Out of Aces (Betting Blind #2) by Stephanie Guerra

Author:Stephanie Guerra [Guerra, Stephanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B00Y3P6U9S
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2015-05-25T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I hadn’t really been doing the math when I told Nick I only needed two days off. One way in the car from Vegas to Seattle is sixteen hours if you go eighty the whole time. Eighteen if you’re driving the speed limit. I would have bought plane tickets, but they were more than a grand, and most flights were full anyway. So I had to leave way early in the morning on the thirty-first. I bought a box of Red Bull, mainlined two, and hoped for the best.

Great Basin Highway was like driving back in time to the cowboy days: big, twisted red-brown humps of land, endless white sky, and who knows—maybe even buffalo hiding somewhere. In Idaho, the forest got crazy thick, one of the last places in the country with more trees than people. I took a rest stop in Twin Falls. In the gas station there was a basket of decals: “You say potato, I say fuck you.” It cracked me up so hard, I had to get one.

Around the Oregon State line, the Red Bull stopped working. I’d been driving thirteen hours. To stay awake, I started to play this extremely screwed-up game where I’d pinch my arm as hard as I could while going seventy. The adrenaline rush would keep me up for a little while longer, and then I’d have to do it again.

Finally that stopped working, too. I pinched and didn’t get the adrenaline kick . . .

When I came to, I was heading straight for the guardrail. I got off the road and sat in my car in front of a tiny gas station on the Columbia River, shaking.

It was 5:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and I was four hours out of Seattle. I was so close, but I couldn’t keep going like this, or I’d get in an accident. I finally calmed down enough to get out of the car and walk inside. I stood in front of the energy-drink case. Black dots floated in front of my eyes as my brain went back and forth in slow motion. Which one? It seemed like a life or death decision.

“Looking for something?” asked the old lady behind the counter. Her gray hair was in a long braid, and she wore a white plastic apron that was way too big for her.

“Do you have anything stronger than Red Bull?” I asked. I pulled out a Monster and a Rockstar and tried to make sense of the backs. What if I drink them both?

“Those are the same as Red Bull,” she said.

“Oh.”

“You want what truckers use?” She squinted at me. She had so many wrinkles, she looked like one of those shriveled apple dolls at county fairs.

“Um . . . okay.”

The lady bent down and pulled something from under the counter. It was a little tin box with a picture of a puppy on the cover. She flicked it open with a thick yellow nail and fished out a couple of brown twisted things.

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