from the room. When he caught up with her, she already had the front door pulled open. “You told me yesterday that you aren’t the man for the job. I couldn’t agree more. Thank you for coming out this morning, but—”
He reached past her shoulder and pushed the door shut.
The suddenness of his movement alarmed her. She backed up to the adjacent wall. Her heart was thudding. “Have you been driving past this house every night?”
His chin went back a notch. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Yeah, I did.” Moving slowly, he raised his hands shoulder high and took several steps backward, away from her. A cleft formed between his eyebrows. “Someone’s been driving past your house?”
“Every night. Almost from the day I moved in. Even before I lost the baby.”
“Have you reported it?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“At first I didn’t think much of it. I passed it off as curiosity-seekers. Then after the emergency in the supermarket, I didn’t want to send up a flare and call further attention to myself.”
He digested that, then said, “Have you made out what kind of car it is?”
She took a breath. “Is it you?”
“Why would I be driving past your house every night?”
“That’s not an answer. Is it you?”
“No.”
A simple denial. No embellishment. No telltale expression. Ergo, a perfect lie. A perfect liar. “Is lying another skill you honed while in juvenile detention?”
His jaw clenched.
She wasn’t going to be deterred by his apparent anger. “The marijuana was your first offense, but it wasn’t your last, was it?”
“No.”
Her breathing shallow, she asked, “What other crime did you commit?”
Chapter 6
That night in 2000—Ledge
Stopping along the roadside minutes after pulling off a burglary, to conduct a meeting with your accomplices, in a ditch no less, was just one of the reasons that this whole escapade of Rusty’s design was all kinds of ways fucked up.
During the planning stages, Rusty had charged Ledge with the task of driving them, and he had been okay with that. In fact, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. If escape became necessary, he figured he knew more back roads than the other three. He certainly trusted himself over any of them to keep a cooler head in a tight situation.
“It only makes sense for us to convene in the parking lot of your uncle’s bar,” Rusty had told him during one of only three covert meetings they’d had in advance of the burglary.
“It will be hopping on a holiday Saturday night. Cars and pickups will be coming and going from happy hour till after last call. Our cars won’t be noticed in the overflowing lot. You’re in and out of there all the time. Christ, you live there. So nobody will think twice about you leaving and returning an hour or so later.”
As Rusty had predicted, the theft itself had been incredibly easy to pull off. When Foster opened the vault, Rusty had exhaled a short laugh. “That’s a fucking lot of Easter bonnets and chocolate bunnies.”
They didn’t stand around congratulating one another, though. They’d hastily stuffed the banded bills into one large canvas bag provided by Foster. As they’d left with it, Ledge had halfway expected an ambush. At any given heartbeat, he’d feared spotlights hitting them, SWAT officers swarming, and a cop with a bullhorn shouting for them to drop facedown and place their hands behind their heads.
It hadn’t happened. Ledge had driven them away while the same mean-looking cat that had been eating from a pile of garbage when they’d arrived was still eating from it when they’d left. Not even he had scurried for cover behind the row of dumpsters behind the store.
But now, after having made a clean getaway with their haul, when they were halfway between Welch’s and the bar in the middle of freaking nowhere, Rusty told him to pull over.
“Pull over? What the hell for?” Ledge spoke for himself as well as for the two in the back seat, who shared his incredulity and were vocal about it.
“Just do it,” Rusty said, squelching their chorus of protests. “We need to lay some ground rules before we split up.”
The car was still rolling to a stop on the shoulder when Rusty opened the door and got out, taking the money bag into the ditch with him. The back of Ledge’s neck began prickling with apprehension, and it lasted the whole while they were huddled in that damn, stinking ditch. While pretending to be cool and unruffled, he’d kept a close eye on Rusty. Ledge