Arlo didn’t speak the entire ride back to the garage, just held Dimitri’s hand in a death grip while he stared out a window far too obscured by ice to provide much of a view.
When they turned into the industrial park once more, Dimitri said, “If you want me to handle this, I can. You can just meet me in my car when I’m finished getting rid of him.”
Arlo shook his head, finally turning to look at Dimitri. “No. No way. The last time you tried to save me, I lost you for years. You can’t just keep cleaning up my messes.”
Dimitri frowned. “It’s our mess. You were defending me. He was trying to kill me.”
Arlo gave him a suspicious look. “You probably could have defended yourself,” Arlo said. “I just panicked.”
Dimitri thought back to that moment. “Honestly, I couldn’t get any leverage. If he’d slit my throat, I wouldn’t have been able to stop him. You saved me. So, nobody is cleaning up anybody else’s messes. We’re in this together. Okay?”
Arlo gave a stilted nod. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
Dimitri scanned the streets, noting not even the homeless roamed at this time of the morning. As they pulled into the parking lot of the warehouse, the anemic glow of the streetlamp was the only light. The windows at the top of the bay door revealed nothing inside but inky blackness.
Dimitri squeezed Arlo’s hand one last time before he hopped out of the car and punched in the number to open the place up, jogging back to the car and hopping in while they waited for the door to crawl slowly upward.
Dimitri’s headlights revealed the interior a strip at a time. When the door was a quarter of the way open, Dimitri frowned, his heart pounding a little faster. They should have been able to see the tires of the Mercedes. Maybe he’d pulled it farther into the space than he’d thought?
He heard Arlo swallow hard beside him, then felt him grip his wrist. The entire concrete floor was visible now. There was no Mercedes.
Arlo’s gaze jerked to Dimitri in confusion. “Where is it?”
Dimitri studied the recesses of the space like it was an optical illusion, like the car had to linger behind some false wall. “I don’t know.”
Arlo’s voice shook as he asked, “Did your mom have it moved?”
Dimitri shook his head. “She would have told me if she’d done that.”
Wouldn’t she? Maybe she was trying to teach Dimitri some kind of life lesson to make sure he never chose violence again. She had no way of knowing he hadn’t chosen violence the first time.
“Well, Holden didn’t crawl out of the trunk with a gaping wound in his skull and drive off,” Arlo said, his voice climbing. “Did he?” The last part of his sentence sounded desperate, like he was hoping Holden had actually risen from the dead and driven himself home.
“No.”
“Do you think the cops found the car and took it? Do you think this is a trap?” Arlo jerked around to look behind them. “Are they watching us?”
Dimitri considered the possibility before dismissing it. “If the cops found the car, this would be a crime scene. We would have seen the lights and heard the sirens a mile away.”
“Are you sure?” Arlo asked.
“Yes. I’m positive,” he lied.
He picked up his phone from the console between them, pulling up his mother’s number and hitting send.
She answered on the second ring. “It took you long enough. Did you stop for breakfast?”
“Did you move the body?” he asked, in lieu of a polite greeting.
There was a long pause on the other side of the line. “What?”
The tone of his mother’s voice unnerved him. “Did you move the body? The car? Is this some kind of life lesson? Because, if it is, I think you could have saved it. My life of crime is over.”
“Dimitri, what are you talking about?”
Dimitri’s stomach churned. “The car… It’s gone.”
“Gone?” she echoed.
Was this some kind of game? “Disappeared. Evaporated. Dematerialized. Whatever you want to call it, Mom. The car’s gone.”
“Christ,” she muttered almost to herself. “Don’t move a muscle. I’ll call you back.”
Then his mother hung up on him for the second time that night. When Dimitri glanced at Arlo, he said, “She didn’t move the car, did she?”
Dimitri shook his head. “No.”
Lights appeared in the rearview mirror, temporarily blinding Dimitri. For a split second, Dimitri thought Arlo was right, that they’d driven right into a sting operation, but he reminded himself that it wouldn’t be one cop in an unmarked police car that came for them. Holden was a judge’s son. They would have had SWAT there if they knew what they’d done.
Time stretched as the car pulled to a stop dangerously close to their bumper, ensuring they couldn’t retreat. Dimitri watched in the side-view mirror as the driver’s side door pushed open and a large silhouette in a heavy coat exited, ambling towards them with little urgency.
“What is happening? Who is that?” Arlo snapped.
Dimitri shook his head. “I don’t know, but let me do the talking.”
Before Arlo could reply, knuckles rapped against the glass. Dimitri cursed himself for not carrying a weapon in his car before he slowly lowered the driver’s side window. Of all the things Dimitri expected, it wasn’t the young woman’s face that appeared behind the frosty windowpane.
She was young, probably not even thirty. She had bright pink hair, and when she stood at her full height, Dimitri realized the woman was not large but heavily pregnant.
What the fuck? “Can we help you?”
“Nope. I’m here to help you.” She handed him an envelope. “Go to this address. Don’t tell anybody. Especially not your mother.”
“What is happening here?” Dimitri asked.
The girl gave him a bright smile, like this was the most normal thing in the world. “Don’t waste time with questions I’m not going to answer. I would hurry. It’s almost dawn.”
With that, she gave a jovial wave and waddled back to her car, slowly pulling away and driving into the night, as much of a mystery as she was when she’d arrived.
“I feel like we’ve entered the fucking Twilight Zone,” Dimitri muttered.
Arlo chewed on his lower lip before asking, “What do we do?”
What could they do? Whoever was on the other side of the note had Holden’s car and his body. They held all the cards. They couldn’t just forget about it and go home.
“We go to that address. What choice do we have?”
Arlo released a shuddery breath. “None, I guess.”
Arlo had plenty of time to cycle through the five stages of grief on their forty-five minute drive from one side of the city to the other. There was something weirdly fitting about driving down a dark, empty interstate together. It felt…final. Fatalistic. Like maybe they were doomed from the start.
He’d tried to convince himself this wasn’t happening. That he was dead, and this was hell, and he would now get everything he had coming to him for beating a man’s head in with a brick. No matter how much that man deserved it.