by Sara Rosett
She hit play on the embedded video clip. Background noise of passerby chitchat and car engines sounded from the computer speakers. Fingers shaking, she quickly lowered the volume as she glanced around. No one had noticed. Jack and the student were still mopping up. The video was jerky and not centered on them at first, but then there was a screech of tires, and the camera swiveled to find the source of the noise. “There we are,” muttered Zoe, shaking her head, half fascinated, half horrified to see the car accelerating toward them.
Zoe watched herself glance over her shoulder, then freeze. Jack reacted, pulled her out of the way, seconds before the car hit the pylon. They were out of the picture for a few seconds as the camera focused on the crumpled front end of the car, but as they stood and hurried away, the camera caught them and followed their movement.
The photo at the top of the article was a still shot from the last seconds of the video. Jack had a look of intense concentration on his face, while she looked like she’d seen the shower scene in Psycho for the first time. The name on the byline jumped out at her as she hit the back button and slid back into her own chair. Jenny Singletarry, the reporter who’d known about the search warrant. Now she’d found a video of them in Vegas? And how did she know about the money?
Jack returned, his shirt soaked to his chest, revealing a nicely cut physique above the bulk of what looked like a pillow. Zoe jerked her gaze up to his face. “According to the article, we’re on the lam, a modern day Bonnie and Clyde.”
Las Vegas
Friday, 8:22 p.m.
“JUST do it, Jack.” Zoe closed her eyes.
“Okay, here we go.”
Zoe could hear the snick-snick of the scissors opening and closing several times. She cracked an eyelid open and saw her reflection in the mirror. Jack stood behind her shoulders, which were wrapped in a thin white hotel towel, a chunk of Zoe’s hair held in one hand and the scissors in the other. They flickered, reflecting the dim light above the bathroom mirror. Irena’s passport was propped up on the little tray below the mirror. Shoulder-length dark brown hair framed a face that didn’t look so different from Zoe’s, which was good since Zoe was going to be Irena during the flight.
Thank goodness Irena had a fairly average face—no hooked nose or heavily hooded eyes. Her lips were neither paper thin or swollen like a Hollywood starlet. Just normal sized. Her face was rounder than Zoe’s and her eyebrows were thinner and more arched, but these last two things were easily fixed, Jack had said. Of course, he wasn’t the one who would be plucking his eyebrows, Zoe had thought. What Irena didn’t have was red hair.
“Jack, just do it. Get it over with,” Zoe said impatiently. Her hair had to go. She knew it. It was too long, too bright, and too distinctive. It was the one area where she felt a tiny bit of vanity. Zoe didn’t care much for make-up. Mascara and a bit of lip-gloss were about all she bothered with. And clothes—she couldn’t care less about designer labels or fashion trends. She didn’t give much thought to coordinating outfits or which shoes she’d wear.
But she had always thought her hair was special—probably because as far back as she could remember, it had been the one thing that always drew comments from strangers and friends alike. She’d always had long hair, at least below her shoulder blades; she’d only had the ends trimmed occasionally. Wearing it long saved money was what she told herself, but she felt her eyes welling up and knew it was more that just economy. It was part of her identity.
“Pity to cut it off,” Jack said. He raked his fingers through her hair along the nape of her neck and paused with one curl cork-screwed around his finger. “I always liked your long hair.”
“You never told me that,” Zoe said, blinking and watching him in the reflection. She was not going to cry. Not over her hair, of all things. She’d been shot at today for God’s sake. A little haircut was nothing, she told herself as she swallowed the thickness in her throat.
“Just one of many things it seems,” he said under his breath. He squared his shoulders and snipped. Zoe jerked a little as she felt the tension on her scalp release when he cut the strand he was holding. He glanced in the mirror, zeroed in on her reddening eyes, and added casually, “Perhaps I’ll make some of it into jewelry like those morbid Victorians.”
She gave him a watery smile. “Keep going,” she said, nodding her head.
