‘Oh.’ Shannon glances at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘Nice to have it all out in the open.’

‘Did you kill my father?’ Hope asks.

Shannon grins at me. I wonder if he’s about to repeat what I told him. About cutting off Biggs’s head with a bread knife.

‘Why would you even ask me a question like that?’ he asks.

Then his chest explodes.

It’s like the birth scene in Alien. The bullets must have flattened as they passed through Shannon’s body. Bloody chunks of his bladder, lungs and heart splatter the windshield and the side window. Hope works her way up his torso methodically, putting bullets through his abdomen, his chest, his neck. I can hardly hear his screams over the deafening blasts of the gun right behind me. Finally she gets to his head. He stops gurgling as the window is flecked with grey and pink.

Shannon’s dead foot presses down on the accelerator. I grab the emergency brake just in time. The engine complains and rubber squeals. Instead of zooming away, the pick-up goes into a skid. Hope unbuckles Shannon’s seatbelt and tries to drag his twitching corpse into the back seat. She can only get him halfway, but it’s enough to lift his foot off the gas. The vehicle slows, stops, stalls. Warning lights flash all over the dash.

I look around. Shannon’s blood makes it hard to see through the windows, but it looks like no one’s around. Outside the loop, predawn. Ghost town. But someone will turn up sooner or later. We have to get this cleaned up, fast.

It’s not until Hope grabs my shoulder that I realise she’s been talking to me. My ears are still ringing.

‘Hey,’ she says. ‘You okay?’

I nod. ‘You?’

‘Never better,’ she says.

‘Get his keys. Maybe you can use them to cut me loose.’ Hope gets out of the car and circles around to the driver’s side door. When she opens it, the movement sends the red drips worming towards the road.

She grabs the keys from the ignition and slams the door, spraying me with blood again. I lick my lips without thinking.

Hope opens my door and starts hacking at the electrical tape with the keys. Punching holes, sawing, punching again.

‘Are you gonna arrest me?’ she asks as she works.

‘I’m a civilian consultant,’ I say. ‘I don’t arrest people.’

‘But you’re going to tell the police about this. Right?’

‘I wasn’t planning on it,’ I say. ‘Were you?’

‘Honestly, I hadn’t thought any further ahead than this,’ she says. ‘What was he going to do to us?’

‘Nothing. But a friend of his was going to torture and kill us.’

Hope nods, satisfied. ‘So what are we going to do?’