‘There’s gotta be someone I can tell my story to.’
‘What story, Mike? That you’re innocent?’ Hank was less angry than distressed. ‘I think they get that particular tale from time to time.’
Mike looked across at Kat in the stolen Civic. The glare of passing headlights turned the windows opaque. She flickered into view, gone, into view, gone again. Watching her ghost in and out of existence intensified the knot in his gut – all the deepest, darkest fears he’d swallowed over the years hardening into physical form. He thought about that morning he’d sat in his truck and watched her climb the fireman’s pole at school, how she’d dinged the top bar with the tiny ball of her fist.
He felt like a third party listening to his own voice. ‘So what do I do?’
The connection seemed to achieve a sudden crisp clarity, the static taking a rest. The rush of passing cars on the freeway was hypnotic, exhausting. When was the last time he had slept? He wet his lips, waited.
‘Hank, what do I do?’
‘I don’t know what to tell you, Mike.’
Bickering, the family packed themselves back into the station wagon and pulled out on their semi-merry way. Breathing gas fumes and hot tar, Mike watched them merge onto the freeway, watched until the brake lights blended into the river of traffic.
‘Mike? Mike? You there?’
A voice echoed in his head, Shep’s reply when Mike had mentioned how they’d had stamina back in the day: That’s because we didn’t have anything else.
‘Yuh. I’m here.’ His voice was flat, robotic. ‘I talked to Shep already.’ When he had, Shep hadn’t offered so much as a told you so. He’d just given Mike the update on Annabel and pushed forward as Mike was trying to now, moving the pigskin a yard at a time. ‘He thinks the best play is Kiki Dupleshney.’
‘Mike, you can’t—’
‘That’s his world, so he put out word through his network that he needs a con woman for a heist he’s pulling. He’ll try to lure her in.’
‘Mike. These men are looking to kill you. You can’t drag Kat along with you.’
‘What choice do I have?’
No answer but the gently falling rain that had started up without Mike’s noticing.
‘Good-bye, Hank.’ He set the phone gently back in the cradle.
He trudged over to the car. Kat had locked the driver’s door. He knocked, but she didn’t look over at him; she glowered dead ahead at the raindrops tapping the hood. He walked around, climbed into the passenger seat, rucksack in lap, and sat, dripping, both of them staring at nothing, going nowhere, a stolen car parked on a rest stop off a freeway Mike couldn’t name.
When Kat spoke, the intensity of her voice surprised him. ‘What’s the deal with Green Valley?’
He bent his head. Water dripped from his forehead onto his thighs.
‘Phony green houses.’ Kat wiped angrily at a stray tear, but her voice hadn’t changed at all. ‘You said “phony green houses.” That’s what you and Mom were whispering about before in the police station.’
‘Given everything going on, this isn’t important right now.’
‘It’s important to me. Right now.’
He realized that this was the end of the line, that there was nothing left to do but submit to the truth swiftly and brutally, but still, it took him two tries to get the words moving out of his mouth. ‘The houses weren’t really green. A guy laid in the wrong pipes. And I covered it up.’
She was shivering, pale. ‘What about your award?’
‘I didn’t deserve it.’
Her voice now was weak, pitiful. ‘You lied to me?’
His hands were shaking. His face numb. ‘Yes.’
She choked out a little cry, and then her door was open and she’d vanished into the rain. He sprang out after her, sloshing through puddles. She was ahead, a wraith in the downslanting wet, faster than he’d imagined. She breached the grassy rise behind the bathrooms and darted down the far side, but he caught her, wrapping her up so they wouldn’t tumble down the slope.
She kicked to get free, shrieking at him, ‘What else have you lied about? What else?’ She kept thrashing violently, and he lost his footing, skidding onto his ass, rainwater soaking instantly through his jeans. ‘I hate you!’ she yelled. ‘You can’t keep me in motels and cars for the rest of my life. I just want to go to school and have my room back and Mom.’
He held her frail little frame until she went limp against him, sobbing.
He spoke into the wet tangle of her hair. ‘I will never break my word to you again. Never again.’
