by Chris Holm
He Googled the place. It was in the middle of nowhere. Open twenty-four hours. Approachable from the highway and two rural routes. A good place for someone on the run. A good place to spring a trap too.
As if it mattered. If it wasn’t a trap, then Evie was in trouble. And if it was a trap, then Evie was in trouble.
He typed a quick reply as Cameron wandered over. She handed him a bowl of ramen and a spoon. Cocked an eyebrow as he hastily closed the browser window.
“Change of plans,” he said, taking the bowl. “We’re getting out of here tonight.”
13.
FRANK CROUCHED IN the underbrush and watched the Park Police go door to door down Funston Avenue. They worked in teams of two, one conferring briefly with the residents, the other idling in a cruiser at the curb. He’d seen dozens of them doing the same throughout the Presidio as he fled inland through the woods, running parallel to the Battery East Trail until it intersected with Lincoln Boulevard and then following Lincoln southeast.
He’d hoped to leave the Presidio before they locked down the perimeter, but the park was lousy with coppers, and the scrutiny given to everyone they came across was too intense. His forged ID was convincing enough for everyday use, but it would never stand up to a database search, and although he was thought dead, his prints were doubtless still on file.
Best to hole up for a while until the investigation shifted away from the park, he thought, and then slip out unnoticed. But finding a decent hiding place was proving harder than anticipated.
He’d spent half an hour casing the Lendrum Court town houses. They were bland midcentury beige boxes with taupe accents, situated on a terraced slope bisected by a winding drive. In most cities, units like these would be low-income housing. On the Presidio, they ran nearly five grand a month.
But as exorbitant as their rents were, the buildings were among the cheapest housing in the park, which meant they wouldn’t have as much security as the luxury properties overseen by the Presidio Trust. Trees towered over the Lendrum Court complex on all sides, isolating it from the outside world, and its parking lot was half empty, which meant some units were temporarily unoccupied thanks to the lockdown.
In short, the place looked perfect—at least until a neighbor had spotted Frank prying open a corner unit’s sliding-glass window and chased him off.
That was over an hour ago. He’d attempted to put some distance between himself and the angry neighbor in case the guy reported him, and he worried the Park Police might now be on the lookout for him. His progress was slowed by his injuries. His punctured palm bled every time he flexed it wrong; his bum knee crunched like gravel with every step.
Frank stuck to the woods whenever possible. It wasn’t always. To cross beneath the Presidio Parkway, he’d had no choice but to take the sidewalk for a few excruciatingly exposed minutes—there wasn’t cover enough beside the road to hide him until Lincoln jagged away from Highway 1.
As Frank pressed eastward through the pines, their thick canopy enclosed him. Nestled in this copse of trees, he could almost believe that the world of fire, chaos, and destruction he was fleeing was a thousand miles away. But what little of the sky he could see between the branches was ambered by the noxious smoke that continued to pour out of the wreckage of the tugboat, and the air—which scratched at Segreti’s throat with his every breath, and made him cough—tasted of oil and ash. Even the peppery scent of pine resin was no match for it.
Eventually, Frank came to a break in the trees and found himself at one end of a large cemetery. He rested for a moment in the shadow of a stone obelisk, catching his breath and attempting to get his bearings. The headstones all around made somber dotted lines that seemed, by a trick of perspective, to converge on his position. The implication troubled him. When he ducked back into the forest, he left behind a bloody handprint on the granite where he’d leaned.
When he hit the edge of the Main Post, he froze. The Main Post was essentially the Presidio’s downtown. From Mexico’s handoff of the base to the U.S. Army in 1848 until its closure by Congress in 1989, the Main Post had been the center of the Presidio’s administrative and social life. Now its historic brick buildings were home to museums, businesses, and tourist attractions.
Today, its massive central lawn was set up as a staging area—tents, personnel, and heavy equipment everywhere. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of police and first responders flitted back and forth across it, their clothes and faces blackened with soot. Armed men in riot gear stood guard at regular intervals. Frank felt like he’d just put his foot through the papery scrim of a wasp’s nest.
