by Brad Meltzer
Butchie pulled Hazel’s phone from his pocket and set it on the nightstand. “Your phone’s been going crazy. Anyone got this number?”
“Skip,” she said. Hazel thought about that, how easy Skip was to follow. “Maybe also divisions of the federal government.”
“I disabled the GPS,” he said, “and all the other tracking shit. Maybe you should call your brother back, let him know you’re alive.”
“I need to see the video first.”
“It’s here,” he said. “Go back to sleep. You don’t look so good.”
She didn’t feel good. Everything was beginning to swim before her eyes. She tilted her head back again and spotted the only constellation she remembered. Ursa Major. Based on the Greek myth of Callisto, who was attacked by Zeus. The woman never got to fight back.
“Did you watch it, Butchie?”
“Nah,” he said.
“Are you lying?”
“I know what I’m guilty of,” he said. “I don’t lie to you. Not ever.”
42
Hazel dreamed of her mother.
No, she was awake.
No, the twilight in between.
She’d open her eyes and see Butchie, still in the chair beside her, hands still clasped together. She’d close her eyes and see her mother in the car in Utah. See her in her open casket. Cutting the crust off a peanut butter and banana sandwich, the two of them eating and laughing, the taste so clear in Hazel’s mouth, tangy and rich at the same time. Reading Where the Sidewalk Ends, holding her hand in a crowd, always holding her hand, there in the classroom, in the back row as Hazel gave her first lecture.
Though that’s not true, Hazel realized, this was a lucid dream. A lie. Her mother was dead by then. She’d imprinted that impression, overlaid something she hadn’t seen with something she wished she’d seen. Perspective was a thing you never really had until you lost it and tried to figure out where it went.
“This continental drift of yours,” Claire is saying to her, and Hazel recognizes she’s remembering something, that there’s some connection her brain is making again, wonders if it will be gone when she’s awake. Her mom is sitting outside on a chaise longue, so skinny Hazel can see the acromioclavicular joint at the top of her shoulder. Hazel’s standing behind her, clippers in hand, shaving her mother’s head, just finishing chemo’s job. “This drift is going to get you killed if you’re not careful.”
“So if I’m careful,” Hazel says, “I’ll be fine?”
“Make no mistakes, and you won’t have much of a life.” The breeze picks up and as soon as Hazel shaves a strand of hair, it blows away, Claire follows its path with her eyes, and again Hazel thinks, No, the perspective is wrong, you’re making this up.
Then Claire says, “I’d like to be buried in my hometown.”
“I know. In Mission Valley,” Hazel says, referring to the small town outside of San Diego.
Claire smiles weakly. “Ask your father when I’m gone. Have him tell you the truth. My real hometown. In Berlin.”
43
Three hours later, Hazel woke up. Something was poking at her throat. It was the corner of a piece of paper, safety-pinned to her shirt, a note from Butchie:
Downstairz having coffee. Look out the window. Then cloze it.
She got up. Her legs felt pretty good, but her head felt like it had been scooped out using a backhoe. She walked to the bank of windows, looked down.
Butchie sat at a table across the street outside a coffeehouse. It was seven thirty in the morning. A line of people already spilled out into the street around him. Butchie had sunglasses on and was reading the newspaper, but as soon as Hazel appeared at the window alone, he lifted a single finger, then put it back down.
Message received.
She closed the window and drew the blinds. Walking into the kitchen, she found a banana. The first bite was like eating mud. –ffgh! She opened the fridge, found some Tabasco, and doused the banana. As she took another bite, she felt the pain, felt the rush.
The GoPro was hooked to a laptop on the counter, and there was a note next to it. Just hit enter. It’z queued.
So she did.
The video rolled. There she was, tied to the chair, helmet on her head, ready for battle. “Yes or No,” her own voice asked onscreen. “Did you kill your father?”
44
Q: Did you kill your father?
A: I didn’t.
Q: Have you ever killed anyone?
A: I tried to. Yes.
Q: Did you kill Darren Nixon?
A: We all did. We’re all to blame.
Q: Did you know Dad was working for the government?
A: No.
Q: Have you been working for the government?
A: No.
Q: Have you seen Benedict Arnold’s bible?
A:
Q: Did you love your family?
A:
Q: Are you lying to yourself?
A:
Q: Hazel, stay awake! Don’t let the drugs knock you out! Do you trust your brother?
A:
Q: Do you trust Butchie?
A:
45
What Hazel saw?
Someone she didn’t recognize.
Someone who looked at peace.
Someone telling the truth.
The video was twelve minutes long. During the first three, she was waiting for Butchie to get far enough away. In the next three, the drug hit and she was answering her own questions. But the weird thing was that she didn’t look angry.
Didn’t look sad.
Didn’t look worried.
She answered the questions with a smile on her face, a giggle working out of her throat, and then she was asleep, out cold in four minutes. Then Butchie, bless him, his face filling up the frame as he ripped the camera from her head, stopped the recording. She doubted he’d gone more than a block away. Maybe he hadn’t left at all.
