He pointed to an empty bay. “A van was just there.”
“What kind of van?”
“Grey? Kind of funny looking.”
“Did you see who was driving it?”
Both men shook their heads.
I showed them Joel Creedle’s picture. “Have you seen this guy today?”
“Bill? Yeah, he’s the security guy.”
“Damn it.” I ran a hand over my face. Of course. “What’s he wearing?”
The shorter of the two men tugged at his shirt. “They made us all wear this.”
“Give me your radio.”
The tall guy handed it over.
I said, “How do I get Mave?”
“Just say her name. There’s only one channel.”
“Mave, come in.”
I realized there was no way she’d hear the radio over the noise. I’d had trouble even hearing the voices coming through my phone.
“If you see Bill back here, keep him from leaving, okay? And say something on the radio. Okay?”
I clipped the radio to the waistband of my jeans and went over to the empty dock. Cold air streamed in from outside, chilling the sweat at my hairline. I saw dozens of vehicles parked back here on the expanse of cracked pavement, but no grey vans.
One earbud was still dangling at my throat. I put it back in place and said to the gang, “Creedle is the security guy. Bill. He’s wearing a lime-green shirt that says ‘event staff.’ Or, was. There’s also a van, grey. The plants came out of that.”
Shelby said, “I keep seeing a lady in a green shirt. Curly red hair? Is she one of them?”
“No, she’s actual event staff. Grab her and tell her to go on the radio.”
I dropped to a crouch and lowered myself off the raised ledge of the loading dock and went around the south side of the Celeste Center exterior, past the short end of the open-air Congress Pavilion and the trampled-looking grassy area between the buildings. I heard voices, lots of them, and saw the massive line of people waiting to get into the expo forming from the main entrance going south; it reached the southernmost side of the building and then snaked away, under the towering posts for the SkyGlider and back toward the Bricker Building.
I lifted the walkie-talkie. “Mave, can you hear me?”
The reply was an unintelligible crackle.
“Hello?”
Crackle crackle.
I realized that I might have been beyond the range of the device now that I was outside the building.
“Shelby, tell her—” I stopped, not sure what I could tell her that wouldn’t make the situation worse. “Tell her not to trust Bill or anyone he brought in.”
I searched the crowd looking for a grey state trooper uniform, but even the line was no longer identifiable as a line, just a huge mob of people. I stood on my tiptoes, which didn’t help. So I stuck the toe of one boot into a chain-link fence that housed an HVAC motor and climbed to the top.
From this vantage point I could see Gail Spinnaker with a television crew off to my left in front of the Taft Coliseum, no doubt having been evicted from the location at the Bricker Building by the growing crowd.
I hopped off the fence and ran the three hundred feet between us. Gail was her perky, put-together self, smiling hugely while telling the camera the incredible success story of her rebranded empire, which she now called Inspohio. Gail did love her portmanteaus. Then she saw me coming and faltered.
“Your head of security is actually a terrorist,” I announced. “You need to do something.”
The reporter, a woman with glossy dark hair and a wide pink mouth, looked at me like I had two heads.
Gail said, “Can we start over?”
“Um, this is live…?” the reporter said.
The camera spun at me—no, not at me, at the Celeste Center, where instead of trying to get in, people were suddenly streaming out.
CHAPTER 36
“Someone just pulled the fire alarm,” Shelby said, “and screamed fire and it wasn’t me.”
I bolted toward the main entrance of the Celeste Center. “Did anyone see who it was?”
Four nos and one yes came through the phone.
Miriam said, “Someone in a green shirt. I couldn’t see who.”
The scene at the entrance was chaos—people pushing out while some people were still pushing in, not realizing that the one-out-one-in protocol had been suspended.
Maybe Mave. Maybe one of Creedle’s crew, having a change of heart?
“The polo shirts are going towards the back, not the front,” Kez said. “Should I follow?”
I said, “Everybody, just get out of the building. If any of you see Matt, grab him too.”
“Roxane.”
I looked up and saw my oldest brother’s face ten feet away—at six-three, he towered over the rest of the crowd.