He hunkered down and watched awhile as afternoon marched toward evening. He was trying to discern pattern, logic, strategy, but the scene was too chaotic. He gave up and slowly made his way around the perimeter of the Main Post—always watchful, always just inside the tree line. That’s when he spotted the perfect house in which to hide.
It was a gorgeous Queen Anne–style home with off-white clapboard siding and a red roof. Three stories, with a front-facing gable and a wraparound porch, a portion of which was glassed in. Simple wooden struts added historical accents to the roof and deck posts. A set of concrete stairs led upward from the sidewalk to its front path. A narrow border of succulents and drought-faded wildflowers rimmed the house on all sides.
The rear of the house abutted the woods, so Frank had a straight shot to the back door without much fear of being seen. And he watched the Park Police knock for several minutes straight without answer—they’d clearly taken the sleek blue Jaguar F-Type in the driveway as a sign someone was home—so he knew he’d have the place to himself.
He waited for the cops to disappear around the corner. Then he burst from the trees and ran, stiff-limbed and creaky, to the house. As he traversed the yard, he felt naked and exposed, but once he reached the door, he breathed a sigh of relief. He was tucked comfortably out of sight of the neighbors and of the street.
The door had an inlaid window, three panes by three panes. He needed something he could use to bust the pane nearest the doorknob and then he’d be inside. But as he looked around for a rock, a garden gnome, whatever, he heard something that stopped him short: a low growl from just behind the door.
His head jerked toward the window, but the dog was too short for him to see. What he did see was a woman watching him wide-eyed through the glass.
For a moment, Frank froze, and the two of them stared at each other. In another context, he might have found her striking. She was a light-skinned black woman a few inches shorter than he, slender in a manner that suggested activity rather than diet or vanity, with high cheekbones and brown eyes flecked with gold. She wore white cotton pajamas with pink piping and pink roses small enough to look like dots all over them. She looked to be in her sixties, and her hair—steely gray—fell in tight natural curls. The ends were wet, as if she’d just been sitting in a bath. Her pajamas clung to her breasts and hips, dampness bleeding through.
It looked to Frank like she’d been crying. Her eyes were glassy and red-rimmed, the skin beneath them dark as bruises. That was understandable, given the day. Her city was injured. Frank knew how deep that ache could be. As a young punk running small-time rackets on the streets of Hoboken, Frank used to eye the gleaming city across the Hudson with almost romantic longing. That longing metastasized and he’d succumbed to Manhattan’s siren song, to life as a made guy. When the towers fell, they took some secret part of him with them, something no new construction, no matter how ambitious, could replace. In Frank’s eyes, the New York skyline was a key that no longer fit. What it had once opened inside him, it never would again.
Frank watched her approach the door. She moved slowly, her slippered feet scuffing along the floorboards. A goodly amount of white wine in a glass sloshed in her hand but never quite spilled over. When she reached the door, she unlocked it and swung it open wide. Beside her was a tan little ball of fur who looked as puzzled as Frank felt.
The woman turned and
shuffled back the way she’d come. The dog—a Pomeranian, Frank thought—regarded him a moment, then trotted over. Frank offered it his hand, still caked with blood. The dog licked it once and solicited a head scratch. Then it followed its mistress back inside, its claws a ticking clock against the floorboards.
Frank shook his head in puzzlement and followed too, his movements as deliberate as if he were navigating a minefield. He closed the door behind him. Set the lock on the knob. Engaged the dead bolt. By the time he turned around, the woman had disappeared from sight.
He set off in the direction she’d gone and soon found himself in a kitchen of stainless steel and gleaming white. A dog bowl in one corner was heaped to overflowing with kibble. The woman was rooting around in the bottom of her refrigerator, the open door hiding her from view. A memory flickered across the fore of Frank’s mind, of a mook he’d been sent to teach a lesson to who’d kept a backup piece inside his vegetable crisper. The asshole offered Frank a beer, all cool and civilized, reached into the fridge, and then damn near blew Frank’s head off when he turned around. Thankfully, condensation kept the gun from firing or Frank wouldn’t be alive today—and that mook still might be.
