She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,185

her hand to her lap. “Perhaps a day, maybe two, but no more.”

“So we just do that again,” I told her. “When you have to, we find another lake or a cornfield or—”

But she was already shaking her head. “You learned of the cornfield in the press, right? If reporters aren’t already at that lake, they’ll be there soon. The story will make the local papers, maybe television. If we escape national news, the reprieve will only last until the next time. Dead lakes, dead fields, dead trees…somebody will connect everything and soon the press will create maps, each occurrence marked. Some scars can be hidden, Pip. Others are simply too large. If the press doesn’t find us, Oliver and the others surely will. I imagine they are watching for these exact moments. Ms. Oliver called it my ‘kiss of death.’ I imagine her map would have such a phrase printed in big, bold letters at the very top—Stella’s Kiss of Death—heading west. There would be no hiding then.”

They don’t always find the bodies, Pip.

“Then we find another bad person. Someone who deserves to die.”

“Nobody deserves to die.”

“A killer, a rapist, someone who hurts others…” I couldn’t believe how effortlessly my mind went there, but when I weighed the thought against possibly losing Stella, there really was no choice, not for me. “Maybe in LA. We’ll go to a park, like you’ve done in the past, and—”

“I won’t,” she said emphatically. “I will not kill again.”

“You do it just this one more time. That will buy us a year, right? A whole year to come up with something else, another way. Some kind of solution.”

“I won’t.”

“If the people in white find us—one of them—any one of them…”

“I won’t.”

“…they’re trying to hurt us. If anyone deserves—”

“Jack, please. Stop. I won’t. I don’t care what that means for me, what happens. I won’t kill again. I need you to promise me, if I’m feverish, if I no longer have my wits, and I try to make you stop like I did with the lake, you must promise me you won’t—”

“I’m not going to…”

“—and if at any point it seems I might hurt you, you need to stop me. We may need rope or handcuffs, or maybe both. I don’t know how bad it will get. I’ve never let it go so far, but I won’t hurt you. You can’t let me.” Her voice dropped low. “These gloves cannot come off. If they do, if I reach for you, you need to shoot me, Jack. You need to kill me.”

“That’s something I won’t do,” I told her. “No way.”

She turned to her window and looked out over the barren landscape. “You’ll need to shoot me like a rabid dog, because at that point that is all I will be.”

I twisted the wheel to the left, maneuvered the Mercedes into the opposite lane, and floored the accelerator. I stayed in the wrong lane long after we passed the semi. It wasn’t until a oncoming car approached us that I finally swerved back, the speedometer buried at that point.

14

Former detective Terrance Stack, just Terry now, went back to the living room window overlooking his front stoop and yard.

The white van was still sitting there.

He wasn’t exactly sure when it first arrived, but it had been out there for the better part of the day.

Just sitting there.

If anybody got out, he hadn’t seen them. Nobody got in, either. No movement at all.

Just sitting there.

15

The sky had grown dark by the time we finally pulled into Carmel, California, the stillness in the night sky rivaled only by the silence between Stella and me. Not a single word had been uttered between the two of us in more than an hour. Every time I looked over at her, I found myself checking the color of her skin, searching for a tremble in one of her hands or arms, waiting for that sheen of sweat to return. Thankfully, none of those things happened, but a voice in the back of my head reminded me that they would, in time all those things would happen again. Time could only be borrowed. Stella continued to stare out the window, lost in her own thoughts, her gaze fixed on some far-off object. Several times, she returned to the book, but even the words of Charles Dickens proved unable to soothe her. She had closed the cover and returned to her window, to that distant nothingness that so captured her attention.

Located on California’s