[Alex Vane 03.0] The Mockingbird Drive

by AC Fuller

  She looked at the sparkler, which had burned down about an inch. The sparks were bouncing off the foil on the soup can, tumbling over the servers and fading out on the table below. She looked straight at me, and for the first time I got a clear look at her eyes. Her small black pupils were surrounded by streaks of white and pale blue that grew darker toward her outer eye. Like a white star exploding in a blue sky. They were wild and wide open, like a madman, and staring straight at me.

  "My name is Quinn Rivers," she concluded. "And we have sixty seconds."

  Chapter 7

  Journalists get lied to all the time, so if you don't learn to read people, you don't make it far.

  Years ago, I took a weekend class from a former FBI agent and learned the basics. First, you study visual clues like age, body type, the presence or absence of a wedding ring, and so on. Then you establish a behavioral baseline using the subject's normal facial expressions and gestures. Do they cross their arms or close their eyes at certain times? Do they discharge nervous energy with foot tapping, fidgeting, or excessive blinking? That sort of thing. From there, you ask questions and study reactions. You watch for deviations in the baseline. It's actually easy. But the basics only take you so far. Greta taught me that you can only truly observe someone if you're deeply grounded within yourself. If you're distracted or stuck in your own head, you're going to miss something. And the deeper your own peace, the more you'll notice about the world, and the person standing across from you. That's the idea, anyway.

  But with Quinn, I didn't know what to think.

  On the one hand, she was finally looking at me, and her eyes had me frozen. In a different time and place I might have called them beautiful, but in that moment, they were simply transfixing. She seemed clearer than before, though not calmer, like all the nervous energy in her had coalesced into a plan of action. And part of me felt like I could trust her. On the other hand, I didn't know what was in that can.

  I assumed it had something to do with destroying her computers and everything else on her desk. Seems like what a paranoid person might do. But I didn't feel like waiting around to find out. I was ready to get as far away from Quinn Rivers as I could, and I was taking the drive with me.

  I decided to bolt out the front door, find a taxi, and head to the bus station. I held her gaze for a moment longer, then scanned her up and down, trying to figure out whether she'd chase me, or fight me, when I tried to leave without her. And that's when I realized that she was dressed like Han Solo. It was a passing thought, a ridiculous thought given the situation. Back at The Barker, we have a life-size cardboard Han Solo stand-up and, intentionally or not, she was dressed just like him, right down to the black leather boots.

  I turned for the door just as I heard a car passing out front, so I peeked through the blinds. A silver Chevy Suburban was easing to a stop in front of Quinn's house, a patch of bright red hair visible through the passenger window. Holly, from the airport. She wasn't looking at me. She didn't see me. But I was pretty sure it was her.

  "Weird," I said.

  Quinn must have been in sync with me, because she bounded toward the window with four long strides and peered out, standing shoulder to shoulder with me.

  Something silver flashed in the window of the SUV. "Was that a gun?" I asked. "I'm pretty sure that's the woman I saw at the airport and—"

  "Shut up."

  Quinn jumped behind the door and pulled me away from the window. "You saw her at the airport? Do they know you have the drive?"

  "Yeah, they saw it."

  "They're here to kill me. And probably you. I'm leaving, and I'm taking the drive with me. Give it to me."

  All I could manage was a weak, "No."

  "Alex, Mr. Listicle, we have about thirty seconds until that sparkler ignites the 300 grams of blue thermite in that soup can. At that point, the plastic, metal, and silicon will literally begin to melt and the paper and wood will catch on fire. If you want to wait here, that's fine. Have a chat with the folks in the SUV, go buy them a Frappuccino or whatever people like you drink these days. And by the time they're wiring your balls up to a truck battery, I'll be two states away." She glanced at the sparkler. "Twenty seconds."

  As stupid as it sounds, my first instinct was to walk out the front door and shake hands with Holly, or whoever that was. I was sure there'd be a reasonable explanation for all this, and Quinn already seemed like the bigger threat to my health and safety. But there was a chance she knew something I didn't, and the sparkler was already more than three-quarters burned.

