Fast Women

by Jennifer Crusie

  “I get to drive your car?” she said.

  “You get to close the office,” he said. “Check all the locks, please. You may also let yourself into my apartment so you can sleep in my bed. I will be driving my car.”

  “How, if I have the keys?”

  “I have a spare key. Do not touch my car.”

  “Right,” Nell said. “You know, if we got married, you’d be endowing me with all your worldly goods.”

  “All of them except my car.”

  “And I thought you were incapable of change,” she said and went to help Suze pour Margie into the Beetle.

  “She’s going to be okay,” Suze said to Nell when they were hauling a sleepy Margie up Chloe’s stairs, Chloe fluttering behind them in concern. “We just had to get her out of that house.”

  “And off the soy milk,” Nell said.

  When Margie was asleep, Nell went back to the agency with Marlene to close the offices. Gabe was probably staked out at Margie’s for the night, but she left her desk light on for him, just in case, and then headed for his office to lock it, only to turn back when she heard a weird purring snarl.

  Marlene was growling.

  Nell went cold. Get out, she thought and took a step toward the door, and then she heard somebody say, “Nell,” from the storeroom behind her. She turned back and saw Trevor standing in the doorway, smiling at her as benevolently as ever. “I was hoping you could help me,” he said.

  “Gee,” Nell said. “I was just on my way to bed.”

  “I need the freezer key,” Trevor said. “It doesn’t seem to be on Margie’s key ring.”

  “Oh, well, Gabe pretty much holds on to that,” Nell said. “But I’m sure tomorrow he’ll be glad to—”

  “Those are his keys,” Trevor said. “In your hand.”

  “These?” Nell said brightly, shoving them in her jacket pocket. “No. Those are mine. I—”

  “Nell, I gave Patrick that key ring,” Trevor said tiredly. “I know those are Gabe’s keys. I’ve had a very long day, and I want to go home. Open the freezer for me.”

  Nell took a step back. “I really don’t have the authority—”

  Trevor took a gun out of his coat pocket, and he was clumsy enough that Nell gave up any thought of making a run for it. She didn’t want to be the one who finally prodded Trevor into an impetuous streak, especially if he was armed and awkward. “You’re the one who runs this place,” Trevor said, all the geniality gone from his voice. “You know where everything is. I want the files from 1982.”

  “What?” Nell said, incredulous. “That’s all?” He wasn’t looking for a place to stash Stewart? Maybe she’d misjudged him. She looked at the gun wavering in his hand. On the other hand, he was pretty serious about those files. “What’s in the files?”

  “You didn’t find it then,” Trevor said. “I thought you could find anything.”

  “I didn’t look in 1982,” Nell said, indignant. “Nothing happened in 1982.”

  “Oh,” Trevor said sadly, “something happened in 1982.” He waved the gun at her, nodding toward the freezer, and Nell nodded back, eager to please.

  “Sure.” She edged around him carefully, and he pivoted as she moved, keeping the gun on her. She went into the storeroom with him close behind—too close—and unlocked the freezer. “There you go,” she said, opening the door. “Have at it. All yours.”

  “Find the files from ’82 and bring them out.” Trevor held out his hand. “I’ll take the keys.”

  “Uh, these are Gabe’s.”

  “But I need them,” Trevor said gently and raised the gun a little.

  “Okay.” Nell handed them over, fairly sure that was a mistake but not seeing an alternative. Gabe would have seen an alternative. If she took his offer to divide up the agency work, he was going to get everything involving people with guns. “Listen, there are going to be two or three boxes from 1982. You want to help?”

  “No,” Trevor said, and waved the gun toward the door.

  “You want to give me a hint of what we’re looking for?”

  “No.”

  “Is this what Lynnie was looking for?”

  “Nell—”

  “Because I was just wondering what it was. We thought it was the diamonds, you know.” She edged away from the freezer a little, babbling to distract him. “We had no idea there was anything in the 1982 files. Is that what you were looking for when you broke into my apartment that night? Boy, that must have given you a start, to find me in there. You probably thought the place was empty. So what were you—”

  “Nell,” Trevor said. “Shut up and get the files.”

