Tiger (10 page)

“Jesus,” he said to Alabama. “Is she really out? If you break her, you bought her—you can answer to the man yourself.”

Wally's lungs were about to burst, but she held tight. She heard some movement—it sounded like the Asian guy was crouching down, and then a slight metallic tone: the oil lamp being set on the floor. The man stood upright again and Wally could feel him moving close. He laid his hand on her rib cage, feeling for movement.

“She's not breathing. . . . ” he said, sounding anxious. She opened one eye very slightly, enough to see that he had moved in close.

“Back off!” Alabama warned.

Too late. Wally flexed her muscles and brought her right knee up as hard and high as she could. It struck the Asian guy in the mouth, and Wally could feel the man's teeth shattering on impact. Blood spurted in every direction as he reeled back, howling in pain and rage. He quickly regained his balance and lunged at Wally.

“No!” Alabama yelled, reflexively turning aside to sidestep the oncoming charge. At that moment, the attacker struck outward with his elbow—aimed at Wally's face—but she managed to move her head to the side just an inch. The point of his elbow glanced off the side of her head and struck Alabama squarely in the throat, connecting with the wound that Wally had given him two days earlier.

Alabama yowled in pain—he tried to keep hold of Wally but she wrestled free of his arms and dropped to the ground, scrambling toward her SIG, still lying on the floor ten feet away. She dove for the weapon, grabbing it and rolling onto her back in one motion, facing upward now with the gun in front of her. In those few seconds, the Asian goon had reversed course and was coming straight at her. Wally blasted three shots, two hitting him in the chest and the third in the face, just below one eye. The man fell lifeless to the floor, but behind him Alabama had regained his balance and came at Wally, his face a mask of burning rage.

She aimed at him and squeezed the trigger, but the SIG jammed.
Shit!

Alabama dove for her, but she rolled to the side and he missed, his massive physique a disadvantage as his momentum carried him past her. Wally scrambled to her feet again but could hear him behind her, rising up again and coming back at her. She took three steps down the hallway and reached for the oil lamp on the floor, its wick still burning brightly.

She swung around and hurled the lamp at Alabama. He ducked, but the lamp struck the wall behind him and shattered, the oil bursting into flames and splashing onto the upper right side of his body, his arm, neck, and face now on fire.

Alabama screamed in pain and fury, flailing wildly. He dropped to the ground and rolled, trying to snuff out the flames. Wally leapt over him and sprinted toward the room at the far end of the hall. There she found Kyle struggling to pull duct tape off his wrists. He looked disoriented but otherwise unharmed.

“Wally . . . ”

“We can't go back that way.” She motioned toward the hallway where they could see Alabama blocking the way, still rolling around frantically on the floorboards—the flames on his clothes and skin were almost snuffed out.

Wally grabbed a wooden chair and repeatedly swung it against one of the windows in the room. The glass shattered, and she jabbed at the space again and again until all the shards of broken glass were cleared from the opening. One more shove with the chair was all it took for the shutters to crash open.

Wally and Kyle heaved themselves through the broken window, rolling onto the shingled roof outside. The moonlight was bright on this side of the lodge, and they could see a clear space below them. Without taking time to debate the choice, they both jumped, hitting the earth ten feet below and rolling. The touchdown was painful.

“Are you okay?” Wally asked, scrambling to her feet and hauling Kyle up with her.

“I'm good,” he grunted. And they ran.

They raced back around the lodge and over the back porch, toward the waiting Explorer. Wally peeled off to retrieve her messenger bag from beside the firewood rack. She dug into the bag as she ran to the car, locating the keys to the Explorer just as she reached it. She pressed the “unlock” button on the fob and the locks clicked open.

She climbed in behind the wheel and Kyle slid in beside her. She backed the car up quickly and then threw it into drive. As they peeled away at high speed, some motion from the direction of the lodge caught Wally's attention: Alabama burst through the porch door and charged after them, the right side of his body and clothes charred black and still smoking. In his left hand was the big steel gun she'd seen him carrying before.

Wally and Kyle ducked low in their seats as they raced away, and a rapid series of gunshots rang out behind them—a full clip. At least four or five metallic
thwunk
sounds signaled that the Explorer had been hit, but none of the car glass shattered, and both Wally and Kyle escaped harm. The shooting stopped when they were about a hundred yards away. Kyle turned his head to get a last look at the lodge.

“It's burning,” he said flatly, void of emotion.

Wally saw a flickering orange light up the second floor of the lodge, where the flame from the lamp she had shattered was growing. A house made of logs stood no chance, especially without a fire company within twenty miles.

“I'm glad,” Kyle added.

WITHIN A HALF MILE, THEY APPROACHED A NEW JEEP Grand Cherokee, black with fake wood paneling. It was parked along the side of the road, right where Townsend's men would have left it to be sure they were not heard. Wally pulled to a stop and climbed out, leaving her door open and the engine running. She peered in at Kyle, who still looked shell-shocked.

“Stay inside and keep watch down the road, okay?” she told him.

