by P J Parrish
His fleece was hard with dried blood, and he gently pulled it down his arm. In the glow of the dome light he got his first look at his shoulder. His shirt was soaked through, dark and wet, and the wound was still bleeding. Everything from his left ear to his elbow was stiff. He couldn’t tell if the damn bullet was still in his flesh or not.
He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. Not even to an emergency room. Because there was a chance she had gone to the cops, and if she had, they were probably already looking for him.
He was shivering violently now. He had to get warm.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, he pulled his keys from his jeans pocket and started the car. He almost passed out when he had to strain across his bloody shoulder to pull the door closed with his right hand.
He switched the heat on high, but when he reached down to put the car in gear he froze. It was gone. He had left the Tele-Bug receiver in the cup holder and it was gone. She had taken it. Most likely, she wouldn’t even guess what it was for. But still, now his link to Hannah Lowrey was gone.
He sat motionless in the seat, eyes closed, as the car heated up. When he finally stopped shivering, he eased the car into gear and started back down the asphalt road.
Passing under the arch, he stopped.
North or south? Did it matter? Right now, the only thing he needed to do was find a good place to hide and hope he didn’t bleed to death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
He stayed on US 71 heading north as long as he dared and then veered off onto back roads, eyes alert for cops. Finally he picked up Highway 9 going west. He passed up a Super 8 and a Ramada Inn, heading out into the flat emptiness of the Iowa farmlands. The lights grew farther apart and the night sky more vast until after about forty minutes he finally spotted lights ahead. It was a four-pump gas station—Kum & Go—with a convenience store. Two cars in the lot and too many bright lights. He slowed to a crawl, and that’s when he saw the sign about fifty yards beyond the gas station for the Wind Vane Inn.
It was one of those old mom-and-pop motels, a long line of rooms facing the highway. There was one truck in the lot and no lights on, except in the office. Buchanan pulled the Toyota into the darkest corner, got out and popped the trunk. His strength was waning, but he managed to get a clean hooded sweatshirt out of his bag. He peeled off the bloody fleece, tossed it into the trunk, and slipped on the sweatshirt. He wadded up a T-shirt and worked it gently under the sweatshirt against his shoulder. He locked up the car and went to the office.
A skinny kid with pimples looked up from his comic book as Buchanan came in.
“I need a room, please.”
The kid stared hard at him. Buchanan realized he should have put a hat on, that the blood in his hair might be visible. Suddenly, he felt like he was going to pass out or puke, and he had to put a hand on the desk to steady himself.
“You okay?” the kid asked.
Buchanan looked up and forced a smile. “Yeah. I’m just drunk. I don’t want to drive any farther and end up wrapped around a telephone pole. I need to sleep it off. Can I have a room, please?”
The kid slid a card across the desk. “Fill this out. The room’s forty a night, free HBO.”
Buchanan filled out the form with a false name and address. He handed over two twenties, and the kid gave him a key.
Nothing about the room registered in Buchanan’s consciousness as he entered except the strong smell of Lysol hanging in the cold air. He dropped his bag on the bed and began to slowly peel off his sweatshirt.
Pain and exhaustion were advancing on him fast now, and for a moment, the knotty pine walls seemed to move, undulating in the dim light, like he was on some sort of bad acid trip. He fought it off and went into the bathroom, holding the T-shirt against his shoulder.
In the hard glare of the bathroom light, he examined the wound. It had stopped bleeding, but the hole was swollen and red. He turned to look at his back in the mirror. He let out a deep breath of relief when he saw the dark hole crusted with blood.
Exit wound. The bullet wasn’t still in him. That meant he had a good chance. He went back to the bag on the bed and rummaged inside until he found the bottle of Crown Royal. Back in the bathroom, he stripped off his jeans, underwear, shoes and socks, and stood in the small tub, holding the bottle of booze.
He screwed off the top, took a long drink, and then poured the whiskey over his left shoulder. He let out a howl as it burned into the bullet hole, but there was no one there to hear him. And there was no one there to pick him up when he buckled to his knees in the tub.
When the pain had passed, he rose slowly, steadying himself against the wall, pressing his forehead against the cool tile. He reached out to turn on the water to take a shower, but his hand was shaking and he was too exhausted to stand up.
He got out of the tub, staggered to the outer room, and fell down on the bed. He managed to pull the bedspread up over his naked body and then everything went black, as black as the sky above the lake.
Amelia sat on the bed in the dark motel room, arms wrapped around her duffel, head bent. Her chest hurt from the constant pounding of her heart.
She had driven due south on US 71, not slowing until she hit her first red light in some small town called Milford. But once out into the farmlands again, she pushed the Impala up to the 65 mph speed limit, heading into the blackness on a road as flat as a velvet ribbon. Her plan was simple—get as far away from Arnolds Park as she could.
It was two hours later that she spotted the sign for the Little Sioux Motel. Ten minutes and fifty-five dollars later, she was here—locked inside an icy room in the middle of nowhere.
Amelia drew a breath and finally looked at her surroundings. Cheap paneling, floral drapes, a blond dresser with a flecked oval mirror. On the nightstand was a beige rotary phone and a Bible.
