Shelter From the Storm

by Peter Sexton

  Lawrence followed her silently to the edge of the property. The rancid stench of burnt rubber and charred wood made standing this close almost unbearable.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Miranda uttered. Her head kept moving left to right, left to right. She couldn’t under- stand what she was seeing, couldn’t bring herself to accept that she had brought this sort of trouble to her friend’s front door. But she knew that she had. Of course, she had.

  “I’m sorry, Randi,” Lawrence said, as he tried to take her into his arms. But she stepped away, pulled up the yellow tape, and walked onto Sarah’s property.

  “Wait,” Lawrence said. But when she didn’t stop, he simply pulled up the tape and followed her. “Be careful.”

  Miranda stepped carefully through the debris. It was a little more than a ghost of a house now.

  “What are you looking for?” Lawrence asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  She crouched down and ran her fingers through the warm, black ashes and brought them to her nose. She sniffed them thoughtfully, though not under- standing why.

  She was about to say something to Lawrence when someone approached from across the street. Miranda suddenly realized she had left her backpack with the Glock in the Town Car. She stood up quickly and moved between Lawrence and the newcomer. Her muscles tense, ready to fight.

  “You’re not supposed to be in there,” the man said. He was wearing a maroon polo shirt and light khaki slacks. He looked like he had just come off the golf course. “It isn’t safe.”

  Miranda relaxed the slightest bit. The man looked harmless enough, just trying to be helpful.

  “This was my friend’s house,” she said.

  “Oh, my goodness,” the man said. “Oh, my goodness.”

  Lawrence: “Do you know what happened?”

  “Last night,” the man said, “scared the hellfire out of me.” He lowered his voice, as if telling them a secret he didn’t want anyone to overhear. “The place blew.”

  “What?”

  “Looked like a scene from out of a movie. One minute the house was on fire, the next minute she blew.” The man sighed and shook his head. “I’m afraid your friend didn’t make it.”

  Tears flooded Miranda’s eyes. She could hardly bring herself to utter aloud the single word: “Sarah.”

  “No one could have made it out of there, miss. I’m sorry.”

  “What else did you see?” Lawrence asked. “Tell us everything you can remember.”

  “I was just getting home from the grocery store. Lots of fire engines and police and news people. Helicopters in the sky.” He paused, looked from Lawrence to Miranda as if searching for an excuse not to go on. “I saw them putting the body-bag into the back of the coroner’s van.”

  Miranda shook her head violently. “It couldn’t have been her.” Then: “Are you certain it was her?”

  “I wish I wasn’t, but I don’t know who else it could have been. The woman lived here alone.”

  “No,” Miranda insisted. Then she turned without saying another word and returned to the car. She sat behind the steering wheel for several minutes in silence.

  “Are you all right?” Lawrence asked, as he climbed in beside her.

  “Maybe it wasn’t her.”

  “I’d like to believe that, too. But like the man said, who else could it have been?”

  “I don’t know,” Miranda admitted. It was almost a whisper. She was shaking her head when her eyes found the charred shell of Sarah’s Land Rover where the garage had once stood. More tears burned a path from her eyes, forging rivers down the sides of her face. She didn’t want to believe it. Couldn’t.

  “What a horrible accident—”

  “It had to have been the people who are chasing me,” Miranda insisted, cutting Lawrence off mid-sentence.

  “What?” Lawrence sounded surprised, skeptic- cal. “You think they would blow up your friend’s house? How would they even know how to find her? Or that she was helping you?”

  Miranda took a long time to answer. “They destroyed our house that night after my father and I fled.”

  “And now you think they’ve murdered your friend.” It was more a statement than a question.

  “I don’t know,” Miranda said. “Right now it’s the only thing that makes any kind of sense.” For this to have been a genuine, unrelated accident would have been one hell of a coincidence.

  Miranda started the car and pulled away from the curb. She drove out of Sarah’s neighborhood, not knowing at first where she was headed. Then she started scanning the businesses along the side of the road as they passed.

  “What are you looking for?” Lawrence asked.

  She cut across two lanes of traffic and pulled into a gas station, maneuvered into an open space and cut the engine.

  “What are we doing?”

  Miranda reached into her backpack and retrieved her cell phone. She was about to dial Sarah’s number when she realized the phone had powered off. “Crap!”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  Miranda again reached into her backpack. This time she retrieved the power cable and plugged it into the cigarette lighter. She said, “The battery must have died. I don’t remember the last time I had it plugged in.”

  “So what are we doing?” Lawrence asked again.

  “I need to try and reach Sarah.”

  Lawrence said nothing in response to Miranda’s latest declaration.

  Once the phone had powered up, Miranda saw that she had several missed calls and three voice- mails. She tried Sarah’s cell phone number before checking her messages. The call went straight to voicemail.

  “Shit!”

  “What?” Lawrence asked.

  Miranda ignored the question. She punched in her voicemail number, then waited for the password prompt.

  “Randi, what is it? Talk to me.”

  Miranda simply held up her hand, silencing Lawrence, as she listened to the messages. They were all from Sarah.

  “Sarah knew she was in trouble,” Miranda said finally. “She was trying to reach me last night.”

  “What did she say? What happened?”

  “She just said she really needed to talk to me right away.” Miranda paused. “She sounded scared. Sarah never sounds scared. And now she’s either out of coverage area, or her phone is off for some reason.”

  “How long ago did she leave the messages?” Lawrence asked.

  “What?”

  “You think she could have left them after the explosion?”

  Miranda understood the truth of what Lawrence was getting at. Unless they could determine that the messages had indeed been left after the explosion, their very existence was not proof that Sarah was still alive. Miranda opened her phone and checked the time of each call. They had all been made the previous evening. No way of telling with any cer- tainty if it had been before or after the explosion had destroyed her home.

  “I don’t know,” Miranda said.

  “So what now?”

  Miranda got out of the car and started searching for a payphone. “I need a phone book. I need to find a Kinkos. Whenever I really need to reach Sarah I just log on to a computer. She’s always online working.”

  “Randi,” Lawrence said. His voice sounded des- perate and plaintive. Protective.

  She stopped and stared at him for a long moment. She hated the beaten look she saw on his face. Sad. Tortured. Devoid of all hope. She didn’t want to believe what that look was trying to tell her.

  “I need to find a computer,” Miranda insisted. “I need to find Sarah.”

  Forty-Eight

  Robert Anderson was in the restroom running cold water over the hand he had burned while struggling to get Puckett’s body into the basement incinerator, when his cell phone rang. He pushed his dry left hand into his coat pocket to retrieve it. Wedging the open phone between his shoulder and ear, he shut off the water and dried his hand with a paper towel.

  “Anderson,” he said.
<
br />   Steven Trammel sounded tired and agitated. Anderson had to strain to hear him. “I followed the girl from Your Postal Partner in Oak Hill,” Trammel said, “but lost her just outside of Los Angeles.”

  “Where exactly did you lose her?”

  Trammel told him he had lost Miranda on Interstate 5 headed north toward Sacramento.

  “North?” Anderson asked, surprised.

  “Yeah.”

  Why would she be going north? Anderson won- dered. What’s north? Who’s north?

  “Has Puckett checked in with you?” Trammel asked.

  “He called me from California. Told me he’d been shot, and that you and Lee were gone.”

  “I left to follow the girl. Lee left the night before.”

  “Yes. Puckett told me the same thing.”

  “All right,” Trammel said. “So what happened after I left to follow Miranda? Where’s Puckett now?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing. He was supposed to meet me back here in Arizona, but he never showed.” Anderson let some silence float between them. “We don’t have time for this bullshit. This whole thing is getting out of control. We have to get a handle on it now!”

  “What do we need to do?”

  “Make this whole mess disappear.” Anderson listened for a reaction from Trammel, but got none. He continued. “I told Puckett last night, so now I’m telling you. We can’t fuck around with this girl anymore. We need to eliminate her before it’s too late. Assuming it’s not too late already.”

  Anderson studied the blister sprouting across his palm. He thought about lancing, cleaning and bandaging it before he left the lab building. It was his gun hand, and it hurt like hell.

  Trammel said, “Why don’t you leave Miranda to me? I’ll track her down and take care of that end of things.”

  “No,” Anderson said. “I need you to help me with something else right now.” He paused, let it hang out there for a minute. Then: “Puckett was arranging some trucks for me.”

  “Trucks?”

  “Four cabs and trailers. I need them delivered to the lab in Camarillo as soon as you can arrange it. I had Puckett working on this, but he hasn’t checked in and I need to make sure the trucks are ready.”

  “Where should I tell the drivers they’re going?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. They’ll have drivers when the time comes. They’ll have destination orders.”

  “They who?” Trammel asked.

  Anderson ignored the question.

  “What about Miranda?” Trammel asked.

  “I think I need to take care of her myself.” He thought about Lee’s sudden abandonment of the stakeout at Your Postal Partner following her myste- rious phone call. He knew that couldn’t be a good sign. More was happening now that he was no longer privy to. “I can’t afford for anything else to go wrong.”

  Anderson heard a sigh from the other end of the line. Then Trammel said, “All right. I’ll meet up with you after I arrange for the trucks and we can track Miranda down together.”

  Anderson smiled. His latest plan was falling right into place. “Yeah,” he said. “That’ll be good. Where are you now?”

  Trammel started to answer but hesitated, then said, “I’m just north of Los Angeles. I should be able to hop on a plane and meet up with you in Arizona in a few hours.”

  Trammel believed Anderson was actually in Arizona right now. Good. He mentally calculated how much time he needed with Gillian Blackwell and how much time he might need to find and kill Miranda August. He hoped he would be able to do it all within twenty-four hours.

  “No need to bother rushing back,” he told Trammel. “I’ve got another matter I need to attend to tonight. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow in my office at say…three o’clock. We’ll formulate our plan then.”

  Forty-Nine

  The phone was answered on the second ring by a woman who sounded weary and uncertain. Trammel spoke as quickly and clearly as he could.

