The Wild Road

by Marjorie M. Liu

  The woman finally forced herself to look at him. “It’s not enough.”

  Lannes’ shoulders slumped. Frederick appeared in the bedroom doorway dressed in loose slacks and cashmere, with a small canvas rucksack hanging from his shoulder. He looked ready for a stroll along the Seine, though his hands shook slightly and his eyes were fraught with concern. Especially when he looked at the woman.

  “What,” he asked slowly, “has happened now?”

  Lannes hesitated, but the woman felt as though truth serum had been poured down her throat. “I don’t know who I am,” she confessed wearily. “I may have put you in danger.”

  Frederick stared a moment then looked at Lannes, who tilted his head in a half shrug, his expression unreadable. The old man tucked his chin against his chest, still staring, and tossed his bag on the floor. His hands shook. He jammed them into his pockets.

  “Lannes,” he said, rather fiercely. “The bedroom, if you will.”

  “No time to talk,” replied the big man, bending down to pick up the bag. “We have to go.”

  The woman wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You should call the police. Report this. Turn me in.” She hesitated when they remained silent. “Unless you have something to hide.”

  “You are an extremely suspicious woman,” Lannes replied, but there was no malice in his tone. Just kindness and a very quiet exasperation.

  She found that unnerving. His motives were mystifying. As were his eyes, the way he moved. His stillness. The longer she was around him, the more she felt like those were the only parts of him that were real, and that the rest was a mask polished to craggy perfection.

  “Boy Scout,” she muttered. “Why do you care?”

  Lannes said nothing. Frederick gave her a stern look. “Because he is kind, madam. Do not take that for granted.”

  Frederick’s words rang inside her head. She thought he might be right. And she did not take it for granted.

  Which was why she said, “I may have killed three men. Shot them.”

  Frederick’s gaze faltered, and he glanced quickly at Lannes. But the big man remained silent, studying her face with those eyes that seemed to see right through her.

  She leaned against the wall, palms sweaty. “Did you hear me?” she asked, nauseated.

  “Do you remember pulling the trigger?” he asked.

  She thought about lying, shrieking Yes!, but could not bring herself to say that one small word. She shook her head, numb, and Lannes made a small sound, glancing at Frederick. “Innocent until proven guilty.”

  “That’s dumb,” she said. “I had a gun in my possession.”

  “You’re suffering from amnesia,” Lannes replied.

  “I could be lying about that.”

  “But I happen to know you aren’t.”

  “How could you possibly know that?” she asked.

  “Boy Scout magic.” A grim smile flickered across his mouth.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Frederick snapped, pointing to his bedroom. “Lannes, I insist. One minute will not harm any of us.”

  Lannes sighed, and glanced at the woman. “Stay here.”

  Like hell, she thought, and watched him disappear into Frederick’s bedroom and shut the door softly behind him. The woman immediately struggled toward the stairs. Her feet hurt too badly for speed, though her stomach twisted with urgency. Near the bottom, she looked at the closed front door and felt chills, pure sickening dread. She imagined she heard breathing. In the night. Waiting for her.

  Find Orwell Price. Run.

  A name. A real name. Answers, maybe. Or danger. Someone had followed her here. The same person who had left that note pinned to her jacket. The handwriting was the same. But the message, the name…

  None of this made any sense.

  The woman hobbled to the kitchen. The blinds were down, which was some relief. She had a fear of mirrors now, after seeing herself in one. Not because she looked bad—that much had been a pleasant if useless surprise—but because her eyes frightened her. Looking into her own gaze had felt like enduring the stare of Medusa, like being cast in stone. Becoming withered and cold and hollow. Lost girl. Trapped.

  The phone was red and hung on the wall. The woman perched on a stool to rest her feet and picked up the receiver. Her finger hovered over the number nine, but she did not touch it. She wanted to. She wanted to turn herself in. She had to. Let the police sort it out. But the dread that crawled into her body nearly choked her.

