The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

  Sarah pictured Danisha’s mother, Corelle, in a hospital bed. Mrs. Helms was a woman of majestic presence, partial to floral dresses, wigs styled like whipped meringue, and quoting from the King James Bible and The Hangover, sometimes interchangeably. And according to Danisha’s message, a young white woman had held a knife to her throat, forced her into her Chrysler, and driven halfway across town to ram DHL’s office building.

  Sarah pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. It took the Worthes only a day to find her friend and her mother.

  Danisha would not take this lying down. She was the human equivalent of a blowtorch. When something set off her temper, she didn’t explode but would cut like a blue acetylene flame.

  She turned over. Zoe’s side of the bed was empty. Sharp morning sunlight streamed against the curtains. Voices in the kitchen sounded bright. The clock on the nightstand read six forty-five.

  She found Teresa at the stove, in a terry-cloth robe and moccasins, cooking pancakes. Zoe sat on the counter, kicking her dangling feet. She was giggling, her little shoulders hunched with laughter.

  “All the backpacks looked like they were lifting off the ground, and the sun whooshed down the side of the sky. All the kids too. They flew. Only they really were falling. Then the bus fell over.”

  Sarah took Zoe’s hand and squeezed.

  “I’m not scared anymore,” Zoe said. “I didn’t dream about it. I dreamed about an angel.”

  The air seemed all at once to feel like ice on Sarah’s skin.

  “It was flying from under the ground,” Zoe said. “It had wings and they whooshed too.”

  Teresa gave Sarah a look. “How about Mousie? Did he fly?”

  Zoe giggled again. “No, you silly.” She tilted her head and pointed at Teresa’s crucifix. “Does that protect you?”

  Teresa brushed Zoe’s hair gently with her fingertips. “It’s not magic. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “What does it do?”

  Sarah picked her up and set her in a chair at the table. “It doesn’t do anything. It means she’s a Christian.”

  Zoe said, “Mrs. Helms wears a cross but it doesn’t have the guy on it.”

  “Jesus,” Sarah said.

  Teresa flipped a short stack of pancakes onto a plate and set it on the table. “It reminds me to live my life in a way that shines a little light on the cross. Coffee’s ready.”

  She sat down. Beneath the chain of the crucifix was another one, half hidden by her robe. Sarah thought: Definitely dog tags.

  “You were in the Army, weren’t you?” she said.

  Teresa eyed her quizzically. “Four years after high school. That’s where I became a medic. How did you know?”

  Sarah nodded at the chain. Teresa touched whatever pendant lay at the end of it, cosseted beneath the terry-cloth folds of her robe. “That? Oh.”

  Zoe picked up her fork like a stick and poked at a pancake. Teresa closed her eyes and bowed her head. Sarah took Zoe’s hand and held it still. Zoe frowned, confused.

  Teresa made the sign of the cross and smiled. “Eat. Come on. Don’t hold back.”

  Sarah released Zoe’s hand. The little girl dug in.

  Teresa said, “I’m on duty at the medical tent from eight to four today.”

  Sarah felt conflicting impulses. The house was isolated, and inside it, nobody could see her. At the music festival there would be thirty thousand pairs of eyes and, possibly, police.

  But the house was so isolated that nobody could see her and Zoe if they were attacked. On balance, if somebody was going to take her, it was better that it be the cops.

  “We’ll go with you.”

  “Today’s the busiest day of the festival. Medical’s likely to be swamped.”

  “I can help. I’m an EMT.”

  “In that case, welcome aboard,” Teresa said. “But you don’t work as an EMT.”

  “I got certified after we moved to Oklahoma. I thought it was a good skill set to have. Especially in Tornado Alley.” And especially when she felt alone—and realized that for Zoe, she was it. She’d decided that if it came to survival, she’d better be a one-man band. She was her own little doomsday prepper.

  “Sounds sensible,” Teresa said. “Any other skill sets you added?”

  “Clearly I lack the how-to-explain-crucifixes skill set.”

  But she had plenty of hours at the firing range. And she’d taken self-defense classes taught by a former Army Ranger. She knew to go for the knees, the eyes, and the balls, if an attacker had ’em.

