Seth was asleep against the window with his mouth open. He snored like a much bigger man.
Cooper’s head was in her lap and her pants were wet where he’d been drooling on her thigh. She didn’t move him. He was warm, and her hands were cold.
Marcus had his foot up on the dashboard again. Ann’s bandage was white and very clean. His toes stuck out the end of it, red and fat.
“Can you put that down,” Vlad said. “It smells.”
“It’s elevated. Doctor’s orders.”
“She said to elevate it. She did not say on the dashboard, where everyone can smell it.”
“Who’s everyone?” Marcus asked. “It’s a parking lot.”
It smelled like rotting eggs mixed with dog shit. Samantha was too tired to take a side.
She had been looking at the lot since they parked. When she walked Cooper there had been thirty-one cars, almost all of them up near the doors. Two rows behind them there was nothing but a pickup with a ladder rack at the far end.
A silver Nissan turned into the parking lot. It drove past all the empty spaces up by the doors and down the length of the lot, turned into the row two behind them, and parked two spaces to the left, facing the store.
Samantha leaned toward the window until she could see it in the side mirror. There were two people in the front seats, and a white barcode sticker on the corner of the back window. She waited for one of them to get out.
“There’s a car two rows back,” she said. “The silver one. It’s suspicious. Everyone else has parked as close to the doors as they can get. That one did a big loop around the parking lot before parking behind us. No one has gotten out.”
Vlad didn’t turn around. He looked in Marcus’s side mirror.
“It has a barcode on the window,” he said.
“It’s a rental,” Samantha said.
“So they’re tourists,” Marcus said. “Waiting for the pharmacy. Same as us.”
Marcus was probably right. She didn’t have a better idea. She moved over a few inches so she could keep the Nissan in the mirror.
Vlad watched it too. Then he went back to the tablet. Samantha decided that was good enough.
The two people in the Nissan sat. The woman in the passenger seat put her hair up in a ponytail.
“What time is it,” Samantha said.
“Eight forty-one,” Vlad said, without looking up.
The pharmacy opened at nine. Seth had said the Bactrim would take ten minutes once somebody was behind the counter. They could be back up the canyon by nine thirty.
Cooper sighed and rolled his eyes up at her without lifting his head.
The lights came on behind the pharmacy sign in the store window.
She nudged Seth, who woke up with a start. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the store.
“That’s me,” he said.
“I’ll come,” Samantha said.
“You’re on every television in America.”
“We don’t split up.”
“It’s a hundred yards,” Seth said. “You can watch me the whole way there. Nobody knows my face, and the prescription has my name on it. Ten minutes.”
Samantha looked in the mirror. The two people in the Nissan were still sitting there.
“Ten minutes,” she said.
Seth got out and shut the door. He bent down and said “Ten minutes” again through the glass and held up both hands with his fingers spread. Then he walked toward the store.
Samantha watched him go. He walked like his back hurt. He waited for a woman with a cart to go past, and then he went in through the automatic doors and she couldn’t see him anymore.
In the mirror both front doors of the Nissan opened.
The man got out first. He was in his fifties, in a Broncos sweatshirt and jeans, with a gut. He stretched with his hands in the small of his back. The woman came around the front of the car in black leggings and a puffy vest. She looked like she was going to a spin class.
They walked to the cart corral at the end of the row. The man pulled out a cart.
So they were shopping. Samantha let her breath out.
The man pushed the cart toward them instead of toward the store. The woman went the other way, around the end of the row, past the pickup with the ladder rack, so she was coming up on the passenger side.
They had been waiting for Seth to leave.
“Vlad,” Samantha said.
Vlad looked in the mirror. He shut the tablet off, put it into the black case on the floor between his feet, and closed the latches.
“Lock the doors,” he said.
“Marcus,” Samantha said. “Lock the doors. The button by your hand.”
“What?”
“By your hand. Now.”
Marcus found it. The locks went down all around the car with one loud thunk.
“What’s going on?” Marcus twisted around in his seat, and his face went white with the pain.
“Two people,” Samantha said. “From the silver car.”
Marcus looked. “Shit,” he said. “They recognized me.”
“No,” Vlad said.
There was blacktop on every side and a strip of grass with one small tree on it. Marcus couldn’t walk. The man with the cart was four cars away.
She moved Cooper’s head off her lap and climbed over the console into the driver’s seat. She hit her knee on the gear shift. She put her foot on the brake and pushed the start button.
Nothing happened. A message came up on the screen in the dash. It couldn’t find the key.
She looked in the cupholders and the console.
“Seth has the key,” she said. “Fuck.”
Vlad was watching the woman.
The man left the cart in the middle of the lane and walked up to her window. Up close he looked like somebody’s dad. He bent down and smiled at her through the glass.
“You’ve got a flat back there,” he said.
Samantha didn’t look at the tire. She looked at his hands. He tried the handle. The door didn’t open. He kept smiling.
Cooper sat up in the back seat and barked, loud, right next to Vlad’s head.
On the other side of the car the woman was at Vlad’s window. She had something small and black in her hand. She put it against the corner of the glass.
There was a small pop. The back window on Vlad’s side turned white all at once and fell into the car in little cubes, onto Vlad and Cooper.
The woman’s arm came in through the hole. Her hand felt down the inside of the door for the handle.
Vlad hit her arm with the black case. Cooper got her sleeve in his teeth and pulled. The woman didn’t make a sound. She found the handle and pulled it twice, and the back door swung open.
Samantha’s hands were shaking.
She put both hands flat in the middle of the steering wheel and leaned on the horn.
The noise was enormous. Up by the doors a woman loading paper towels into a minivan stopped and stared at them. A teenager in a green King Soopers apron came out pushing a line of carts and also stopped. The minivan woman held up her phone at them.
Samantha leaned harder on the horn.
The man didn’t run. He walked around the front of the Range Rover and came to the open back door on Vlad’s side. He put one knee on the seat in the broken glass and reached across Vlad, between the front seats, for Samantha.
His hand closed on the shoulder of her jacket.
Vlad shoved at his chest with both hands. Marcus was yelling “Help!” at the windshield, over and over.
Through the windshield Samantha saw Seth come out through the automatic doors with a white paper bag in his hand. He stopped. Then he started running across the lot toward them.
The man pulled. Samantha kept both hands on the horn.