by Joshua Guess
“Watch it, asshole!” a young man barked at me as I sped around the corner of the building and pelted toward my goal. My pockets were considerably lighter for the day’s efforts; I’d paid the busboy two grand in cash for his car. Told him to give me until the end of his shift and then report it stolen if he wanted. It was more money than he made in a month, and the kid had been happy to hand over the keys to his five hundred dollar ride.
The ride in question was an ancient Blazer, jacked up by some previous owner and wearing tires large enough to compete in the muddiest 4X4 competition and bald enough to make me briefly consider getting my money back, car full of enemies be damned.
I nearly dove inside the drab brown beast. The engine came to life with a surprising ease; the thing was at least taken care of. I didn’t gun the engine or do anything else to draw attention. Only a moron would take that kind of risk. Instead I pulled a trucker hat from inside my jacket—another purchase—and jammed it on my head before driving away as casually as possible.
“This is going to get really bad,” I said to myself as I glanced in the side and rear view mirrors for any sign of pursuit. “So fucking bad.”
Saying the words out loud was an old coping mechanism of mine. Stating a truth you didn’t want to face, the sort of deep awfulness human minds shy away from thanks to our instinct for self-preservation, helped cement its reality in my head. This was made easier by the fact that the situation was both obviously terrible and already spiraling. I didn’t need much convincing. After all, when your day includes lobbing a fire bomb into a car filled with people you know well, things have clearly gone off the rails.
No one followed. I hadn’t expected them to, because few people have the mental toughness to stay on target when a quart of napalm splashes over their friends, but it had been a risk. I hired hard cases who weren’t cold-blooded, though it was impossible to know the heart of any person.
“They’ll want blood for this,” I muttered, because it was true and I needed to face that fact. Kicking the shit out of someone was one thing. Setting them on fire was another entirely. One was the application of force in a relatively standard sort of way. You expected to take bruises or maybe broken bones in a fight. You’d get a split lip or a cut across the sharp jut of your cheekbone. That shit just came with the territory.
But burning was cruel. Fire was, in its strange way, both personal and impersonal. It was a thing you did out of horrible disregard for the suffering of others. Something which attacked the ability of the flesh and nerves to recover. Bruises would heal and bones could be set, but fire burns. It scars. It eats away at your being and destroys utterly.
There was no doubt I’d made things worse, and I said as much out loud. Just as I’d said things out loud when my world imploded in years gone by.
Then
Hannah was her mother in miniature, which was a blessing. She had the light tan skin, the lustrous and curly hair, the same brilliant mind.
“Daddy, you’re not listening,” she said. Not in the whine you might expect from a child of nine going on ten, but with the familiar patience of a teacher resigned to a life of explaining the same facts over and over again.
“I totally am,” I said. “You were explaining how the planets form. Something about playing pool, right?”
Hannah sighed, her dark eyes twinkling the only proof that the perfect imitation of her mother’s frustrated face was only an act. “If you’re not going to listen, I’ll go to my room and get on my computer.”
I let the corner of my mouth quirk up. “If you do that, we can’t go to the science center. But I guess you’re too old to want to spend time with your dad…”
“No!” Hannah said, suddenly a little girl again. “No, no, no, no, no! You’ve been saying we’d go forever. No take backs!”
I gave her my most innocent look. “Are you sure? I don’t think I remember that. Must be some other dad you’re talking about.”
In response, Hannah scowled her little girl scowl and punched me in the ribs. It wasn’t a childish hit, either. In a world where stories of internet predators abounded, our daughter knew how to throw down. Granted, she was much smaller than a grown man and thin thanks to her rapid growth, but the punch landed solidly nonetheless.
I grinned, a bubbling giggle escaping my lips. I raised my hands in mock defense. “Jeez, okay. If you kill me, who’s gonna pay the bills?”
“Mom will,” Hanna said without hesitation. “She’s smarter than you anyway.”
True enough. I stuck my lip out at her and put a hand over my heart dramatically. “You wound me, child. Your words are cruel.”
Shaking her small head, sending broad ringlets of dark hair whispering against each other, Hannah regarded me frankly. “She wouldn’t joke about not taking me to the science center when she promised she would. Which is smart.”
I gave her a shrug. “Seems more nice than smart, but we’ll agree to disagree. Now, go grab whatever you want to take with you. It’s an hour and a half just to get there.”
Some parents complain about long drives with their kids, and in a theoretical way, I get it. Kids, especially young children, are basically sociopaths you’re required by law to cater to. Hannah certainly had her moments all through the terrible twos, but once she was able to express herself in complete sentences she had become a bright and engaging child. Also a smart-ass, which as far as I’m concerned only meant she advanced to the teenage years before her body got there.
We jammed out to terrible pop music, me singing reasonably in tune while she happily warbled like a lunatic. We played the old standby and looked for license plates from different states. “Oh, look there,” I said. “That one’s from the lunar colony.”
She knew better than to hit me while I drove, but she had her punchin’ face on. “No one lives on the moon. You’re such a dad.” She said it with a strange mix of dismay and appreciation, as if my particular flavor of dad jokes were unique to us.