  Teresa wiped her hands on a napkin and began clearing up. Sarah stood. “Let me get this.”

  “I’m going to say my morning devotions. We’ll leave in forty-five minutes.”

  Sarah opened the fridge to put away the milk and syrup and butter. In the door, she saw a prescription vial.

  Zoe said, “What are devotions?”

  “Prayers, honey,” Teresa said.

  “You mean like, father, son, and holy ghost?”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “I thought the cucifisk didn’t fight vampires. Does it fight ghosts?”

  Sarah said, “No, munchkin. The Holy Ghost …”

  “I don’t say ghost,” Teresa said. “Holy Spirit. Because God isn’t a ghost, God’s everywhere, a spirit that moves through our hearts.” She glanced at Sarah, as if to say, Is that how a five-year-old might understand it? “The father is how we think of God too. Because God is the creator of the entire universe. And God loves us like a father does.”

  Zoe kicked her feet. “Who’s my father?”

  Sarah’s breakfast abruptly stuck in her throat. “Let’s talk about that later.”

  “At the hospital they said my father is Nolan Asa Worthe.”

  Sarah couldn’t turn away from Zoe’s obstreperous stare. Or Teresa’s curiosity.

  “That’s his name,” she said. “And I’ll tell you about him soon. Now let’s get ready to go.”

  She led Zoe from the kitchen, feeling like an utter coward.

  Lawless rolled out of Alamogordo, passing like a black shard near the White Sands Missile Range, a vast tract of dunes and desert that encompassed the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated in 1945. To the east, the sun crested the mountains of the Lincoln National Forest. The U-Wreck-Em he’d rented in El Paso pounded along the highway. The engine rattled but he didn’t care if he drove it into the ground. He still had a hundred miles to go. At 90 mph, he’d be there in time for his next cup of coffee.

  He called the Marshals Service again. He wanted to get protection approved for Sarah and Zoe. He needed backup, a team. But he was in bureaucratic hell, and it was a holiday weekend. The Marshals Service had a hot desk—but even so, contacting available people over Memorial Day was a nightmare. A guy he knew in New Mexico was on call, but had seemingly disappeared into Carlsbad Caverns.

  “Dammit.” He hung up. Called District again. Voice mail.

  He had taken this to the supervisory deputy U.S. marshal, who said she would take it to the chief deputy for the judicial district—and that was all he’d heard.

  Bureaucrats could have selective hearing as acute as any teenager. Meanwhile, Sarah’s life, and Zoe’s safety, hung in limbo.

  He couldn’t wait for the machine to grind into action. He’d rented the car on his own dime. He was carrying his service weapon. The star was good for many things, such as bearing firearms aboard commercial airliners.

  He swung around a long curve on U.S. 70. This part of the Southwest was home to coyotes, both canine and human, and night skies that startled you into thinking the gods were flinging white sparks at the Earth. It was where the space shuttle had landed when other runways were shut. It was where J. Robert Oppenheimer saw the radioactive sunrise and recited from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” It was the birthplace of William Bonnie. This was Billy the Kid country.

  Portentous, considering that Sarah might by now be a federal fu
gitive. Her photo had been on the news again. It was now officially a Story, a Thing.

  He should have known all along that this would not stay under the radar. Not with the Worthe clan running loose. Not with Curtis Harker working the case for the Bureau.

  He wondered how Sarah looked. On the phone her voice sounded clear and sharp. It no longer sounded young and lost, but determined, if desperate—like a flash of sunlight from a broken mirror.

  He accelerated eastward. Once he crossed the mountains, it would be a rifle shot straight to Roswell.

  Sarah wanted to get to San Francisco. There was no way to do that on a commercial flight, not without federal government resources being expended on her behalf. Unless he got a go-team with official clearance, and legal protections in place for her, he didn’t want the government to know where she was. She needed to stay off the grid.

  The road steepened. He put on his sunglasses against the morning glare.

  He remembered spotting the flames consuming Beth Keller’s house, crackling orange against the green of the forest. He had broken into a run. Heard another crack, sharp like gunfire, and drew his weapon. Out of the trees appeared a young woman, breath frosting the air, eyes hot with grief and panic and fury. Baby cradled against her chest. Glock in her right hand.

