“I’ve got something that can take the edge off.”

I look up through a haze of smoke and bullshit.

The guy has a crooked smile and he’s too thin. His baseball cap is angled sideways. He looks like an idiot.

“Fuck off.”

He doesn’t fuck off. He sits down next to me on the couch. The cushion under his ass is worn through to the foam padding. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” He jerks his jaw in the direction of my leg.

I don’t want to talk about how much it hurts. I don’t want to talk about the dull throb that settles into a stinging ache if I walk from the couch to the fucking bathroom. I don’t want to talk about how there is no fucking foot but the toes feel cramped, curled under. I can’t get them to release. And the throbbing guilt in the center of my chest. It’s like a stab wound. If I had been paying attention…

“I can see it hurts,” he says. “I promise. I can take the edge off.”

“You can go away.”

“Alex.” Another guy cuts in from the side of the couch. “Delivery by three.”

“I’ve got it,” says the asshole who won’t leave me alone. I guess his name is Alex. He turns his attention back to me. “Look. You give me a ride, I’ll give you something that’ll make it easier to handle.” He’s got an accent. It’s faint, but it comes out in the consonants. “It’ll be like the pain is on a separate island.”

I look across the couch at him. Pale blue eyes. Light hair. I don’t trust him.

The pain moves another inch up my leg. It’s taking on more ground.

I am already ruined.

“One ride?”

He grins. “Maybe two. It’s worth it, right?”

* * *

It’s more than two rides.

After the first one, Alex presses two little pills into my hand and congratulates me. “You’re about to be a new man.”

He’s right.

It doesn’t erase the pain in my leg. It pushes it to a separate island, just like he said, across a river from my real life. For the first time since that day in the Humvee, I can think.

I think myself right into a neat little box, where what I’m doing for Alex is fine. I never ask him what he’s doing at the houses we visit in the boroughs. I never look at the people he meets. I pick him up at his place and I drop him back off. That’s it.

Sometimes, his wife comes along with us. She wears a thin silver band around her left ring finger and hardly speaks. Her name is Kate.

Alex pays me in pills, and in my newly clear-headed state, I figure out that I’m not going to be able to live on pills forever. So I take a job at Killon, manufacturing windows, and give him rides at night.

This has two effects. The first is that I’m fucking tired. The second is that the little pills don’t work as well as they used to. I bargain with him. I need three. Then four.

On the sixteenth ride, I turn off the car when he gets in. Kate climbs into the backseat, the passenger side, and says nothing.

“What are you doing?” He shrugs his jacket up to his neck. “It’s freezing out. Turn on the car.”

“Pills first.”

He shakes his head. “You know that’s not how it goes.”

“That’s how it goes today.” I’m banking on the fact that he doesn’t have time before his delivery to get another ride. I’m banking on it because the pain has crawled all the way up into the back of my neck, an electric line from my foot to my head, and I can’t think straight. I need the pills. It can’t wait.

Alex sighs. “Two now, two after.”

“All of them, right now.”

He must hear the desperation in my voice because he reaches into his pocket for a folded napkin and drops them into my hand. One, two, three, four. I knock them back with the remains of a coffee I bought on the way out here. It’s already cold.

I turn the car on.

“Where are we headed?”

He names a place on the Upper East Side and I sigh. It’s almost two in the morning. This is going to take fucking forever.

We’ve only gone about fifteen blocks—still on the Queens side of the bridge—when a familiar patter-patter starts hitting on the top of the car.

Sleet.

Alex cranes his neck and looks out the window. “Shit.”

“It’s not good.”

It’s icy, coating the road and the windshield. At the next intersection, I tap on the brakes and the front wheels jerk sideways. I correct it, but it still takes longer than I expected to stop.

Alex has his hand on the door handle. “Fuck, man.”

“It’s fine.”

This is his moment to call it off. I’m sure as hell not going to. I got what I came for, so I’m in no position to back out now. And even though I make it a point to know as little as possible about Alex, I’ve overheard some things. Namely that his full name is Alexei Sokolov, and he’s got some shady fucking ties to a Russian underground group.

I push that fact out of my mind. I don’t know anything.

We move through the intersection and the sleet intensifies. The pain in my leg is receding, moving out to low tide, and my head clears. The more it clears, the more I know one thing: we shouldn’t be driving right now. It’s the end of February, when the weather is volatile in New York City, and this kind of shit is no joke.

It’s a long way from here to the Upper East Side.

A long fucking way.

I grip the wheel tighter and flick my eyes up to the rearview mirror. Kate sits in the back, staring out the window. What little light there is from the streetlights reflects off her face. She sits with her hands in her lap. Why does she go along with Alexei? On all the rides I’ve given him, she’s gone on at least half, and she never gets out of the car.

The sleet pummels the road, the roof of the car, everything, and the wipers can’t keep up. I stop at the next intersection and squint toward the stoplight. It looks red.

Kate says something from the backseat. I’m not paying attention, so I don’t catch the words. I do catch that there’s a note of alarm in her soft voice.

“It’s going to be quick,” Alexei says. “Then we’ll go home.”

I will the sleet to clear so I can see the fucking stoplight.

Is that a flicker of green?

Shit.

I wait.

It cycles through the colors again.

There—that must be yellow, and then red. It must be.

The sleet only gets heavier as we wait for green.

Alexei gets impatient, tapping his fingers on the dash.

I’m not totally sure it’s changed when he brings his palms together, a sharp clap. “Let’s go. Green light. Get out of here.”

“I’m going.”

I step on the gas and the car lurches forward into the intersection. It’s a good thing it’s so late. Minimal traffic.

Which is why it surprises me when the headlights blaze on the passenger side of the car.

“Fuck,” Alexei yells. “Fuck.”

I gun it, but the wheels scramble for purchase on the road. Military focus kicks in. I don’t turn the wheel—that won’t do us any good. We have to get out of here. We have to go forward. I stomp on the accelerator again but the wheels spin.

He doesn’t see us.

He doesn’t see us.

The lights bear down, one, two… I give one more desperate step on the accelerator. The car careens forward. Kate screams.

It’s not enough.

The truck—it’s huge, it has to be a truck—slams into the back half of the car and we start spinning, a violent torque that slams my head against the driver’s side window. I hear ragged breathing, the scraping of ruined metal, and then we collide with something. A building? A mailbox? The breathing cuts out in a gurgle that I’d recognize anywhere.

Alex sucks in a breath in the passenger seat and I pick up my head. Headache. Fuck. Something hot is on my cheek. I put my fingers to my cheekbone and they come away wet and red.

He’s shouting something, but the sound rattles uselessly around in my brain. Alex shoves his full weight against the passenger door and it springs open. The sound of sleet gets louder. I watch him go to the back door, but the back door no longer exists in a way we’d think of as a door. It’s crumpled into a mess.

So is Kate.

He dives back into the front and kicks me in the face on his way over the shitty center console. Sleet from his boots is everywhere.

In the backseat, he sits beside her, his chest heaving. He touches her face. He fumbles for her seatbelt and somehow gets it undone. Then, ever so gently, he puts his arm around her shoulder. When he pulls her body to him, her head lolls to the side like a broken doll.

She’s gone.

“Kate,” he breathes, and I look away. The sound of his voice is too intimate.

“Kate, it’s all right.” He takes a deep breath. “Kate?”

I open the door and half-slip, half-stumble out of the car.

I’m halfway down the block, dialing 9-1-1, when I hear Alexei start to howl.