She murmured into his chest, half moan, half mantra, ‘I want my mom I want my mom I want my mom.’
He held her in the rain.
Footfall, slow and heavy, proceeded up the hospital corridor. It paused. Two blots interrupted the seam of light beneath the door. The lockless handle dipped silently. The hinges issued no complaint.
A wedge of light fell from the bright hall into the dark room, widening like a fan as the door swung inward.
A man’s form, distorted and massive, stretched across the floor, a black cutout framed in a yellow rectangle. Inside, Annabel lay at rest, limp arms over a pilled hospital blanket, her mouth slightly pursed. The cutout hands twitched impatiently. Two shuffling steps and the door eased closed, extinguishing the light. Dirty boots moved across sterile white tile.
Uplit by the seesawing EKG line glowing from the monitor, Dodge stared down at Annabel’s tranquil face.
Chapter 37
Dodge’s hands twitched again. One moved to the tangle of tubes on the cart beside Annabel’s bed, the other slipping into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants.
The partition curtain screeched back on its tracks, shrill as a scream. Dodge barely had time to pivot when Shep hit him on the side of the neck, staggering him. Dodge took a knee, broad fingers groping, clutching for air, his mouth agape. One hand settled on Annabel’s bed, fisting the blanket into a black-hole whorl. Even with Dodge stooped, his mass dwarfed Shep, making him look, improbably, average-size.
Before Dodge could regroup, Shep grabbed him by the shirt collar and arm and rode him like a battering ram toward the closed door. Dodge twisted at the end, falling, ball-peen hammer magically in hand, steel head whistling past Shep’s temple, just missing. The collision was titanic, both men bouncing back into the room. The door cracked but did not cave. Stunned, it wobbled open.
Dodge’s breath came as an ongoing squawk, a reed-thin draw of air smothered in his throat. His Adam’s apple jerked. Even drowning, he was finding his feet, hammer loose at his side like something mythological, something Nordic. He drew himself up, his back to the doorway, a head taller than Shep.
Shep had torn his St. Jerome pendant from around his neck. One worn silver edge protruded from the fingers of his fist like a push dagger. He drove flesh and metal into the high center of Dodge’s chest, a brimstone variation on Dr Cha’s sternal rub. Dodge flew back through the doorway, arms and legs trailing weightlessly.
Shep slammed the lockless door closed, leaning all his weight into it. A thunderclap shuddered it in the frame as if a truck were butting the other side. Shep’s sneakers left the floor, chirp-landed on the tile. He drove the door closed. Another thunderclap, the door yawning open a foot this time, then banging shut.
Silence. Shep panting, shoulder to the wood, waiting. The wound on his forearm had torn open around the stitches.
A nearby smash. Someone screamed down the hall. A bang, farther away. Footsteps and panicked voices.
Then the handle rotated again in Shep’s grip, and someone shoved at the door. After Dodge it felt like a puppy nuzzling a palm.
Shep stepped back, and security and nurses spilled into the room, rushing toward Annabel. Two guards moved to grab Shep, but Dr Cha was shouting, ‘No, no, he’s okay!’
Shep shoved through and across the threshold. Dodge’s wake told the story of his flight – a knocked-over patient tangled in his gown and IV pole, then a
bleeding orderly picking herself out of an upended gurney, then a kneecapped security guard moaning and clutching either side of his leg as if to keep it from exploding. Finally, at the end of the hall, the stairwell door swinging closed, wiping from view the sliver of blackness beyond.
Dr Cha sat in the stillness of Annabel’s room, restitching the cut on Shep’s forearm. A drape of blood hung from the slit, dripping off his elbow. Her fingers moved nimbly, a blur of hook and Prolene. Two security guards were posted outside. The silence, long delayed, was welcome.
‘Stitching a nick like this twice,’ she said, ‘is not the best use of a trauma surgeon’s time.’
Shep said, ‘Sorry I wasn’t injured worse.’
‘So am I.’ She smirked, then repositioned his arm like a slab of meat on a grill.
