‘I just put out the word twelve hours ago.’
‘—piece o’ bubble gum, go to your room, oooo aah, lost my bra—’
‘I know, Shep, but—’ Mike looked over at Kat, finishing the thought in his head: But I don’t know how much longer my daughter can hold up.
Snowball II got into the song and dance now, swinging along, Kat kicking up the stuffed-animal legs, a Vegas revue gone polar. She was punch drunk, coming apart at the seams. She needed to run in circles until she fell down.
Shep said, ‘Cat-and-mouse games take a lotta waiting, Mike. You know that.’
Traffic had loosened; Mike had a full tank of gas and nowhere to go.
Miss Suzy’s life cycle had drawn to a close: ‘—to heh-ven, to heh-ven, Miss Suzy went to heh-ven, and this is what she said.’
He set the phone in his lap and watched the streetlights whip by overhead. All those people on the sidewalks, shopping and pushing strollers, going about their normal lives.
Seven hours until that first flight departed for St. Louis.
‘—oooo aah, lost my bra, help me, choke choke choke, tra-laaaaaa!’
A nanosecond of silence.
Mike exhaled with relief.
‘Miiiiiiiiiiiss Suzy was a bay-bee, a bay-bee, a bay-bee—’
They passed a public park with grassy hills and picnic tables and jungle gyms. Severing the third verse, Mike pulled off, and they used the bathrooms. He waited nervously outside the women’s room until Kat reappeared. They sat at one of the picnic tables, Mike wearing the rucksack and digging through the grocery bags to come up with food. He found himself checking the parking lot, the trees along the perimeter, the guy in shades walking his dog. Kat picked at her food. He couldn’t blame her; they’d had peanut butter for five straight meals, and the bread was stale.
‘That sandwich isn’t gonna eat itself,’ he said.
‘But if it did,’ Kat replied, ‘that would be really cool.’
‘Want me to get you a hot lunch somewhere?’
‘No. Really. This is fine.’ Kat took a bite, made a big show of chomping to emphasize the hardship. He soaked in the smart-ass sight of her.
Clouds moved overhead, dimming the park a few watts. Mike thought about a one-way no-companion ticket to St. Louis. 5:30 P.M. Her boarding passes crinkled in his back pocket. He fussed with his fingers. Cleared his throat. ‘Your mother and I, when we got married . . . Man, did we want a baby. We wanted you more than anything. Do you know that?’
Kat nodded impatiently, her eyes on the fenced jungle gym below. ‘Can I play?’
He fought his voice steady. ‘Of course, honey,’ he managed.
She bolted down the slope, leaving her sandwich behind. He cleaned up and followed, watching from outside the fence. He indulged in a brief fantasy: her on a tire swing in an expansive St. Louis backyard, Annabel’s brother waiting on the porch with his new bride and some lemonade.
He thought of that playground from his childhood, of the wail of that distant bell and how he’d emerged from the yellow tunnel to see the empty parking spaces along the curb. Can you tell me who you belong to?
His heart was racing. Needing to be closer, he circled the fence and pushed Kat on the swings. For a time there was nothing but the sand under his feet, a pleasant breeze, and his daughter rotating away and back, away and back. Her curly hair, flying up in his face, was badly tangled and smelled like fruit punch. The scene, this scene, never changed. She could have been two or five. He could have been twenty-nine or thirty-three.
He pushed her, his hands light against her back, letting her go, catching her, letting her go again.
Chapter 39
Holding Mike’s faxed transfer order, Dr Cha appeared in Annabel’s room, where she had left Shep, baffled.
‘I will need to have a conversation with the receiving doctor. Then I’ll require a signature from the critical-care transport team.’
Shep said, ‘Huh?’
Dr Cha said, ‘Do you think you could arrange that for me?’
Shep said, ‘What?’
Dr Cha said, ‘Excellent,’ and disappeared.
Shep turned to Annabel to see if she was keeping up any better than he was, but she remained still on the mattress, hair matted, eyes closed.
The bedside phone rang. And again. And again.
Shep trudged over and picked up. ‘Yeah?’
‘This is Dr Cha. And this is . . .?’
A very long pause.
Shep said, ‘Dr Dubronski.’