She got up, turned on the heat, and stripped off her wet clothes. In the bathroom, she blinked hard when she switched on the light, and looked in the mirror. Her neck was already bruising. She could actually see the pattern his fingers had left on her skin.
After a quick hot shower, she changed into clean jeans and a T-shirt. While she was hanging the sodden sweater coat over the heater, she felt something in the pocket.
She pulled out a piece of paper. It was the car registration from the black leather folder she had found in the man’s glove box. She stared at the name and address.
Clay Buchanan. Nashville, Tennessee.
Who was this man?
Why had he tried to kill her?
God, her damn heart wouldn’t stop pounding, her hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and her neck was pulsing. She sat down on the edge of the bed. She needed to talk to someone, needed to not feel so alone.
Hannah . . .
Amelia pulled the phone on the nightstand to her lap and dialed, hoping Hannah would still be awake. Just as it started to ring, she heard a beeping coming from her open duffel on the bed beside her.
She looked inside. The man’s black phone was lit up, flashing something on the small display. She pulled out the phone. The display read INCOMING CALL followed by Hannah’s number.
Amelia slammed down the rotary phone’s receiver and looked back at the display on Buchanan’s phone. It read CALL ENDED.
What the hell?
She sat there for a moment, and then redialed Hannah’s number on the rotary phone. The other phone chirped again, with the same message about an incoming call. Again, she hung up and again the display read CALL ENDED.
This phone—this strange black gadget—was somehow connected to Hannah’s phone. But how? Did this thing also record conversations?
Amelia dialed Hannah again. The black phone chirped an alert, but Amelia didn’t hang up.
“Hello?”
The sound of Hannah’s voice melted Amelia’s heart, and she wanted to tell Hannah she was okay, but she couldn
’t.
“Yes, I’m calling from American Subscription Service. Can I interest you in our offer for a subscription to House Beautiful?” Amelia asked, taking care to alter her voice.
“What? Hell, no. My house is plenty beautiful already.”
Hannah hung up.
Amelia turned back to Buchanan’s phone. The display now read: ONE NEW RECORDING PRESS # TO LISTEN. Amelia pressed the # button. Her own voice came back, asking Hannah about the magazine. She turned the thing off, in case it had a GPS connection. For a long time she sat there in the shadows, her mind spinning with questions.
The only person who could know about Hannah was Alex. He could have made the connection through her phone call to the dog spa. Had he shown up in Georgia after she left? Was he the person Hannah said she saw sitting in a car across the street? Had he tapped Hannah’s phone, hoping Amelia would call her and tell her where she was?
But something in her gut told her Alex wasn’t the type of man who would tap a phone. He had money and connections. He would have hired someone—this Clay Buchanan—to tap the phone.
Which meant he had also hired Buchanan to kill her.
Had the car accident in the Everglades been his first attempt? Had Alex hired Buchanan for that as well? But Buchanan had light hair. He wasn’t the dark-haired man from her visions. She had always felt that it had been Alex in the car.
Tears burned in her eyes, and she squeezed them shut.
What had she done to make her husband want her dead? And who was this man Buchanan who would agree to do such a horrible thing?
God, she wanted to just curl up and sleep, to drift into a darkness that would feel safe and warm. But she couldn’t.
She picked up her iPad and tried to go to Safari. No signal. She moved around the room, holding the iPad near the window. Finally, the signal icon appeared, and the Safari screen popped up. She sat down at a table under the window and typed in Buchanan’s name. The first link read:
BUCHANAN INVESTIGATIONS
www.claybuchanan.com
Skip Tracer. I can find anyone, anywhere.
There were other links to him. An article in Eye Spy magazine: “Skip Tracers: The 21st Century Bounty Hunters.” A blog called Technewsworld.com with the heading “Following Digital Footprints.” And a story in PI World: “Clay Buchanan: Hunter of Humans.”
Amelia shut her eyes, feeling sick.
When she opened them again, the screen seemed to waver before her, and she was about to shut down the iPad when another link caught her attention.
NOWHERE TO HIDE—AMAZON.COM
www.amazon.com/ClayBuchanan
Skip tracer extraordinaire Clay Buchanan recounts his decades of tracking down scoundrels, scofflaws, and anyone with secrets to hide.
She clicked on it, which took her to a page offering a book for sale for $19.95. The cover showed a motel sign and the shadowy silhouette of a man watching the place.
Amelia leaned back in the chair. The bastard had written a book. Was that how Alex had found him?
She scrolled back up and clicked on the link to his personal website. His photograph popped up and her heart caught. The man on her screen was a little younger, his face a little thinner, hair a little lighter. But it was the same man who had put his hands around her neck and tried to kill her.
The blurb on his site boasted that he could find anyone anywhere and warned people who wanted to disappear that because of technology and people like him, there was nowhere left in this world to hide. Under that was an image of his book cover and a link to buy it. At the bottom of the page was a final link: E-mail Clay Buchanan.
