False Memory

anybody’s drinking water,” said Zachary. “Federal offense.”
    “Nobody’ll ever find your bodies. Maybe after your car crash, you just wandered off into the desert, got disoriented and lost in the storm, and froze to death.”
    As the speed of the car dropped, eerie shapes appeared in the snow on both sides. They were low and undulant, pale formations reflecting the headlights, gliding past like ghost ships in a fog. Weathered ruins. Fragments of buildings, the stacked-stone and adobe walls of a long-abandoned settlement.
    When Kevin braked to a stop and put the car in park, Martie turned toward Zachary and jammed the .45 Colt into his side so hard that his face clutched in pain.
    His eyes revealed a man who was both fearless and pitiless, but not a stupid man. Without her saying a word, he dropped the machine pistol onto the floor between his feet.
    “What?” Kevin asked, instinct serving him well.
    As the driver sought Martie in the rearview mirror, she said, “Reach behind and put your hands on the headrest, you sonofabitch.”
    Kevin hesitated.
    “Now,” Martie screamed, “before I gut-shoot this moron and blow out the back of your head. Hands on the headrest where I can see them.”
    “We have a situation here,” Zachary confirmed.
    Kevin’s right shoulder dropped slightly, as he started to reach for the machine pistol on the front seat.
    “HANDS ON THE HEADREST NOW, YOU FUCKER!” she roared, and she was shocked to hear how totally psychotic she sounded, not like a woman merely playing at being tough, but like a genuine crazy person, and in fact she probably was crazy right now, totally psychotic with raw fear.
    Sitting up straight again, Kevin reached behind himself with both hands and gripped the headrest.
    With the Colt jammed into his gut, Zachary was going to behave, because she could pull the trigger faster than he could move.
    “You got off that plane with nothing but carry-ons,” Kevin said.
    “Shut up. I’m thinking.”
    Martie didn’t want to kill anyone, not even human garbage like this, not if it could be avoided. But how to avoid it? How could she get out of the car and get them out of the car, too, without giving them a chance to try anything?
    Kevin wouldn’t leave it alone. “Nothing but carry-ons, so where did you get a gun?”
    Two of them to watch. All that movement getting out. Moments of imbalance, vulnerability.
    “Where did you get the gun?” Kevin persisted.
    “I pulled it out of your buddy’s ass. Now shut up!”
    Going out of the driver’s side, she’d have to turn her back on one of them, at some point. No good.
    So then ease backward out of the passenger’s side. Make Zachary slide across the seat with her, keeping the gun in his belly, looking past him to Kevin in the front.
    With the windshield wipers off, the snow began to spread a thin coverlet on the glass. The motion of the descending flakes made her dizzy.
    Don’t look outside.
    She met Zachary’s eyes.
    He recognized her irresolution.
    She almost looked away, realized that would be dangerous, and jammed the muzzle of the Colt even deeper into his gut, until he broke eye contact.
    “Maybe it’s not a real gun,” Kevin said. “Maybe it’s plastic.”
    “It’s real,” Zachary was quick to inform him.
    Feeling her way backward, out of the car, would be tricky. Could hook her foot on the doorsill or hook up on the door itself. Could fall.
    “You’re just damn housepainters,” Kevin said.
    “I’m a video-game designer.”
    “What?”
    “My husband’s the housepainter.”
    And after she was out, when Zachary followed her, he would for a moment fill the open door, her gun in his belly, and Kevin would be blocked from her sight.
    The only smart thing to do was shoot them while she had a clear advantage. Smilin’ Bob hadn’t told her what to do when intelligence and morality collided head-on.
    “I don’t think the lady knows what’s next,” Zachary told his partner.
    “Maybe we got a stalemate here,” Kevin said.
    Action. If they thought she was incapable of ruthless action, then they would act.
    Think. Think.

68
    A winter scene frozen in a liquid-filled glass globe: the soft and rounded lines of ancient Indian ruins, silvered sage, a midnight-blue BMW, two men and one woman therein, another man unseen in the trunk—two dumpers and two dumpees—and nothing moving, everyone and everything as still as the empty universe before the Big Bang, except for the snow, a windless blizzard, which falls and falls as though a giant’s hand just shook the