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“You got here fast,” she remarked.
“Uh, yeah. I hotwired a car.”
That got her to lift her head off me, and she stared at me with red-rimmed eyes. “You what? Brett, you could’ve gotten caught—”
“I made sure there were no people nearby and no cameras,” I told her, a little prickly at that. Please. This wasn’t amateur hour. This wasn’t my first rodeo. “And it’s an old car, so it doesn’t have anything tracking it.”
“That doesn’t mean no one can find it. Someone might have an AirTag in it or something. There’s no way you could know,” she listed off a possibility I hadn’t even thought of. “Tell me the car’s not sitting in the driveway.”
I stared at her. “Okay. The car’s definitely not sitting in the driveway.”
For someone who’d been crying and about to kill themselves, Charlie sounded awfully exasperated with me when she said, “It’s in the driveway, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
She sighed and pulled away from me, and I let her go because she seemed to have calmed down quite a bit. “We need to get rid of it. Take it somewhere else.” Charlie threw a look at me. “Let me grab my keys. Obviously we can’t drop it off right where you stole it, but—”
“Who’s the criminal mastermind here, you or me?” I asked, following her out of the treehouse. She crawled down the ladder first, and I was seconds after her—but before I swung my legs out, I spotted the kitchen knife on the floor of the treehouse. I went to grab it and then hauled myself down.
When my feet hit the ground, I told her, “I know what to do. Just follow me.”
We walked in silence through the woods, to the gated part of the yard. I let her walk in front of me, mostly so I could study her from behind. She was so small. Her thighs didn’t even touch. Literally, from the back, she looked like a fifth-grade boy with long hair. So not my type.
And yet here I was. You’d think I wouldn’t give a shit whether she lived or died, but somehow Charlie had rooted herself inside me like a fungus. Or a parasite, invisible to the naked eye.
Charlie probably wouldn’t like being compared to a fungus or a parasite.
I wondered if she thought the same about me. She’d told me she’d dreamt of me, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything. And, yeah, we’d both gone to each other the same night because we needed to be near the other—not to mention the fact that sometimes the tension between us was so think you could cut it with a knife—but that didn’t mean anything.
No, none of that meant a single thing.
Charlie pushed inside the house first, and I followed her through the hall, departing to return the knife into the kitchen while she grabbed her keys. I met up with her near the front door.
She didn’t even look at me before saying, “Let’s get this done.”
I went straight for the idling vehicle, getting inside and waiting for Charlie to turn her car on before backing up out of the driveway. A part of me wanted to go back to her college to see if anyone had found Zak’s body yet, but if someone reported this car missing, they’d be on the lookout for it there. Best head in the opposite direction.
I drove for fifteen minutes until we hit what must’ve been the big city around here. Four lane roads, grocery stores, clothing stores, a few department stores that looked like they were either closed down or about to shutter their doors for good. I picked the biggest parking lot and pulled into a spot away from the store and the light poles scattered in the parking lot.
Charlie rolled to a stop next to me, and I hopped out of the car and got into hers. I hit the dash and joked, “Drive, drive!” I said it like someone was on our tail even though the parking lot was as empty as it could possibly be this Monday afternoon.
All Charlie did was throw me a look.
“What? Not funny?”
She pulled us away from the car and shook her head once. “You never are.”
I made a tsk-tsk sound as I buckled my seatbelt and grinned at her. “Please, sweetheart. You know I’m the funniest guy you’ve ever met. Considering who I am, that’s actually kind of sad. You should really meet more people.”
That was the opposite of what I wanted, though. I didn’t want her to meet more people. I wanted her to stay reliant on me, which was wrong in and of itself, because this thing between us, whatever you wanted to call it, could never have a happy ending.
But did that ever stop people from hoping for the opposite?
The Charlie of old would’ve told me to stop calling her sweetheart, but today she simply rolled her eyes at me and groaned. “You’re ridiculous, you know that? I never knew a serial killer could be so weird.”
“Oh, yeah? How many have you met before? Ballpark number. Just curious.”
“Shut up.”
