She came out of the food court like the sun had been waiting for her.
Short brown hair. White shirt. Phone never away. Mid height, the kind of person you would lose in a crowd and then find again by the tilt of her head. She did not look for danger. She looked for a logo. I popped the sliding door and the bleach smell rolled out. She wrinkled her nose and got in anyway. Faith in branded metal. That is how Saturdays work until they do not.
“Luis running late?” Eyes on the screen.
“Held up. I am covering.”
“Whatever. That place was a zoo.”
She sat behind me without buckling. The phone painted her face in cold light. I pulled into the four lane with a horn explaining my hesitation, clipboard on the dash, Luis’s handwriting still the last true thing in the van.
I had no gun. I had towels and a stolen afternoon and a witness who had not looked up. Every truck that passed felt like a jury. Every red light felt like a mouth about to speak my name.
The mall shrank in the mirror. Families kept being families. The sticky tree kept dripping. None of that belonged to me anymore. What belonged to me was a woman in a white shirt and a child latch I had tested with my own panic an hour earlier.
She typed. She sighed. She told someone in a message that Luis was late and some other guy was driving. I heard the tap of it. I did not tell her to stop. Stopping her too soon would have made me a person with a plan she could feel. I wanted her bored. Bored people do not memorize faces.
A bus pulled alongside us at a light, faces in windows, a kid pressing a nose to glass. The kid looked into the van and then at a phone. I looked at the light. When it went green I took the lane like a man who had somewhere legal to be.
“You live near Maple?” I asked, because silence had a shape now.
“By the old theater.”
I knew the old theater. Everyone did. The marquee had been empty so long the letters were a rumor. I did not turn toward it. I stayed on the four lane until stores thinned and trees began, then I took a side street to see if she would notice. She did not. The rectangle in her hand was a more convincing world than stains on a floor mat.