The Blood Guard (The Blood Guard series) (6 page)

Dawkins dropped the money and Tesla gun into the satchel, stood up, and threw the empty duffel bag into the trash. He dragged a hand through his greasy hair and rubbed vigorously at his face. He looked exhausted. “Our enemies don’t know who you are or that you’re with us, Greta, so you should be safe once Ronan and I depart. But that will work only if you agree to hold off calling your father until we’ve made good our escape. Deal?”

Greta looked back and forth between us, then growled with exasperation. “Deal. But I’m only doing this because I don’t want to make it worse for Ronan’s parents.”

Dawkins broke into that crazy smile of his. “Then it’s time to find ourselves a ride!”

C
H
A
PT
E
R
7
:

THE RIGHT MAN FOR THE WRONG JOB

D
awkins instructed us to wash up while he attended to “more urgent tasks.”

“Since when do you care about cleanliness?” Greta asked him, sniffing loudly.

“Yes, yes, very clever,” he said. “If we’re going to avoid suspicion in this place, you have to look well-scrubbed and not like you’re running for your life.”

The men’s room was enormous, with dozens of stalls and showers. I cleaned myself up as best I could at one of the many sinks and tried not to catch anyone’s eye, remembering what had happened the last time I was in a men’s room.

When I came out, I found Greta at a table in the dining area, her red hair dripping wet. She was busy pinning it back and pulling it through her scrunchie. It looked complicated.

“Why don’t you just cut your hair short?” I asked.

“I like it long,” she said, sliding a barrette into place as she stared at me. “So spill: who are those people with the swords?”

“I wish I knew,” I replied, feeling frustrated. “I need to find out from Dawkins. But they’re the same ones who’ve been chasing me since my mom put me on the train in Stanhope.”

I gazed around the truck stop, wondering how long we had until the bad guys caught up with us. There were a lot of older men in rumpled jeans and baseball caps browsing the junk for sale, clearly truckers taking a break from the road. But there were also families, killing time while they gassed up their cars. From overhead came the soft twang of country music. The entire place was busy and noisy, and nobody paid us any mind at all.

The hands of an old-style clock over the registers showed the time: just after six o’clock. “It’s dinnertime,” I said, wishing I was about to sit down with my parents.

“It’s
time
to call my dad,” Greta said. “Give me your cell phone.”

“But you made a deal with Dawkins!” I said.

“I’m not going to break my word,” Greta said. “I just want to let my dad know I’m all right.”

I patted down my pockets and then remembered: my phone was in my backpack on the rack above my seat. I closed my eyes. “I’m so dumb: I left it on the train.”

“Super,” Greta said, pouting out her lower lip and blowing her wet hair away from her forehead. “I seriously don’t trust this guy, Ronan. And you shouldn’t, either.” The Greta I’d known back at school had always been pretty but with a hardness to her, like a fingernail slick with red polish. She didn’t seem that way now. Her clear green eyes looked worried. For
me
. “There were a couple of pay phones back there by the bathrooms. I’m just going to call my dad and tell him I’ll wait for him here. Okay?”

This wasn’t her fight or her problem. I was just some stupid kid from her old school who she tried to help once upon a time. “Sure,” I said.

The smile that lit up her face made her look prett
y
—
s
o much so that I had to look away. “Great!” She was out of the booth and had vanished in the back before I could even think about trying to stop her.

Moments later, Dawkins slid in across from me. “We’re good to go. Where’s Sustermann?”

“Bathroom, I think,” I lied.

“Still?
Girls
. Anyway, I found a guy who is happy to give us a lift as far as Roanoke, Virginia.”

“Roanoke?” I said. “We’re supposed to be going to DC!” Maybe Greta was right and my mom was wrong, and Dawkins
was
a madman. “Roanoke wasn’t the plan.”

“The plan has changed. Greta got mixed up with us, and then those two agents appeared, an
d
—
w
ell, I’ve reconsidered the wisdom of our initial itinerary. They are too much up in our business, Ronan, and I don’t know why.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “I tried calling my contact on the pay phones back there, but wasn’t able to get hold of him, which worries me a teensy-weensy bit.”

