Page 78 of The Deeper Game
Seven at night.
Deserted.
“Stop here, but keep your hands on the wheel. I have no aversion to shooting you and throwing your body off the cliff. It’s not like they’re really going to think you killed yourself. Your death here is more for the sake of symmetry than verisimilitude.” He paused, seeming proud of his smart-sounding sentence.
It made me want to gouge out his eyes.
He made me put the truck in park and directed me to knit my fingers on top of my head, at which point he patted his creep hands up and down my legs, efficiently and clinically removing the weapons from my thigh and ankle holsters. I was glad he didn’t touch me in a sexual manner, but it also showed what a fucking pro he was. Manning wasn’t somebody who could be distracted in that way, even if I had the stomach for it, which I didn’t.
“What do you think they’re doing now?” he asked, taking my last gun out of my ankle holster, my mini nine. “What do you think?”
“I think they’re coming after me,” I said.
“What do you really think?”
I pictured them ravishing the safety deposit boxes. Enjoying the riches. Filling bags. Thor would be nearing the Mexican border. “I think they’re coming to tear you the fuck apart.” It was more a wish than a possibility, but I wished it fervently.
“They don’t know you’re gone yet, that’s what I think. I have alerts set up for when they get into that SUV. Don’t you wish you could hear them when they discover the message you wrote?”
“No.”
He grinned. “I do. And I’ll get my wish, because it’ll be recorded. They’ll want to rip me apart. You can console yourself with that. They’ll get a real vengeance hit off that. They’ll drivehere pretty fucking fast. I’d let you stick around to listen to them discover your message and what they say on the drive, but I don’t like to cut things that close. Suffice to say it’ll be entertaining. Nothing like the grand finale, though. Don’t you wish you could be a fly on the stone when they discover your body in the quarry right where Venus’s body was?”
I looked away, chin and lip both throbbing like mad. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a reaction.
He motioned with his gun. “Out.”
I weighed my options, feeling like I was in a nightmare maze with no way out.
“Out, or I shoot you and carry you. Or more, drag you. You’re too heavy to carry.”
My pulse whooshed in my ears, and I wondered dimly if he was trying to insult me by suggesting I was heavy. As if a man can get more insulting thanwanting you dead.
“Out.”
I started working off my heels, pushing them off with my toes. As soon as they were off, I leaned on the horn. The blare echoed off the stone piles, filling the area with sound.
Manning cursed and went for the keys.
That was my chance. I jumped out of the truck and ran for it. The rocks felt hard on my feet, and one or two definitely pierced the skin, but torn-up feet were better than broken ankles.
What are torn-up feet also better than? Death.
I ran like hell toward the nearest massive pile of stones, huge enough to cover half a tennis court and maybe five stories tall.
I heard him swear behind me, but it was a good sign that he hadn’t liked the honking—he was worried somebody might hear. Maybe he’d be reluctant to use the gun. He did have that silencer, but a silenced gun isn’t that silent.
I made it around to the far side of the mountain of stones and stilled.
The sharp little stones were a bitch to walk on.
On the upside, I could hear the crunch of his footfalls as he reached the other side of the pile.
He paused there.
I waited for his next move, senses on alert. Suddenly he was on the run again, his footsteps going clockwise.
I moved the same way, keeping the pile in between us, holding up the hem of my dress. The bottoms of my feet were raw and probably bloody, but unlike Manning, I could walk in relative silence. He picked up his pace to a run and so did I.