  She saw him and brought the semiautomatic up, chest high, finger on the trigger. “Stop right there, or I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you, motherfucker.”

  He stopped. He didn’t doubt the death in her hand. But she looked so much like Beth, she had to be her sister. Her teeth were chattering.

  He gambled. “If you want to stay alive, let me help you.” Carefully he held up his star. “U.S. marshal. Lower the weapon.”

  She had a terrible gash across her palm. Her shoulders were heaving. The Glock never veered from a kill shot at his chest.

  “I’m not staying here,” she said. “I’m getting the baby out.”

  He looked at the burning house. “Beth?”

  “No.” Her voice broke. “The Worthes.”

  His chest felt hollow. “Nolan?”

  “They’re not getting Zoe,” she said. “Hear me?”

  He eyed the trail she had broken through the snow. He saw everything she had left in her wake: flames, death, blood where she’d fallen.

  If the Worthes found her trail, they would follow her like a lit fuse.

  He said, “I’ll get you to safety. But lower the weapon.”

  She didn’t. “Understand me. I’ll protect Zoe. She’s not leaving my arms.”

  She waited. She knew what she was asking of him.

  “Understood,” he said.

  She held still an everlasting second longer. Took her finger off the trigger and lowered the gun.

  He put a hand against her back. “Run.”

  He knew what she was asking of him, and he did it. He ran at her side, weapon at the ready, to the switchback where she’d parked her truck. Shaking, she climbed in. Fired up the engine. Waited for him to get in too. He turned back toward the forest.

  “No.” Alarmed, she opened her door again.

  He shut it. “Your job is to protect the baby. Mine is to apprehend the Worthes. You want to have any chance of stopping them? Trust me.”

  She stayed icily still, the Glock in her hand. Then she swallowed and nodded.

  “Go,” he said. “Drive. Don’t stop.”

  She spun the wheels, pulling away.

  Trust me. Those two words, spoken in a snowy clearing, had echoed across five years and rung like broken glass in the hot New Mexico morning.

  His phone buzzed. He read the message from Teresa Gavilan.

  On our way to fairgrounds. Med tent #1.

  He pushed the gas pedal to the floor.

  29

  Grissom drove the last sixty miles, while the women slept in the back seat. He checked the mirror. With their eyes closed, they looked like dolls, innocent and pliable. They looked perfect. On the seat beside him were the things he’d picked up from the dealer’s house outside Amarillo. The man had been unhappy, stumbling out of bed at four A.M., but he was a sales associate of the clan. He handled dope and meth and occasionally sold firearms. He hadn’t wanted to sell his personal weapons, but Grissom didn’t give him a choice. A Smith & Wesson revolver was wrapped in a pillowcase. The Mossberg shotgun was on the floor with ten boxes of shells.

  Ahead, the scrubby trees and scruffy billboards of Roswell pocked the desert horizon. When he pulled off the blacktop and bounced over the dirt into the parking lot at the music festival, he said, “Wake up.”

  Fell and Reavy roused themselves. For a second their eyes were vague with sleep. But then they snapped alert.

  Time to unfurl the angel’s wings and fly.

  In the medical tent, Sarah set Zoe up with a coloring book beside a volunteer at the check-in desk. The morning crowd consisted of hangovers, a sprained ankle, and a suspected scorpion sting. In all, the festivalgoers seemed a ruly lot. They were having fun, but their idea of abandon seemed within bounds. Or maybe Sarah had grown used to people who thought boundaries were something to be snipped with bolt cutters and driven through with a stolen car.

  She had the reborn doll in the Snugli. Zoe had on a blue T-shirt, jeans rolled up at the cuffs, and Converse All Stars. She looked like a kid out of Father Knows Best. Luckily, she was too young to understand either the fifties or irony.

  Teresa handed Sarah a clipboard. “I’ll let you take names. I imagine you’re good at that.”

  “I’m good at matching names to the right people. And pinning them to a map.”

  “And then to the ground?”

