night before exited the convenience store attached to the gas station. He put on a pair of sunglasses as he stepped out into the bright afternoon sunlight and checked out a couple of young teenage girls who passed him on their way in.
Pervert . Not that I was surprised, given the company he’d kept. His buddy had been found dead in a parking lot only that morning, and here he was buying Doritos and a newspaper like nothing happened.
I slouched down in my seat in case he glanced my way, peering up over the dash every few seconds to follow his progress to the pumps. He opened the driver’s side door of a black, jacked-up truck and swung himself into the cab. The engine rumbled to life and I dithered over what to do next. Should I follow or let him go? And if I did follow, what then?
Nora and Jackson wouldn’t implicate me in Clinton Miller’s death, and I’d been reassured that Lefty was no threat. That left the man in the truck as the strongest link between the body and me. Should I follow and confront him in an attempt to find out what he planned to tell the cops? Or should I let him go and hope he wouldn’t mention me?
Follow , freaky-me urged inside my head. Again, she startled me, and I jerked up straight in my seat, managing to smash my funny bone painfully against the door. I stifled a moan and wished Alex and Rachel were there to back me up. Alex would tell me to follow the guy, no question. Rachel, though, would look at the situation rationally and point out that following the truck could only make things worse. That confronting this guy would do nothing but remind him of what I looked like and reinforce his memory of the night before.
The voice spoke again. FOLLOW . Demanding now, not persuading.
I thought of the leer the guy had given the two teenage girls he’d just passed and gritted my teeth. Whether I wanted to or not, I couldn’t go back to the way things had been. The voice in my head was proof of that. And what if what was happening to me wasn’t such a bad thing? Maybe Nora was right, maybe there wasn’t enough justice in the world.
Maybe this was happening to me because I was supposed to stop guys like Miller and his friend.
My knee bounced rapidly and butterflies fluttered in my stomach. I took quick, shallow breaths and put the car in drive quickly so I wouldn’t have time to chicken out. As I pulled out behind the truck, I eased off the gas to keep some space between us. I didn’t know if the slimeball behind the wheel would recognize me if he looked back, but there was no sense drawing attention to myself.
My hands clenched so tightly on the wheel my fingernails turned white, and I exhaled in heavy relief when the truck signaled a right and pulled into the parking lot of the Stardust, a cheap motel where you could rent a room by the day, week, or month. The truck stopped in front of room number five and I continued on past the motel to park at the neighboring grocery store.
I watched as my quarry let himself into his room, then felt around in my purse for the pepper spray Alex had pressed on me before I left the house. I twisted my long hair up into a bun and grabbed an elastic from the jumble of hair ties and bobby pins I kept in one of the cup holders. There was a ball cap on the backseat, so I jammed it on my head and pulled the bun out through the hole in the back. Sherlock Holmes, I wasn’t, but my makeshift disguise was the best I could do.
I reached for the door handle, but paused before exiting the car. Was I really going to go through with this? Follow a strange man into his motel room and confront him? My intention to do so went against every ounce of caution and self-protective instinct I’d had drilled into me by my mother, Oprah, and every man who’d ever catcalled me on a public street where I should have felt safe.
Then I remembered how I’d felt the night before, when this man had called me a bitch simply because I’d walked away from him. And how his friend