Run - Blake Crouch [10]
Jack could hear in her voice that she didn’t mean it. Just trying to push whatever button she thought he’d left unguarded. Under different circumstances, it would’ve pissed him off, but not tonight.
He said, “Well, it wasn’t stupid to me, Na. That was one of my favorite days. One of the best of my life.”
Jack unlocked the shotgun. He found a good-size rock and smashed out the tail- and brake- and reverse lights. Unloaded everything from the cargo area and picked the glass slivers out of the carpet and knocked the remaining glass out of the back window, the rear right panel, the front passenger window. The army-green paint of the front passenger door and the back hatch bore several bullet holes. A round had even punctured the leather of Jack’s headrest; a white puff of stuffing mushroomed out of the exit hole.
Jack had folded the backseat down. Naomi and Cole slept in their down bags in the car. It was after 1:00 a.m., and he sat against a boulder. Dee’s headlamp was shining in his eyes as she wiped the right side of his face with an iodine prep pad. She used plastic tweezers from the first aid kit to dig the glass shrapnel out of his face.
“Here comes a big one,” she said.
“Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
The shard clinked into the small aluminum tray, and when she’d removed all the glass she could see, she dabbed away the blood with a fresh iodine pad.
“Does this need stitches?” he asked.
“No. How’s the left ear?”
“What?”
“How’s the left ear?”
“What?”
“How’s the—”
He smiled.
“Fuck you. Let’s dress that hand.”
They inflated the Therm-a-Rests, crawled into their sleeping bags and lay on the desert floor under the stars.
Jack heard Dee crying.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“You don’t want to hear it.”
“Kiernan.” Jack had known about Dee’s lover almost from the inception of their affair—she’d been honest with him from the beginning, and on some level he respected her for that—but this was the first time he’d spoken the man’s name.
“That wasn’t him,” she said. “He’s a decent man.”
“You loved him.”
She nodded, a sob slipping out.
“I’m sorry, Dee.”
The wind kicked up. They faced each other to escape the clouds of dust.
“I’m scared, Jack.”
“We’ll keep heading north. Maybe it’s better in Colorado.”
In the intermittent moments of stillness when the wind died away, Jack stared up into the sky and watched the stars fall and the imperceptible migration of the Milky Way. He kept thinking how strange it felt to be lying beside his wife again. He’d been sleeping in the guestroom the last two months. They’d lied to the kids, told them it was because of his snoring, having promised each other they’d handle the dissolution of their family with grace and discretion.
Dee finally slept. He tried to close his eyes but his mind wouldn’t stop. His ear throbbed and the scorched nerve endings flared under the barrel-shaped blister across the fingers of his left hand.
COYOTES woke him, a pack trotting across the desert half a mile away. Dee’s head rested in the crook of his arm, and he managed to extricate himself without rousing her. He sat up. His sleeping bag was glazed with dew. The desert the color of blued steel in the predawn. He wondered how long he’d slept—an hour? Three? His hand no longer burned but he still couldn’t hear a thing out of his left ear except a lonely, hollow sound like wind blowing across an open bottle top. He unzipped his bag and got up. He slipped his socked feet into unlaced trail shoes and walked over to the Land Rover. Stood at the glassless back hatch watching his children sleep as the light strengthened all around him.
They were packed and on the road before the sun came up, pressing north, the morning air whipping through the broken windows. For breakfast, they passed around a bag of stale tortilla chips and a jug of water that had chilled almost to freezing in the night. Eighty miles through Indian country—sagebrush and pinion and long vistas and deserted trading posts and buttes that flushed when first