They’d recounted the official version endlessly. Dr Cha had explained to the responding cops, as she and Shep had rehearsed, that she’d permitted him to go back to the room to pick up his good-luck pendant that he’d forgotten there. What fortunate timing that he’d been inside when the intruder had burst in.
On the bed Annabel stirred, her face drawing tight in a grimace. Progress.
Dr Cha went on alert, her hands pausing, then slowly resuming their work. She finished and wiped the blood from Shep’s arm with some wet gauze.
Shep looped the thin silver chain back through his pendant and, ducking his head, secured it around his neck. His lowered gaze snagged on a small length of electrical wire partially hidden behind one of the medical cart’s wheels. He retrieved it, held it to the light. He realized she was watching closely.
‘A signal wire,’ he explained. ‘For a digital transmitter – a bug.’
‘Why?’
‘So they’d know when Mike came to visit. It’s the one place they think he’ll show up. Where they can trap him within four walls.’
Dr Cha cracked her knuckles, shook out a neck cramp. Her choppy black hair framed a swan’s neck. She was quiet a moment. Then she said, ‘This hospital isn’t safe as long as she’s here.’
‘No,’ Shep said.
‘I spoke to Annabel’s father this evening after he landed. The health-care-proxy hearing, I gather, is first thing’ – a bleary glance at her Breitling despite the wall clock overhead showing a quarter past four – ‘this morning. Proxies are very rarely reassigned, not without drawn-out legal battles, but I have seen the rights suspended.’
Shep stared at her patiently.
She continued, ‘If Mike Wingate wants to make a request to transfer his wife, he needs to get me something signed in the next six hours.’
‘I thought she can’t be moved,’ Shep said.
Dr Cha’s smirk, this time, held an element of cunning. ‘She can’t.’
Chapter 38
The Batphone, charging on the nightstand, rattled Mike awake, harmonizing with the throbbing in his head. His eyelids felt gummy, his mouth filled with sand. He pried his eyes open, uncoiled himself from Kat’s side. Slowly, his surroundings trickled into his brain. A motel. Somewhere in Glendale.
He answered, his voice hangover-rough.
Shep said, ‘Dodge tried to get to Annabel.’
Mike felt a sudden temperature drop, an arctic wind blowing through the shoddy room. ‘And?’
‘He didn’t get to her.’
‘He was going to . . .’
‘Maybe. He dropped an electrical wire. Maybe he was gonna plant a bug so they could ambush you if you visited. Either way they’re watching her.’
Mike sat up sharply, Kat sliding off his arm, deadweight. Snowball II peeked out from under her shoulder, its bulging eyes a portrait of alarm. ‘Is she okay?’
‘Yes. I mean, for being unconscious.’
‘So they want to use her to catch me when I surface?’ Mike asked. ‘You think that means they won’t kill her?’
Shep said, ‘They could always hope you surface at her funeral.’
The line hummed for a bit.
‘There’s a hearing on your health-care thing this morning,’ Shep said. ‘We’ve gotta get her moved before then, while you still have authority. You need to send a fax to Dr Cha demanding that Annabel be moved. Get a pen. Write down this phrasing.’
Mike stumbled around, tripping over his shoes, found a pencil and a torn grocery bag to write on, and took dictation. ‘Okay, but how am I going to find a place to transfer—’
‘I’ll handle it. Just get me the fax. Now.’
Mike did his best to rouse Kat, but she was out cold. He shook her gently, tugged at her arms, even lifted her eyelids with his thumbs. Finally, juggling their bags, the rucksack, and a page torn from the phone book, he carried her out to the Honda and laid her in the backseat. A few blocks from FedEx Kinko’s, she woke irritably.
‘What day is it?’
Early-morning gray. Few cars on the road. People smoking at bus stops. Drivers slurping from Starbucks cups.
‘Friday,’ Mike said. ‘I think it’s Friday.’
‘Where are we?’
‘I have to send a fax.’
‘Then where are we going?’
