“I wouldn’t get caught up there after nightfall if I were you,” Bibi had told me.

It was too late for that. It wasn’t even four o’clock and darkness had already fallen.

37

They throw me into the rear of the SUV, atop a bed of crushed beer cans. I have a container of gasoline for a pillow. The sloshing sound it makes is oddly soothing.

They’ve refastened my wrists behind my back, this time with plastic cables. These aren’t the zip-ties you can buy at any home improvement store; they’re specially designed for cops to use in place of steel handcuffs. I don’t know the proper name for these restraints; I’ve only heard them referred to as “cobra cuffs.” None of the methods one can find online about how to escape conventional flex cuffs work with these heavier pieces of plastic.

I honestly expected Tori to shoot me. God knows she wanted to pull the trigger. Fear of her grandmother must have stopped her. Or maybe she knows that the punishment Grambo has planned for me will be torturous. Where I am being transported is a mystery beyond the powers of my exhausted brain to solve.

To keep me quiet for the trip they did some tenderizing first. The bearded man had held me up, arms pinned behind my back, while Tori jabbed the butt of her shotgun in my shoulder, my solar plexus, my bleeding thigh. It didn’t escape my notice that she was wearing an Israeli bandage taped to her leg where I’d slashed it.

I’d wanted to roll my eyes when she and Tiff had said they were home health aides (although what better job to rob old and ill people of their pain meds). But Tori knows about human anatomy. There are nerve bundles that, when pressed, can reduce tough guys to whimpering babies. She is a natural born torturer, this one.

Fortunately for me, they hadn’t had more time. They had two bodies to collect—Tiff and the young logger who’d tried to shoot me behind Reynolds’s van—and reason to believe that cops were on the way. I’d watched them carefully place their beloved dead in the cab-covered back of a Ford truck that rolled late onto the scene.

I didn’t see what they did with poor Reynolds.

Now I am lying on my side with my knees raised. The bed liner under my cheek smells of stale beer and another foul smell I recognize. Someone shot a deer recently and threw it here, probably under a tarp so that the local warden wouldn’t see. From the amount of half-dried blood and the overpowering musk, it might have been multiple animals. I’m riding in a deer hearse.