Authors: Patrick Lee
Instead of verifying the statement, Dryden leaned in through the empty window frame and spoke carefully.
“Curtis, the people who attacked Bayliss Labs have a place they call the interrogation site. Have you heard of that? Do you know where it is?”
Curtis’s eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head.
“Are you sure?” Dryden said. “Think as clearly as you can.”
Curtis nodded, and when he spoke again, his voice was only a whisper. “All their language is careful. All their e-mails, the stuff on the server. No locations. No names. I copied all of it, though. Took it with me. Figured a lot of it out…”
He was losing strength by the second. Fading.
“Curtis,” Dryden said.
“I’ve been hiding three days,” the kid said. “I printed it all, got it organized.” He nodded weakly toward the space behind the front seats. “It’s all in a bag back there, for Claire. I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.”
The shivering was getting worse.
“I tried to be careful,” Curtis said. “I made sure they couldn’t find me with their … system. Maybe they found me the old-fashioned way. Jesus, I went to my old coffee shop this morning. Maybe they were just watching…”
His eyes were wet now. The shock was losing ground to the pain, or else the fear.
Then something changed. Curtis blinked and exhaled hard and forced himself into a state of alertness. He turned and stared out through the shattered passenger window, then swept his gaze left in a slow arc, eyes darting everywhere.
Looking for some threat out there in the woods.
Like Claire had done in the desert.
Exactly like Claire.
Dryden’s scalp prickled. He turned fast and raised the Beretta, studying the surrounding trees.
Nothing there.
He pivoted slowly counterclockwise, his eyes and the pistol tracking around, a few degrees per second.
He ended up facing back the way they’d come from: toward the paved two-lane road, which was just hidden from view by the curve in the gravel lane through the forest.
A hand seized his arm. He spun toward it, reflexively.
Curtis had reached out through the driver’s-side window frame and taken hold of him. The kid’s eyes were intense, keenly aware.
“Hide our bodies,” Curtis said.
“What?”
“You can’t leave any record for anyone to pick up on. The people we’re up against … if there’s anything tying me to this place and time, then … they’ll send other killers here. They’ll have …
already
sent them. Hours ago. They’d already be here waiting.”
As crazed as the kid sounded, his words lined up eerily well with what had happened in the desert.
The gunmen there had already been in place. Claire had begun looking for the threat once it was clear the cop was going to stop and question the two of them.
Once it was clear there would be a record of their presence there.
At that place and time.
Dryden felt the dots trying to connect. In some sense they did, but only partly.
“Hide our bodies,” Curtis said again. “Me and these two guys. Put us in their car and hide it someplace. It has to stay lost for a long time.”
The kid’s burst of alertness was leaving him. The skin of his face was paper white. His voice was back to a whisper.
Dryden said, “But this Tahoe—”
Curtis shook his head. “Can’t be traced to me. I was already careful about that. Stolen plates. Filed off the VIN. Just burn it.”
He took a deep breath. It looked like it hurt.
“Do it,” Curtis sighed. Then a strange little smile crossed his face. “I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.”
The odd smile stayed on his face as his eyes went still.
Gone.
When Aubrey Deene pulled into the carport in front of her apartment, one of the maintenance guys was mowing the lawn. Her eyes fixed on the mower: an old Husqvarna, like the kind her father had beaten to hell every summer of her childhood back in South Bend. Sometimes a fouled spark plug would set him off, and he’d burn up a day’s worth of anger in five minutes of wrench throwing in the garage. Other times the mower would only get him warmed up, and then Aubrey and her sister and her mother would have a long night in store for them. Rod Deene had been dead for five years now—heart attack a month before Aubrey finished undergrad at Iowa State—but the damnedest things could shove him right back into her head.
The engine of her ancient Miata coughed and threatened to die. She killed the ignition and pocketed the key, then turned and rummaged through the textbooks and folders on the passenger seat. Any day now, the car was going to give up the ghost and leave her hitchhiking. Which would be fitting, in its own way. Her life had taken on a distinctly hitchhiker kind of feeling lately. Like her future was no more plotted than that of a paper cup in the wind.