Mike blinked hard, fighting off an image of his own father behind a different steering wheel, giving indistinct answers and nervous glances at the rearview. A fresh hostility spiked in his chest. In three decades he’d traveled only the distance from the backseat to the front.
Kat was asking something else. ‘When do we get to go home?’
‘I don’t know.’ His voice was half strangled, defeated.
She slumped against the window and blew out a sigh of despair. It struck him with renewed urgency that they couldn’t keep up the nomadic routine for much longer. That they’d run out of time. Out of patience. Out of luck.
At Kinko’s he prepared the fax on a rented computer. Kat spun in the chair next to him, her head tilted back so she could watch the ceiling spin. Before printing he let the cursor linger over the Explorer button. Hesitating, he looked at Kat, twirling, mumbling. Something in his chest cracked open, and he glanced away quickly so she wouldn’t see his eyes watering.
Through the American Airlines Web site, he booked a oneway ticket for Kat to St. Louis, departing at 5:30 P.M. Annabel’s brother, whom Mike had always liked best of her family, had just gotten married and bought a house in the suburbs. A companion-ticket option popped up, and it took all he could muster to click No. He used Annabel’s PayPal account to complete the purchase. Then he bought another ticket on the same route for Kat on the 11:45 red-eye and printed both boarding passes.
He gave the fax to the lady at the desk – “I, Michael Wingate, do hereby request that my wife, Annabel Wingate, be released for transfer to a specialist management team which I have selected based on their ability to provide a higher level of care” – and split.
Nosing the Honda onto the nearest freeway entrance, he put the pedal down, hard, wanting as much distance between him and the Kinko’s phone, the number of which would be tattooed across the transfer request when they pulled it warm from the fax machine at the Los Robles Medical Center.
‘Mom takes me to get ice cream every Friday after school,’ Kat said.
Mike sliced between two semis, hit the fast lane on a slide. Around the bend they were greeted by a wall of brake lights. The front edge of rush hour. Mike jerked onto the shoulder, gauging the distance to the next exit.
‘It’s Friday,’ she said. ‘I know Mom’s not . . . she can’t . . . but maybe you and I could—’
‘Not right now.’ He struggled to hide his apprehension. His tone gave off more irritation than he would have liked.
‘Why not?’
‘Because.’ He glanced over at her. ‘Oh, come on. What?’
‘You yelled at me.’
‘I didn’t yell at you.’
Vehicles clogged the exit. Two, three streetlight changes should be enough to shove them through onto residential streets. Then he could weave for a while, find another motel, hole up until . . . until what?
He risked another glance over. Kat’s face was flushed, the skin puffy around the bridge of her nose, as it got before she cried. What could he do? Half the time she was more mature than he was, but right now she was eight and missed her mother and wanted ice cream.
Fifteen minutes and twenty constipated blocks later, he found a Rite Aid. Kat sat on a Lilliputian chair by the ice-cream counter. She ate her Rocky Road looking down into the cone.
He was not forgiven.
Watching her nibble around the scoop, savoring each bite with almost mournful focus, he realized that the scene felt like a last meal.
Back in the car, amped on sugar, Kat’s anger boiled away. She strained at the seat belt, singing, ‘Miiiss Suzy was a ki-iid, a ki-iid, a ki-iid. Miss Suzy was a ki-iid, and this is what she said—’
Mike drove, fumbling at the wheel, cell phone at his face. ‘The doc get the fax?’
Shep said, ‘Just.’
‘Waah waah, suck my thumb, gimme a piece o’ bubble gum—’
‘What now?’
‘Don’t know,’ Shep said. ‘But wherever Annabel goes, we can’t keep tabs on her anymore. We have to sever all contact. It’s the only way to keep her safe.’
‘What if she—’
‘You have to let her go.’
‘—was a tee-nager, a tee-nager, a tee-nager, Miss Suzy was a teenager, and this is what—’
‘I can’t. She’s my wife. I need to know how she’s doing.’
‘Even if that kills her?’
Mike fought his face back into place. Took a few breaths. ‘Anything on Kiki Dupleshney?’ he asked.
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