States of Grace by Mandy Miller (top 100 books of all time checklist .TXT) 📕

enough to see out the side window. High above, the concrete underbelly of a bridge. The deafening clanging of an electronic bell from above—the parking lot under the Seventeenth Street bridge. It’s ironic. This used to be one of my favorite spots for liquid lunch breaks. Only five minutes from the courthouse, and always deserted. Like tonight.

He flings open the back door and slits the ankle ties with a hunting knife, pulling me up by the wrists, the sharp plastic edges of the zip ties sawing into my flesh.

“That hurts, goddammit!”

Holding the gun on me with one hand, he tosses an FLPD Official Business card on the dash with the other, and kicks the door shut. “Didn’t I already say, shut the fuck up?”

I refuse to move, and he presses the gun into my ribs. “You never were much good at taking orders, but now you’re gonna learn real fast. Move! And if you even think about kicking me in the nuts, I’ll blow your way-too-clever brains out.”

He marches me down a steel dock to a speedboat painted with FLPD Marine Patrol.

On board, he forces me into the chair to the left of the helm, cuts the wrist ties, and secures me to the chair with a pair of standard-issue handcuffs.

He pulls two FLPD hats from a grocery bag, and jams one onto my head. “Not exactly the high fashion you used to be accustomed to, but it’ll do. In case anyone gets close, which I doubt at this time of night.”

He puts his hat on. “And, one thing before we get going. Take it off.”

“What? Take what off?”

He points at Oscar.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” he says, with a whack to the side of my head.

Gun barrel resting on my temple, he unlocks the cuffs and watches as I press the pin mechanism on the inside ankle to release the leg, revealing my stump, sausage shaped and bound in white gauze.

He wrinkles his nose. “Shit, that is ugly.”

When I respond by spitting in his face, he strikes me in the shoulder with the butt of the gun.

Gritting my teeth, I stare down at Oscar, lying on his side like a fallen soldier, foot still inside my running shoe. I’ve spent months hating the damn thing, and now I want nothing more than to strap him back on where he belongs.

When Sonny snatches the contraption from the deck and hurls it into the water, I know without any modicum of doubt I could kill again—if I had to.

He double checks the line securing a Zodiac inflatable boat to the stern, unties the mooring lines from the pilings, and fires up the engine. “At least those six years in the Navy weren’t totally useless.” He glances overboard at Oscar bobbing like a piece of driftwood. “And at least I came back with all my parts.”

“You bastard!” I scream, my voice breaking into as many pieces as my heart. “If you’re going to kill me, why don’t you just do it here?”

He eases the throttle forward. “Because that would be messy. And I don’t like messes.”

We slide through the no-wake zone in silence, the moon a golden gong high in the night sky, the warm breeze like silk drawn over my skin. A school of dolphins rises in arcs alongside the boat, their slick, silver faces grinning as they surface and dive again and again.

“There’ll be other lawyers who’ll take my place and they’ll find out the truth too.”

“Not a chance. This time the good doctor will make sure to find a hack who’ll be a little more cooperative with his…” he raises his hands off the wheel to make air quotes with his index fingers, “his goals.”

“Money can buy anything these days, right?”

He sniffs the salt air. “I see it as a win-win-win. I get rich, Slim gets richer, and his Botox babes with big boobs are none the wiser.”

As he pilots the boat through the channel between two skyscraper-sized cruise ships docked in Port Everglades, the seemingly unconnected details—everything I know and what I don’t—assemble themselves in my mind, into the whole truth, as obvious now as the fact that I’m not getting out of this alive.

Sonny and Slim are partners.

An involuntary gasp escapes my mouth.

“You got it now? I knew you could figure it out. And that’s why we’re taking this little cruise.”

Choking back the impulse to vomit, I focus on the towers of swaying royal palms encircling John Lloyd State Park, an isthmus of land lapped by shallow azure waters where manatees like to play, and teenagers get up to no good.

“And you know where we’re going, don’t you?”

I do, but I’m not about to give him the satisfaction.

At the cut of the Intracoastal and the open ocean, he slams the throttle forward and we surge ahead, leaving behind a bubbly, chevron-shaped wake. This boat’s nowhere near as fast as the monster cigarette boat Manny bought without telling me, but it’s plenty fast enough for what Sonny has in mind.

I yank on the steel cuffs, hoping the chair rails might detach from the seat back, but knowing they won’t give an inch. What good would it do anyway? Even if I were able to launch myself off the side, I’d be fish food in no time. They never tell the tourists about the sharks, but they’re out there.

Keep your wits about you. Keep your wits about you!

I repeat the mantra again over and over in my head. It had been my father’s advice for almost any occasion. New school? Keep your wits about you. New job? Keep your wits about you. Backpacking through the Himalayas? Just keep your wits about you, and don’t eat anything from a street vendor. Going to a war zone? You know how to keep your wits about you, Grace. You’ll be fine. Percy’s wits had kept him alive in more than one dark corner of the earth, a topic he rarely spoke of, even when I begged. But