Serial Uncut - J. A. Konrath [41]
She exhaled a steaming breath and looked around. Painfully blue sky. Treeless high desert. Mountains thirty miles east. A further range to the northwest. They stood blanketed in snow, and on some level she understood that others would find them dramatic and beautiful, and she wondered what it felt like to be moved by nature.
Two hours later, she lifted her guitar case and walked up the shoulder toward the idling Subaru Outback, heard the front passenger window humming down. She mustered a faint smile as she reached the door. Two young men in the front seats stared at her. They seemed roughly her age and friendly enough, if a little hungover. Open cans of Bud in the center console drink holders had perfumed the interior with the sour stench of beer—a good omen, she thought. Might make things easier.
“Where you headed?” the driver asked. He had sandy hair and an elaborate goatee. Impressive cords of bicep strained the cotton fibers of his muscle shirt. The passenger looked native—dark hair and eyes, brown skin, a thin, implausible mustache.
“Salt Lake,” she said.
“We’re going to Tahoe. We could take you at least to I-15.”
She surveyed the rear storage compartment—crammed with two snowboards and the requisite boots, parkas, snow pants, goggles, and…she suppressed the jolt of pleasure—helmets. She hadn’t thought of that before.
A duffle bag took up the left side of the backseat. A little tight, but then she stood just five feet in her pink crocs. She could manage.
“Comfortable back there?” the driver asked.
“Yes.”
Their eyes met in the rearview mirror.
“What’s your name?”
“Lucy.”
“Lucy, I’m Matt. This is Kenny. We were just about to have us a morning toke before we picked you up. Would it bother you if we did?”
“Not at all.”
“Pack that pipe, bro.”
They got high as they crossed into Utah and became talkative and philosophically confident. They offered her some pot, but she declined. It grew hot in the car and she removed her hat and unbuttoned her black trench coat, breathing the fresh air coming in through the crack at the top of the window.
“So where you going?” the Indian asked her.
“Salt Lake.”
“I already asked her that, bro.”
“No, I mean what for?”
“See some family.”
“We’re going to Tahoe. Do some snowboarding at Heavenly.”
“Already told her that, bro.”
The two men broke up into laughter.
“So you play guitar, huh?” Kenny said.
“Yes.”
“Wanna strum something for us?”
“Not just yet.”
They stopped at a filling station in Moab. Matt pumped gas and Kenny went inside the convenience store to procure the substantial list of snacks they’d been obsessing on for the last hour. When Matt walked inside to pay, she opened the guitar case and took out the syringe. The smell wafted out—not overpowering by any means, but she wondered if the boys would notice. She hadn’t had a chance to properly clean everything in awhile. Lucy reached up between the seats and tested the weight of the two Budweisers in the drink holders: each about half-full. She eyed the entrance to the store—no one coming—and shot a squirt from the syringe into the mouth of each can.
Kenny cracked a can of Bud and said, “Dude, was that shit laced?”
“What are you talking about?”
They sped through a country of red rock and buttes and waterless arroyos.
“What we smoked.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Man, I don’t feel right. Where’d you get it?”
“From Tim. Same as always.”
Lucy leaned forward and studied the double yellow line through the windshield. After Matt drifted across for a third time, she said, “Would you pull over please?”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m going to be sick.”
“Oh God, don’t puke on our shit.”
Matt pulled over onto the shoulder and Lucy opened her door and stumbled out. As she worked her way down a gentle embankment making fake retching sounds, she heard Matt saying, “Dude? Dude? Come on, dude! Wake up, dude!”
She waited in the bed of the arroyo for ten minutes and then started back up the hill toward the car. Matt had slumped across the center console into Kenny’s lap. The man probably