Except three years ago, a few nights before the arrest that would land him in the Huntsville Correctional Unit, Ryan had made thesole, single, stupid promise of his life. He’d promised a beautiful woman that he wouldn’t let a pair of girls languish in Fort Stockton if anything went wrong.
Are you afraid somethingwillgo wrong?Ryan, in Jessica’s bed, pressed against Jessica’s back.
Jessica was silent for a long time.Just promise you’ll get Polly and Adeline out of here.
Ryan hadn’t been able to save Adeline Holiday, as it turned out. He hadn’t been able to save Jessica either. Ryan had been in lockup when some goons came to Jessica’s house and placed bullets into the skulls of all the women sleeping inside. A pair of meth-heads robbing the wrong house. If Stan Holiday hadn’t gotten Ryan chucked into Huntsville a few months before (a bogus charge, for the record), Ryan had no doubt the big man would have found a way to pin the murders on him, Ryan, the man who’d stolen the heart of Stanley’s daughter.
If that had happened, Ryan wouldn’t have faced a nickel for possession. He’d be on death row.
And if a passing neighbor hadn’t come across Penelope stumbling down the road outside her house, bleeding from a hole in her forehead, the girl would have been even deader.
But they’d both dodged the scythe, Penelope and Ryan. Penelope had been rushed to a hospital. Her survival was declared a miracle, a one-in-a-million parabellum trajectory, and it meant that Ryan could keep the single solitary promise he’d ever made in his life. The minute they let him out of Huntsville last week, he’d gathered some gear and picked up a vehicle and headed back to Fort Stockton. He’d pulled up outside Penelope’s school, met her eye through the window. He’d patted the back seat of his bike. The girl had slipped outside without drawing much notice. Penelope could sneak with the best of them, when she needed to.
She could also scare the shit out of him when she was bored. More than once on the long ride, Ryan had been certain he heard Franklin O’Shea on the back of his bike, berating his men for failing to make their numbers. “Enough of The Game,” Ryan had said.
Ryan had thought that Mexico City would have been far enough from west Texas to escape Stanley Holiday’s eyes—or, to be moreexact, the eyes of Mister Frank O’Shea—but Ryan was never correct about much. Stanley had not only known the hotel where Ryan was staying with Penelope: he’d known the fucking room number.
Stanley had crushed Ryan’s nose with the butt of a massive Desert Eagle magnum yesterday morning. If Penelope hadn’t started crying, Stanley would have probably done much worse.
But was that enough to stop Ryan Phan?
Now, as a funny flash of silver light passed over the Texas sky, Ryan Phan was behind Stanley Holiday’s minivan because he was an idiot with something to prove, if only to himself. Ryan was going to keep the promise he’d made to Penelope’s mother. He was going to get the girl out of here, whatever it took.
Not that he had any idea how to do that. Stanley was no doubt still armed with that Desert Eagle. Ryan wasn’t carrying any sort of weapon, not even a knife. He’d crossed the border with a fake passport and a pocketful of cash and bag of decent cocaine in case he needed to grease any noses. Thankfully, he’d found a friend at the Border Patrol station—one of the few men around here who wasn’t a fan of Franklin O’Shea or any part of his entourage.
Still, his friend on the BP didn’t like Ryan enough to give him a gun. And he’d taken the cocaine. Ryan was armed with nothing but his wits and his tongue and his temperamental luck. Ryan had no plan, no idea what he would do when he and that Honda Odyssey finally stopped moving. But when had that ever stopped him?
Ryan blew a clot of blood from his broken nose, let it whip away into the wind. Maybe he wouldn’t just get Penelope back tonight.
Maybe he could get some revenge.
Blood for blood. It’s the law of the desert.That’s what Jessica Holiday used to say. And she’d probably say it went double for her father.
THE TWINS
Moments before the girls in the Malibu arrived, Tabitha stepped out from behind the desk.
Thomas paled. “What are you doing?”
Tabitha said nothing. She hurried into the cold, down the front porch, and stepped into room 5. The room that would soon house Kyla and Fernanda.
Tabitha heard the creak of Thomas’s step on the boards behind her. He called her name. She didn’t stop.
He caught up with her in the bathroom, just in time to see Tabitha bundle up the stack of towels Thomas had left on the vanity when they’d prepared the motel for another night’s work. He said again, “What are you doing?”
“Repeating what we did yesterday.”
“Yesterday was a mistake.”
“But the mirror cracked again today.”
“It was a fluke. It wasn’t like the first night. Put them back.”
“Maybe the first night was the real mistake.”
The twins studied the mirror of room 5’s bathroom. Again, today, a crack had spread down the glass a moment after the clock struck four. It was identical to the crack from yesterday, though perhaps that wasn’t quite true. This crack might have been a hair wider. It was hard to say. Their memory wasn’t what it used to be.
The twins were the only ones who remembered last night. Every night. They’d long ago acknowledged that the human mind wasn’t designed to function under these conditions. How was a person supposed to remember a hundred identical nights? (Was it even a hundred? Could it be more?) All of those memories melted together, each lodged in the same place inside the brain. They were like layers of sediment over an archaeological record, slowly crushing themselves into dust.