Not so far off the mark, you know.
That internal voice had an irritating, teen-angst edge to it. If there was anyone less welcome in Aubrey’s head than her father, it was her own younger self, two months out of high school, pulling out of her parents’ driveway in her rusted-to-shit VW Beetle. Leaving South Bend and heading for the world. Iowa State, then MIT, then whatever Ph.D. program looked right. The girl with all the answers, all the dominoes lined up and ready to fall.
They had fallen. For a while. Iowa State had gone swimmingly, and MIT had played out like a well-rehearsed dance number, exhilarating and challenging, leaving her winded but with her feet right on the intended marks. She’d had her choice of doctoral programs, and she’d picked Cornell, and for a time, things there had followed the game plan, too. She could remember feeling like it was all still clicking along. There were beautiful afternoons on the plaza, maybe her favorite place in the whole world. Sometimes she would take her textbooks and sit inside Sage Chapel, though she had never been religious and never would be. Most of the time the chapel was empty except for a few tourists, moving in little groups, whispering, taking pictures of the beautiful architecture. Aubrey had sat in the shadowy pews, way back from the lit-up altar, and let the silence of the place envelop her like water.
She supposed the doubts had started creeping in around that time. Little uncertainties that gave her pause now and then, like static lines flickering in the movie of her life. There were social issues, for one. She was twenty-four and had never had a boyfriend—nothing that’d lasted beyond a few weeks, anyway. She knew she was pretty, and it wasn’t hard getting the attention of boys. Yet the few times she’d let someone in—nice guys from her classes who didn’t push for things to get physical right away—had ended horribly. Three or four dates along, she would make the first move. Things would happen, enjoyable things if a little clumsy and brief, and then she’d find herself lying awake all night next to a sleeping body, her mind trying like hell to avoid the unwelcome truth: that she felt nothing for this person; that she wished she was back at her place, alone with her books and her lab notes; that she had no idea what to say in the morning.
Then, two months into her time at Cornell, a different kind of boy had come along. His name was Daryl, and he didn’t wait for her to make the first move, and when things happened they were neither clumsy nor brief, and they were way the hell past enjoyable. Sometimes Aubrey had still lain awake all night next to him, but only to worry that she might do something wrong and lose him. That fear had been there from the moment she’d met him, the sense that she had never quite won him over, though she couldn’t define it more clearly than that.
She found her interest in the books and lab notes waning just a bit in the months after meeting Daryl, though her academic work didn’t suffer much for it. Instead, her time with Daryl came at the cost of time with her friends, a fact Daryl seemed just fine with. He didn’t like her friends all that much. He certainly didn’t like her spending time with them. In hindsight, that should’ve been a red flag, but it hadn’t been. She had not been looking for any flaws on his side of the equation; all her focus was on worrying about her own flaws.
Other flags should have been more obvious. Like when he would pick her phone up off the table and check whom she’d called that day, right in front of her, as casually as if he were reading the newspaper.
You talked to Laney?
he would say.
What was that about?
Some little spark inside of her wanted to reply,
She’s my best friend, and it’s none of your fucking business what it was about.
Then another part of her would think,
Don’t lose him, don’t lose him, don’t lose him,
and when she opened her mouth all that came out was the answer to his question, in detail, and somehow in the tone of an apology.
They’d been together six months when he suggested she drop out of the program. She wouldn’t need an income, he said; his own would be mid-six by the time he was thirty. They had never talked about getting married, but the possibility of it had been there for months already, in the subtext of their conversations.