“Alright,” he continued, “I think a brooch is out of the question, but perhaps a bracelet. There’s enough length for that, or one of those man chokers. Like that country music guy who’s always singing about the ocean.”
She laughed out loud. “I meant keep cutting,” she said. He nodded and went to work with the scissors.
McCarran International Airport, Las Vegas
Saturday, 11:39 a.m.
“DON’T avoid eye contact,” Jack said as they inched forward in the security line.
“Right,” Zoe murmured, because that was the only word she was going to attempt with two wads of cotton stuffed in her cheeks to make her face look fuller. She was already nervous and the cotton seemed to be absorbing what little moisture there was in her mouth. If the woman checking passports at the head of the line asked her a question, Zoe hoped she’d be able to croak out a response.
She crept forward another foot, Irena’s new passport clutched in her sweaty hand. Would a slightly damp passport give her away? Jack actually looked bored. How he managed it, she didn’t know.
“Don’t fidget,” Jack said, and Zoe realized she was running her other hand over the nape of her neck, which felt oddly drafty without the thick curtain of her hair hanging down her back. Her hair brushed her shoulders and was “Maple Brown Number Six.” She’d tried to style it like the photo of Irena, curling the ends under as best she could without a curling iron. She must have come close because when she emerged from the bathroom at the hotel, Jack had looked shocked and surprised for a second then he’d got a grip on his emotions and nodded sharply. “You’ll do,” he’d said. They had decided that her hazel eyes would have to be close enough to “Irena’s” green eyes to pass security.
Zoe felt her hand inch self-consciously to her neckline again and firmly crossed her arms over her waist. She wished she had a baseball cap like Jack. It was a new one, plain navy blue, which covered his new shorter haircut. He trimmed it himself while she rinsed the dye out of her hair. After their joint makeover session last night, Jack had left “for supplies,” as he called it.
Zoe had fallen asleep on one of the rickety double beds. They had stayed in a dodgy hotel that didn’t ask questions about why they paid in cash. Zoe had worried that the desk clerk would remember them because they were staying more than a few hours. “This is the kind of place where not remembering the guest is the main reason people stay here,” Jack had said. Her long night of driving and the intense ups and downs of the day caught up with her, and she’d slept so hard she hadn’t heard Jack return or slip into the other double bed.
She’d awoken to find a rolling suitcase situated at the end of the bed beside Jack’s backpack. There was a stack of clothes on top of the suitcase and a pair of boots on the floor. Who knew Jack remembered her shoe size? She was thrilled to have a new white fitted T-shirt to change into, but the shapeless black cardigan made her look like a lump. “That’s the idea,” Jack had said as he pulled a gray T-shirt over his head that morning. Jack had discarded the pillow he’d used to pad his figure yesterday.
There was a jacket for her and a black crew neck sweater in the rolling bag for him. Zoe had held up a double-breasted black jacket and raised her eyebrows. “What are we cat burglars? You have more breaking and entering planned?”
“We haven’t done any breaking and entering, remember?” Jack countered. “We want to blend in. Europeans usually wear dark colors, and it will be much cooler there than it is here. You’ll need that jacket.”
She pushed the no-prescription black rectangular-framed glasses back up the bridge of her nose. This morning she’d thought she was a good match f
or Irena’s passport photo. That was this morning. Right now, she felt like she had the word “imposter” printed on a sign hanging around her neck.
“Ma’am?” a voice called, and Zoe scurried forward to the podium where the woman glanced at their faces, then ran a special flashlight over their passports. She gave Zoe’s face an extra glance. “Do I know you?”
Zoe shook her head quickly and mumbled a no.
“You take any classes at UNLV?” she persisted.
Zoe gave another headshake and forced herself not to shoot a panicked look at Jack. “I’ve just got one of those faces,” she managed to say, despite her dry mouth.