  I looked back at Quinn, whose eyes were fixed on mine. "Prove it," I said. "Prove you know something I don't."

  "Have you looked at the drive?" she asked.

  "I have."

  "There's a sticker on it, right?"

  I nodded.

  "It says 'Destroy Per Directive 6/35'?"

  "How'd you know that?"

  "Because I'm telling you the truth. C'mon."

  "What does it mean?"

  "I'll tell you when we're out of here. Five seconds."

  At this she grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the table. The sparkler had burned down to just above the tinfoil. I didn't know how much space there was between the tinfoil and the blue thermite underneath, but I was convinced that I'd be safer with Quinn than in a thermite fire. On our way past the table, she scooped up the duffel bag, then shoved me through the kitchen and into a small bedroom.

  A loud click-whoosh came from the living room. Like a huge match being lit. Then there was a heavy knock at the door. Thack-thack-thack.

  Quinn slid into an open closet door on her knees and I glanced around the bedroom. Slivers of light streamed through cracked blinds, illuminating a twin mattress on the floor in the corner. The mattress was surrounded by stacks of books, bits of wire, and a few hand tools. Two egg crates, one of jeans and one of t-shirts, sat by the foot of the mattress.

  Quinn was pulling up a loose section of floor inside the small closet. The floor opened into a dark hole and the top few rungs of a cheap aluminum ladder started about a foot below floor level.

  Quinn said, "You first."

  I dropped my suitcase to the bottom and climbed down, holding the backpack over my head so I could fit. About eight feet down, the ladder stopped at the mouth of a low tunnel with dirt walls and cheap plywood planks along the ground.

  I heard the closet door close above me. Quinn's duffle bag struck my shoulder and fell to the ground. I heard her feet hit the ladder. "Go," she shouted.

  Suddenly the tunnel went black. Quinn had replaced the closet floor above us. I took my phone out and turned on the flashlight, then swung the backpack over my shoulder and scurried down the tunnel in a half-hunched slump, pulling my suitcase awkwardly behind me.

  "Where are we going?" I called.

  "To my other house."

  I'd only gone about twenty feet down the corridor when I saw a glint of silver rising out of the dirt floor. The bottom rungs of the second ladder. It matched the first and led up a slightly wider space that ended abruptly about twelve feet above me. I gripped my phone in my mouth—flashlight aimed up the ladder—and held my suitcase over my head. I climbed, pressing my chest into the rungs and sucking in my stomach so the drive on my back wouldn't get crushed against the back wall. My shoulders were burning by the time my suitcase ran into a piece of plywood.

  Quinn was right behind me, at the bottom of the ladder. "Push hard," she said. "There's a layer of dirt."

  Using my suitcase as a wedge, I popped up the plywood. Dirt rained down on my head and onto Quinn. She cursed as I reached the top of the ladder and rolled onto the floor of a tiny shed. "This is your other house?"

  Quinn made her way up the ladder and stood next to me, breathing hard. "It's the shed behind the house. I have a truck nearby." She slid a deadbolt on the thin metal door and peeked out. I heard pounding coming from the other house. They were still knocking.

  "What do we do now?" I asked.

  "Th
ey're at my front door, so we've got a clear run through the vacant space behind those houses, then we've got shade from that fence. We get to the other side of the fence and it's a straight shot to the truck."

  She held out her hand. "How about I take the drive?"

  I offered up a blank stare.

  "Fine," she said. "Follow me close and move at the speed I move and remember I'm being generous right now." When I nodded, she pushed the door open and ran out of the shed. She wasn't limber, but she could run. Like someone who never worked out but was constantly moving, constantly walking, and stayed in pretty good shape despite a lack of regular exercise. I watched her for a moment, debating whether I should follow, then ran after her.

  We covered the thirty yards of open ground at a pace that made me realize just how out of shape I'd gotten, then stopped in the shadow of an old wooden fence. I glanced back at the shed. Nothing. I couldn't see the front door of Quinn's house, but through the holes in the blue tarp on the side window, I saw flames. She hadn't mentioned that after the blue thermite lit the table on fire it would spread down the table legs to the floor and curtains and walls, but I figured it had been her plan all along. Quinn was burning down her house.

