Jonathan sent a screenshot of his location and a message: I can see the approach road. If anyone other than you comes down it, they’ll have to stop to move Marcelline’s dead body out of the road first.

Owen texted back: Have you been working up that line for the last hour? You missed your calling. You should have been a janitor.

Jonathan: How long till you get here?

Owen: About half an hour. So go ahead and put on something pretty.

It was oddly reassuring that Owen was being a dick.

•  •  •

Jonathan waited. Sometimes he caught Marcelline looking at him, sometimes she was so still he wondered if she’d somehow died.

He got the gas from the back. It was his leash on this meeting. The cheap hunting knife would be the collar. He’d picked up both at a gas station that sold everything. It even had a diner and Laundromat. You could practically live there. The styrofoam cups in the flotsam of Roy’s truck had the same logo as the sticker on Jonathan’s new gas can. The symmetry sent a nasty little tingle through his chest.

The sting of his blood pressure surged pins and needles into his hands as he worked. He held his breath as much as he could. He opened the truck’s doors and poured and splashed the gasoline. He was thankful for every oily, antiseptic waft of the fumes. It burned his throat, but it gave him a break from the constant exhalation of rot coming off Roy and his mess.

It was a strange, miserable thing to do, dousing Roy and all his stuff. It had to be like this because Jonathan had to go as far as he could. And that might have to be all the way.

Of anyone he’d ever met, Owen was the only one who might happily go to that line, take them there possibly only because it amused him. And Owen had a pastime of feeding humiliation to Jonathan. The dose makes the poison. This time, Jonathan wouldn’t swallow it.

He rehearsed it in his mind to the worst case, imagining sinking the knife into Marcelline’s neck. He had to know if it could happen. The shiny, pleated cummerbund was an accident of necessity that made it more likely. It held her still against the headrest, but better than that, he wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing. If it came to that, it would be almost like not doing it at all, just the blade disappearing into black fabric.

Owen had stopped to save her before. That was his line. He would stop to save her again.

Jonathan could do it. He would do it. Owen would believe it if Jonathan did.

He heard the Mercedes coming before he saw it. It had to be Owen. Even cops didn’t swagger that much in the tailpipes.