The woman handed everything back to Jack with a yawn. “Thank God we dyed your hair,” he said in an undertone as they moved forward. Zoe felt hot and sweaty, and her heart was racing. She wondered if this was what a nervous breakdown felt like. The airport was packed, and they had to wait again before going through the scanners. She felt exposed when she put the cardigan in the bin along with her new boots.
The official waved her through the metal detector. Jack was behind her, and once their belongings emerged on the rolling belt, he swept everything up and they walked a few steps away to redress. “Why the rolling suitcase?” she asked as she worked her foot into her boot. They’d had hardly any clothes to put in it.
Jack didn’t look up from threading his belt through the loops of his jeans. “Traveling without luggage, especially to an international destination would be unusual.” Jack slid his watch onto his wrist, and she had a mental flash of all those times he’d picked up his watch from the nightstand as he rolled out of bed in the morning. The situation suddenly seemed awkward and too intimate. Jack had shaved this morning, so he’d match “Brian’s” passport photo. The stubble had given him a different look, made him seem more scruffy and approachable, but with his face shaved clean, he looked more like he had when they were married. She couldn’t help but think of the last time they’d been in the Las Vegas airport. They’d left together, a married couple, in a heady haze of affection and excitement. Zoe shoved her arms into the cardigan, glad to have the extra layer back on and focused on settling her messenger bag on her shoulder. “This way to the gate,” she said and felt Jack fall into step beside her.
One of the cotton pads was creeping up the side of her cheek away from her jaw. She worked it back down and asked, “So, no one said anything when you bought the tickets with cash?”
Jack slung one strap of his backpack over his shoulder as he said, “I told the ticket agent we’d had a good night at the tables. She didn’t seem to think it was all that unusual. This is Vegas. I’m sure they’ve seen stranger things.”
If they had really been jetting off to Europe on an impulse, it would have been a wonderful trip. No delays, no weather, no complications. After the Vegas airport, which felt like a mall on Christmas Eve, the international departure terminal at Dulles was eerily deserted. Zoe kept expecting a security guard to come through and tell them it was closing time even though it was only four in the afternoon. Again, their passports passed scrutiny, and no one gave them a second glance. “It’s all so easy, I’m frightened half out of my mind—not just for us,” Zoe whispered as they settled into their seats for the flight to Rome. “Think about national security. If we can just waltz through the system, what does that mean?”
Jack leveled a look at her and said, “It means that the documents the federal government created for my cover are top notch. Let’s just concentrate on getting ourselves out of this mess, then you can worry about the terrorists.” He folded his arms, and within minutes was asleep—with his seat in the full, up-right position. Zoe frowned and tried to get comfortable. He’d done the same thing on the first flight. She didn’t see how he could sleep. She’d spent the early part of the flight alternately reading through Connor’s spreadsheets and his journal and tensing every time the flight attendant walked by.
She examined the photos Connor had mailed to her, but again, found nothing distinctive about them. Was the photo of the Madonna important? Was it a famous painting? A valuable painting? The cobblestones and ancient architecture in the other pictures didn’t exactly narrow it down to one location. Several photos included people. A blond woman appeared twice, but Zoe couldn’t distinguish her features. A dark cocker spaniel also appeared in several of the photos. Could that mean something? Zoe shook her head and put the photos aside and took the tray of food from the flight attendant.
After eating a turkey sandwich so small that it seemed it would only satisfy a toddler, or perhaps an elf, the cabin lights dimmed, and she settled down to try and sleep, but numbers and names from the spreadsheets and the journal kept running through her mind. She sat up and went back to the papers. There was one spreadsheet with columns of numbers that she studied until her eyes were practically crossing.
The row headings were combinations of numbers and letters, like VB2FQ9, which initially looked like some sort of airline or hotel reservation code, but because the spreadsheets were filled with them, she had to assume they were something else. Connor went out of town a lot, but not that much. And there were no dates or places associated with them. Just column after column of numbers.
“You’re a bundle of contradictions, you know that?” Jack said, shifting so that he was mostly on his side, facing her, his pillow bunched between his ear and his shoulder.