‘Dr Dubronski, have the risks of transfer been explained to the health-care proxy?’
Shep picked at his teeth with a nail. ‘They have.’
‘Are you familiar with Annabel Wingate’s case?’
‘I am.’
‘Would you like to discuss the plan of care now or once the transfer is complete?’
‘Once it’s complete.’
‘Excellent. Will you be sending your own critical-care transport team?’
‘No?’ Silence. ‘Yes.’
Click. Dial tone.
Light footsteps, a brief knock on the door, and then Dr Cha reappeared with a form on a clipboard. She tapped cheerily with a pen. ‘I’ll need a signature here.’
Shep scribbled something.
She glanced down at the page. ‘Insert doctor-handwriting joke here.’ She kicked the green foot pedal and wheeled Annabel’s bed out from the wall, guiding it into Shep’s hands. Steering the attached cart and IV pole, Dr Cha walked Shep down the hall and into the elevator, then leaned in and hit the button for the third floor.
A clerk jogged down the hall toward them. ‘Dr Cha? An attorney is holding on line three. It’s about Annabel Wingate, and he says it’s urgent.’
Dr Cha winked as the doors slid shut, wiping her from view.
Before Shep could protest, he was rising. He stared down at Annabel. Fluids moved through tubing. Equipment beeped. She breathed, the skin of her neck fragile and translucent, showing faint blue veins beneath. He wondered what the hell was going to happen next.
The elevator stopped, the doors opened, and a team of folks in scrubs were waiting in a semicircle, a serious-looking young woman at the forefront.
‘I’m Dr Bhatnagar. Is this the patient Dr Dubronski wanted transferred here?’
The doors banged shut on Shep as he wheeled Annabel out into their hands.
He rubbed his shoulder. ‘Sure.’
The woman snatched the clipboard from where Dr Cha had left it across Annabel’s shins. On the medical chart beneath, the personal information had been blacked out as on a CIA document. ‘Do we have a name for this patient?’
An elderly man in a wheelchair butted Shep aside and punched at the elevator button impatiently. Shep said, ‘No.’
She scribbled “UCF 2” across the chart. At Shep’s look of incredulity, she said, ‘Unidentified Caucasian Female. Yes, we already have one. They’re falling out of the sky today.’ A quick nod to Annabel. ‘I understand she’s a victim of domestic abuse.’
Shep said, ‘Possibly.’
‘We’ll hide her in the pediatric ICU, then. Thanks so much. We got it from here.’
She nodded, dismissing him. Shep stepped back into the elevator, nearly stumbling over the man in the wheelchair. The doors closed, and they whistled down to the lobby. The entire episode had occurred in a matter of seconds.
Shep cleared his throat and said to the elderly man or the quiet confines of the elevator, ‘I will never understand smart women.’
Kat splashed in the bathtub, which Mike had rinsed out extensively before filling. The motel, a variation of the ones they’d been ping-ponging through, was in a seedy part of Van Nuys, a stone’s throw from the park where he’d smashed up that forest green Saab with a baseball bat.
He was sitting on the bed, a heavy old-school phone in his lap, his stomach all acid and dull pain. The dust that had risen when he’d sat on the rust-orange bedspread swirled and swirled, impervious to gravity. It
danced along a shaft of light slanting through the sole window, which provided an alley view of plastic wrappers snared in a chain-link fence. Dusk came on in fast-forward, the shaft dimming even as Mike watched it, a flash-light losing batteries.
He’d already spoken to Shep several times. Annabel’s transfer had squeaked through. When Shep had last seen her, she’d been stable, though her improvement seemed to have stalled out. Shep had made clear that being in contact with the doctors at her new location could put her or Mike – and, by extension, Kat – in harm’s way. It was a needless risk, and though it felt like swallowing barbed wire, Mike had acceded.
The upshot was that Shep was turned loose, finally, to run down Kiki Dupleshney. But none of that was what had Mike’s gut in an uproar.
It was the two boarding passes in Kat’s name, folded and rumpled from his pocket, sitting beside him on the bed. One for the 5:30 P.M. flight, one for 11:45.
The beside clock showed 5:01.
Hands sweating, he dialed, routing through the prepaid card’s calling center.
