we’ve got a pretty sad mess of a childhood, don’t we?” I say and smile. “How about we promise each other it’ll be better from here on out. Right here and now. Let’s make that promise.”
He looks at me skeptically and searchingly, like he’s trying to see if I’m telling him the truth. I am, and I reinforce it by smiling even wider. It finally paints itself onto his face too, making it shine bright and fresh and like a dream come true.
But it doesn’t last, because the waitress makes us break apart so she can set our food down.
The rest of our meal passes in a much friendlier way. I get no sense that he’s judging me, and I end up getting a second plate of fries and a chocolate milkshake because I seriously misjudged how hungry I actually was. By the time I tell him it’s because he’s made me burn so many calories last night, he’s all mine again and I can’t wait until we’re together again, alone in the moonlight, making love.
The president—Cross—and Ace return right on the dot, two hours later to pick us up from the motel. They arrive in a beat-up looking, dark blue pickup truck with tinted windows and no distinguishing marks on it, unless you count the dents and rusted parts. But I bet no one sees those, since all hard used pickups look like this one.
They put me in the back with Ace, while Cross and Colt sit in the front. It’s so none of the Sinners will recognize us in case they are in the town and watching, Ace explains once we’re all seated.
“OK, so which way?” Cross asks, his eyes piercing me even though he’s looking at me through the rearview mirror. Weird how that works. But the guy doesn’t scare me, not really. He just demands a high level of fearful respect and there’s no not giving it to him
“It’s better if we go to the Sinners’ bar first,” I stammer. “I know the way from there best. I don’t know the rest of this town very well, so I’d just get us lost if I tried to figure it out.”
Cross shakes his head. “That’s out of the question. We’re not going anywhere near that place. Try harder.”
I swallow, wishing I could. But I left the bar a grand total of three times. One of those was with Piston to go see the ghost town, and the other two times were visiting the nearby mall with Stormi. Normal life was so far out of my reach, while we were held there, I didn’t even want a taste of it, because I wanted it back so bad.
Colt is looking from me to Cross kinda protectively.
“You said it was along the same road we took to get to this motel,” he says, trying to help. “Was it in the direction we took?”
“I don’t know, we went over a field that time,” I stammer, still trying really hard to remember the route me and Piston took that night.
“There’s basically just the dirt road passing the bar,” Ace says. “Did you go down it to the left of the bar or to the right?”
“The left,” I say. “I know because it’s the opposite direction to than the way to the mall. Then we made another left onto the main road. And then just straight.”
I’m as sure as I can be about this, but I’m not completely certain. It was a long time ago, and my mind was on other things, I wasn’t watching the road very closely.
“It’s further down this road then,” Ace says after thinking about it for a while. “It’s gotta be.”
I hope so hard that he’s right because I’m not sure about anything anymore.
“It was surrounded by hills, and just a dirt road led to it, I remember that,” I supply. “And there was a tall rusty gate on the entrance to it, and I think a barbed wire fence around it. Piston had to unlock the gate so we could go in.”
Oh, man, this information I have is so useless. We’re just gonna ride smack into a bunch of Sinners, and then they’ll finish what Crow started before I killed him. What the fuck am I doing in this car.
“Was the town visible from the road?” Cross asks.
“Yeah, a part of it was, like one side of it was, but not the actual gate,” I say. “We should stay away from the gate, otherwise they’ll see us.”
Cross