I zigzagged out of the trailer park using the landmarks I’d remembered-a peace sign made of minilights, a kids’ jungle gym, and finally the aluminum Christmas tree close to the entrance. I used the same strategy when I left the pockmarked road that had led to Oksana’s, trying to make my way back to the casino.
It should have been easier as the sun was coming up, but it wasn’t. Buildings and things I hadn’t seen thirty minutes earlier materialized and made me doubt my route selection. A convenience store came up on the right, a small gray shack that looked like a prefab army building with a blue neon Miller sign I would have remembered. It confirmed that I’d missed my turn. I hung a U-turn to slowly retrace my steps.
Jeez, it was a huge hotel-I could faintly see it in the distance through the morning haze-I just couldn’t seem to find the road that led there. I crawled back and stopped two hundred yards ahead of a turn I didn’t make, just in time to see a silvery blue sedan take a left and pull onto the long stretch of road that led to the trailer park. I hadn’t seen another vehicle since Oksana and I had left the casino and I was startled by the appearance of another car.
I told myself it was probably another waitress or pit boss who’d just finished his shift at the casino. All the same, I killed the lights and rolled into a hidden driveway. If the driver of the other car looked in his rearview mirror all he’d see was a dark bump behind a hemlock tree, not a nervous woman wondering if the two men who’d just driven by were Ukrainian mobsters.
All I could see were shadows. The driver’s silhouette was the larger of the two. But that could have been anyone-a woman in a fur coat, a guy in a down jacket-it didn’t have to be the Michelin Man. And just because he was on the road to Oksana’s place didn’t mean he was headed there. But I felt sure it was the men we’d seen at the casino, and they were looking for Oksana, or the two of us.
With the engine turned off all the heat had left the car and I sat there, a chill setting in, wondering what to do next. Do I go back to Oksana’s to see if she is okay? What could I do if she wasn’t?
Stacy Winters’s card was still floating around in the bottom of my bag, but by the time I found it, I’d talked myself out of calling her. What would I say? Two people I didn’t see may be visiting a person I barely know?
I started the car slowly, with a KISS. Key, ignition, seatbelt, signal. An old boyfriend told me that when he taught me how to drive and I still thought of it-a lifelong habit started by a boyfriend of a hundred days. By the time I got to signal, I saw the headlights of a car racing toward me. The same car, with the same two passengers. The stocky driver made the turn that I had missed minutes before and luckily he didn’t notice the Jeep backing out of the hidden driveway.
Rather than get on the road behind them, I kept my lights off and slowly navigated the rutted dirt road they’d just left until I pulled into the trailer park and found my way back to Oksana’s.
When I got there, she was gone.