  The woman pressed her forehead against the cool wall, thinking hard. Looking deep inside herself. She was not afraid of arrest, was too exhausted to care. No, she was afraid of being found.

  The woman closed her eyes, searching her memories, fighting for something, anything. All she recalled, though, was the hotel room—and that was enough. She hung up the phone.

  Then she picked it up again. Chicago, she told herself. She was in Chicago. And just like that, area codes and phone numbers slipped into her mind. Like magic.

  The woman dialed directory assistance. When the operator answered, asking for city and state, she said, “Chicago. Illinois.”

  “Listing?”

  “Orwell Price.”

  “Hold on.”

  And the woman held on, leaning against the wall. Until, moments later, she heard a click—and a computerized voice rattled off a phone number. The woman listened, stunned, then got over her surprise just in time to hear the digits repeated. She memorized them. And when the computer asked if she wanted to make the call, she affirmed it with another push of a button. Waiting. Breathless.

  She heard ringing. She also heard footsteps on the stairs: a quick heavy tread, followed by a lighter slower one. Both men, Lannes and Frederick, were coming to find her. She hardly cared. The phone was still ringing.

  Until, suddenly, a voice answered after a great deal of fumbling and mumbled, “’Lo?”

  The woman hung up fast. Lannes and Frederick walked into the kitchen. The men stopped when they saw her—froze in their tracks—but not, she thought, because they were surprised to see her. She felt her stunned amazement reflected back in the way they looked at her, and her voice clawed up her throat like a wild thing.

  “I think I found Orwell Price,” she whispered.

  Lannes drove. Frederick sat up front.

  The Impala’s interior was flawless. The woman reclined on black leather that had never known a scratch and wondered how she had gone from waking up in a burning hotel to this—driving in the dark near dawn with two strangers. It was dumb. Incredibly dumb.

  “Drop me off somewhere,” she said. “I’ll take it from there.”

  “Young lady,” replied Frederick, “you must be crazy.”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “Deliriously so.”

  Frederick turned in his seat to look at her. The suspicion was gone from his eyes, replaced instead with a thoughtfulness that was cautious but kind. As kind as he had been earlier, when he had brought her his wife’s clothing. She wondered what, exactly, Lannes had said to him up in that bedroom.

  “Perhaps you suffer from the onset of a fugue,” said the old man, so calm one might have thought he was discussing a wine list or the weather.

  “A fugue,” she said, assailed by facts. “A disordered state of mind in which somebody wanders from home and experiences loss of memory.”

  “Men and women have been known to spontaneously forget themselves. Afterwards, they are often possessed with a desire to…flee.”

  Sounded familiar. She found Lannes watching her in the rearview mirror. A hot flush stole through her, a sensation with which she was becoming familiar in his presence. He seemed to fill the entire front seat, and it was not her imagination that the car dipped slightly on his side. Frederick sat pressed against the passenger door, his hands shaking against his thighs.

  At a stoplight, Lannes pulled out a battered cell phone and dialed a number. “Charlie,” he said quietly, “something happened. I need you to send someone to the Pen
insula in Chicago to look after Freddy. As soon as possible. I don’t care who. Just make sure they’re good. And look someone up for me. Orwell Price.”

  He recited the phone number she had given him back at the house, then hung up. The woman leaned forward. “Who was that?”

  “My brother,” Lannes said awkwardly, leaning away from her. “My brother, who happens to work for a…detective agency.”

  Her stomach dropped. “You told him? How much?”

  “Everything.” He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “You can trust him.”

  She leaned back and closed her eyes against the city lights. Frederick muttered, “Really, Lannes. Bald statements like that would hardly comfort me.”

  Lannes muttered a tense reply, which was lost beneath the roar of the engine. The woman almost smiled. Almost. It was either that or cry again, and she was determined not to let that happen.

