Читать книгу Pieces of Her - Karin Slaughter, Karin Slaughter - Страница 13

Wet sand caked into the insides of Andy’s sneakers as she ran along the shore. She had the make-up bag clutched to her chest, fingers holding together the top because she dared not take the time to zip it. There was no moon, no light from the McMansions, nothing but mist in her face and the sounds of sirens at her back.

She looked over her shoulder. Flashlights were skipping around the outside of her mother’s house. Shouting traveled down the beach.

“Clear on the left!”

“Clear in the back!”

Sometimes, when Andy stayed on a 911 call, she would hear the cops in the background saying those same words.

“It’s okay to hang up now,” she would tell the caller. “The police will take care of you.”

Laura wouldn’t tell the cops anything. She would probably be sitting at the kitchen table, mouth firmly closed, when they found her. Detective Palazzolo wouldn’t be making any deals after tonight. Laura would be arrested. She would go to jail. She would appear in front of a judge and jury. She would go to prison.

Andy ran harder, like she could get away from the thought of her mother behind bars. She bit her lip until she tasted the metallic tang of blood. The wet sand had turned into concrete inside her shoe. There was a tiny bit of karmic retribution about the pain.

Hoodie was dead. She had killed him. She had murdered a man. Andy was a murderer.

She shook her head so hard that her neck popped. She tried to get her bearings. Seaborne extended three tenths of a mile before it dead-ended into Beachview. If she missed the turn-off, she would find herself in a more inhabited area of the Isle where someone might glance out the window and call the police.

Andy tried to count her footsteps, pacing off two hundred yards, then three hundred, then finally veering left away from the ocean. All of the McMansions had security gates to keep strangers from wandering in off the beach. City code forbade any permanent fences in front of the sand dunes, so people had erected flimsy wooden slats hanging from barbed wire to serve as a deterrent. Only some of the gates were alarmed, but all of them were marked with warnings that a siren would go off if they were opened.

Andy stopped at the first gate she came to. She ran her hand along the sides. Her fingers brushed against a plastic box with a wire coming out of it.

Alarmed.

She ran to the next gate and went through the same check.

Alarmed.

Andy cursed, knowing the fastest way to the street would be to climb over the dunes. She gingerly pushed the wooden slats with her foot. The wire bowed. Some unseen anchor slipped from the sand so that the fence fell low enough to step over. She lifted her leg, careful not to snag her shorts on the barbed wire. Sea oats crushed under her feet as she traversed the steep slope. She cringed at the destruction she was causing. By the time she made it to a stone path, she was limping.

Andy leaned her hand against the wall, stopped to take a breath. Her throat was so dry that she went into a coughing attack. She covered her mouth, waiting it out. Her eyes watered. Her lungs ached. When the coughing had finally passed, she let her hand drop. She took a step that might as well have been on glass. The sand in her sneakers had the consistency of clumping cat litter. Andy took them off, tried to shake them out. The synthetic mesh had turned into a cheese grater. Still, she tried to cram her feet back into the sneakers. The pain was too much. She was already bleeding.

Andy walked barefoot up the path. She thought about all of the clues that Detective Palazzolo would find when she arrived at the bungalow: Laura’s face, especially her bloodshot eyes, still showing signs of suffocation. The plastic bag around her neck with the dead man’s fingerprints on it. The dead man lying in the office by the overturned coffee table. The side of his head caved in. Urine soaking his pants. Foam drying on his lips. His eyes pointing in two different directions. Blood from Laura’s leg streaked across the carpet. Andy’s fingerprints on the handle of the frying pan.

In the driveway: broken glass from the floodlights. The lock on the kitchen door probably jimmied. The puddles on the kitchen tiles showing the path Hoodie had taken. More water showing Andy’s route from the bedroom to the hall to the guest room to the living room and back again.

On the beach: Andy’s footprints carved into the wet sand. Her destructive path up the dunes. Her blood, her DNA, on the stone path where she now stood.

Andy clamped her teeth closed and groaned into the sky. Her neck strained from the effort. She leaned over, elbows on her knees, bowed over by the impact of her horrible actions. None of this was right. Nothing made sense.

What was she supposed to do?

