You Believers Read Online Free PDF

cry, I’ll shoot.” She’d stand frozen beside him. Katy learned to chew her lip until it was bloody, but in time she learned not to make a sound.
    Katy glanced at Jesse, sitting easily and looking out the window as if he were just a guy on a road trip. She told herself she’d been through much bigger dangers than this. She was a bartender, had walked to her car in the back alley hundreds of times, had talked guys out of raping her more times than she could count. The key was to make yourself human—she’d read that in a psychology class.
    It had worked once when her car had broken down and she’d hitched a ride with a man who kept saying it’d be easy to rape her,leave her, and be long gone before she told. She looked him in the eye and said, “You won’t do that.” She told him she was on the way to the hospital, where her daddy was dying from a tumor in his head. She made the facts of her daddy’s suffering real in the air. And the guy believed her. He went silent and drove. He dropped her off at the hospital door and sped off before she thought to check his license plate. She was amazed. She had spun a story of her daddy’s pain to save herself when her daddy was already dead. He would have been proud of her lying like that to get to the hospital instead of ending up somewhere getting raped.
    Crossing through downtown, she looked up and saw the Cape Fear River bridge. Once she crossed that bridge, she’d be in farm country. There’d be hardly anyone around. Randy would laugh at the risk she was taking. And Frank, he’d just say it was one of Katy’s new adventures. Even Billy would like the cash. But her mother would be furious.
    “My mother,” she said thinking her mother could never hear about this.
    “What about your mother?”
    “Nothing,” she said. “My mother,” Katy said again, looking out at the suspension bridge she was about to cross. “My mother hates driving over bridges. She’s a nervous type, that’s all.”
    He laughed. “And look at you. You’re not nervous at all.”
    Katy headed up the ramp to the bridge over the Cape Fear River and saw the dark water swirling below. She’d heard stories of all those guys thinking they could swim the river. They got caught in the cross-currents of the river rolling out and the tidewaters of the sea rushing in. The churning force pulled them down in the river, so dark it was almost black with tannins from the vegetation that rotted on its shores. People drowned all the time in the current that whirled likea wheel. They got disoriented, couldn’t see which way was up, the water so thick and dark it sucked away all light.
    As the truck surged forward, the bridge seemed to shudder, but it was her own shaking inside. Her stomach clenched, and a flash of fear shot up her spine. She saw his hands now clenched in his lap while his face looked so easy and mild. She’d seen that expression of a man about to explode: face calm, body tensed. And that look just before they grabbed a beer bottle and broke it over someone’s head. And she knew it. This was bad. This was stupid.
    Slowly she reached under the seat for the little pocketknife she kept there, but all she’d ever used it for was to cut apples and cheese. She tried to slip it under her thigh to be ready. Maybe this was really bad.
    Jesse saw the move, reached across, snapped up her wrist, and squeezed. The truck veered into oncoming traffic, and she pulled back into her lane. A car horn blared; the driver gave her the finger and rushed by.
    He took the knife, put it in his pocket, and laughed. “What do you think you’re doing, girl? You could’ve killed us back there.”
    “I’ll give you the truck,” she said.
    “Really,” he said with a teasing little sound.
    “You can have it. I won’t call the cops. You drive to his granny’s house. Once we get across the river, just let me out. I’ll walk home.”
    He smiled. “Now, why would I make you do something like that? You’ll get