  She slid through a broken section in the fence and I followed her.

  She took a few confident steps, then froze.

  "Where's your truck?" I asked.

  "I can't remember where I parked it."

  She closed her eyes, mumbled something to herself, then paced in a little square. I was beginning to recognize this as her contemplative stroll. She took off suddenly, heading north.

  A block later, we came to an unmonitored parking lot next to a boarded-up grocery store. Quinn pulled out her keychain as we came alongside the truck, an extra-large Ford F-series from the eighties. Dual-tone brown on light brown. Ugly thirty years ago, now it was just sad. She fumbled to find the key, but she made it into the cab, stowed her bag in the footwell, then tugged on the passenger door lock until it popped up.

  I looked back. No sign of pursuit. I hopped in.

  "Check the drive," she said. "Did it get cracked in the tunnel?"

  I didn't need to check it. "I was careful," I said. "It's fine."

  Quinn leaned back, jammed the key into the ignition and, for the first time, smiled. "We'll be on the freeway in ten minutes."

  "Then you'll tell me what 'Destroy Per Directive 6/35' means?"

  "Yes. And I'll tell you about Baxter. About all of this. The parts I know, anyway."

  "Good," I said.

  "Good," she said, turning the key.

  Damn thing didn't even click.

  Chapter 8

  I should've known her truck wouldn't start.

  "Any other ideas?" I asked, brushing some dirt from my hair onto the floor.

  Quinn's face was sweaty and dusty, and frozen in a blank expression. But I could tell her mind was racing. She tried the key again. Nothing. "Motherless son of a—"

  "Did you see a gun in the window of the SUV?"

  "No, but I didn't need to," she said, staring down at the key. "They always have guns."

  I wasn't sure I'd seen a gun. Just a flash of silver that could have been a cellphone. And I wasn't even positive that the person I'd seen in the SUV had been Holly from the airport. I hadn't gotten a good look at her face, and hadn't seen the driver at all.

  Being around Quinn was messing with my head, and I was doing another thing Greta liked to accuse me of: trying to convince myself that everything was okay, that the status quo wasn't being disturbed. Greta would tell you that this particular failing was why I'd never dealt with Rebecca's death. And I was probably doing it again now.

  I grabbed my phone from the backpack. "If they're still following us, we should call the cops."

  Quinn slapped my phone to the truck floor. "These guys are the cops, you asshole. Or at least on the same payroll. They're here to kill us, like they killed Baxter."

  "Baxter shot my friend through the chest with a shotgun," I said.

  Quinn grunted. "Because your TV told you that?"

  I was starting to recognize two distinct grunts from Quinn. One was a dismissive, hell-no grunt. She'd grit her teeth and release a deep bass note out of the side of her mouth. The other was her slightly-less-dismissive, ambivalent-yes grunt. An open-mouthed, higher-pitched sound that felt like a shower of rainbows compared to the first kind.

  Her latest grunt had been the first kind.

  "Tell me about Baxter?" I said.

  Another grunt, the second kind.

  She looked out all the windows, like she was expecting us to be surrounded by a SWAT team. "Well, if you want proof he didn't kill himself, here's some. He loved dogs as much as I do. Worf was his best friend. Even if he'd let his demons get the best of him, even if he had planned to kill himself, he never would have left that dog alone in the apartment for the police to find."

  "But you didn't have a dog at your house."

  "Only because I knew I might have to disappear one day. But anyway, there's another thing about Baxter. He gave James the drive."

  "No way." As usual, she'd buried the lede, but I didn't buy it. I knew that the press screwed up rapidly-developing stories all the time, but they wouldn't have plastered Baxter's face across every TV in the country if they weren't sure he was the shooter. And they wouldn't be sure he was the shooter if the police hadn't leaked it to them.