When the woman closed the refrigerator, Frank braced himself reflexively and eyed the nearby knife rack, but all she had in her hand was a half-empty bottle of chardonnay. She set it on the counter beside her wineglass and fetched a fresh one from the cupboard. Then she poured Frank a drink and topped up her own. He accepted it automatically, although in truth he had no idea what was going on, and it unnerved him.
“You’re bleeding,” she said, nodding at the bloodstain on his shirt. Although she didn’t slur her words, they came out flat and affectless. She sounded as if she’d taken something for anxiety, Valium or Xanax, before she’d started on the chardonnay.
“I cut my hand,” he said carefully. “Not badly. It’s fine now.” He didn’t actually know if that was true—the barbed wire had been rusty, the puncture deep—but the last thing he wanted was for her to call a doctor.
She said nothing for a full minute. Just looked at him and drank. Frank met her eyes but did not lift his glass. The dog looked back and forth expectantly between them.
“I know you,” she said finally.
Frank waited for her to continue. She didn’t. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“From the TV,” she replied.
Frank’s guts went crawly. Gooseflesh sprung up across his skin. “I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.”
She shook her head. Frowned slightly, as if trying to hold on to a slippery thought. Her eyes brightened somewhat, and when she next spoke, her voice was stronger, more assured. “There’s a cell-phone video the networks have been showing. A smiling family. A boat hitting the bridge. I must’ve seen it thirty times before I turned the news off. I couldn’t stand to watch any longer. It was too horrible. You took that video, didn’t you?”
Shit. If his face was out there, it was only a matter of time before the Council came for him. “Yeah,” he said, “I took it.”
“The anchor said the family in the video survived. Apparently, their eldest child was the one who uploaded the video. But no one seemed to know what became of you.”
“I’m glad they’re okay,” he said. “We were separated by the blast.” He offered neither details about himself nor explanations of why he’d shown up at her house, which was two miles from where he’d last been seen.
Silence descended once more. The woman sipped her wine. Frank ignored his. She was trembling, Frank realized—her wedding ring clinked against her wineglass as she raised it to her lips.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
She blinked at him in confusion.
“You’re shaking,” he added, by way of explanation.
“Oh. I’m not…It’s just…” She waved her hand as if the gesture were sufficient to finish her thought, which Frank supposed it was.
“Did the people on the news ever mention my name?”
“If they did,” she said, “I don’t remember.”
“It’s Max,” he said, “Max Rausch.” Max Rausch was the name on all his fake IDs.
“I wish I could say it’s nice to meet you, Max. I’m Lois.” She raised her glass in a halfhearted toast. Frank did the same with his. Then they drank, two strangers in a quiet house—he a sip, she the entire glass.
14.
HENDRICKS WATCHED FROM his perch across the street as the big rig shuddered to life. Its runner lights flickered on. Its air brakes emitted a hydraulic hiss. Then its headlights were engaged, pushing back the dark of night, and it pulled out of the parking lot, kicking up dirt as it rumbled past. Hendricks averted his eyes and blinked away the grit.
The Roadhouse Truck Stop was situated just off the Pennsylvania Turnpike between Harrisburg and Morgantown. It was no doubt a gorgeous stretch of countryside by day, Hendricks thought, but at night it was just a desolate pool of black bisected by a thin ribbon of rarely traveled highway.
The Roadhouse was a mom-and-pop place, not part of a national chain, and it looked like a remnant of an America long forgotten. A midcentury sign topped a metal pole tall enough to be seen from the toll road. The sign’s colors were faded, and the incandescent bulbs that framed it were long dead. The main building was cinder block, off white and grungy at the edges from exhaust. Fluorescent light spilled from its storefront, bathing the men out front smoking in its sickly glow. Two banks of gas pumps extended out from it, one on either side. Behind the main building was a second one, small and windowless, containing showers, and behind that was an overnight lot, a dozen eighteen-wheelers side by side. The smaller lot out front had, until now, been blocked from view by the truck that just drove off.