‘American Airlines, LAX.’
‘Will you please put me through to the gate for Flight 768?’ he asked. ‘I have an extremely urgent message for a passenger.’
His response was hold music. Daniel Powter was better than the usual, but Mike didn’t need the reminder that he’d had a bad day. The blue sky haaaw-liday was cut short by a singsongy male voice.
Mike said, ‘I have an important message for a ticketed passenger, Katherine Wingate.’
A pause. ‘Okay. Yes.’ Some rustling as the phone receiver was covered, and then, ‘There is someone here who can help you with that. Let me hand you off.’
A cool feminine voice. ‘Hello?’
Smart – they’d posted a female cop.
‘Hello,’ Mike said cautiously.
‘I’m with Katherine Wingate,’ the woman said. ‘I was told you have a message for her?’
Mike hung up. He bowed his head. If they were checking Annabel’s PayPal account and looking for flights under Kat’s name, that meant they’d be monitoring trains and borders and extended-family members. Which meant that he had no idea, beyond the four walls of this shit-ass motel, where to take his daughter that was safe.
Kat splashed away in the tub, the water’s reflection wavering off the open door. She was singing softly, the same off-key tenderness that infused Annabel’s voice when Mike listened to it through the baby monitor.
‘Lulla-by and good-night, with ro-ses bedight – Dad? What’s bedight? Dad?’
His voice was husky. ‘To decorate.’
‘Oh. Be-di-ight. Lullaby and good night—’
He ripped the boarding pass for the 5:30 flight in half, then kept tearing and tearing, the hundred tiny pieces fluttering like snow to the carpet. The lump in his throat was making it hard to breathe.
‘Lullaby and good night, thy mu-ther’s delight. Mother’s delight?’
‘You, honey,’ he managed. ‘That’s you.’
He tore up the boarding pass for the 11:45 flight that he was actually going to put her on if the first run had been clear, then stared down at the scraps.
What now? ‘
Bright angels beside my dar-ling abide. They will guard thee at rest.’
Mike tilted his head back, cleared his throat, wiped his nose. Kat was out of the bath now, drying off, her pink body stretched thin, elbows and kneecaps poking into sight at the towel’s edges. Absorbed water had bubbled the cheap particleboard counter; rust ringed the faucets. He thought, This is no place for her.
He remembered the plea Annabel had made as dark blood drooled from the gash between her ribs. For him to get Kat away from all this. For him to keep her safe.
And he considered the hard reality of what he might have to do to fulfill that promise.
He scooped up the confetti from the carpet, dumped it in the trash, and went to Kat. The towel, draped over her shoulders like a boxer’s robe, parted around the slight pout of her tummy. She’d dried her hair too exuberantly, the curls all ratted up. Of course no detangler spray, which Annabel would have thought to buy. He brushed patiently from the bottom up, working an inch at a time, the needling pain wearing Kat down until she was whimpering.
‘Stay still, honey, I have to—’
‘Ow. Ow.’ She pushed away. He caught her hands, lowered them, started over. He got half the job done and did his best to fight a ponytail through a hair band. Her eyes were watering from the pain, and he was growing more frustrated, trying to force it, trying to make it right. ‘Ow. Not like that, Dad.’ She finally pulled away and put her back to the counter, like a combatant. She was digging at her scalp with her nails now, scratching hard enough to raise welts at the hairline.
A calm dread descended over him. ‘Let me look.’
‘I don’t have lice.’
‘Let me look.’
‘No.’
‘Kat.’ He took her by a skinny arm, turned her, and tilted her head.
Tiny white dots at her nape.
Eggs.
She read his face in the mirror and fought out of his grasp. ‘No. Not again. No more mayonnaise on my head. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. I can’t.’
‘We don’t have a choice!’ he yelled.
She flinched, her back to the counter, leaning away from him.
‘We’re out of choices. And the mayo doesn’t even work.’ His teeth were clenched. ‘Gentle isn’t effective, Kat. To fix this we have to consider harsher options. The chemical wash might sting and it might seem like it’s not good for you, but sometimes that’s what . . . what’s required . . . if we’re gonna keep you safe from. . .’