What could she do?

She needed to talk to her father.

Andy started to walk toward the road. She would go to Gordon’s house. She would ask him what to do. He would help her do the right thing.

Andy stopped walking.

She knew what her father would do. Gordon would let Laura take the blame. He would not allow Andy to turn herself in. He would not risk the possibility that she could go to prison for the rest of her life.

But then Palazzolo would find Andy’s wet footprints inside Laura’s house, more footprints in the sand, her DNA between the McMansions, and she would charge Gordon with lying to a police officer and accomplice to murder after the fact.

Her father could go to prison. He could lose his license to practice.

Don’t make him lie for you.

Andy remembered the tears in her mother’s eyes, her insistence that everything she’d done was for Andy. At a basic level, Andy had to trust that Laura was telling her to do the right thing. She continued up the driveway. Laura had guessed that the man’s Ford would be in the Beachview Drive cul-de-sac. She had also said to run, so Andy started to run again, holding her sneakers in one hand and the make-up bag in the other.

She was rounding the corner when a bright light hit her face. Andy ducked back onto the stone path. Her first thought was that a police cruiser had hit her with the spotlight. Then she chanced a look up and realized she had triggered the motion detector on the floodlights.

Andy ran up the driveway. She kept to the middle of the street away from the motion detectors on the houses. She did not look back, but her peripheral vision had caught the distant rolling of the red and blue lights. It looked like every Belle Isle police cruiser had responded to the emergency text. Andy probably had minutes, possibly seconds, before someone in charge told them to fan out and search the area.

She got to the end of the one-way street. Beachview Drive dead-ended into Seaborne Avenue. There was a little dog-leg at the other end that served as beach access for emergency vehicles. Laura had guessed that the dead man’s car would be there.

There was no Ford in sight.

Shit.

A pair of headlights approached from Beachview. Andy panicked, running left, then right, then circling back and diving behind a palm tree as a black Suburban drove by. There was a giant, springy antenna on the bumper that told Andy the car belonged to law enforcement.

Andy looked back up Beachview Drive. There was an unpaved driveway halfway up, weeds and bushes overgrown at the entrance. One of the six remaining bungalows on Belle Isle was owned by the Hazeltons, a Pennsylvania couple who’d stopped coming down years ago.

Andy could hide there, try to figure out what to do next.

She checked Seaborne in case any cars were driving up the wrong way. She scanned Beachview for headlights. Then she jogged up the road, her bare feet slapping the asphalt, until she reached the Hazeltons’ long, sandy driveway.

There was something off.

The overgrown tangle of bushes had been tamped down.

Someone had recently driven up to the house.

Andy skirted the bushes, heading into the yard instead of down the driveway. Her feet were bleeding so badly that the sand created a second layer of sole. She kept moving forward, crouching down to make herself less visible. No lights were on inside the Hazelton house. Andy realized she could sort of see in the darkness. It was later—or earlier—than she’d thought. Not exactly sunrise, but Andy recalled there was a sciencey explanation about how the rays bounced against the ocean surface and brought the light to the beach before you could see the sun.

Whatever the phenomenon, it allowed her to make out the Ford truck parked in the driveway. The tires were bigger than normal. Black bumpers. Tinted windows. Florida license plate.

There was another truck parked beside it—smaller; a white Chevy, probably ten years old but otherwise nondescript. The license plate was from South Carolina, which wasn’t unusual this close to Charleston, but as far as Andy knew, the Hazeltons were still based in Pennsylvania.

Andy carefully approached the Chevy, crouching to look inside. The windows were rolled down. She saw the key was in the ignition. There was a giant lucky rabbit’s foot dangling from the keychain. Fuzzy dice hung from the mirror. Andy had no idea whether or not the truck belonged to the Hazeltons, but leaving the keys inside seemed like something the older couple would do. And the dice and giant rabbit’s foot keychain was right up their grandson’s alley.

Andy considered her options.

No GPS in the Chevy. No one to report it stolen. Should she take this instead? Should she leave the dead man’s truck behind?

Andy let Laura do the thinking for her. Her mother had said to take the dead man’s truck so she was going to take the dead man’s truck.