He didn't argue. Wally pulled the survival knife out of her boot and sliced the air nozzles off the Cherokee's tires, the air rushing out as she did each one. The doors to the car were locked, but she used the heavy steel butt of the knife to break the driver's-side window and let herself inside. There wasn't much to find: trash, a map, a container of antacid pills. One cell phone had been left there in the driver's door compartment—a cheap burner—and Wally took it. She popped the trunk and found two sleeve-style gun cases there, one with a shotgun inside and one with an assault rifle. She didn't want either, so she left them. There was nothing else.

She climbed back in the Explorer and they sped onward, retracing the route that they had taken to the lodge two days before. Wally snuck a look in Kyle's direction, and in the glow of the dashboard lights his expression appeared vacant and numb. She could relate to his stressed-out condition—her hands were clammy, and they gripped the wheel as if it were a lifeline. Her jaw felt permanently clenched.

The images of the battle in the upstairs hallway of the lodge—the battle for her life—flooded back. She had killed a man. Shot him dead at point-blank range. A human life. She'd set another man on fire.
Oh my God
.
Oh my God
.

Wally hit the brakes and the speeding Ford took a hundred feet to skid finally to a stop on the dirt road. She flung her door open and tumbled out, dropping to her knees. With a massive heave, she began puking, one violent purge after another, until there was nothing left and her throat was burning from the acid. After a minute she caught her breath and stood to find Kyle near her. Something about her distress had jolted him out of his stupor. He looked halfway alert now, and he was worried about Wally.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No.” She absolutely was not okay.

She reached inside the car and pulled out a bottle of water. She gargled with it and spat it out three times until the taste of puke in her mouth was nearly gone. When she'd steadied herself, they drove on in silence. Kyle fished around and found a pack of gum, passing two slices of peppermint to Wally and taking two for himself.

It was forty minutes before they reached the highway, where Wally came to a full stop on the shoulder of the road. All she wanted was to think clearly, to be smart. Anything else was too much to ask.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “For everything. For getting you involved.”

Part of Wally wanted to comfort and reassure him, but in the back of her mind she'd been trying to figure something out, and she had to confront him about it.

“Kyle, I need to ask you something,” Wally said. “We talked about the rules: no cell phone calls, no—”

“At that gas station,” he blurted out.

“What did you do?”

“You were paying for everything, and . . . I just felt weird about it. I wanted my own money—”

“What did you use? An ATM card?” Wally felt an eruption of anger growing inside her.

“It's a secret account. My mother set it up for me, like a special thing between the two of us so my father couldn't always use money to control me. He didn't know anything about it—”

“
Kyle
. Your father knows whatever he wants to know! Get that through your head! You came to me for help, but you ignore all my advice. I take time out of my own life to come up here—against my better judgment—and in the end it's all a waste of time because you don't have the guts to follow through. On top of that, you do a stupid thing like using the ATM card and because of that I
killed
a man?! Are you fucking
kidding
me?!”

Wally felt herself about to lose control and stopped, pulling herself back from the edge. She took a few deep breaths and turned back to Kyle. He looked scared and ashamed, the way he was when Wally had first seen him in the hallway outside the Ursula Society, only worse.

“I'm really sorry,” Kyle said weakly. “I don't know what else to say.”

“Okay,” Wally said, trying to keep the anger out of her voice. “You didn't mean any of it, I know. I'm just . . . ” She couldn't finish the thought, because if she continued it would undoubtedly turn into another tirade, which would be pointless now.

“Let's just keep going,” she finally said. “I think we should take a different route home, just in case.”

He nodded in agreement. Wally turned north, planning eventually to loop back east and take another highway back to the city.

As they drove on, something in the passenger-side footwell caught Kyle's attention: Wally's messenger bag had fallen open, and the photographs she had taken from Townsend's secret stash had spilled out. Wally watched from the corner of her eye as Kyle picked up the photos and slowly sifted through them, a look of both fascination and dread on his face. For a moment she thought about stopping him, but that would be pointless now.

He switched on the overhead cab light so he could get a better look, studying the images closely as he leafed through them, transfixed.

“Where did you find these?”

“Your father's den. While you were asleep. I probably shouldn't have done it without asking you.”

“There are at least a couple dozen of them,” he said, sounding grieved. “And there are some I remember who aren't here, so there are probably others.” Wally could see him working through the implications of it. “I'll never find my birth mother, will I? I won't even be able to figure out which of the women she was.”

“Honestly, I don't know,” Wally agreed. “It will be difficult.”

After that, Kyle remained quiet for a while, deep in thought. Wally drove on, following the curving two-lane highway west—nothing but dark, impenetrable forest on either side of the road for miles—until they reached an intersection with a larger highway that could carry them south. There was a busy truck stop there, and Wally pulled over.

“I can barely keep my eyes open,” she said, feeling herself start to crash as her adrenaline rush finally bled out for good. “I need to get something.”

It was just past four in the morning by then, still entirely dark. Diesel fumes filled the air as Wally and Kyle walked together into the truck-stop store, splitting up at the restroom doorways.

The ladies' room was empty. Wally peed, then leaned over the sink and gave her face and armpits a thorough rinse. When she was done, she went out into the store and found a large can of energy drink—a nasty, carbonated green one that she knew would jolt her awake—and a bag of trail mix that included chocolate, nuts, raisins, and enough other things to fill up her recently evacuated stomach.

Kyle wasn't in the store, so she paid for her stuff and went to the car, which was also empty. Leaning against the hood of the car, Wally munched on a few handfuls of the trail mix and popped open the energy drink. She waited and snacked for several minutes before she started to wonder what the hell he was still doing in the men's room.

Wally set her food down in the car and went back inside the store. No Kyle. She went to the men's room and knocked on the door.

“Kyle. What's up? You okay in there?”

No answer. Wally was starting to feel uneasy.
Screw it
. She pushed through the men's room door and went inside. It was pretty disgusting in there—much filthier than the women's—but Wally found no one there, even after checking every stall. She went back out into the store and checked every aisle again. No Kyle.

Wally returned to the car, worried. There she saw something—a scrap of paper—pinned to the windshield under one of the wipers. Had it been there before, and she just hadn't seen it? It was a blank lotto card from inside the store, and Wally opened it to find just a few words scribbled there in pencil:

Forget it all, Wally. I'm done
.

Shit!
Wally walked to the edge of the highway and looked in both directions, thinking she might see Kyle trying to hitchhike up or down the road. She didn't. She realized that vehicles were regularly arriving and departing from the stop—at least one or two every minute—and Kyle had plenty of time to talk his way into a ride.

He was really gone.

What the hell? To come all this way, to go through everything that they had—together—and then this? She wondered if he'd left because of her tirade or because of the hopeless situation with his birth mother. Both, no doubt. It broke her heart a little, but mostly she just felt angry, plus overwhelmed and exhausted in every possible way. All she wanted now was to get in the car and drive, as fast as she could, back to the city, where she would sleep for three days straight.

Wally gassed up the Explorer and climbed in, turning south as she pulled out onto the dark, nearly empty highway toward home. Her burner phone still had the music-streaming program, and she created her own channel of loud, throbbing house mixes that would help keep her awake and hopefully drown out some of the emotional noise in her head.

She drove fast, stopping only once for another tall energy drink and a couple of granola bars to fill the aching void in her stomach. She reached the city in four-and-a-half hours, inching her way across the Triborough Bridge and down the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway with the early commuters. Her first stop was the rental-car agency, where a polite young Hispanic guy named Hervé walked around the Explorer with an iPad in his hands, checking for damage.

Hervé paused at the rear of the car and gave Wally a significant look. She checked out the area that had caught his attention and saw the large bullet holes that were now ventilating the rear hatch of the SUV, courtesy of Mr. Alabama and his big, shiny .
44
.

“That's why I always get the extra insurance,” she told Hervé.

“I think maybe I'm supposed to report this to the cops,” he said.

“Not necessarily,” Wally said, handing him five twenty-dollar bills from her wallet.

Hervé took the money.

Wally walked the last few blocks home, climbing the stairs to her rooftop apartment two at a time, desperate to collapse onto her mattress. Everything else—Tiger, Kyle, Lewis—they would all have to wait. She reached her landing and pulled out her keys, ready to unlock the door—then stopped short. There were noises inside the apartment. Footsteps, moving lightly inside. She remained still, head cocked and nerves alert, concluding that there were two separate sets of feet moving in there.

Shit. Had Townsend found out who she was and where she lived already? Her last sanctuary in the world had been invaded. Her heart sank at the thought. The SIG was still in her bag, the clip full of ammo again, but the idea of going strong against yet another team of armed goons was inconceivable to her. The only smart option was retreat. She would back down the stairway and call Greer—it was time for his buddies from the
94
^th
Precinct house to earn their salaries.

Wally took one step away from the door—ready to run—but then she heard music. Her boom box was suddenly playing an old-school favorite, “Rock the Casbah” by the Clash, followed by an outburst of laughter—high-pitched and as familiar to Wally as the sound of her own voice. Wally fumbled with her key, finally fitting it into the lock after what seemed like ages. She pushed through the door and entered, just in time to hear Ella bitching at Jake.

“Don't open it! What if she's saving them for something special?”

“Special
olives
?” Jake answered in exasperation.

Wally hurried into the room to find Jake and Ella in the kitchen, Jake holding a jar of gourmet stuffed cocktail olives that had been sitting in her fridge for months. Huge grins broke out on their faces when they saw her, followed by expressions of concern—Wally knew she looked ragged and drained after the events of the past few days. Ella flew across the room and threw her arms around Wally in a bear hug, nearly tackling her to the floor with the impact.

“Oh my God,” Ella said, her voice tearful.

“I love you, Ella,” Wally said, and felt tears of relief and grief and happiness all mixed together tumbling down her cheeks. It was a release of the feelings she had been keeping inside for months.

Thank you
, thought Wally. She had no idea who or what she was thanking, but somehow that didn't matter.
Thank you
.

While the girls held each other tight, Wally snuck a peek at Jake, who watched them with a smile on his face and the jar of olives still in his hand.

“So . . . can I open these?” he wanted to know.