“You’re not listening,” I said, feeling sick and out of control. I needed someone I trusted to tell me what to do. “My mom told me to go to DC, and Greta’s dad lives there.”

“And that’s
exactly
why DC is such a bad idea, Ronan. Something very bad is going down, and for reasons I can’t go into, it is best we get both you and Greta far away. So we’re going to Roanoke.”

“No,” Greta’s voice cut in, “we are not.” She’d come up behind Dawkins while he talked. “Ronan, don’t go with him.”

I looked from her to Dawkins. Would my mom want me to go to Roanoke? I didn’t even know where that was. Maybe my mom didn’t know Dawkins. Maybe he wasn’t a part of the Blood Guard at all. And yet he
had
known how to answer the question my mom told me to ask.

“Don’t waste too much time making up your mind, Ronan,” Greta said. She looked upset; I wondered what she’d told her dad. She held up the weird-looking Tesla gun from Dawkins’ satchel. “Oh, and I’m taking this. Just to make sure no one gets hurt.”

She tucked it into her waistband, pulled her shirt over it, and marched outside.

Dawkins and I stood up at the same time.

“What are you going to do?” I asked him.

“Nothing.” He held me back with a palm against my chest. “Her dad will sort her out soon enough. She’s safer apart from us, anyway. It’s you they’re after, Ronan, and so long as they don’t know about Greta, she’ll be oka
y
—
oh, for the love of Pete.”

He grabbed my arm and jerked me right, toward a row of claw machines and pinball games and a photo booth with a little blue curtain.

But we didn’t move so fast that I’d missed what he’d seen: As Greta opened the glass double doors at the front of the building, she was stopped by three people. Two men in natty dark blue suits, and a severe-looking older blonde woman.

“The lady from the station. And the bald guy from the train,” I said, hoping Dawkins hadn’t heard me gulp. The other guy had long black hair that had been greased back against his scalp.

“Right.” Dawkins shoved me inside the photo booth. Then he stepped in after me, yanking the curtain shut. “Well, there goes a good plan.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we’re not going anywhere now.” He peeked out. “We’ve got to go rescue our mouthy little friend.”

“She’s not my friend,” I protested.

Dawkins gave me a look of such withering contempt that I immediately felt ashamed. “Of course she is. Do you know why those three haven’t come back here yet to nab us? Because even though they’ve grabbed Greta, she hasn’t told them where we are. She probably lied, and that’s why they’re looking for us outside.

“So we’ve got to go rescue her,” Dawkins added, crouching down and sliding through the curtain. “Come on. Stay low.” He led me deeper into the truck stop. Beyond the restaurant area the store extended in every direction, like the biggest convenience store in the world. In the back corner was a dark doorway curtained with long clear strips of heavy plastic. “Storeroom,” he said, pointing. “Should lead outside.”

Four crates of milk were stacked on a handtruck beside the plastic-strip curtain. Dawkins tipped the handtruck back on its wheels and rolled it through the doorway.

A chubby young guy in a blue apron glanced at us as we passed, but the dolly must have convinced him we belonged, because he just turned back to stocking an ice-cream case.

Dawkins pushed the dolly through another strip curtain and into a giant room with ramps and a parked truc
k
—
a
loading dock. There were slots for trucks to back into, and huge open roll-up doors to the outside. Dawkins left the milk on the nearest ramp and peered around one of the doors. I joined him.

“She’s resisting,” he said. “Scrappy little thing, that girl.”

A red SUV was parked on a raised concrete island between the two gas pump fueling stations, its doors hanging open. The blonde woman, her two minions, and Greta were struggling in front of it. Even from here, I could hear Greta shouting that her dad was a cop, that they were going to be in huge trouble, that if they were smart they’d get him on the phone before it was too late.

All of the people gassing up their cars had stopped what they were doing, but the woman held up a silver badge in a leather wallet and began talking.

“What’s she saying?” I asked.