She stared at the e-mail link for a long time, not sure what she was feeling. She was almost tempted to send him an e-mail to tell him that she knew who he was and now it was his turn to disappear. But she knew that if Buchanan was dead, they could find her through his website. Still, the thought of rubbing her survival in his face gave her an unexpected feeling of satisfaction and something else. And she realized what it was—anger.
What’s the matter, Mellie?
I hit a girl at school, Grandma. Mama took away my bike.
Was the girl bothering you?
She’s always bothering me. Mama said I should’ve just ignored her, that nice girls don’t lose their tempers.
Your mama is wrong. Getting mad is a girl’s right. Sometimes it’s all you got.
The Bird was right. Her anger was justified, but it wasn’t all she had. Not anymore.
Amelia set the iPad aside. Her whole body hurt, and her mind was shutting down. She knew she needed to get some sleep. In the morning, she would pull up some newspapers online to see if there was any information about a body being found at Arnolds Park. Then she would decide what to do.
And where to go next.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
His eyes burned, like someone had poured kerosene on his lids, and when he finally opened them, all he saw was an orange fireball.
The sun . . . it was just the sun filtering through the orange drapes, turning the motel room into his own little version of hell.
But it was ice cold in the room. And slowly it came to him that beneath the thin stiff bedspread he was naked. Had he even tried to turn on the heat? Where was he? The whole of last night was gone, lost in the tornado of pain.
Buchanan squinted toward the drapes.
Or was it last night? How long had he been out? Just one night or longer? His head was throbbing, and he couldn’t think straight, like someone had pushed a button in his brain and erased his memory.
Except . . .
It was coming back now, the hard ride into the Iowa night, the pimply kid with the comic book, the burn down to his bones as he poured whiskey over his wound, and the helpless feeling as his knees buckled in the bathtub.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
He brought his wrist up and squinted at his watch. Eight ten. He squinted hard at the inset date display—SAT 12.
Okay . . . he had only been out about eleven hours. Good, that was good at least. But he had to see how bad the wound was, and that meant he had to move.
When he tried to turn over, the pain came, a hard throb in his left shoulder, radiating down the length of his body, coming in waves that made his toes curl.
He gritted his teeth and used his good right arm to push up to a sitting position, trying to ignore the bloodstains on the sheet. When he looked down at the entry wound, he was relieved to see it was puffy and red but not bleeding. He stood up, staggered into the bathroom, and slapped the wall switch on.
He let out a long breath as he turned to look at the exit wound. It was ragged and raw, bigger than the front wound, but it was crusted and seeping only a pale pink bit of blood.
Which meant he was probably going to make it. If the damn thing didn’t get infected.
He turned the spigot on and waited until the water got hot and then splashed his face. When he looked up into the mirror, he almost didn’t recognize the man who looked back—whiskered jaw as gray as the winter sky, hair like tamped-down dead cornstalks, and eyes as empty and flat as the road that had brought him to this place.
You tried to kill her, Bucky.
He shut his eyes.
You can’t do it.
If I don’t, I can’t get you back.
But I’m gone.
I failed. I failed you. I didn’t find you. I can’t do anything good in my life. I can’t even do anything bad.
No, you can’t, Bucky.
He squeezed his eyes tighter. Her voice was gone, but her words were still in his head. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t kill anyone. Not even to get his daughter back. Not even to save himself.
It was over. He was going back to Nashville.
He looked back at his reflection. What a fucking irony. He wouldn’t go to jail for trying to ki
ll Amelia Tobias. But he might go to prison for killing his wife.
The sky was huge and blue, but the wind cut across the back of his neck as he made his way across the hotel parking lot and to the Kum & Go. His plan was simple. Get some food and supplies, gas up the Toyota, and head back east on Highway 9.
There was no one in the store except an old woman behind the register who gave him a glance before going back to reading the National Enquirer spread out on the counter.
Buchanan grabbed a breakfast burrito and, stomach rumbling, he unwrapped it and started to eat as he roamed the aisles. He was looking for first aid stuff to dress his wounds but there was nothing but tins of Band-Aids.
His eyes went left to the baby stuff. He grabbed a package of Pampers, detoured to the automotive shelf, and picked up a roll of duct tape. Adding some Tylenol and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a large black coffee, and two more burritos, he went up to the counter.
As the old lady started to ring up his stuff, Buchanan’s eyes roamed over the display of cheap wine.
“Do you sell whiskey?” he asked.
“Nope. You gotta go to a liquor store,” she said. “Nearest one is in Arnolds Park.”
He let out a long breath.
“Or you can head north up 86 to Grovers Lake.”
“Where’s that?”
“Minnesota.”
His burner phone chirped. He grabbed it from his pocket and looked at the screen. McCall again. He hit “Decline” and stowed the cell. After paying for his supplies, he headed back out into the cold sunshine. He was halfway to the motel when the cell rang again.
Shit!
He jerked the phone out of his pocket and hit the button to answer.
“What?” he demanded.
Several seconds of silence, then McCall’s voice was in his ear, distant yet as close as a shadow. “Why haven’t you answered my calls?”
“I’ve been busy,” Buchanan said.
“Have you found her?”
“Yeah.”