It was in the days after that talk—days she spent giving the idea real consideration—that younger Aubrey started piping up in her head. Younger Aubrey with that old Beetle packed full of clothes and books, rolling out of South Bend on a summer morning. She began to call that version of herself Proust Girl, because among those books in the Volkswagen had been a boxed set of all Proust’s published work. Proust Girl had not read a word of the man’s writing yet, back then, but fully intended to. She had meant to have it deeply absorbed by Christmas break of freshman year, not just so she could whip out quotes and look brilliant, but for the light it would shine on her understanding of human nature. Proust Girl couldn’t have known that she would get fifty pages into the first book and throw the whole goddamned set in the trash. She couldn’t have known the writing would feel like ham-fisted overacting on the page, any more than she could have known that nice boys would never be able to get her off—would never even be able to make her smile. Proust Girl was none too happy at the idea of dropping out of Cornell, but what the hell did she know? Proust Girl could’ve never seen Daryl coming.
When it finally happened, it did so in the most mundane of places: the kitchenware aisle of a Target, just off campus. She and Daryl had been out to dinner and had stopped for groceries afterward. Aubrey saw a vegetable steamer she’d looked at two or three times before; it was on sale now, a hundred dollars instead of one fifty. She set it in the cart, and Daryl took one look at it and told her to put it back on the shelf.
Don’t worry,
she said.
I’m paying for it.
No you’re not. You can’t afford it. Put it back.
No joke in his tone, and nothing in his eyes but sternness, and the expectation of obedience.
That look from him wasn’t quite unprecedented, but it caught her off guard this time.
Daryl, it’s my money, I’m buying it.
Never taking that locked gaze off of her, Daryl took the steamer from the cart and set it back onto the shelf. When Aubrey reached to pick it up again, his hand clamped around her forearm hard enough to dig into the muscles. Hurting her. On purpose. And still there was that gaze drilling into her. In that moment she realized she’d seen it before she ever met him. Long before.
And no, Proust Girl really would not have seen Daryl coming, she thought. Not if he’d been standing in a garage with an old Husqvarna, beating it with a wrench.
It ended right there in that aisle full of pots and pans, with Aubrey screaming at him to let go of her, screaming even after he complied, her hands coming up and covering her head, the brink of a nervous breakdown right there in front of a dozen shoppers.
That had been four years ago. She had finished up at Cornell and taken a postdoc appointment at Texas A&M. A year later she’d found herself here, at Arizona State, where she was now contemplating starting over and getting a law degree.
A paper cup in the wind.
She gathered the books she wanted from the passenger seat, stuffed them into her backpack, and got out of the car. On the front walk she nodded hello to the guy with the lawn mower, put her key in the lock, and stepped into her unit.
Her unit—no one else’s. There had been no more Daryls, though there had been a few more sleepless, guilt-heavy nights lying awake beside nice guys, in the endless hope that one of them would somehow light up enough of her buttons.
The thing was, she didn’t crave her academic work on those nights anymore. She didn’t crave much of anything, really, on any night. Which was unnerving as hell, at twenty-eight. Where had all the old rocket fuel gone? Where had Proust Girl gone? She existed only as a nagging thought now and again, all criticism and no advice.
Maybe the law degree would be a way to hit reset. A friend in D.C. had told her she should come out east and get into policy work. Advocate for something. Find a cause. Maybe. Or maybe there was something else she could do in D.C. Something she wasn’t even thinking of yet.
Aubrey set her bookbag on the carpet, stepped out of her shoes and—
Flinched, her breath coming out in a sharp little convulsion.
There was someone in her apartment.
Right there in the kitchen doorway.
Holding something.
These thoughts, in the tiniest sliver of a second.
In the next sliver her eyes locked on to the object: a handgun with a silencer on the barrel.
The first three shots felt like fingertips jabbing her chest, hard enough to shove her backward—and little balloons of ice water popping inside her, deep behind her ribs.
She didn’t feel the fourth shot. It broke the center band of her glasses and punched through the bridge of her nose.
* * *
The man with the gun watched her fall in a heap of limbs. Watched the carpet become soaked around her head, as if someone had tipped over a pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid.