Sonny steps back inside the house and the door shuts. Zack has vanished from the window. Jay takes off his helmet.
“What are you doing out here?” Lucy asks him, and in the distance I spot Bev Kiffin walking this way, carrying a shotgun, coming from the direction of the motel, where I can only assume she has been with Jay. Red flags are popping up all over the place inside my head, and neither Lucy nor I make the connection fast enough. Jay is unzipping his thick leather jacket and almost instantly he has a gun in his hand, a black pistol relaxed by his side.
“Christ,” Lucy says. “For God’s sake, Jay.”
“I really wish you hadn’t come here,” he says to me in a calm, cold way. “I really wish you hadn’t.” He motions the gun toward the motel. “Come on. We’re going to have a little talk.”
Run. But there is no place to run. He might shoot Lucy if I run. He might shoot me in the back. He raises the pistol and points it at Lucy’s chest as he unfastens her butt pack. He of all people knows what is in it. He takes my satchel and pats me down, making sure he explores my body intimately, to degrade me, to put me in my place, to enjoy the fury that dances across Lucy’s face as she has to watch. “Don’t,” I quietly say to him. “Jay, you can stop now.”
He smiles and dark rage sparks in a face that could be Greek. It could be Italian. It could be French. Bev Kiffin reaches us and her eyes narrow as they fix on me. She wears the same red lumberman’s jacket she had on the other week, and her hair is tousled as if she has just gotten out of bed. “Well, well,” she says. “Some folks just never get the message they aren’t welcome, isn’t that right?” Her eyes slide to Jay and linger.
I know without being told that they have been sleeping together, and every word Jay has ever told me turns to fable. Now I understand why Agent Jilison Mclntyre was perplexed when I said that Bev Kiffin’s husband was a truck driver for Overland. Mclntyre was undercover. She did the company’s books. She would be aware of it if there was an employee named Kiffin. The only connection to that criminal-infested trucking company is Bev Kiffin herself, and the gun and drug smuggling that goes on is connected to the Chandonne cartel. Answers. I have them, and now it is too late.
Lucy walks close to me, her face concrete. She shows no reaction as we are walked at gunpoint past rusty campers that I suspect are unoccupied for a reason. “Drug labs,” I say to Jay. “You making designer drugs out here, too? Or maybe just storing assault rifles and other things that end up on the street and kill people?”
“Kay, shut up,” he softly says. “Bev, you take care of her.” He indicates Lucy. “Find her a nice room and make sure she’s comfortable.”
Kiffin smiles a little. She taps the back of Lucy’s leg with the shotgun. We are at the motel now, and I scan parked cars and find no sign of another human being. Benton flashes in my mind. My heart pounds and the realization roars through my brain. Bonnie and Clyde. We used to refer to Carrie Grethen and Newton Joyce as Bonnie and Clyde. The killing couple. All along we have been so certain they were responsible for Benton’s murder. Yet we have never known for a fact who he was meeting that afternoon in Philadelphia. Why did he go off alone and not tell any of us? He was smarter than that. He never would have agreed to meet Carrie Grethen or Newton Joyce or even a stranger with information, because he would never have trusted a stranger with so-called information when he was in a city trying to track down a cunning, evil serial killer like Carrie. I stop in the parking lot as Kiffin opens a door and waits for Lucy to walk ahead of her into one of those rooms. Room 14. Lucy doesn’t look back at me, and the door shuts after her and Kiffin.