  Nell took a deep breath. “Okay, look, you’re not going to shoot me. That’s probably the gun Stewart shot Helena with. You meant to get rid of it, and then put it off, right? I think that’s wise. People make mistakes when they hurry. We should think this over. Because, you know, if you shoot”—me—“the gun, the police will get the bullets”—from my body—“and trace the gun right back to you. So let’s just put the gun down—

  “Calm down,” Trevor said. “I don’t want to have to get rid of another body. They’re too damn heavy. At least, human bodies are.” He moved the gun from her to Marlene, who sat on her haunches and looked up at him with her usual contempt as he took aim between her eyes.

  “No,” Nell said, going cold.

  “A dog body,” Trevor said, “would be easy to get rid of.”

  “Wait,” Nell said again and stepped into the freezer.

  “Much better,” Trevor said, keeping the gun on Marlene. “Now get me the files.”

  “Just give me a minute.” Nell shoved the boxes from the nineties out of the way to get to the eighties, determined to not panic. “Definitely two boxes at least,” she called back to Trevor. She brought the first box out, thinking fast. As long as she brought him the boxes, he wouldn’t shoot Marlene. And of course he wasn’t going to shoot her, either. Stewart shot people but Trevor didn’t.

  Trevor put them in freezers.

  She went back in and got the second box. “That’s it,” she said as she brought it out and put it on the floor in front of him. She reached for the freezer door to close it, but he was standing in the way. “If you’d just back up, I’ll close this up and help you go through the files,” she said, trying to edge her way around him. “They’ll be a mess—”

  Trevor shoved her hard and she tripped back, falling flat through the freezer door as Marlene went crazy behind him. She tried to roll to her feet, but he kicked at her and, when she rolled away from him, he slammed the freezer door, cutting off Marlene in mid-bark, leaving Nell entombed in the darkness.

  “Trevor, you son of a bitch,” Nell screamed and stumbled to her feet to open the door as the darkness settled around her like a shroud, impenetrable.

  He’d locked the door. He’d locked her inside and he was outside with Marlene. He wouldn’t kill Marlene now. There was no reason to. Marlene was safe, she was sure of it.

  But she could die.

  Trevor was going to freeze her like he’d frozen Lynnie, so he could keep his life the same once he’d found whatever he was looking for in 1982.

  “Trevor, you dumbass,” she yelled at the door. “You’ll never find anything in those files.” She couldn’t remember if the freezer was soundproof, and she didn’t care. It felt good to yell at him. It felt better to remember that Riley’s mother had been doing the filing in 1982 while Chloe was on maternity leave. Trevor didn’t have a hope in hell of finding anything in those files unless he went through them page by page.

  Of course, he was going to have a lot of time to look if he took the files with him. And in the meantime, she was freezing.

  She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the cold. Okay, the way not to freeze to death would be to keep moving until Gabe showed up and let her out. She had one moment of doubt—that was putting a lot of faith in Gabe’s powers of deduction—and then realized that she didn’t have to rely on deduc
tion. When Gabe got home and she wasn’t in his bed, he’d tear the city apart until he found her.

  So all she had to do was not freeze to death until then.

  Movement, that was the key. She began to pace up and down the freezer in the blackness, stumbling over file boxes, flailing her arms, trying to think hot thoughts, anything to keep her blood from freezing in her veins, checking the door periodically to see if Trevor had unlocked it yet. Heavy breathing, she thought and began to jump up and down. Hurry up, Gabe. She switched to walking again when the jumping got painful, thinking that it must be midnight, that Gabe would give up watching Margie’s when the sun came up, that she’d only have to walk for six hours—could she walk for six hours?—and then she’d be out.

  Or she could break out. That’s what Gabe would do. How did you break out of a locked freezer? There should have been a safety latch on the damn door, but you couldn’t accidentally lock yourself into this freezer, somebody had to deliberately lock you in with a key, so there was no safety latch because that dumbass Patrick hadn’t realized that his best friend would be turning his future daughter-in-law into a Popsicle thirty years later.

