"No," Brooke said out loud, to nobody. "No, no, no, no, no."
Tyler never filled the tank. She should have known. Tyler never filled anything. He had people for that. He had a driver and an assistant and a man who came to his house to wash the car on Sundays, and one of them, in theory, should have filled the tank before he left for Miami, and none of them had, because none of them had been told to, because Tyler had not thought about it, because Tyler had never in his life had to think about whether there was gas in his car.
She looked at the clock on the dashboard. Eight-twenty-one.
The arts district was eleven kilometers away. On the other side of the river. In the rain, at rush hour.
She pulled out her phone with shaking hands and searched for gas stations. There were dozens. But Tyler's car did not take just any gas. She knew that much. She had heard him complain about it, more than once, in the bored voice. It needs ninety-three, babe. At least ninety-three. You put the cheap stuff in there, it'll knock like a washing machine and the dealership'll charge me ten grand to clean the injectors. She scrolled through the list, squinting at the tiny print, looking for stations that listed premium fuel, and she found one, four kilometers away, almost exactly on her route, at the corner of Linwood and Fifth. An independent station. Four pumps. Premium available.
Four kilometers there. Then seven to the arts district. Nine kilometers of range.
It would be close. But it would work. It had to work.
She put the car in gear, and the engine snarled, and she pulled out of the parking space too fast and felt the rear tires slip on the damp concrete of the garage floor, and gasped, and gripped the wheel, and the car caught itself and shot forward up the ramp toward the gray square of daylight at the top, where the rain was falling on the street outside.
She did not see the speed bump at the top of the ramp until she was on it. The front of the car scraped on it with a horrible grinding crunch that she felt through the soles of her red patent-leather shoes. She screamed. Then she was out in the street and the rain was hitting the windshield and the wipers were thrashing back and forth and the car was roaring beneath her like an animal, and she was driving, too fast, through the gray wet morning, with her heart pounding so hard that she could feel it in her teeth.
Eight-twenty-four.
She drove the four kilometers to the corner of Linwood and Fifth in eleven minutes, which was much too long. There was traffic on the bridge. There was a delivery truck double-parked on Fifth with its hazard lights flashing. There was a school crossing, and a crossing guard in a yellow raincoat who held up her sign and stood in the middle of the road with what Brooke was certain was deliberate slowness while a line of small children in raincoats and rubber boots shuffled across in front of the orange car, staring at it with their mouths open. One of them waved. Brooke did not wave back. She sat with her hands clamped on the wheel and her red-painted nails digging into the leather and watched the fuel symbol flash and the range on the little screen tick down, eight kilometers, seven, six, and she thought about the woman from Paris sitting in the converted warehouse in the arts district looking at her watch, and she thought about the email from Gary without the smiley face, and she thought about her mother, and she felt the tears come up behind her eyes again, and she forced them back down, because if she cried now her eye makeup would run and she did not have time to fix it.
Eight-thirty-five.
The gas station came into view on the right, at the corner. A low concrete canopy held up on square pillars, its underside lit by rows of white lights that glared in the gray morning. Four pumps on two islands. A small convenience store behind them with neon signs in the windows advertising lottery tickets and cold beer and a two-for-one deal on energy drinks. A broken car wash. A puddle the size of a swimming pool spreading across the entrance from a blocked drain. And at the nearest pump, on the island closest to the street, a big, boxy, dark gray SUV, old and battered, with a dent in its rear bumper, standing alongside the pump with its fuel door open.
Brooke swung in off the street, through the puddle, sending a sheet of brown water up over the curb, and pulled up behind the gray SUV, and looked at the pumps.