  I also knew that, if Kenny and Holly had followed me to Quinn's house, something weird was going on. So, as sure as I was that Quinn was wrong about Baxter, I agreed with her that something was up.

  But she seemed to have no idea what to do next.

  I looked through a smudge in the dust collector that was the back window of Quinn's truck, but didn't see anyone. A few blocks to the south, peeking out above an overpass, I saw the red and white sign for Binion's, then I caught something out of the corner of my eye. A flash of red emerging over a slight hill about two blocks away. It was partially covered by a hat or scarf or something, but the hair was unmistakable. Holly.

  "C'mon," I said, opening the door. And because I had the drive on my back, Quinn followed me.

  We walked north for a block, away from her house, then turned left twice to land on Fremont Street. A few blocks away, a thin line of smoke was rising from the area of Quinn's house. I pointed at it. "You're burning down your house, huh?"

  I think her mind was on the truck because she'd been passing the key from hand to hand, glancing at it every few seconds like it had let her down. As though the truck not starting was the key's fault and not the fault of the owner who'd let it rust, unmaintained, for years.

  "Data destruction," she said at last. "Bastards aren't going to get a single byte out of me. And where are we going?"

  "Fremont Street," I said, ignoring the sigh Quinn let out when I was halfway through the first word. "If that was a gun, and if those were the two people from the airport, I figure we can disappear there."

  A block later, we passed under the overpass and entered the Fremont Street Experience. The crowd wasn't huge, but it seemed to be growing, and I wanted to be around people. To our left, a graying singer with a mic and a cheap amp was doing a terrible cover of Prince's "Purple Rain." To our right, a gang of buff guys in Red Wings jerseys laughed loudly, sipping colorful drinks from two-foot tall plastic cups from Fat Tuesdays. A hundred feet above us, a couple flew by on a zip line attached to a curved, translucent roof. If Kenny and Holly were following us, they seemed to be hanging back, because I hadn't seen them since we left the truck. We walked toward the bright blinking face of the Golden Nugget, the largest of the old-time, downtown casinos.

  That's when I spotted them.

  About a hundred yards behind us, Kenny and Holly were jogging slowly and in something close to rhythm, like the Secret Service alongside a presidential motorcade. Kenny in the amazing linen suit and Holly in the light blue pantsuit. She now wore a matching hat, the brim tilted down, shadowing her face, but patc
hes of red peeked out from the side when she turned her head.

  I turned to Quinn and shouted, "Let's run."

  She'd fallen a few yards behind and was gazing up at the twinkling lights wrapping around the facade of the Golden Nugget Casino. I took off before she answered, my rolling suitcase in one hand and the drive on my back. I raced across a little intersection and past a crowd that was watching a guy spray paint onto t-shirts. Quinn was on my tail and, as we ran, I swung the backpack off my left shoulder and pulled my phone out of the side pocket.

  Quinn seemed to be keeping up with me, because I could hear her yelling something, but the light show was starting to the thunderous applause of the crowd, so I couldn't tell what she was saying. I entered my password without looking—0618, which stood for June 18, the date Greta and I got married.

  Suddenly a pop song from the nineties filled the air and, above us, a surreal underwater scene appeared on the arched screen as the crowd stopped and stared at the lights. In another block, we'd be out of the covered area of the Fremont Street Experience and into more deserted territory, so I needed to hurry. With a swipe and a tap, I was in the ZipCar iPhone app. After two more taps, a map popped up showing three cars near us. All my info was already on file, so it only took three more clicks to reserve a red Toyota Corolla four blocks away. Problem was, it was south, well away from the crowds.

  I slowed my run a little to allow Quinn to catch up with me. Kenny and Holly were still jogging about a hundred yards behind us. For a terrifying instant, I thought Kenny was holding a gun, but then I realized that he was talking on a cellphone. Both he and Holly had seemed fit—more fit than Quinn or me, at least—and I was getting the sense that they weren't trying all that hard to catch up with us.

  When she'd pulled abreast of me, Quinn said, "You…you didn't call…?"

  "Call the police? No. I got us a ZipCar."