  Think, she told herself. Be like Gabe. Stop whining and think. What did she have to work with? Twenty years of files. If she had a match, she could set them on fire. Then at least there’d be some light. Of course, then she’d be trapped in a freezer full of flames. And carbon dioxide, since fire tended to use up oxygen.

  Oxygen.

  Freezers were airtight.

  How long did she have? Six hours until Gabe got home, how much longer after that until he found her, how much air did she breathe an hour, how much air had she already breathed in, walking fast?

  If she slowed down, she’d freeze to death. If she speeded up, she’d suffocate. Why wasn’t there ever a middle ground?

  Goddamn Trevor. He was going to kill her, the same way he’d killed Lynnie. Lynnie. There was a role model. Lynnie hadn’t given in to him, hadn’t let him run her. She’d been a tough woman, hadn’t compromised, hadn’t let men get her down.

  Of course, Lynnie was dead. Maybe “What would Lynnie do?” wasn’t the inspiration she needed at the moment.

  I need help, she thought. I cannot get out of here alone. I need backup. I need Gabe.

  She felt sick at the thought. She shouldn’t need anybody, she should be able to save herself, a strong woman would save herself and not rely on any man. For the next half hour, she fumbled through the blackness for any opening, any possibility, stacking boxes to get to the ceiling, growing colder and more desperate, and with the cold sicker and sleepier.

  I am not going to give Trevor Ogilvie the satisfaction of my death, she thought and repeated it in her head like an affirmation while she searched for something, anything, a switch, maybe she could turn the freezer off, there was a thought. She’d still suffocate but—

  The door opened and the light came on, and Marlene barked hysterically as Gabe said, “Nell?”

  “Oh, thank God,” Nell said and stumbled across the freezer into his arms.

  “What the hell?” Gabe said but he caught her at the door and pulled her out, slamming the door behind them.

  “Take the door off of that damn thing,” Nell said, shivering uncontrollably against him. “Take the whole thing out. It’s horrible.”

  Gabe tightened his arms around her. “God, you’re like ice. Who—”

  “Trevor,” Nell said. “Get me out of this storeroom.”

  “He locked you in? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” She realized she was shaking, the cold, she thought, and the adrenaline and the exhaustion and the fear. “He wanted the ’82 files. He must have taken them. He took your keys, too. I don’t know what—”

  Outside, a motor erupted, and Gabe said, “That’s my car.” He let go of her and ran for the reception room, and Nell followed in time to see him go out the door.

  “Hey, it’s all right, I’m fine,” she said, still shuddering from the freezer, and then she heard tires squeal and a crash that sounded like an explosion, short and sharp and hard and loud.

  “If there’s a God,” she told Marlene, “that was that bastard, Trevor.”

  * * *

  “That was my car,” Gabe said, when they’d all gathered in the office two hours later, after the paramedics had taken Trevor off to the hospital and the police had arranged to tow the remains of the Porsche.

  “Yeah, it was selfish of him to try to commit suicide in your car,” Nell said, cuddling a toasty-warm Marlene to her.

  “He didn’t try to commit suicide,” Riley said. “He was taking the car to search it. Gabe’s bright idea.”

  “Don’t remind me,” Gabe said.

  “Your idea?” Nell said.

  “It was the last place you hadn’t looked,” Gabe said. “I told him that last week, thinking he’d try to get into it. And of course, being Trevor, he waited.”

  “So what happened?” Suze said. “Why’d he crash into the park?”

  “A Porsche 911 is not your average car,” Riley said. “The turbo lag is insane.”

  “He lost control,” Gabe said. “It was just his bad luck he was headed for the park and those stone pillars.”

  “Turbo lag?” Suze said to Riley.

  “It hesitates,” Riley said. “And for once, Trevor didn’t. He must have stomped on that accelerator. Which meant after the hesitation, he was airborne.”

  “I don’t care about Trevor or turbo lag,” Nell said, holding Marlene closer. “What the hell happened in 1982 anyway?”

  “My dad died,” Gabe said.