Andy approached the Ford cautiously. The dark windows were rolled tight. The doors were locked. She found Hoodie’s keys in the make-up bag. The ring had a can opener and the Ford key. No house keys, but maybe they were inside the truck.

Instead of pressing the remote, Andy used the actual key to unlock the door. Inside, she smelled a musky cologne mingled with leather. She tossed the make-up bag onto the passenger’s seat. She had to brace her hands on the sides of the cab to pull herself up into the driver’s seat.

The door gave a solid thunk when she closed it.

Andy stuck the key into the ignition. She turned it slowly, like the truck would blow up or self-destruct with the wrong move. The engine gave a deep purr. She put her hand on the gear. She stopped, because something was wrong.

There should have been light coming from the dash, but there was nothing. Andy pressed her fingers to the console. Construction paper, or something that felt like it, was taped over the display. She turned her head. The dome light had not come on, either.

Andy thought about Hoodie sitting in the truck blacking out all the light then parking it at the Hazeltons.

And then she thought about the light in her mother’s office. The only light Laura had left on in the house. Andy had assumed her mother had forgotten to turn it off, but maybe Laura had not been sleeping in the recliner. Maybe she had been sitting on the couch in her office waiting for someone like Hoodie to break in.

He has my gun in the waistband of his jeans.

Not a gun, but my gun.

Andy felt her mouth go dry.

When had her mother bought a gun?

A siren whooped behind her. Andy cringed, but the cruiser rolled past rather than turning down the driveway. She moved the gear around, slowly letting her foot off the brake, testing each notch until she found reverse.

There was no seeing out the dark windows as she backed out of the driveway. Tree limbs and thorny bushes scraped at the truck. She hit Beachview Drive sideways, the truck wheels bumping off the hard edge of the curb.

Andy performed the same trick with the gear until she found drive. The headlights were off. In the pre-dawn darkness, she had no way of finding the dial to turn them on. She kept both hands tight on the wheel. Her shoulders were up around her ears. She felt like she was about to roll off a cliff.

She drove past the road to Gordon’s house. The flashing lights of a police cruiser were at the end of his street. Andy accelerated before she could be seen. And then she realized that she could not be seen because all of the lights were off, not just the interior lights and the headlights. She glanced into the rearview mirror as she tapped the brakes. The taillights did not come on, either.

This was not good.

It was one thing to cover all of your lights when you were on the way to doing something bad, but when you were leaving the bad thing, when the road was crawling with police officers, driving without your lights was tantamount to writing the word GUILTY on your forehead.

There was one bridge in and out of Belle Isle. The Savannah police would be streaking down one side while Andy, illuminated by the sun reflecting off the water, would be trying to sneak out of town on the other.

She pulled into the parking lot of what happened to be the Mall of Belle Isle. She jumped out of the truck and walked around to the back. Some kind of thick black tape covered the taillights. She picked at the edge and found that it wasn’t tape, but a large magnetic sheet. The other light had the same.

The corners were rounded off. The sheets were the exact size needed to cover both the brake lights and the back-up lights.

Andy’s brain lacked the ability to process why this mattered. She tossed the magnets into the back of the truck and got behind the wheel. She peeled away the construction paper on the console. Like the magnets, the paper was cut to the exact size. More black paper covered the radio and lighted buttons on the console.

She found the knob for the headlights. She drove away from the mall. Her heart was thumping against the side of her neck as she approached the bridge. She held her breath. She crossed the bridge. No other cars were on the road. No other cars were on the turn-off.

As she accelerated toward the highway, she caught a glimpse of three Savannah cruisers rushing toward the bridge, lights rolling, sirens off.

Andy let out the breath she’d been holding.

There was a sign by the road:

MACON 170

ATLANTA 248

Andy checked the gas gauge. The tank was full. She would try to make the over four-hour trip to Atlanta without stopping, then buy a map at the first gas station she found. Andy had no idea how far Carrollton was from there, or how she’d find the Get-Em-Go storage facility near the Walmart.

The unit number is your birthday. One-twenty. Say it.

“One-twenty,” Andy spoke the numbers aloud, suddenly confused.

Her birthday was yesterday, August twentieth.

Why had Laura said that she was born in January?