"I need your help," he says. He pleads. "I need you."

"You need a bath. You smell like–" She takes a whiff. "Cat piss. Jesus, Ashley. You're using. You're actually using that stuff."

"I'm on the run."

"Then get the hell away from me."

"They're following me. Dogging my every step. I gotta stay sharp. It's just for now."

She laughs. "Just for now. I can quit anytime. I didn't know she was fourteen, officer."

"Fuck you, you alcoholic, nic-fit freak."

"Those are legal." As if to demonstrate, she taps a cigarette out of the pack and grabs it with her lips. "They also make me smell like a bar, not an overturned litter box."

"We can go somewhere. We can go anywhere. Just get on a plane and go."

"Where's the case?"

His eyes dart to-and-fro. "I've taken care of that. But I can get it when we need it."

"You can't take a metal suitcase full of crystal meth on a plane, dumb fuck."

"Then we'll take a bus."

"Oh, heck, I love the bus," she says. "Nothing better than a twelve-hour ride in an oven-baked casket with unwashed schizophrenics. Super-sweet. Understand something: I'm not going anywhere with you. You're on your own. You left me to die out there, paired up with a gun-toting Annie Wilkes-wannabe. She could've killed me." Probably should've.

She takes the unlit cigarette out of her mouth and pops it behind her ear. Heel pivots to toe, and then she's turning away from him and heading inside the motel.

"Wait," he says, coming in after her. The motel clerk – a bald guy in one of those translucent-green poker visors – regards their conversation with sleepy eyes. She doesn't plan on giving him a show. She hits the hallway, passes the ice machine.

Ashley dogs her.

He puts his hand on her shoulder. She thinks seriously about biting it, but she doesn't know where those hands have been over the last week.

Instead, she shoves him back.

He reaches for her again. She grabs a fistful of his shirt and hurls him backward.

"I'll tell him," he says, staggering.

She stops. Over her shoulder, she asks, "Tell what to whom?"

"Your truck-driver boyfriend. I'll tell him everything."

Her feet carry her forward, away from Ashley. She heads toward their room. The key is in her hand before she knows it, and she suddenly recognizes that this was a bad move. But she doesn't know where else to go or what else to do, and the quiet scared little girl inside of her just wants to go to Louis and curl up in his lap and let him protect her from her mistakes.

She opens the door and calmly walks in.

She closes the door behind her and locks it.

She sits on the bed, trembling.

Louis is already up and alert. He looks concerned.

"What was that? What was that in the hallway?"

Miriam stares forward. She bites her lip. She tries to say something and can't find words.