wouldn’t know where to stop.”
Serena, sitting nearby, tilted her head, surprised at the brisk ease of my tone, after our hushed and frustrated planning session.
I went on, “Let me put this another way: You want to know the reason I’m not going to kill you? Other than morals?” I stepped closer and leaned over him, looking down into his dark, mutinous face. “I don’t care that you’re going to tip Brittany off. If she runs, so much the better. A moving target is easier to spot than one that stays still.”
Then, to Serena, “Check the knots, make sure he can’t get loose.”
18
When we left, Serena and I smoked a cigarette each, sitting in her car.
“So now what?” she said.
“Now I call Joe Laska and have him send the cavalry, to let Quentin out of the closet.”
“Let him out?” Serena said.
“The sooner the better.”
Recognition dawned. “You don’t think Quentin’s going to call this girl,” she said. “You think he’s going to go to where she is.”
“Yeah. Not really to protect her, but to be there when I show up. I know that to you and me it doesn’t seem likely that I can find her with the information I have, and that’s true, but look at it from Quentin’s point of view. I wasn’t supposed to figure out how Brittany passed herself off as me, but I did. I had no way of knowing where he lived, but somehow I turned up here. It’s easy to start overestimating your enemy when they’ve scored a couple of victories off you. He’ll believe I can find Brittany.”
“So we’re going to tail him.”
“No. As soon as we’re off the freeway, he’ll spot a tail.”
“Then what?”
This was going to be the hard part, getting Serena to accept this part of the plan. “I’m going to be in the trunk of his car the whole time.”
Serena almost dropped her cigarette into her lap. “No. No way. That’s just crazy. I’m not helping with this.”
The truth was, I could almost carry out this plan by myself. When I’d left the house, I’d taken Quentin’s keys. So I could open the trunk, get in, and hide myself as much as possible in the back. But I couldn’t slam the trunk lid from the inside, not hard enough to make it latch.
“It’s the only way,” I said. “He’s my only link to this woman. He’ll go to her because he thinks he’s chasing me there. My only way to find her is to go to the back of the line.”
“I know, but we can follow him. You don’t have to get in the fucking trunk of his car.”
“It’s the last place he’d look for me,” I said. “There’ll be a trunk release for when it’s safe for me to get out, and if he opens the lid before that and sees me, I’ve got this,” I said, showing the Browning.
“You don’t even know he’ll go down there.”
“No, but there’s a good chance,” I said. “Think about it: If Brittany gets arrested, she’ll implicate him as a co-conspirator, both before and after the fact. That can carry a sentence as stiff as the original offense, which in this case is murder.” I let that sink in. “Quentin will tell Brittany that they need to kill me because the one thing that’ll close the Eastman-Stepakoff case with a certainty is if I turn up dead. The confession by suicide—it’s a classic.”
“How would he get your handwriting on a confession note?”
“You’re thinking way too elegant. Quentin’s idea of subtlety will be to walk me into an abandoned building, stick a gun under my chin, pull the trigger, and spray-paint the words I’m sorry on the wall.” Then I said, “Besides, he said he was going to kill me. He doesn’t mean someday years from now, when I’ve dropped my guard. He’s not a chess grand master. He wants to settle accounts now.” Then I played my trump card: “¿Cómo vivimos?”
She stared straight ahead, through the windshield.
“Serena. ¿Cómo vivimos?”
“Ad limina fortunarum,” she said, capitulating, underscoring her frustration by grinding her cigarette harder than necessary into the pullout ashtray.
It was our old affirmation, in Spanish and Latin. How do we live? To the limits of our fate.
Then Serena blinked, and for a moment her face looked so sad I thought she might cry. Now, that really was crazy.
She shook it off and said, “What if he flies?”
“He’ll drive. He’ll need a car once he gets down there.” I didn’t add that he wouldn’t rent