herself.
“Something happened back at the gas station,” Cooper continued. “After you talked to whoever was in that car, you were off your game.”
She had been, and he had been the one to notice and care. Keith had been more worried about drawing the proper line in the sand to preserve their authority, and she had been too anxious to repress what had just happened to dive into it the way she had known, even then, that she needed to.
Maybe her instincts were right, and maybe they weren’t. But letting fear take the wheel sure as hell didn’t help.
She could guess the general outline of what had happened at the gas station, and if it hurt to think about it, well, tough. She wasn’t going to play it safe with her own feelings anymore. The price was too steep.
“You’re right,” Gretchen said. “Something did happen back there. Something weird.”
It was strangely hard to trace her way back through her memories. It was like she was watching a video, and the footage went staticky and pixelated as soon as she started approaching the black car. Everything was muddled and blurred, and the driver of the black car had used her sense of shame and embarrassment to get her to avoid looking too closely at what she could remember.
Despite her good intentions, it was hard to cast those feelings aside just because she wanted to.
But she had to do it. Cooper needed her to. His life had been at stake. He was the one the men had been shooting at. He was the one they’d hunted all the way from the prison yard at Stridmont.
“I thought the car looked suspicious,” Gretchen said. She spoke slowly, feeling like she was making her way through a dark maze with one hand always planted against the wall so she didn’t get too lost. “Black cars aren’t unusual, tinted windows aren’t unusual, but—it was just sitting there, still running, and it had been there as long as we had, on a day when the cashier inside had said she wasn’t getting many customers because of the weather. I had a bad feeling about it. I wanted to just... check it out.”
“Smart. It’s what I would have done.”
That she was pleased by that assessment was one more sign that she’d flipped completely over to believing he was innocent. There was no way the approval of a disgraced, disloyal Marshal would have made her that happy.
That was something to keep in mind.
“The driver didn’t want to roll the window down, not at first. I had to knock a couple times. That’s unusual, because the car was running and I obviously knew they were in there. Most people won’t just ignore you when they can’t actually hide.”
“But he did finally roll it down, right? Did you get a good look at him?”
“I must have.” She let out a short, humorless laugh. “Just like I must have gotten a good look at our two shooters earlier. I have 20/20 vision, and both times, I was looking in the right direction. But I don’t remember anything. That’s weird too, because I’m usually good with faces, and we’re all trained to be better at that than most people anyway. But with these guys—nothing. They might as well have been ghosts.”
Eyes. Something about the driver’s eyes.
But what about the driver’s eyes? She didn’t know.
“The driver told me not to worry about any of it. He...”
Peered inside my brain. Found out everything that makes me feel squirmy and insecure.
She hated admitting to that kind of weakness, but she needed to be honest with him. They weren’t going to figure any of this out if they kept secrets from each other.
“It was like he knew what I was thinking. He knew how he could convince me that I was overreacting, that I shouldn’t trust myself.”
“Why shouldn’t you trust yourself?”
She looked away. More than ever, it felt like the scar on her shoulder was a brand, one that was still glowing red-hot. “I’ve made some mistakes in that area before.
”
“Everybody makes mistakes sometimes.” He laughed, and it was a quiet little laugh that felt completely natural. She relished it: she couldn’t get over what a privilege it was to feel like he was showing her his real self, not the version that was edited for everyone else’s comfort. “But that probably doesn’t sound too comforting coming from a guy in a prison jumpsuit. Okay, so we’re talking about some kind of force that would make us hallucinate and maybe make us more susceptible to persuasion. What would do that?”
Every possibility Gretchen could come up with felt like it was straight out of a comic book. Then again, the chameleon car wasn’t exactly standard issue, either.
She went with the least ridiculous option. “Maybe some kind of aerosol spray? A drug that we breathed in?”
“Maybe. Like some kind of tear gas. Only if you breathe this stuff in, you get anxious and confused, so not tear gas exactly, but—”
“Fear gas?” Gretchen said. So much for not sounding ridiculous.
“I didn’t call it that,” Cooper said primly, and then he deflated. “But yeah, fear gas. Basically.”
Okay: fear gas. It sounded like something the Joker would use to attack Batman. They were right back in comic book territory again.
She tried to remember if there had been some kind of strange smell in the car, or maybe a hint of mist, but she kept drawing a blank: her memory’s cooperation was still faulty at best. But she couldn’t think of any other possibility. She must have gotten dosed with something to make her disoriented and suggestible.
But only when you looked at the men drugging you? the small voice said dryly. Not when you were looking anywhere else? That’s a pretty weird drug.
True. She didn’t have a good answer for that.
“There’s always ‘a wizard did it,’” she said, offering him a halfhearted smile.
