Shooting Glasses pulls a Dr Pepper can up to spit into, being sure to break the saliva string off before guiding the can back to the cupholder.
“I like how your eyes squint right when you’re spitting,”
Jade tells him. “It’s like you know how gross that is.”
Shooting Glasses turns the parking lights off, stranding them in the darkness. But it does make the fence go away, which is pretty cool.
“So why do you want to kill everybody?” he asks.
“Some more than others,” Jade tells him.
“No names, no names.”
“Said the car thief.”
Shooting Glasses grins a guilty grin.
“You know that kid they pulled from the lake last week?”
Jade says, patting the dashboard lovingly. “Bet his prints are somewhere in here. Hers too.”
“Her who?”
“His girlfriend,” Jade says. “She’s dead out there too.
Probably sunk, down in Drown Town.”
“That’s the old town that the reservoir—”
“Lake,” Jade says. “Yeah.”
“I heard one of them over there talking about it,” Shooting Glasses says. “The—that astronaut one?”
“Mars Baker? He’s the lawyer one, I think.”
“He said he’s going to take a remote-control submarine down there, get some video.”
Jade looks into her lap, both amused and disappointed.
“Some things should probably just stay buried,” she says.
“You saying you wouldn’t watch that video?”
“I’d watch it until that girlfriend’s decomposed face bobbed into the camera’s eye, yeah.”
“That’s from Jaws,” Shooting Glasses says, checking her eyes to be sure he’s right.
“Good enough for Spielberg, good enough for me,” Jade says back.
Shooting Glasses just sits there. Which is to say, he’s not leaving, not sloping off to whisper to his buds about how weird this girl is with all her throwback references, all the horror, all the gore. Jade’s face heats up, and, praying her voice won’t crack, and only saying it after she’s gone over it and over it in her head, she says, “I could like you, I think.”
When Shooting Glasses looks over for more, the Dr Pepper can to his lower lip, she adds in quick, “As somebody to talk to, I mean.”
“Where was I your last four years?” he sort of quotes.
“Why’d you come over, shine your headlights like that?”
Jade asks. “Did you know it was me?”
“There’s supposed to be a bear around. Bears like trash.”
“This one likes human innards, supposedly.”
“Supposedly?”
“It’s all setup, distraction, red herrings.”
“Thought there were just trout up this high.”
Jade has to grin a tolerant grin about this.
“I’m not supposed to be there on Saturday, even,” she says all wistfully, changing direction.
“Independence Day? The movie on the lake thing they do?”
“We do.”
“You do.”
Jade can feel Shooting Glasses’s eyes on her again. “Lot of people are going to, you know,” she says, looking up to see how he takes this: “Die.”
“Said the girl looking for murder weapons in the junk pile.”
“No, you’re right,” Jade has to admit. “I’m definitely a suspect, the reddest herring.”
“Better than being a trout.”
Jade hits his arm with the back of her hand and he rolls with it into his door, making a show of keeping his spit can level.
“You told that old sheriff about this big wilderness massacre only you know about?” he asks.
“Doesn’t believe me.”
“Because of your hair, your… history.”
“Among other bullshit reasons.”
“Your taste in movies?” Shooting Glasses guesses.
“My good taste in movies,” Jade says, flashing her eyes at him and also, for a snapshot of an instant, seeing the two of them through the windshield: two kids playfighting, making eyes behind the feeble jabs.
And she doesn’t even know his real name.
Shooting Glasses holds his hands up in surrender.
“But if it’s not you,” he says, running with this just to keep her talking, it feels like, “then who? Is it that… who were you talking about? That janitor who caught fire? Cropsy?”
“Cropsy’s strictly Staten Island,” Jade says. “That’s New York City.”