to go with his second instinct, which was to find out who was calling. “Answer it.”
“Hello?” she said. She frowned, then handed the phone to Ethan. “It’s for you.”
“Yeah?” he answered.
“It’s me,” said Rick.
“I thought I said that I don’t want to talk to you.”
“I got that. But we can help each other.”
“Is that so?”
“We have plans, and backup plans, and backups for our backup plans,” said Rick. “If a player goes to the police, we have to enact what we call the Nuclear Option, which sucks. Until that line is crossed, there’s still the potential to work something out.”
“How do we work it out?” Ethan asked.
“I need you to go back home and pretend you’re still playing.”
“If I go back home, you’ll kill me.”
“No. Going back home is your only chance of staying alive.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“In the preliminary rounds, you left with sixty thousand dollars. That was nothing to the people running the game. If you’d won an extra hundred thousand dollars, they wouldn’t have blinked. If you’d seen that game through to the end, the final prize would have been one million dollars. A drop in the bucket. And that’s just the potential payout to you. This is all a fun game to them, but if they need to, they’ve got the resources to make problems disappear. Do you think that if the police raided my office in Las Vegas, they’d find the arm-breaking machine? They know how to cover their tracks. I know that you don’t believe me, and I completely understand, but there is no happy ending for you unless you trust me.”
“I’m not going home,” said Ethan. “I’ll meet you somewhere to talk in person. If my wife doesn’t hear from me in the time that she and I agree on, she’s going straight to the FBI and she’s telling them everything.”
“I’ll agree to that,” said Rick.
“There’s a McDonalds on Eastman Avenue. Call me when you get there. If you keep me waiting too long, the deal is off.”
“How long do I have?”
“I’d get right on the road if I were you.” Ethan hung up.
“What now?” Jenny asked.
“I’m going to drop you guys off someplace public,” Ethan told her, not wanting to say the name of the place out loud. “Lots of people around. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t leave until I call you.”
“You threw your phone out the window.”
“Right. I did. I still think it was a good idea. I’ll call you from Rick’s phone.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Not really. But if there’s a chance we can work this out, it’s better than driving across the country and hoping they don’t come after us.” He looked at Patrick and Tim in the rearview mirror. “I need you all to take care of each other, okay?”
His sons both silently nodded. Ethan had no idea how he was going to make this up to them.
17
Rick left the dead bodies of Gavin and Butch behind in the van. At some point very soon he’d have to figure out how to get rid of them and explain their disappearance, but for now he’d deal with one apocalypse at a time.
A short while later he pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot and called Ethan on his wife’s phone. Jenny answered.
“Go to Dorian’s Ice Cream,” she said. “It’s two minutes away. Don’t be longer than two minutes.”
Rick put Dorian’s Ice Cream into his GPS and quickly drove there. It was a small place in a strip mall, and Ethan was seated at a round table right outside.
“Let’s get some ice cream,” said Ethan, as Rick got out of his car. “Your treat.”
They each got double scoop ice cream cones (dark chocolate and peanut butter for Rick, peach and strawberry for Ethan) and returned to the outdoor table.
“This is good,” said Rick, tasting his ice cream.
“They make it on site.”
“Nice. So let me be blunt, Ethan. The best way for you to stay alive is to keep playing.”
“You’ve said that, but I don’t buy it. This game sucks. You keep threatening my family. I’m here to let you try to convince me not to run to the police, but it’s not going to be an easy sell.”
“I understand. As I said before, if you go to the police, we have to go with the Nuclear Option. There’s only so long the authorities can protect you. Best case scenario, I guess, you get your family into a witness protection program, completely uproot your life and start over, but the people running