And I suppose they were. Every relationship is a fingerprint, composed of the same fundamental materials but expressed in an infinite variety of shapes and patterns.
Hannah was a good kid not solely from her nature, but definitely as a consequence of it. Her brain was her greatest asset; not even a decade old but able to appreciate what she had by observing the fact that other kids didn’t. My own mother worked herself to death to raise me alone, and I couldn’t have asked for more. And though it was by and large a happy childhood, it lacked the stability and lightheartedness Rosa and I tried so hard to give our own child.
Hannah didn’t understand the nuance, but she had a handle on the broad strokes and I couldn’t have been more proud.
We arrived in good time, and though Hannah nearly danced with excitement in the parking lot, she didn’t rush me along. She waited as I unlimbered myself and stretched after the drive, then took my hand.
“Come on, Daddy,” she said, her voice high and somehow younger in her excitement. “We can make it to the planetarium show if we hurry.”
She pulled me along and I went happily, silently wondering at how very like her mother she was. Some people have what I think of as an inherent selfishness about experiences. Not a judgment, just saying it’s one species of personality. Those folk tend to want to savor things on their own terms, to experience them wholly by their internal mechanisms.
Hannah wanted to see all the sights, but like Rosa she basked in the reflected glow of sharing them with another person. Part of the memory she would build of this day and the love she would assign it relied on knowing—on feeling—my own enjoyment. It wouldn’t matter to her that the science itself wasn’t of great interest to me, only that I had a good time.
And of course I would. I was spending a day with my daughter. Her happiness, of an irregular purity untouched by concerns over petty annoyances or imperfections, had been the singular goal of my life from the day she was born.
To that end I would listen intently to any number of lectures or video
s about planetary nebulae, Oort Clouds, the Van Allen Belt, or almost anything else.
At the end of the planetarium show, I headed toward the door but was stopped by Hannah.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, then trotted over to the man running the show. He looked like the harmless academic he probably was, thinning on top, smile lines on his face, and an air of ‘hey guys, look at this cool thing I found in the math!’ too powerful to be denied.
I watched them talk from a distance. Their body language and facial expressions painted a rich picture.
Hannah said something, pleasant but serious. The man pushed his glasses up on his nose and blinked, recoiling so slightly I only noticed because I was looking. He had the plastic smile of someone trying hard to be polite when they otherwise wouldn’t be—in other words, the smile of every retail worker who has ever endured the holidays.
Hannah was patient and insistent as she spoke. The employee’s smile eventually faded and transformed into a thoughtful frown. He put up a finger as he said something and turned to his workstation, from which he presumably ran the show. Its screen lit his face brightly in the dim room, showing me the relentless scan of his eyes and the slow climb his eyebrows made.
He turned to Hannah with a grin and stuck out a hand. She shook it, her own face cracking into a wide, toothy smile. They exchanged a few more words before she waved a goodbye and made her way back to me.
“What was all that?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Phobos and Deimos were switched.”
I stared at her dumbly. “What.”
“The moons of Mars?” Hannah said, as if talking to a small child. “The names were switched.”
I thought back to the display we’d watched and recalled the way the projection overhead had sprinted through the planets and moons. She’d caught that in two or three seconds at best, and during a presentation packed with hundreds of items of information.
Hannah had always been smart. With her genes there wasn’t much doubt she would end up with a brain. But this was more than raw ability. She had paid attention to details she already knew, parsed them out in no time. It reminded me powerfully of Rosa, who drank down computer science books the way other people work through a Stephen King novel.
Hannah Ash might not be the next great name, but she would stand out above most others.
I had such hopes for her.
11
The Blazer held up well through the lower gears, but as the speedometer crept toward 55 the beast began to shudder. By the standard of modern vehicles it was ancient, the sort of car held together by duct tape and love. Much as I wanted to stomp the pedal and rendezvous with Kate, self-control won out.
I didn’t follow their trail for very long. Less than a mile down the way I turned left onto a county road. The idea was for Kate to get far enough ahead of pursuit that she could lose them for the minute it would take her to ditch the car, grab the bag and maybe a weapon or two out of the trunk, and dash into the woods.
One thing my people weren’t trained for was woodland tracking. Not that she’d be in the surrounding foliage for long, but it was good to know the bad guys wouldn’t have a leg up. In an ideal world, Kate would be able to evade long enough that no one would have a good idea where she went at all. The assumption would likely be that she went to a house and asked for help.
It wouldn’t take long to find out.
I turned right onto another road running roughly parallel to the one she’d rocketed down.
She was standing behind a tree, only visible if you were looking. I slowed down as soon as I spotted a crescent of light blue fabric fluttering, the hem of her shirt jutting out from her hiding spot.
She hopped in almost before the Blazer stopped moving. Rather than the fear I expected, her face was flushed with excitement and the smug satisfaction all teenagers seem to have as a default setting. She slid into the seat, pulled the strap of the bag over her head, and slapped the dash twice.
“Let’s get going,” Kate said. The bag thumped heavily to the foot well on the passenger side, a sound not at all proportionate to its size.
The Blazer surged back onto the road. “What are you so happy about?”