Did she kill Darren Nixon? “We all did.” What did that mean? Who else was she referring to?
She wondered who she’d killed. Or did she just try? Was that Nixon or someone else?
Realized it could’ve been accidental. But no, it wasn’t accidental, was it?
Realized that Dr. Morrison was right about her. She was not who she thought she was. Not at all.
Realized if she killed anyone, they probably deserved it. Hopefully deserved it.
Realized she was fine with it.
Realized that everyone has a job.
Realized that there definitely used to be something wrong with her, that she didn’t need to be that person anymore, right? She could start over, be who she wanted to be. Maybe she’d start over and end up in the same place.
Fair enough.
But there was Skip to consider.
She found her phone. There were a dozen missed calls, but no messages. She figured that once she called her brother, with or without any GPS, whoever was looking for her—the government or anyone else—they’d be able to find her somehow. That’s how it had to be. Everyone serves someone.
Except, Hazel knew right then, she served her family first. Honor the people who love you. That was one of her father’s rules. It was a good one. She hadn’t answered the question about whether or not she loved her family. At that point in the video, she was already gone, and maybe now it didn’t matter.
Why? Because as far as she could tell, she’d spent the past few years retracing her dad’s steps, wearing Benedict Arnold’s words on her body, but did it on her own. She wasn’t working for the government on whatever they had her dad doing. No, whatever Hazel’s life consisted of, it was hers.
But…
That didn’t mean she wasn’t interested. She’d been with Jack and Skip in that car in the Utah desert, she’d been with her father when he died, and maybe one day she’d remember those last moments as her own, not as the broken movie reel in her mind. But she’d been there with her brother, they’d survived, and Skip hadn’t left her side since.
She had walked away, pushed him away, and still he waited for her. If that wasn’t the definition of someone loving you, she didn’t know what was.
Honor the people who love you.
Yes. She’d do that. No matter what it took.
46
Skip answered on the first ring. “You all right?”
“Never been better,” Hazel said. “What about you? You somewhere safe?”
“I’m in London, waiting for my connecting flight. I spoke to the network. They’re thinking of sending a full film crew with the cameraman,” Skip said. “To get it started again.”
It. “That’s what they told you?”
“You were right, Haze. Whatever happened out in Dubai, this is our chance to find out.”
“Unless we’re doing exactly what whoever did this wants us to: Split us up, so they can pick us off.” She paused. “Maybe you should come back.”
“I’m not coming back.”
“Skip—”
“Listen, I’ve been thinking. This thing? Maybe it’s also an opportunity for me. On TV.”
“Skip, that was Dad’s life. It doesn’t need to be yours.”
“Then what do I do with the rest of my life?”
“Get a job.”
“I have a job,” Skip said. “I’m not like you. I don’t know how to do anything other than be Skip Nash.” He stopped. “Crap. I just spoke of myself in third person. That’s a bad sign, isn’t it?”
“It’s not a good one,” Hazel said. “Skip, did you know about my tattoo?”
“You have a tattoo?”
“On the back of my neck, under my hair.”
“No,” Skip said. “What is it? Some death rune? An Iron Maiden logo?”
“Something Benedict Arnold said. A wretched motley crew.”
Skip was silent for a moment. Hazel heard an announcement being made over the PA in the airport: Boarding for Dubai would start momentarily out of Gate 62B. “The last couple weeks,” Skip said, “is the most time I’ve spent with you since we were kids. You could be covered in tattoos, Haze, and I frankly wouldn’t know any different. You’re a stranger to me, and not because I wanted it that way.”
“Did Dad know me?”
“Whatever you two had was between you two. It was like you spoke the same language, one different from the rest of us.”
She knew Skip was right. “I don’t think Agent Rabkin has been entirely truthful with us,” she added.
“About what?”
“He told us Dad did work for the government, as if that were Dad’s choice. But what if it wasn’t? What if the only reason Dad was with them was because they found something bad about Dad, something they could use against him?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not there yet. But maybe Dad did all this because he had to. Do you think he wanted to put his life at risk going to those crazy places? He had kids. A wife. Who would do this willingly when they had so much to lose?”
“I would do it. I want to do it.”
“You have nothing to lose,” Hazel said. And there it was. Another announcement rang out.
“I need to get on a plane, Haze. You go to Spokane, find what you find, then come out here too. We’ll do it together.”
“I will. I promise,” Hazel said, worrying deep down that those were the last words she’d ever say to her brother.
47
Butchie drove down the main drag. The Mission was as busy at 10 a.m. as it was at 10 p.m. People were already standing outside, smoking, texting, looking at their feet. Everything the same as it ever was, except legendarily rough bars like the Elbo Room were now filled with people who lived in modernist condos and preferred chardonnay to a beer and a shot.
“Stop here. In front of the noodle place,” Hazel said. They were still a few blocks from her apartment building, but she didn’t want to get closer until she knew what they were walking into.
“You really think someone’s watching?” Butchie asked.
“Only one way to find out.” She pulled out her phone, a new one that Butchie had at his place, and dialed a number.
Butchie looked out his window. Across the street, an old Asian woman was walking a poodle. “How soon you think until I can get another dog?”
“A year.”
Butchie considered this. “When does reincarnation kick in?”
“When the soul is ready,” Hazel said. “That’s what the Hindus say, anyway.”
“Any of these religions got a damn clock?”
The woman with the poodle crossed the street, and the poodle started going crazy, barking and snarling at a passing old man.
“No, Astro! No, Astro!” the woman shouted.
“No kind of name for a dog,” Butchie said.
Hazel focused on her phone, which was ringing until—
“Hello?” a man’s voice said. The manager of Hazel’s apartment building.
Hal, Hazel decided. Definitely Hal. “Hey, Hal, it’s Hazel Nash. Sorry to bother you, but I’ve got a leak in one of the toilets. Can you come up and take a look?”
Hal coughed out a half syllable, then stopped himself. “S-Sure. No problem. I’m just glad you’re okay. We were worried about you.”
“We?”
“M-Me. And your cleaning lady. Mel, right?” he stuttered, an evolutionary tell. When something scares you, a few million years of practice tells you to run. Another couple of million years and it gets wired to your emotions, even your speech, which is what Hal had going on. A polysensory experience. Proof that your premotor cortex was alive and well.
Hazel hung up the phone. “Something’s wrong. Get us out of here,” she told Butchie.
“If you want, I could just keep driving. My plane is out in Concord. I could have you over the Channel Islands in a couple hours. Get you to San Nicolas and you could be like that native girl in the 1800s. Live off the land and shit, except I’d come and visit.”
Juana Maria, the last of the Nicoleño tribe. Eighteen years she’d lived alone on the island after the rest of her tribe died off. Finally, in her fifties, she was found and brought to the mainland, where she lived at the Santa Barbara Mission. Became a children’s book and everything.
A good story.
But the truth was also that she got off the island and no one understood her language. No one could figure out what the hell she was talking about. So they fed her, baptized her, and in under two months she was in the grave, dead from dysentery.
A bad ending. It didn’t sound all that different from the situation Hazel currently found herself in.
“You got enough gas in your plane to get me to Spokane?”
“You might need to jump out,” Butchie said, “but I’ll get you close.”
48
It was a forty-minute trip across the bridge into the East Bay, Butchie driving nice and slow as Hazel eyed any car that followed them for more than a few minutes.
By the time they turned off for Buchanan airfield in Concord, they were alone. No one behind them.
But that didn’t mean someone wasn’t already waiting there.
“Yeah, I see them,” Rabbit said into his phone as he watched them scurry from Butchie’s car, still searching every direction of the airport. They didn’t spot Rabbit across the way, tucked into a maintenance hangar that smelled of gasoline and Fritos.
Sure, Rabbit could shut down the airport, put Butchie in cuffs, arrest Hazel just for the guns he found in her apartment. But as Moten himself had said, there were better ways to find the truth.
Within a half hour, out on the runway, Butchie’s black and yellow Beechcraft—the Bumblebeez—took off, heading north.
“Absolutely. I promise you, sir,” Rabbit said into his phone. “I’ll be there before they land.”
49
Hazel didn’t like this place. She knew it the moment she realized that Darren Nixon—the man found dead wearing her father’s colonial coat—hadn’t actually lived in Spokane. He lived twenty miles no
rth, in a town called Deer Park, population 3,500.
When Hazel pulled up to Nixon’s white one-story house, she didn’t see a soul in the neighborhood. It was late afternoon and everyone was still working. She probably had a few hours until any of the neighbors came home. Good. Hazel took one last look over her shoulder. At least this was going right.
Nixon’s Arts and Crafts house was right off Main Street, walking distance to a Christian bookstore and a used car lot that had three cars and a tractor for sale.
According to Agent Rabkin, Hazel’s father had been here in June, before the family trip to Utah. When Hazel thought it was Spokane, she imagined her dad in a city, a cab dropping him off, but Deer Park was rural and small, and if Jack Nash had showed up in town, much less visiting an ex-con, people would have known about it. Someone at the gas station would have had him sign a dollar bill. Hell, he might have stopped into the Christian bookstore just to see if they had his book. But Hazel had looked online: There was no mention anywhere of anyone seeing Jack up this way.
Hazel knocked hard on the door. It was wood, just like the rest of the house, making Hazel think about Nixon’s crimes. His arson charge. Was the place he lit on fire made of wood too?
No one answered. No surprise. From her pocket, Hazel pulled out the lock pick and tension wrench that Butchie had given her back on the plane. At first, she didn’t know what to do with it, but as she inserted it, muscle memory kicked in, leaving her wondering what other locks she’d picked.
Had she been here before? Could she be the one who followed Nixon up to Benedict Arnold’s old home in Canada, then slipped him poison and stood on his neck to make it look like he’d drowned? We’re all to blame, she heard herself saying. But what did that mean? Would she do that to protect her father? To protect Skip? Was that something she was capable of?
Of course she was.
But was it something she’d done? She turned the tension wrench. There was a muted click, and the door slid open. If she was right, she’d know soon enough.
