Burn Down the Night (Everything I Left Unsaid #3)- Molly O'Keefe Page 0,11

needed water. Badly.

“Someplace safe.”

“No place is safe.”

“Ah, spoken like a real badass.”

“You got…a smart mouth.”

Yes. My mouth. The only part of me I could bank on being smart.

“Where are we going?”

Our choices were limited and the bullet in his leg limited them even more.

“To my aunt Fern,” I said, because this was rock bottom and we had nowhere else to go. “She was a combat nurse in the army. She’ll patch you up.”

And I could only hope—after seven years of silence—she’d let me in.

—

I changed my shirt, cleaned myself up as best I could in the parking lot, and went inside to get us some food and water.

“You can’t leave,” I told him.

“Where am I going to go?” he whispered.

Good point.

“You want anything?”

“Thirsty.”

I’ll bet. I unfurled my sleeping bag and unzipped it, stretching it out to cover up his body and what I could of the blood.

“Why…why are you doing this?” he asked.

“Covering you up? Because if someone looks in the window, they’re going to call the police and have nightmares for the rest of their life.”

“No…why are you doing this?”

Saving him. Why was I saving him?

“I should have just let you die?”

“Lots of people would.”

“Well, I’m not one of those people and I got plans for you, Max. Big plans.”

“That…makes me nervous.”

I liked that he was making jokes. Making jokes made this seem a whole lot less scary. It made me feel a whole lot less alone.

“I’m going to get you a drink. Try not to scare anyone while I’m gone.”

I closed the door, locked it for good measure, and went into the well-lit hell of the truck stop.

I got Max a big bottle of water and Coke, thinking the sugar would be good for him. I grabbed some beef jerky and Skittles. A giant coffee.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t the sketchiest person in the truck stop at 2:00 on a Thursday morning. It made me wonder how many of these freak shows had bodies in their cars.

I cleaned up the backseat as best I could with about seven thousand Lysol wipes and practically poured the water down Max’s throat. And then the Coke.

His cheeks were looking flushed, and I realized the clock was ticking for infection.

It was seven hours to Indian Shores, Florida.

I had to pray it wasn’t too long.

Chapter 5

While scrolling through the radio stations, I had a really short attention span.

“No,” I said to classic Zeppelin.

“No,” I said to Taylor Swift.

“Hell no,” I said to the religious talk stuff.

I caught a familiar lyric in a voice from my childhood and scrolled back, searching for it.

The thunder rolls…

Garth Brooks.

“Yes!” I cranked the volume and unrolled my window so the hot wind whipped my hair into a frenzy and the smell of the highway overpowered the smell of bleeding biker.

Jennifer was all about country music. She’d had posters of all those guys in tight Wranglers and ten-gallon hats. Countless CDs and playlists. She’d had cheap, pink cowboy boots that gave her blisters.

I’d spent more of my life calling radio stations trying to get free tickets to country music concerts than I cared to remember. For every one of Jennifer’s birthdays, every holiday, every chance I could, I tried to be lucky caller number ten or whatever. It didn’t matter the show, Jennifer loved them all. Jennifer had more luck than me, which was a radical truth in my life, and she got us tickets to festivals in Wisconsin before Dad died. And one in Florida when we were with Aunt Fern and then another one in Georgia during the good years before she left school and while I was with Hector (Good Boyfriend #1).

Every concert, we’d dressed ourselves up and danced on the lawns and in the aisles for hours, splitting beers and counting our change to buy nachos.

And here’s the thing—I would have sworn under oath that I hated country music. It was for Jennifer, the dancing and the radio station calling. I cared nothing for those earnest lyrics, the back-slapping good old boys, and the women who’d been done wrong.

I rolled my eyes when she wasn’t watching. Changed the radio station when she wasn’t around. But in the last seven months, there had been no music. None. The world was silent without my sister.

The thunder rolls and the lightning strikes.

But here I was—screaming the lyrics. Every single word to a song I would have sworn I didn’t remember.

That song ended, but it was a Garth block and “The Dance” came on and I knew every word to