  “Please don’t hang up,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of time. And you need to hear me out right now.”

  “Who is this?” the woman asked.

  “My name is Steven Trammel. I work for Earth’s Own Flavors. Corporate Security.” There was a long silence from the other end of the line, and Trammel thought the woman had hung up. “You still there?”

  “What is it, Mr. Trammel? Why are you calling me?”

  “You’re in danger.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “There’s no time to explain, you just have to trust me.”

  “I don’t know who you are. Why on earth should I trust you?”

  Trammel did not reply.

  The woman continued. “Let’s assume, for a moment, that you’re telling the truth and that I am in danger. What sort of danger might that be?”

  Trammel took a moment to formulate his answer. “The people I work for see your daughter as a major threat to the successful completion of an ongoing operation.”

  “What sort of operation?”

  “I don’t know. I thought I knew, but I was wrong. Dead wrong.” A beat. “I thought I would be able to protect Miranda, keep her safe.”

  “You say they see Miranda as a threat—whoever they are. So why are you calling me? Why would I be in danger?”

  “In the beginning, we were instructed to recover an item they believed had been given to Miranda by her father. But now—”

  “But now what?”

  He didn’t want to say, as if not saying it would somehow make it not so. He forcefully swallowed the dry lump growing in his throat. “I work for a man named Robert Anderson. He’s the CEO at Earth’s Own Flavors. I’ve been getting my instructions from him. But I think there’s someone else involved now, someone else calling the shots. Who knows, maybe he’s never actually been in charge. It doesn’t matter. Whoever it is, I get the feeling Anderson’s afraid of them. Like maybe he believes he’s in some kind of danger himself the longer Miranda remains alive and on the run.”

  “You mentioned an item. What sort of item?”

  Trammel considered the question. “I’m not really sure. It must be some kind of evidence. That’s the only thing that would make any kind of sense.”

  “Evidence of what?”

  “Actually, I’ve been trying to figure that out myself.”

  It was a long moment before the woman spoke again. “So why is it exactly you believe I’m in danger, Mr. Trammel?”

  “I’m not sure how to explain it. I’m fairly certain my boss is keeping things from me...information. I think he’s taken me out of the loop. I know he believes Miranda is a liability, but now it seems to be more than that. Like maybe everyone she’s come in contact with is now a threat and a liability.”

  “How so?”

  “It must have something to do with the evidence we’ve been trying to recover. Maybe Anderson’s afraid that Miranda has talked to you about it. Maybe he thinks she gave you something to hold for her.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “It’s all I can come up with. I’m not positive that you’re in danger, but I’m not positive that you’re not.”

  “And how do you think you can help?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know.” A moment of con- templation. “I need you to let me know if Miranda tries to contact you. I was with her a short time ago, but she managed to ditch me.”

  “You were with her?”

  Trammel heard the skepticism in her voice, the doubt. He needed to convince her quickly. Too much time had already been wasted. “I followed Miranda and your husband from Your Postal Partner in Oak Hill. I eventually caught up with them at a little roadside café. But they managed to slip away from me.” He gave her a moment to digest this infor- mation. “I can’t protect her if I don’t know where she is.”

  There was a longer silence. Then Gillian said, “I want to help my daughter, Mr. Trammel. And I certainly want to keep her safe, keep all of us safe. But I can’t help you. I don’t know
where she is. And I’m not sure that I would tell you even if I did.”

  “You need to trust me,” Trammel said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Trammel.”

  “Please!” Trammel pleaded. “Don’t hang up. I’m telling you the truth. Miranda needs my help. Don’t you understand? They have orders to kill her.”

  “I’ve been watching the news, Mr. Trammel. I don’t doubt that you’re telling me the truth. At least what you believe to be the truth. But I don’t know what I believe. And I certainly can’t trust a voice on the phone.”

  Time was running out. Trammel needed to make this woman believe him.

  “Listen,” he said. “I just got off the phone with Anderson. I tried to get him to let me handle Miranda on my own but he wouldn’t. I was trying to buy her more time, at least enough so that I could find her myself. But when I suggested that he let me help him track her down, he blew me off until tomorrow afternoon.” Trammel took a thoughtful breath. “I get the feeling he’s stalling me. I think he’s planning to do something tonight and wants to make sure I don’t get in his way.”

  “I don’t know what I can tell you, Mr. Trammel. Even if I wanted to help you, like I said, I don’t know where Miranda is.”

  “I love your daughter, Mrs. Blackwell. You have to believe me. I don’t want to harm her. I was hoping that I’d be able to get her through this.” Finally, after a long silence, he added softly, “Maren was my daughter.”

  ###

  Gillian immediately called Lawrence’s cell phone but only reached his voicemail. She told him to call back right away, and hung up. While she waited for Lawrence to return her call, Gillian flipped slowly through Miranda’s baby album. She took herself back to what she was beginning to realize was a better time in her life. She still couldn’t quite grasp the truth that her baby had had a baby of her own—and had lost her. She couldn’t imagine what Miranda had gone through or whether the magnitude of her loss had even begun to sink in yet.