Expecting to Die

God help me. She felt around the bed of the truck. Empty. Except for the toolbox
fastened behind the cab, right behind their heads. As they turned a corner, the
truck leveling off, she forced her still-shuddering body to her knees and then, as
quietly as possible, pushed the lid of the box open just wide enough for her hand
to slip through and dig, quietly, across a shelf of flat tools until she felt the
handle of what was probably a screwdriver. Just what she needed.
As Kywin braked, she withdrew the small tool and, with shaking fingers,
hands still tied together, lifted it to the neck of her T shirt and forced it into her
bra. Then, daring another raid in the box, she reached inside again and felt
something flat and palm sized and . . . oh geez, was it one of those all in one
tools, like a Swiss Army knife? Could she get that lucky? She slipped it out, saw
it was just that and, using her fingers and teeth, pulled several of the deadly little
blades from their sheath. Then she went to work on the twine, sawing wildly.
You can do this. You can! At least the feeling was back in her hands and feet,
her muscles were beginning to obey her again.
But, she knew, she was fast running out of time.
* * *
Kip Bell had finally cracked. Given enough time alone, he’d come to his
senses and decided he wanted a deal. But he’d demanded a lawyer and a promise
of leniency, both of which had been granted. He’d talked with his lawyer and
after an hour of negotiations with the DA, whom Alvarez had called, he finally
spilled his guts.
“Just so you know. I didn’t kill no one,” he said. “Not really.”
What kind of confession was that? Alvarez said, “But—?”
He glanced at his lawyer, who sat next to him in the interview room. She was
about sixty, with silver hair, no lipstick and tired eyes behind rimless glasses.
She’d obviously not wanted to be hauled out of bed in the middle of the night,
but now, Diane Moore was giving her all to her client. She nodded.
“It was all supposed to be a joke,” he said, and the lawyer winced slightly.
“What was?”
“All of it. The monkey suit. I lifted it from the club, the Big Foot Believers,
and yeah, I chased Bianca with it that night. It was kind of a joke, like I said, a
prank, a big ‘Ha-ha!’ but I didn’t know anything about . . . Destiny. I swear. That
was a total shocker, you know.”
Alvarez waited.

---

Another nod from the lawyer.
“And I got into a little more trouble. You were right, I was, like . . . involved
with Lindsay. She was really Kywin’s friend. Hell—all the girls are, y’know.”
Alvarez didn’t.
“But she, Lindsay and I connected. I didn’t want Kywin to get wind of it and
we share a room at the old man’s house—it’s really a pain—so Lindsay and me,
we worked out this signal system. She’d butt dial me, like a mistake, y’know,”
he said, trying to look honest when Alvarez knew him to be a liar. “And then she
got real upset. Knew that Kywin had something to do with Destiny’s death.
Destiny had texted her and told her she was going to meet Donny that night, the
same as she texted Kywin, so . . . she wanted to go to the cops and tell everyone
what she knew.” Some of his bravado slipped a little. “I told her to meet me up at
Horsebrier Ridge at a park up there, we’d been there before. So she snuck out
and I did a stupid thing. I went up ahead of her and left a dummy on the road, so
that she’d see it, you know, and swerve. I just wanted to scare her. . . .”
“But she did just what you expected, swerved, overcorrected, and ended up
driving her car into the canyon, where she died.”
He looked at his hands. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I didn’t expect her to die.”
“You thought she’d survive?” Alvarez didn’t bother hiding the skepticism in
her voice.
“I didn’t know she’d actually drive off the damned cliff. Besides, she was
going to rat out Kywin.”
“The brother you didn’t want to know that you and she were seeing each
other.”
“That was before everything got so heavy, you know?” He was now searching
for reasons to explain his unexplainable behavior.
Alvarez said, “So you thought it would be funny, a prank, to scare the living
shit out of her by having her crash her car.”
“I already told you: I didn’t know that would happen.”
“Really?” Alvarez wanted to lean across the table and throttle the stupid ass,
but she controlled herself by holding on to the edges of the table in a death grip.
Diane Moore said, “My client is here giving you information. This is
obviously difficult for him.”