“Probably identifying herself as police or some other nonsense,” Dawkins muttered in disgust. “People are easily duped by official-looking shiny things.”

The slicked-back hair guy put Greta in handcuffs, then he and Mr. Clean lifted her into the backseat. She kicked and screamed the whole time.

“I wish she hadn’t taken that Tesla gun,” Dawkins said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because now Blondie and her goons have it,” he replied.

The woman Dawkins called Blondie handed Mr. Clean the weapon, and he leaned back in the open door of the SUV. Then Blondie and Slicked-Back Hair separated. She headed right, toward the garage/auto-shop area, and he came our way, disappearing among the line of semitrailer trucks waiting to fuel up at the diesel pumps.

“Now’s our chance,” Dawkins announced, sidling outside. Crouched low, he ran around the corner. I followed as quickly as I could, wondering why we were going in the opposite direction from Greta and hoping that the blonde lad
y
—
w
herever she’d gon
e
—
w
ouldn’t see us.

But I didn’t hear any shouts or gunshots, and then it didn’t matter anymore, because we’d turned another corner and were deep in the shadows of the garage.

The place stank of old oil and gasoline, and there was junk all ove
r
—
t
eetering stacks of tires and grime-encrusted car parts heaped against the walls. An engine was suspended in a harness of chains, a black puddle of gunk beneath it. An enormous rusty orange Cadillac sat right in the entryway, the rear end propped up on a rickety pair of tire jacks. It didn’t have any back wheels, just rusty metal discs where the tires should have been, lug nut screws sticking out. A panda bear key chain dangled from the ignition.

“Nice ride,” Dawkins commented. “Keep an eye out, Ronan. We need something we can use as a weapon.”

A friendly looking old man in a spectacularly dirty gray jumpsuit walked up, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “May I help you two young gentlemen?” he asked. Sewn onto his chest was a name patch that read
ALBIE
.

“Why, hello!” Dawkins said brightly. “We’re here to pick up our 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Brought it in to have the head gasket replaced.”

I didn’t even have to look to know that Dawkins had turned on that smile of his: Albie grinned in response. “I don’t recall an Olds with a blown gasket, but let me go find the paperwork in the office. May take me a minute; it’s a mess in there.”

“Sure, go ahead,” Dawkins said. “We’re in no rush.”

But we wer
e
—
B
londie and her goons would be here any minute. I jiggled my leg and tried not to look anxious.

After Albie disappeared, Dawkins picked up a tire iron and smacked it against his palm, then sighed. “It’s no use. The problem is, they’ve parked out there in the center of that enormous concrete lot, so that guy will see us coming from a mile away.”

“Right,” I said. “My mo
m
—
s
he ran really fast. Can you maybe do the same thing? Magic?”

“Can I do
magic
?” Dawkins said, disbelieving. “You mean like flap my wings and
fly
out there? Or turn invisible?”

“That sounds kind of dumb, doesn’t it?”

He replaced the tire iron. “The Guard can’t fly or turn invisible, Ronan. I suppose the speed thing
is
magic of a sort,” Dawkins said, “but it’s a talent that would be useless here. He’d still see me coming, and even if I dodged the shot from his weapon, he might harm Greta.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Greta.”

“We need to be sneaky but get to her fast.”

“How about that thing over there?” I pointed to what looked like a short ambulance stretcher on wheels. It had a cushion for someone’s head, and a four-foot-long platfor
m
—
a
creeper that mechanics lie down on to go underneath cars.

He put a foot on the creeper, rolling it back and forth. “Good idea,” he said, clapping me on my shoulder. “This looks like it should work.”

“You’re going to skateboard out there?”

“No, no,” Dawkins said, bending down and picking it up. “I’m going to scoot out there on my belly. He’ll never see me coming.” He walked to the front of the garage, hugging the creeper to his chest. “But just to be sure, we’ll need a distraction so big that Blondie and her goons won’t see me, either.”

We looked out at the SUV. Between it and us were a few hundred yards of pavement, empty save for the occasional car or truck rumbling past.