  It was almost six in the morning, and the sky was beginning to lighten. Not enough to dismiss the night. They reached Superior Street, downtown, and pulled up in front of an immense art-deco monolith with an entrance composed of glittering golden glass and marble, doors framed by pillars, and stone lions that were distinctly Asian in design. The Peninsula Hotel.

  A doorman approached. Lannes turned off the car engine, twisted in his seat and said, “You can come or stay, lady. But if you stay, I want your word that you won’t run or hot-wire my car.”

  Frederick stared at the big man. “You’re not both staying with me?”

  It was of some interest to the woman that Lannes squirmed. “Charlie will probably call back soon. No time, Freddy. I’ll make sure you’re safe in the room before I go.”

  “That’s not the point. I would like to go, too. And help.”

  “Freddy.”

  “Don’t let these useless hands fool you.”

  Lannes rested his own hand on the old man’s shoulder, and the compassion on his face, the sadness, was enough to take the woman’s breath away. She forgot herself for a moment as he very quietly said, “Never would I be fooled by anything so shallow.”

  “Ah,” breathed Frederick, sagging against the seat. “But I’ve become old, haven’t I? What happened to those years, Lannes?”

  “They’re still here,” he said firmly. “But I won’t put you in danger.”

  Danger I caused, added the woman silently, feeling very insignificant and helpless. Frederick glanced at her almost as though he had heard her thoughts, but she saw no accusation on his face. Just concern.

  Behind him, the doorman waited, one gloved hand resting on the car. Frederick took a deep breath, tore his gaze from the woman and fumbled for the door himself. It was immediately opened from the outside.

  But Frederick paused, looking back again at the woman. “You, young lady,” he said quietly, “I hope you find yourself. But if you do not, remember that there are worse things than…choosing the course of a new life.”

  Then he was gone, rising out of the Impala with as much dignity as a king. Lannes shot the woman a brief look, then followed Frederick, keeping close, one hand under the old man’s elbow. He loomed over everyone else, and as she watched him, Frederick’s words rang inside her head. She thought he might be right: there were worse things than starting a life afresh.

  Here she was, too, sitting in the backseat of a car just ripe for stealing. No keys, but there was a something twitching at the back of her mind that might have been a skill for stripping wires. So very tempting.

  She got out of the car, ignoring the incredulous look the doorman gave her as he stared at her floppy socks and ill-fitting clothes, and climbed into the passenger seat. She leaned back and studied the steering wheel.

  I am a practical woman, she told herself, willing it to be true. And Lannes was a resource, an opportunity. She needed him. Or someone like him. And while she could bemoan the safety of that, or its ethics—or beat her chest in some mocking, woe-is-me roar—the facts were dead simple: she did not know who she was, she had no money or friends, and she had only a name, only one clue to what might have happened to her. Giving that up was no longer an option.

  So she waited. And locked the doors. Watched the street and the lightening sky.

  The woman sat for almost twenty minutes before Lannes returned—a remarkable length of time that eventually felt like playing chicken with a freight train, a train rumbling toward her filled with the ominous specters of police and blood and murder. But finally, finally, she saw the big man exit the hotel.

  He did not look entirely surprised to see her waiting for him, which the woman found a bit insulting, but he did give her a small grateful smile that felt almost unbearably sweet to her raw ticking nerves. She unlocked his door. He slid in, carrying with him the scent of earth and something delicate, like orchids.

  “Is he all right?” she found herself saying, genuinely concerned.

  Lannes shrugged, frowning. “No one likes being left behind. But…thank you for asking.”

  “I like him,” she said simply. “And I’m sorry for the trouble I’ve caused. It’s not too late to ditch me, you know.”

  “Maybe later,” he said. “I’m curious now.”

  The woman could not help herself. “No matter what happens? How do you know I’m not lying to you? Or that I didn’t plant that note at your front door? I could be anyone in the world.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that,” he said, pinning her with a look that made her feel very small. “This isn’t an easy thing for me. But I believe you. I see a person who needs help. And if I don’t help you, I’m afraid no one will.”

