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there for a long while. “So I took it. That was the wrong thing to do, but I took it.”
    “From the motel room? Money was just sitting there in the room?”
    “Yes, and I should have told you, okay? But I was worried. I mean, who leaves a thousand dollars in a motel except maybe a drug dealer? I should have told you. I’m sorry. But I didn’t know what you’d think—”
    He didn’t register her apology. He was looking at the money, counting all over again. He pinched the wad in his hand, squinted at it as though measuring its thickness. Then he said, “You say a
thousand
.” He spoke very slowly, and far more seriously than she had ever before heard. “So where’s the other five hundred?”
    —
    HE WAS ON the air in just over an hour, but they were heading away from the station. He had to get back to the motel, find the rest of the money, then get out again. The car burned through seventy, eighty, ninety on the straightaways, him screaming at her, asking why in hell’s name had she left five hundred dollars behind? He could not be late to his midnight spot. Could
not
! She had fucked everything up, fucked it clean up, and why was he always making up for her incompetence?
    She tried to read him, to figure out where the flying ball of his rant would land. She had to appear not too casual but not too wary, either. Whatever else, not scared, because that always made him worse. Slanted on the bench seat of the Buick, shoulder against the window, she stayed as far from him as she could without being accused of sulking, holding on to the seat with one hand, the door with the other. She didn’t want him to know she was worried by how fast he was driving so she held on lightly, as though her hands just happened to rest there. Meanwhile she watched the short distance between the car bumper and everything else in front of them. She tried to look up at the moon, a tonic of white stillness in the slate sky, to set all her thoughts there and ignore the speed of the trees and bushes and telephone poles flying past.
    Out on the highway, he skirted the traffic. “You better hope we don’t meet a cop!” he said. Always her fault, always. He glared hard at her, as though she were the reason for all his ills and every trouble in his otherwise tidy life.
    They skimmed the bed of a big semi, so close to its wheels she felt the suck of a vacuum pulling the side of the Buick. The shadow of the truck bed fell over them, the darkness covering her lap. A weight of gravity pushed against her shoulder, and she thought for one clear moment that her life was done now, that she would be taken by the truck as a field mouse is taken by an eagle.
    Craig jerked the Buick into the next lane. She breathed out hard as he pressed down the accelerator. She felt her stomach burn as he swerved into a third lane, then skirted up two cars and over once more.
    Now the highway dipped downward, with a long tongue of road ahead. The car rolled faster and faster. It was exactly as though they had no brakes because he did not use brakes. His response to everything—bends and bumps in the road, other cars—was
forward, forward
.
    “What made you think I didn’t need the whole grand?” he said. As though the money—all of it—was already his.
    After a moment she said, “I didn’t want to draw suspicion.”
    “
What?
”
    Louder this time, so that her voice carried over the road noise, “I said I didn’t want to draw suspicion!”
    He slapped the steering wheel in exasperation, then punched the accelerator at the belly of the highway’s slope, and she swore they went airborne. He said, “Who was
watching you
? How can it be ‘suspicious’ when there is nobody to
see
?”
    With the word
suspicious
he took both hands off the wheel to draw little quotation marks in the air. Air quotes while topping a hundred. He said, “That’s just
retarded
! You find money, it’s
yours
! That’s how it is with money. And other stuff, besides. Not car keys,