“You’re supposed to be asleep,” Zoe said. “What do you mean?”
“You’re so impulsive and such a free spirit, yet you do all this detail work,” he said tapping the spreadsheets. “Creating spreadsheets like this, copy-editing manuscripts, stuff like that.”
“I’m a complicated woman.”
Jack snorted.
“Besides, you’re one to talk,” Zoe said. “You’re so straight-forward, a man with a hidden past, who loves rules and schedules, yet you can use whatever happens to be lying around—like flowerpots—to disarm men with guns.”
“Er—right. I’m going back to sleep now.”
With a half smile, Zoe went back to the spreadsheets, but after thirty minutes of trying to wrap her mind around the possibilities, she gave up.
Zoe reclined her seat and tried to blank her mind, but the only thing that fell asleep was her left foot. She sat up straight and rolled her head around to work the crick out of her neck. She wasn’t the only one who wasn’t sleeping. Jack had the window seat and she had the aisle. The seat between them was empty. The man directly across the aisle from her was playing solitaire on his e-reader, which reminded her of the cards she’d found in Jack’s car. She tilted her head and looked at Jack.
His head was moving in a slow arc, millimeter by millimeter, down the headrest until he hit the tipping point and his head fell forward. He jerked upright, then burrowed lower in the seat, and drifted off again.
Zoe moved to the middle seat. “Jack,” she said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the engines, but not loud enough to carry to the rows around them, “are you awake?”
He made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a groan. Perfect. He might be just groggy enough that she’d get the truth out of him. “Why did you leave playing cards on the seat of your car before you disappeared?”
He yawned and murmured, “A warning. For you.”
“But how did you know I’d find them or even know what they meant?”
With his eyes closed, he rotated his head toward Zoe. “The car would eventually get towed. I knew you’d get the car and whatever was inside. You’re my beneficiary.”
“So you just happened to have a pack of cards from the Venetian, and you knew certain cards had special meanings?”
He rubbed his eyes before opening them. “I had a girlfriend in high school who was into all that mystic stuff...numerology, astrology, reading cards. She did a reading for me once, and the eight of Spades came up. It was about a week before my dad died in the car wreck.”
“Oh, Jack. I’m sorry,” Zoe said.
He shook
his head slightly, waving off her sympathy. “It’s been a long time. Anyway,” he sighed as he said, “the eight of Spades stuck with me. And the cards were in my car because I picked Connor up at the airport a few weeks ago after one of his trips to Vegas. He tossed them in the console when he got in the car. Said they were a souvenir for me.”
“So what if I never figured out the cards? I didn’t know they had meanings.”
“I wasn’t trying to leave you a trail of breadcrumbs. I didn’t even know at that point I was going to Vegas. The cards were there and it was the only way I could think of communicating with you without giving myself away. I couldn’t very well leave you a note or send you a text. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the police figured out that I wasn’t dead, and then everything...and everyone I knew would be under scrutiny.”
“Considerate of you, to think of me,” Zoe said mildly.
Jack sighed, crossed his arms, and leaned back in his seat. “I did the best I could in the situation.”
The engines hummed in the silence between them, then Zoe asked, “What did you do when you woke up in the office?”
He cocked his head toward her. “After I figured out—what did you call him?—Stumpy Guy—was going to kill me whether or not the kid with him objected?”
“Stubby Guy. Yes, after that.”
“I waited until they were yelling at each other and I didn’t see how the argument could get more heated, then I lunged for Stubby. There was a struggle. Fortunately, for me, the kid was so shocked when I moved, that it gave me a slight advantage.” Jack looked away for a moment, then said, “I left them there in the office. I knew what they’d come to do and my main goal was to get out of there. I knew Connor was dead. I’d seen the bank transfer, and with their conversation, I figured everything was part of the set up to make me look guilty. I drove to Connor’s house, looked around, found the Vegas address, then I bought a burner phone, drove out to Highway 375, set the stage, made the 911 call, then hiked over to the shopping center for a ride.”
