Chapter 95 A Ticket
Molly was doing ninety on a road with a sixty limit, she knew it and couldn't bring herself to care.
The town moved past the windows in the dark, and she kept both hands on the wheel and her eyes forward. She did not look in the rear-view mirror at the two bodies lying across the back seat. She had arranged them as best she could before she'd gotten in, Zion along the seat and Enzo on the floor behind the passenger side, and she had covered them with the emergency blanket her mother kept folded under the driver's seat.
Her mind was doing several things at once. The part of it that was still processing the kitchen and the dust and her mother's voice saying to dispose of them was running on a loop that she kept interrupting because the loop was not useful. The part that was trying to figure out where to go was more productive but not producing results fast enough, and the part that was calculating what her mother was going to do when she came downstairs and found three people missing was producing results she did not want.
Her mother would call the police. That was the first move, it was what any parent would do, and she would give them the car's plate number because the car was gone and that was the most trackable thing. Which meant the car was a problem that needed to be solved quickly and the solution needed to not involve Molly standing anywhere near it when it happened.
She eased her foot off the accelerator when the speedometer hit ninety-five.
Blue lights in the rear-view mirror.
Her heart leaped to her throat and she pulled over immediately, hands gripping the wheel, and sat very still while the patrol car pulled up behind her and the officer got out.
She wound the window down.
The officer was young, early thirties, unhurried. He looked at her face and then at the empty front passenger seat and then at her face again.
"You in a hurry?" he said.
"I'm so sorry," Molly said, and she put everything she had into sounding like a teenager who had been distracted rather than a teenager transporting two unconscious werewolves under an emergency blanket. "I wasn't paying attention to the speed. It won't happen again."
The officer looked at her for a moment. He looked at the back seat and Molly's whole body went rigid and she breathed and waited.
The emergency blanket covered them. She had made sure of that.
"Licence," the officer said.
She produced it from the glovebox. He took it, looked at it, and handed it back.
"You're young to be out at this hour," he said.
"I know," Molly said. "My friends drank a little too much,” she gestured to the boys at the back before he could notice. “I'm heading home."
He looked through the glass at both boys in seatbelts and fast asleep, then at the road ahead, and then back at her. "Watch the speed."
"I will. I'm really sorry." He did write her a ticket though.
He went back to his car and she sat with her hands on the wheel until the blue lights moved away and then she sat for another thirty seconds before she was confident her hands would work properly if she put the car in gear.
She pulled back onto the road and drove at exactly the speed limit for the next three miles.
‘Where to go? Where to go? Where do I even go?’
She turned the question over. Not home, that was obvious, her mother would be there or the police would be there, or both. Not a friend's house, because any friend she called at this hour would tell their parents and their parents would tell her mother. Not anywhere that required her to be on record, a hotel, a petrol station with cameras.
The thought arrived the way inconvenient thoughts arrived, sideways and uninvited.
School.
She almost rejected it immediately because it was the kind of idea that sounded worse the longer you looked at it, but then she looked at it longer and found it was actually functional. School was empty at this hour, it was a building she knew the layout of completely, and there was a back entrance on the east side that she had heard about secondhand from people who used it to sneak in late, a door that sat in a corner where the camera coverage had a gap. She had never used it but she knew which door it was.
It was also the last place her mother would look for her, which was the most important criterion.
She turned toward the school.
The back entrance was exactly where she remembered. A fire door set into the east wall in the gap between the sports hall and the main building, covered from above by a section of roof overhang that put it in permanent shadow. She had parked the car two streets away and walked, and she stood at the door now and found the edge of it with her fingers and applied pressure at the specific point that people who used it had described, and it gave.
She went back for Zion first.
He was heavier than he looked, which was a thing she had not accounted for, and dragging him from the car to the door and through the door and down the corridor took considerably longer and made considerably more noise than she had planned. Her trainers squeaked on the floor with every step and she kept stopping and listening and then continuing, and by the time she got him to the gymnasium and laid him against the wall she had sweated through her jacket and her arms were shaking.
Enzo was worse.
He was larger than Zion and the angle was different because he had been on the floor rather than the seat and getting him out required a manoeuvre that she was not built for, and she may have let his head knock against the door frame once and she decided not to feel guilty about it, given everything.
She let it hit against the frame a second time before she got him inside.
She went back and locked the car and left it where it was. That part of the plan came later.
In the gymnasium, she looked at both of them lying against the wall and thought about the twenty-four hours her mother had mentioned, and thought about what either of them would do when they woke up with their full faculties restored. The answer to that was not something she wanted to be in the room for without some kind of precaution.
She found the equipment storage at the back of the gymnasium and dug through it until she found jump ropes. Several of them, long ones. She dragged them out and stood over Enzo, looked at him, and took a breath.
She didn't like him. That was the plain truth of it, arrived at not from the events of tonight specifically but from the accumulation of everything she'd heard and seen and processed since Grace had first told her about this world and the people in it. Enzo Torres had not been kind to her friend. He had been cold and withholding and complicated in the ways that men were complicated when they wanted something from you and resented wanting it, and from the outside that was the version Molly had been given and it was not a version she felt inclined to revise.
But she didn't want him dead. That was the other plain truth, the one that had gotten her out of the car in the first place. Her mother had said dispose of with the domestic calm of a woman talking about old newspapers, and something in Molly had taken that phrase, held it at arm's length, and refused to be a part of it, regardless of who they are.
She tied Enzo first because she was more afraid of him and wanted it done.
She used three ropes, one at the wrists behind the pillar and two around the torso at different heights, and she tested each one and retested and was satisfied they would hold. She looked at his unconscious face and thought about the way he'd looked at Grace in Zion's retelling, the complicated and unwilling regard of a man who had feelings he hadn't asked for and was managing them badly.
She moved to Zion.