Kate chuckled. “That was fun. They probably still haven’t found the car.”
“Fun,” I said, my voice flat. “You’re being chased by men who would kill you without hesitation, and you’re having fun?”
Kate shrugged. “I don’t know, I mean it’s still scary as hell but at least I was in control, you know? It was up to me to get away. I didn’t have you there to protect me. Kind of liberating.”
I nodded along with this. “I get that. After I left the army I spent a few years bouncing around doing work for loan sharks, small-time drug bosses, anyone who’d hire me. Had to learn a lot of skills, usually on the job. It’s a hell of a thing knowing the whole operation rests on whether or not you can pick a lock in time, or fight off a couple guys. It’s…thrilling, I guess. Like a roller coaster.”
I gave her time to catch her breath, and when the curiosity was too much I finally broke down and asked.
“How’d you get away? From the look of that bag, you grabbed most of the gear from the trunk. Surprised you had the time.”
Kate smirked. “I did have time to get all of it, but I dumped what I couldn’t fit in the bag in the woods. Just the long guns, they were slowing me down. You had an arsenal in there.”
I let her take another second to be smug, then raised a questioning eyebrow at her.
“Okay, okay,” she relented. “There was a big subdivision under construction about five miles down the road. It was on the west side, where you told me to be, so I cut through. About half the houses were finished and some of them were occupied. I’d gotten far enough ahead so your guys didn’t actually see me turn off. I used the time to get all the way to the back. Got lucky, too. There was guy working with his garage door open, no car inside. I pulled into the garage next to him and pulled a bunch of money out of a stack, told him he could have it if he shut the door and hid me.”
I blinked. “So a teenage girl drives into his garage in a car filled with guns and cash, and he agreed?”
Kate favored me with a rakish smile. “I told him I was on the run from some very bad men, had stolen one of their cars, and was just trying to get to safety. Helped that it was mostly true. And I can put on a good show when I have to. Daughters learn all the tricks.”
“Nice,” I said, and I meant it. “Keeping your head on straight under that kind of stress is tough. How’d you get so far ahead?”
Kate shrugged. “I’ve been sneaking out to drive my dad’s car since I was twelve. After the sixth time he caught me, he decided it was safer to give me an outlet that didn’t involve grand theft auto. So a friend of his took me out to practice on the test track at that old closed car plant on the east side.”
I tried to imagine Hannah, who for her curious nature and analytical mind still had an impulsive streak miles wide, zooming down a closed road under the influence of teenage hormones.
“Lot of people let their kids do that nowadays?” I asked, eager to push thoughts of Hannah away for the moment. “Drive crazy?”
“More than you’d think,” Kate said. “I guess technically it’s illegal to go out to the old plant and cut loose, but a lot of parents take their kids there to teach them how to drive. Only reason dad didn’t do it himself is because his buddy used to teach those defensive driving classes, you know? I didn’t get to learn all that stuff, but Steve made sure I knew what I was doing.”
It was my turn to smile. “And once in a while, when you were a good girl, he let you floor it and go wild, right?”
I didn’t need to see her nod to know I was right.
Later:
“You promised a cabin,” said Kate. “This is a shack.”
Though her assessment of our temporary lodgings was near the truth, I protested. “It’s small, sure, and maybe it doesn’t meet the, you know,
classical definition of a cabin, but it fits our needs. And you should keep in mind I promised a safe place first, which this is.”
We were deep in a forgettable rural county in southwestern Indiana. My first instinct had been to double back toward Louisville and find a new safe house there, as it would have been the last thing anyone would expect. But as I considered the implications of a tracker being planted in my super-secret hidden bag o’ money, staying away made more sense.
Tom Russey controlled an organization of specialists with fifty or so regular employees, four times that in contractors who could be called upon if needed. Not that I had much fear of it; Russey’s essential nature was more mistrustful than I could have imagined. He would be loathe to trust the loyalty of anyone outside the company. Hell, he was probably getting an ulcer worrying about the people in it.
Even so, the city was too dangerous to risk taking Kate back to just yet. Louisville was a big place, Jefferson county even bigger, but I wouldn’t risk going back to it without taking a few precautions first.
“Does any of this work?” Kate said as she approached the small corner of the cabin which served as a kitchen. She peered at the ancient gas stove, then out the window at the massive propane tank which fed it. “Looks older than you.”
I put a hand to my heart. “Ouch. Cruel, but fair. According to the guy who owns it, everything works. He uses this as a vacation spot, which I take to mean an illegal lodge for hunting out of season.”
The cabin was old and weathered, the wood silvery with age. But the plank walls were solid and tightly sealed, clearly taken care of. A massive water tank, one of the kind used on farms for livestock, stood outside the two-room shack to feed the plumbing. “It has a functional toilet. You can take the bedroom. I’ll sleep out here.”
And I wanted that sleep. The last day had been exhausting in every possible way. Kate was propelled by the weird and apparently endless energy of youth, though the first shadings of dark circles had formed beneath her eyes. I knew better than most how hard it was to constantly exist in a state of fear or grief. She’d seen me kill a man right in front of her, but the horror of the act was subsumed by the mad dash for safety which followed.