  “That’s skip tracing. Anybody who’s trying to stay lost, I find.”

  “Like a feral shepherd.”

  Sarah laughed.

  Teresa began loading bottled water in a cooler filled with crushed ice. “This wasn’t always the career you pined for, I sense.”

  “No.”

  The nun’s expression filled with curiosity.

  “You really want to know? I wanted to be a Secret Service agent.”

  “A shepherd indeed.”

  Sarah felt flustered. “I guess … I wanted the earpiece and aviator sunglasses, you know—getting to ride on Air Force One and all that. Have movies made about my badassedness.” She shrugged, but nonetheless felt discomfited. “I wanted to live in the White House. I was eight.”

  “You’ve given up that ambition?”

  Sarah made a face. Whaddaya think?

  Teresa touched her arm. “I didn’t mean to throw you off balance.” Her expression turned kind. She glanced at Zoe. “You’re a ferocious guardian already.”

  Sarah swallowed, unexpectedly emotional.

  The tent flap opened and a young man came in, nearly dragging his girlfriend. “Little help?”

  Danisha pulled her Jeep carefully into the carport at her mom’s clapboard house. “Here we are.”

  The place was painted sparkling white, like all the other clapboard houses on the street. A neat line of them, separated by chain-link fences, ran all the way to the river. Pecan trees were coming into leaf.

  Corelle Helms was exhausted. She looked like she’d been beaten up. Danisha felt incandescent and ashamed.

  This had come into her mother’s life because of her. It wasn’t her fault, or Sarah’s. It was the fault of a bunch of sick patriarchal cocksuckers who wanted the world to burn, and wanted Zoe as some kind of torchbearer. Or as kindling. And to get her, they were willing to punch a widow in the face.

  “The neighborhood watch is sending somebody to stay with you while I clean up the office,” Danisha said.

  Since her brother had passed three years earlier, Danisha had stopped by to see her mother every day. She hated the thought of leaving her this morning.

  She killed the engine. “Wait here. Let me double-check that everything’s ready for you.”

  “You be safe,” Corelle said.

  Danisha tried to smile, but her mother looked
shrunken. Her glasses reflected her eyes, huge and shimmering.

  “Lock the car doors after me,” she said.

  When she opened the front door, the emptiness, the lack of lights and noise, spooked her. She walked silently through the house, room by room, like clearing a building in Kandahar. Step by step, she began to feel calmer. Things looked all right. In the living room, framed photos on the side table had been knocked over. She set them back up, like a virtual choir, all smiling.

  She brought her mom in and got her settled on the sofa with a glass of iced tea and a book of crossword puzzles.

  “Thank you, angel,” Corelle said.

  Danisha went out to check the mail. The morning was nearly empty, just a jet on approach to the airport. She opened the mailbox, and stopped.

  She drew out the eight-by-ten photo, her hands shaking. When she went back inside, she sat down beside her mom, fists clenched.

  “I have to go out of town for a few days.”

  “Honey, no.”

  “I want you to stay with Yvonne and the boys till I get back.”

  There was a knock on the door. Through the frosted glass, she saw the neighborhood watch coordinator.

  Corelle sighed. She knew that things weren’t right. “Where are you going?”

  Danisha wasn’t about to show her mother the photograph she’d found in the mailbox. It was her brother Orrie’s high school graduation photo. It had been in the lineup among the shining choir on the side table, and she hadn’t noticed its absence.

  A red X had been painted over Orrie’s face in nail polish. Below, in black marker, was written One down, one to go. You decide.

  The clan meant to terrify her into providing information about Sarah and Zoe. And if she didn’t …

  She patted her mom’s hand. “I’ll call you from the road.”

  Unless she helped take down the Worthes, nobody was safe.

  “I’m going to New Mexico,” she said.

  30

  Fell and Reavy walked side by side a step behind Grissom. The fairground looked like a vast dump in the morning light. Acre after acre of dirt, scuffed from tens of thousands of feet, speckled with beer cans. And speckled with thousands of people looking for breakfast or more beer. A cleanup crew was skewering litter with sharp sticks. The food court was open. On the stage, the load-in for the day’s first act was in full swing.