He realized, with horror, that he was about to cry.
Kat had gone as white as the towel, which had fallen to her feet. Her mouth was ajar, lips trembling. Arms half up in front of her.
He pressed a hand to the wall, leaned over a little, tried to catch his breath. Clenched, she waited. He reached for her, and she drew back violently.
‘I’m sorry. I miss your mom, too. She’s so much better at—’ His voice broke, hard. ‘I miss her, too.’
Kat unfroze, shoulders lowering first, then the arms coming loose. She crouched, picked up the towel, and wrapped it tightly around herself. Her head was down, and tears were dotting the worn-thin linoleum. He reached for her unsurely, but she didn’t push away, and then he drew her in and hugged her as she grasped his arm.
They watched bad TV for a while and ate a late dinner – ‘Oh, swell, Dad! Peanut butter and fruit juice! Mm-mmm.’ He did his best to smile, to keep things light, but his face felt wooden, the passing minutes a countdown to some terminal event. He took a long shower and dragged a disposable razor across his face. The last time I shaved, it was in my own bathroom, thinking I needed to pick up more razor blades. Annabel was in bed, flipping through a magazine and humming out of key to Nina Simone.
He shoveled cold water over his face to clear the residue, then returned to watch the end of The Simpsons. Finally he zipped Kat into the powder blue sleeping bag, checked the baby monitor’s batteries, and tucked it between her and Snowball II. He and Kat both pretended not to notice her scratching her head.
The curtains barely touched in the middle, so he slid a chair over to trap them closed. When he turned, Kat’s stare was focused and intense, and he realized that when his shirt had pulled up a moment ago, it had revealed the gun at the small of his back.
‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Of dying.’
He crossed, sat beside her, and ran a knuckle gently down the slope of her nose. ‘Everyone is.’
‘You, too?’
A prescient question, given what he was considering.
‘A little,’ he said. ‘Sure.’
‘What scares you the most? Being dead or not seeing me and Mommy anymore?’
He said gently, ‘What’s the difference?’
After a moment her face changed, and she nodded. He kissed her cheek, breathing her in. She s
nuggled into the pillow.
He stroked her hair until she was asleep.
Pocketing the Batphone and clipping the monitor receiver to his belt, he locked Kat in the room, walked a few steps down the outside corridor, and crouched with his back to the wall. Across the strip of parking spots, traffic whirred past. The air was diesel fumes and fast-food grease. On the ground, ants overran an apple core. The monitor complained a bit, and he crab-walked a foot or so closer to their door so it would shut up.
A maid pushed a long-handled broom up the corridor toward him, head down. She was badly slouched, ancient, attired in a black, old-fashioned maid’s dress, a stereotype unto herself were it not for the iPod headphones visible through the gray wire of her hair. The broom shushed its way down the corridor, a delta of dirt tumbling ahead of it. She did not acknowledge Mike, not even when she bent arthritically to pick up the apple and dustpan the debris. She continued out to the parking lot, broom bristles scraping against the concrete soporifically – shhoop shhoop shhoop.
Shep picked up on the first ring. ‘I’m getting close,’ he said. ‘Kiki Dupleshney. Everyone knows I’m auditioning con women for a job. Her name keeps getting tossed around. Sooner or later someone’s gonna produce a contact.’
Mike said, ‘Annabel’s recovering, right?’
Shep did not respond.
‘Can you watch Kat until Annabel’s back on her feet?’ Mike asked.
The old woman made her way around the parking lot – shhoop shhoop shhoop.
‘What are you doing, Mike?’
‘They want me. Not Kat. Me.’
‘And if Annabel doesn’t get better? And you’re not around? You want me to explain to your daughter that her father gave up and that’s why she’s being badly raised by a safecracker?’
‘I’m not giving up. I’m facing them. Maybe I get the drop anyway. If they win—’
‘I’ve seen Dodge,’ Shep said. ‘He’ll win.’
At Mike’s hip the monitor whined, and he nudged down the volume. ‘Then they’ll have gotten what they want. And Kat will be useless to them. She’ll be safe.’
‘I will find Kiki Dupleshney,’ Shep said. ‘Soon. She will point us to them. Then we’ll find them instead of them finding you.’
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