  The woman stared at him in silence. Lannes sighed, put the Impala in gear and drove away from the curb. The sun was rising. A hint of golden light twinkled between the skyscrapers, reflected by glass and steel. It was going to be a pretty day.

  “My brother called,” Lannes said. “He found Price.”

  “Okay,” the woman whispered, hardly hearing him. She was thinking instead that she should have thrown survival to the wind and done the right thing after all, embraced a little self-sacrifice and saved this man from his moral compass. She should have stolen his car while she had the chance.

  Chapter Six

  Orwell Price lived in a gritty little neighborhood on the far west side of Chicago. Not much in the way of personality. All the houses were small and made of brick, with wide porches and scrappy yards.

  The Impala purred. Lannes parked behind a white pickup. He and the woman got out of the car. The air was cool.

  The neighborhood was quiet, but that was merely a lull—he heard doors banging and car engines roaring, saw tiny children crying and screaming, throwing down their book bags on the concrete sidewalks while their mothers ignored them and leaned on chain link fences, cigarettes dangling from their fingers.

  Folks going to work, school. It was only Thursday.

  Lannes stood for a moment, watching the woman posed frozen on the sidewalk, her gaze sharp, thoughtful. She was still wearing only socks. He needed to get her some good shoes if they were going to keep on like this. A first-aid kit for her feet, maybe.

  They walked down the sidewalk to a small brick house surrounded by a chain-link fence decorated with plastic windmills shaped like birds. Yellow grass and bushy weeds filled the small lawn, which was covered in stone birdbaths and bird feeders that hung from iron poles jammed into the earth, leaning at an angle. The feeders were empty, and there was no water in the baths.

  The fence gate stood ajar. Lannes and the woman hesitated, staring over the threshold at dirty windows covered in curtains yellowed with age.

  “Think the boogeyman lives in there?” asked the woman. “Or Mister Rogers?”

  Lannes grunted, extending his senses into the home. Listening with his mind. Someone was in there…but that was all he could determine.

  “Stay behind me,” he said, ignoring the amused surprise that flashed through her eyes—an amusement that faded just as soon as he started walking up the path to t
he front door, deliberately taking long strides so that he would reach the house before her. The woman hobbled behind him, her presence at the back of his mind sparking with irritation. It made him think of Charlie.

  Wait, his brother had said. I’m sending help. Don’t go alone.

  Well. He was not alone. And he could not wait. Those instincts in his heart had been pushing and pulling from the moment he had found that note—earlier even, if he considered the woman—and it was now or never. He knew it. Even if he did not understand why.

  Fate. Moments passing in time. Moments that will never come again.

  And knowing just when to catch them was another kind of magic all of its own.

  Lannes knocked on the front door, stepping sideways as the woman neared. His bound wings ached. So did his nerves. He had spent too much time alone to be well equipped for playing hero. Up until now, his only purposes in life had been simple: Mind his own business. Cause no harm. Never be discovered.

  He heard a shuffling sound. The door opened. An old man stood on the other side of the screen, wearing a ratty blue bathrobe that gaped at the front revealing a scarred pale torso and a pair of striped pajama bottoms that hung low over wide hips. His face sagged. His nose was red. He had no hair on his head, but plenty on his chest. White and bristly.

  Find Orwell Price, the note had said.

  “Who the hell are you?” growled the man.

  “Mr. Price?” Lannes inquired. “We were hoping to speak with you.”

  “I’m not buying, I’m not converting, and everyone under the age of thirty-five deserves to be shot,” the man snapped. “Get off my porch.”

  “Hey,” said the woman, stepping close to the screen door. “This is important.”

  “I’ve got jock itch more important than you, lady,” he replied, then looked at her. Lannes was certain Orwell had already seen the woman, but perhaps his eyesight was bad. He blinked, reaching up to rub his left eye…and went very still.

  The woman’s breath caught. “Do you know me?”

  “No,” Orwell whispered, sagging backward. “No. Who did…who did you say you were again?”