She had almost forgotten that Connor hated the police. He thought they were idiots and had never forgiven them for failing to find his mom and brother’s killer.

Except for my uncle, he’d said. He’s all right. Briggs had been living in Chicago when Connor’s family was killed. Connor had told Dea his uncle wasn’t supposed to have worked his mom’s case—he was too close to it, according to his superiors—but had insisted, vowing to learn the truth for his brother’s sake. Because of his uncle’s influence, Connor had ultimately been absolved, at least formally. There just wasn’t enough evidence to pin the murder on him, even if there was no evidence to pin it on anyone else, either. He’d told her all this on the drive back from the Fright Festival, when they’d had to pull over because of the rain, and she’d been desperate to ask whether it was true what people said about Will Briggs and his dad and the guitar—she didn’t see how someone good could do something so terrible.

She thought of her mother, and all the midnight running away, and the frauds. Maybe people were more complicated than she thought.

Connor exhaled heavily. “No way in,” Connor said. One of the cops, starkly visible in the brightly lit interior of the hut, had a paperback bent across his knee—a crossword puzzle book?—but the other one, with the face of a hound dog left too long without its owner, watched them as they drove past. Dea hunched down in her seat, though she knew she couldn’t possibly be seen.

Then she spotted it: at the very edge of the lot, a ruined sculpture of metal, broken lines of steel and singed rubber. Her heart caught in her throat. Connor had prepared her for this but still, she couldn’t believe it: the car, her mom’s car, was folded nearly in half. Its doors gaped open; she imagined they no longer closed correctly. Or maybe the cops had needed to wrench the doors from their hinges to get her out. Two tires were completely blown out, so the car listed like a ship in shallow water. She hadn’t realized until now how lucky she was to be alive. She felt the sudden, wild impulse to cry, to call her mom up, to tell her she was sorry. Her mom loved that car.

“There it is.” Her voice, amazingly, was steady. She stubbed a finger into the glass, even though Connor kept his eyes on the road. “I see it. It’s right there. Next to the jeep.” There were fewer than two dozen cars in the impound lot, scattered seemingly at random, many of them still papered with bright orange parking tickets or fitted with a metal boot, like a monster’s giant teeth, around one wheel.

“Did you hear me, Dea? I said there’s no way in. They have guards posted for a reason.”

The lot was fenced on three sides and backed up on the station: a long, low building, jointed in several places where it had undergone expansion, so the effect was of a lumpy gray caterpillar tacked to earth. On the far side of the lot, next to the Dumpsters, three cops were standing, smoking, in the narrow wedge of light carved out by a propped-open service door. She saw the flare of cigarettes, like the distant glow of fireflies.

“Through the station,” Dea said. Connor was hooking another right, circling back around toward the front.

His eyes went to hers in the rearview mirror. “What?”

She looked away. She didn’t like the mirror, and didn’t like thinking of what she had last seen reflected in it. “There’s a way into the lot through the station. I saw cops on smoke break.” He said nothing. “You could get in. You could ask to see your uncle.”

“Even if he hasn’t heard you pulled a disappearing act by now,” Connor said pointedly, “I’ve never once come to see him at work. Don’t you think he’ll be suspicious?”

“Make up a story. Tell him you were with Gollum and got a weird message from me. Tell him you went to the hospital and I wasn’t there. Or don’t tell him anything. All you need to do is get in. Find a back door. Grab the money and get out. I would do it myself, if I could.”

Connor was quiet for a moment. They had turned off the service road and were bumping around toward the main entrance again, traveling down a spit of a dirt lane barely wider than the chassis. “Where’s the money?” he said quietly.

“In the passenger seat,” she said. “There’s a hole under the seat cushion, and a stocking inside of it. It should be there. It was the last time I checked, anyway.”

Dea once again stretched out on the backseat, as Connor angled the car into the lot. She felt suddenly exposed. Every few feet, as they passed under a streetlamp, a bright disk of light swept over her. She eased down into the narrow space between seats, where it was shadowed, where she would be almost entirely concealed from view.

Connor parked and turned off the engine. Voices vibrated thinly through the windows. How many cops worked the county? Ten? Twenty? More? How many of them knew—or thought they knew—about Dea and her mom?

“Stay here.” Connor spoke quietly, without turning his head. “I’m locking the car. Don’t open up for anyone.”

“Okay,” she whispered back. She was seized by a momentary terror—she didn’t want him to go and leave her alone in the dark. But it was the only way.

He was gone.

Her legs soon began to cramp, but she was afraid to move. There seemed to be a constant flow in and out of the station, a rhythm of voices and doors and conversations abruptly interrupted or swallowed by distance. She tried to picture where Connor was and what he was doing—he must be in the building now, maybe even heading to see his uncle, scouting the building and its various exits on the way—but she was too nervous to be very imaginative, and a vision of Connor sitting in a plain white room behind two-way glass kept intruding.

Or maybe—the idea came to her so starkly, in a flash, she went breathless—maybe he would sell her out. He might regret helping her.

She dismissed the idea as soon as it came to her, but the worry stayed with her. Her breath crystallized and dispersed, but sweat moved down her spine and pooled under her arms. She fantasized briefly about showers, running water, soap-scented steam rising from a bath. Her mother had always drawn the best baths, the surface knit with bubbles as thick as clots of cream, heavenly smelling.

She imagined she might wake up and find this had all been a dream.

No. A nightmare.

More minutes passed. She was sick with hunger, anxiety, and exhaustion. It felt like she had left the hospital days ago, though it had only been a matter of hours. She couldn’t remember whether she’d eaten any lunch. Her right foot was falling asleep. She tried to adjust her position, and caught a textbook with her elbow, wincing as it thunked to the floor, and several papers, water-warped and ringed with coffee marks, fluttered bird-like after it. But no one heard; no one came. Her thighs were shaking now. She eased backward, shifting her weight off her legs, so she could sit down.

Where the hell was Connor? She had no sense of how long it had been. Ten minutes? Twenty? How long would she wait? She could spend the night here, if she had to. But if Connor had been caught, she’d need to move eventually. She wished he’d left the keys. She couldn’t possibly stroll out of the car, dressed the way she was dressed, and hope to make it even a minute without attracting someone’s attention.

There was another volley of voices outside, a rapid-fire back-and-forth she couldn’t understand, and then suddenly the driver’s side door opened.

It was Connor. Even though he had his back to her, she could tell that he was shaking a little from the effort of keeping it together.

“Did you . . . .?” she whispered.

“Shhh,” he said. He turned on the engine. Then: “Yes.” A second later, an envelope thudded at her feet. She pulled it into her lap. All there. Two thousand dollars, maybe a little more.