The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,171
the horn again. He waved Charlie over.
She made her excuses to the group, though she assumed that many of them had at one point in their lives run toward a truck idling in a parking lot.
Sam got out, her hand resting on the open door. Charlie could hear the truck’s muffler belching from thirty feet away. Ben’s Datsun was twenty years old, the only thing they could afford after the canceled trip to Colorado. They had sold his SUV for the loan pay-off. A week later, the buyer was not amenable to selling it back to them. Rusty and Lenore had offered to let them keep the loaned money, but Charlie couldn’t bring herself to do it. The clinic in Colorado had refunded the wire within days. The problem was the other bills: the flight and hotel cancellations, surcharges on their credit cards for cash advances, then the post-miscarriage hospital bills, surgical bills, specialist bills, anesthesiology bills, radiology bills, doctors’ bills, pharmacy bills and a ton of co-pays and an avalanche of no-pays. At the time, the debt was so crushing that they’d been lucky they could afford to pay cash for the piece-of-shit truck.
They had spent an entire weekend scraping the giant Confederate flag decal off the back window.
Sam said, “Ben offered to help me escape. I couldn’t take being in that crowd for much longer.”
“Me, either,” Charlie said, though she would rather congregate with known felons than suffer through what she assumed was Sam’s lame attempt at matchmaking.
Charlie had an awkward moment over the gearshift, which jutted out of the hump in the floor. She started to hike up her dress to straddle it, but Ben had made it clear the other night that he did not want his knob between her legs.
“You okay?” Ben asked.
“Sure.” Charlie ended up sitting sidesaddle, knees clenched together, legs at an angle, like Bonnie Blue Butler before the fall.
The door groaned on rusty hinges as Sam pulled it shut. “A spray lubricant would alleviate that noise.”
Ben said, “I tried some WD-40.”
“That’s a solvent, not a lubricant.” She told Charlie, “I thought we could spend some time together at the farmhouse.”
Charlie did a double take. She could not imagine why her sister would want to spend two seconds at that detestable place. The night before Sam had left for Stanford, she had made a not completely unfunny joke about the most efficient way to burn it to the ground.
Ben shifted the gear into drive. He made a tight U-turn around a cluster of parked cars. BMWs. Audis. Mercedes. Charlie hoped none of Rusty’s mourners boosted them.
“Shit,” Ben muttered.
Two police cars were parked on the median by the exit. Charlie recognized Jonah Vickery, Greg Brenner, and most of the other cops from the middle school. They were waiting to do the funeral escort, leaning against their cruisers, smoking cigarettes.
They recognized Charlie, too.
Jonah made circles with his fingers and put them to his eyes. The rest of the gang joined in, laughing like hyenas as they made raccoon eyes in honor of Charlie’s bruises.
“Fuckers.” Ben grabbed the handle and rolled down the window.
“Babe,” Charlie said, alarmed.
He leaned out the window, fist raised. “Motherfuckers.”
“Ben!” Charlie tried to pull him back in. He was almost yelling. What the hell had gotten into her passive husband? “Ben, what are—”
“Go fuck yourselves.” Ben flipped them the bird with both hands. “Assholes.”
The cops were no longer laughing. They stared Ben down as the truck pulled out onto the highway.
“Are you crazy?” Charlie demanded. She was supposed to be the unhinged one. “They could beat your ass.”
“Let them.”
“Let them kill you?” Charlie asked. “Jesus, Ben. They’re dangerous. Like sharks. With switchblades.”
Sam said, “Surely not switchblades? They’re illegal.”
Charlie felt a strangled groan die in her throat.
Ben rolled the window back up. “I’m so sick of this fucking place.” He wrenched the gearshift into third, then pushed it into fourth as he sped up the highway.
Charlie stared at the empty road ahead.
He had never been sick of this place before.
“Well.” Sam cleared her throat. “I love living in New York. The culture. The arts. The restaurants.”
“I couldn’t live up north,” Ben said, as if entertaining the thought. “Maybe Atlanta.”
Sam said, “I’m sure the public defender’s office would be happy to have you.”
Charlie glared at her sister, mouthing a “What the fuck?”
Sam shrugged, her expression unreadable.
Ben loosened his tie. He unbuttoned his collar. “I’ve done my time for the greater good. I want to join the dark side.”