  “Oh,” Nell said.

  “I don’t want to think any more tonight.” Riley stood up. “You can all stay up and look for Stewart and the ’82 files if you want, but I’m going to bed.”

  Suze stood up, too. “I’m going to go next door to stay with Margie. I don’t even want to think about explaining all of this to her tomorrow.”

  Riley held the door open for her, and Suze stood close to him for a moment and then left. When Riley had gone upstairs, Gabe said to Nell, “You sure you’re okay?”

  “No,” Nell said, cuddling Marlene closer. “What would you have done if Trevor had locked you in there?”

  “Haven’t a clue,” Gabe said. “Why?”

  “I kept thinking you’d have known what to do,” Nell said. “I felt stupid, freezing to death in the dark. You’d never have let him put you in there in the first place.”

  “Maybe. Depends on the circumstances.”

  “He threatened to shoot Marlene.”

  Gabe was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “He has a concussion and multiple fractures.”

  “Good,” Nell said. “How did you know I was in there?”

  “I called to make sure you’d closed the office, and Suze said you’d come over here, and when there was no answer here, I came back and found Marlene throwing a fit at the freezer door. So I got the spare key out of my desk and—”

  “Marlene?” Nell kissed the top of Marlene’s furry little head. “Marlene, you heroine, you saved me.”

  “Well, I helped,” Gabe said.

  “Yeah, you did.” Nell looked at him in the lamplight, the hero who’d saved her. That kind of guy was dangerous, she thought. A woman could start depending on that kind of guy.

  He smiled at her, his concern for her plain, and she thought, The hell with it. For tonight, she was that kind of woman. “You get a reward, too,” she said and pulled him upstairs, determined to be warm again, one way or another.

  * * *

  The next morning, Nell and Suze helped a shocked and sober Margie pack the things she hadn’t managed to sell on eBay and move into Chloe’s. As they’d carried the last of her things out, Budge had put his foot down, forbidding her to go, and Margie had stared at him for a moment and then said, “I’m sorry, Budge, I think you just wasted seven years,” and left while he’d sputtered behind her. That afternoon, Suze took Margie to the hospita
l to see Trevor, and Nell came down to the office wrapped in Gabe’s thickest sweater. She wasn’t cold anymore, but it was still good to have something warm wrapped around her, especially something warm that was Gabe’s. It was all of a piece with being rescued, she thought. At least Gabe didn’t rescue like Budge did, expecting a lifetime of grateful service in return. With Gabe, it was more all in a day’s work. She could live with that.

  She went into his office and said, “Okay, I’ve been thinking.”

  He was sitting behind his desk, looking tired, staring into space as if in deep thought, and she took the seat across from him while Marlene found a sunny spot on the rug and stretched out.

  “You were right,” she said. “About me being here seven months and you being here a lifetime. I didn’t contribute one thing last night, didn’t even leave a trail of bread crumbs—”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, frowning as he focused on her. “You were locked in a freezer.”

  “That equality thing,” Nell said. “I want it so I won’t get left with nothing again. But I haven’t earned it. My seven months is a drop in the bucket compared with what you know. It’s okay. We don’t need to get married to work together. I can wait until I’ve learned more.”

  “You think too damn much,” Gabe said. “I saw Trevor this morning.”

  “I do not think too damn much,” Nell said, annoyed at being dismissed. “I’m capitulating here, you dumbass.”

  “My dad wrote a letter in 1982,” Gabe went on as if she hadn’t said anything. “One of those in-the-event-of-my-death things. He confessed to helping Trevor cover up Helena’s murder.”

  “Oh,” Nell said, momentarily sidetracked. “In 1982.”

  “Yeah. The same year my mom died, and Lu was born, and his heart started giving him trouble. I think he…” Gabe shook his head. “Oh, hell, I don’t have a clue what he was thinking. I want to believe he was finally trying to do the right thing. In the letter, he said he was going to the police, but first he was going to tell Trevor and Stewart what he was going to do, so they’d be prepared. He also said he was going to tell them that he’d written the letter, to protect himself.”