Page 126 of I Will Ruin You

She looked. At the far end of the parking lot she saw what looked to be a pickup truck and a black car and at least three people standing around.

“That must be them!” Bonnie said. “Has to be!”

Trent hit the brakes. If he didn’t slow way down, he’d roll the car making the turn into the parking lot. He still ended up taking it too quickly, and the steering wheel whipped back and forth in his hands once he’d made the turn, and it took a moment for him to regain control. If Bonnie was at all worried that he was going to get them killed, she showed no sign.

“It’s Richard!” she cried.

Trent saw him, too, standing there by the black car with a man and a woman. Trent had been crossing the lot at a good clip when he thought better of it and slowed to a crawl.

“What are you doing?” Bonnie said.

“We don’t know what we’re getting into here. We’ve found them, we know where they are. We should wait for Marta and—”

Bonnie shouted. “She’s pointing a gun at—”

The windshield shattered. Bonnie screamed as shards of glass littered the dash and fell into their laps.

Trent cranked the wheel hard and hit the gas.

“Goddamn you, sis,” Marta said under her breath as she ran for her car.

Bonnie had never listened to her when they were kids, so why, Marta asked herself, should things be any different now? But this was a life-or-death situation, and Bonnie had no idea what she might be getting herself into. Marta hoped, if she put on the siren and broke every Milford speed limit, she could get to Walnut Beach before Bonnie and the principal.

She got in her car and tore out of the Lodge High parking lot without telling anyone where she was going, but once she was on the way she got on the radio to tell the dispatcher that the suspect in the school shooting might be at Walnut Beach, but that any cars responding would need to exercise extreme caution.

Once she’d made her call, she wondered whose phone Richard—if it even was Richard—had used to text Bonnie. They’d never found Billy Finster’s, nor had they been able to track it. Marta was also thinking about those chicken wings that had been left at the scene, how the manager at the wing joint said a guy driving a pickup truck had waited for them at the shop.

Maybe, Marta mused, Billy Finster’s killer was Herb Willow’s killer.

She was on Viscount now, heading south. Once she had passed the seniors residence on the right, she was able to get her first view of the Walnut Beach parking lot. Something was going on. At that far end sat a dark car and a pickup, and midway in the lot, heading in that direction, was the Lexus she’d seen Trent and Bonnie driving away in.

She heard what sounded like a muffled gunshot.

The Lexus veered wildly.

Sixty

Richard

It all happened very fast.

Andrea fired at Trent’s car, shattering the windshield.

Bonnie. Please, God, don’t let it have hit Bonnie.

Trent cranked the wheel hard to his left, steering toward the water. The car did a complete turnaround and zoomed off in the opposite direction, but came to a stop a few seconds later. Did that mean Trent had been shot? Had Bonnie been shot and he’d stopped to see how she was?

Gerhard’s attention was on Andrea and the Lexus, which gave me an opportunity to do something I’d been wanting to do for some time:

Run.

Lanes of parking in that lot were divided with mini-boulevards adorned with tall trees, so I had intermittent cover as I ran, moving right and left, thinking, bizarrely, of that old Peter Falk–Alan Arkin movie The In-Laws, where Falk offers advice on dodging gunfire: “Serpentine!”

While my route might have looked haphazard, I was heading for Trent’s car to see whether, and how badly, he and Bonnie had been hurt. I glanced back over my shoulder a couple of times to see whether the drug dealers were in pursuit.

They weren’t coming after me. They were jumping into the Audi. Gerhard was getting in on the driver’s side, Andrea hopping in next to him. She barely had the door closed before the car started to move.

Someone else was coming to the party.