The Roadhouse sat at the intersection of two rural routes, a stoplight blinking yellow where they met. Across the street in one direction was a low-slung motel, its neon sign declaring VACANCY. In the other direction was a road-salt storage dome, dun brown, beside which sat a pair of idle snowplows, weeds sprouting around their tires.
It was nearly three a.m., and business was slow. The lunch counter was a quarter occupied. The booths were out of sight around a corner.
Hendricks had been watching the place for an hour. He had another hour before he was expected. Though the drive from Long Island took less than four hours, he’d told whoever had summoned him it would take six—in part because he figured he’d need some time to steal a new set of wheels, and in part because he wanted the chance to case the place before he went in.
He was wrong about the wheels. It turned out Cameron had a car stashed around the corner, a four-year-old Volvo wagon. It was clean—a hand-me-down still registered to her mom—and it had room enough for him to lie in the back and rest while Cameron drove. Hendricks was grateful she was the type to bike to work, otherwise the car would have been sitting in the Salty Dog’s lot, inaccessible and useless. Now it was parked across the street from the Roadhouse in the motel’s lot, Cameron hunched behind the wheel so she could case the truck stop from the other side. She’d been thrilled at the prospect of joining him. He’d told her not to get used to it, that she was to do nothing but observe, and even that was a onetime deal.
“Sure thing, boss,” she’d replied.
The wind gusted, cold and clammy. The lone streetlight swayed. The sky was clear and full of stars. The heat of the day had long since bled off into space. Hendricks zipped up his new sweatshirt and crossed his arms for warmth. The stitches in his side protested. He wondered how long it had been since he’d washed down those four Advil with Gatorade in the Walmart parking lot in Hempstead, New York, trying simultaneously to dull the pain and replace the fluids he’d lost.
He watched trucks come and go from his perch atop one of the snowplows. The dirt lot in which it sat was dark. The salt dome behind him prevented anyone from seeing him in silhouette.
Walmart was where he’d gotten his new clothes: a pair of olive-drab cargo pa
nts, a navy blue henley, a gray zip-up hooded sweatshirt. The fits were close, but not quite; since his old clothes were covered in blood, he’d made Cameron go in to get them. She’d also picked up a few other supplies: gauze pads and medical tape; a pack of disinfecting hand wipes; two pairs of pocket binoculars; ammunition for Pappas’s .45; several cheap, prepaid cells (Android smartphones, to Hendricks’s surprise—burners had come a long way since he’d started using them four years ago); two Bluetooth earpieces; a backpack; some snacks for the road. All told, it wasn’t cheap, but the cash Pappas had slipped her at the Salty Dog more than covered the bill.
When they’d arrived at the Roadhouse, Hendricks had Cameron drive by slow a couple times, but there’d been no sign that he was walking into an ambush. There’d been no sign of Evie either, so Hendricks decided they’d set up at two vantage points, a phone line open between them, and watch the place awhile.
“Hey,” she said in his ear, “can you read the license plate on that pickup now that the tractor-trailer moved?”
He raised his binoculars. Eyed the boxy old Chevy—mid-1980s, he figured, in two-tone red and white. “Yeah, I can read it.”
“Pennsylvania tags?”
“Yup.”
“Cool. I’m ready when you are, then.”
Hendricks read the number to her. Heard her tap at her keyboard. Aimed his binoculars at her while she worked, her face lit ghostly white by the laptop screen, barely visible from this distance. He reluctantly admitted to himself that it was nice to have some backup for a change. And the kid was good. She didn’t fill the line with idle chatter or complain that she was bored. She was alert and attentive, her focus unwavering. And she’d infiltrated the PennDOT database without breaking a sweat.
“Says here it’s registered to a Stan Walters,” she said.
Hendricks’s adrenaline spiked. His palms grew sweaty. His chest felt as though someone had filled it with helium.
Stan Walters sounded awfully close to Stuart Walker. Stuart Walker was Evie’s husband’s name—and WITSEC liked crafting aliases their charges would answer to.