“Never mind,” I said to the group. “I found him.”
But then I saw something else, and my heart dropped through the pavement under the soles of my boots.
A grey van, parked just behind a pair of oak trees and the patch of grass on the north side of the doors.
* * *
“The van,” I said. “Fuck. The van.” I cleared my throat and yelled, as loud as I could, “The meeting point is to the left. Behind the Taft Coliseum.”
The people in my immediate vicinity glanced at me, but no one seemed to care. Matt lifted his hand to his mouth, index finger and thumb in a circle, and made an ear-piercing whistle. “Everybody. Come on. Keep moving to the left.”
“Whoever’s still inside, go to the secondary entrance at the southwest corner of the building,” I said to the group while Matt continued to holler at the crowd. “Tell everybody you see. Go out and keep moving south.”
Andrew said, “What’s happening?”
I peered in the windows of the van but couldn’t see anything through the tint. I considered smashing a window, even went so far as to unsnap the strip of webbing that kept my gun firmly in its holster, but I didn’t know what could possibly trigger the explosive. Besides, what would I do if I got my hands on it—defuse the bomb like MacGyver?
The only thing I could do was try to get people the fuck away from it.
Which wasn’t going that well.
The end of the line, which was nearing the north side of the Bricker Building, had begun to rush forward, unaware that the goal was now to get away from the building, not closer to it. There were too many voices, some scared, some excited, phones ringing and pinging, feet on concrete—even Matt’s bellowing wasn’t loud enough to get the message across to people spread out across such a wide area.
I needed a visual, a gigantic flag that said GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM THIS VAN.
But all I had was four crumpled maps and nothing to write with.
I turned to the parking lot. Some people were heading that way, giving up on the event, and more yet were still coming in from the outer reaches. My vehicle was a few hundred yards away but I started toward it anyhow, thinking maybe there’d be time to herd the crowd that way.
Then I saw Matt’s behemoth truck parked much closer, parallel to a rectangle of grass at the northeast corner of the Celeste Center. It sported a small trailer with a concrete machine strapped inside.
I grabbed his arm. “Give me your keys.”
“What—why—no.”
“Right now.”
“No—”
I swiped at his pocket and grabbed them before he had time to react.
“Roxane, what the hell are you doing?”
“Sorry. Really. I’ll make it up to you.”
I ran through the crowd over to the truck and stepped up on the rail to get into its towering cab. I jammed the key into the ignition with trembling hands. Matt was right behind me, though, and he caught the door before I could close it.
“Scoot,” he said. He put a hand on my upper arm and shoved. “I don’t want you messing up my mirrors.”
It wasn’t exactly a fair fight, give
n his size. So I scooted over to the passenger side as he swung himself into the truck and revved the engine. “Now what?”
“Drive at these people. Carefully, but not too slow. Everybody needs to get way the hell down there.” I pointed through the side windows to the Taft Coliseum and the rest of the fairgrounds outbuildings beyond.
“Put on your seat belt.”
“Matt.”
“Just do it, come on.”
I buckled up and Matt pulled a sharp turn to get us facing the Celeste Center.
He revved the engine and crept forward; people scattered. In the side mirror I saw, finally, two Columbus police cruisers on Seventeeth, still trying to get into the lot.
“Now what?”
“Keep going,” I said.
I leaned forward as far as the seat belt would allow, searching the crowd for anything that might give me a clue as to what was going to happen. I didn’t find anything. But the plan was working—the crowd was moving back.
Just not nearly fast enough.
“Can you kind of zigzag? Like, serpentine? And faster.”
My brother nodded, picking up speed as he drifted to the right and then across to the left, weaving in and out of the blue-and-red SkyGlider pylons and revving the engine all the while. Finally, the crowd began to react with some urgency. A chorus of screams went up from a group of women, their arms laden with purchases from the expo.
We were just passing the grey van.
The back doors flew open and Joel Creedle jumped out and bolted north.
He glanced over his shoulder—not at us, but at the van—as he cut to the left, heading diagonally toward the Brown Arena.
“Now,” I said, “it’s now. Go.”
Matt stomped on the gas and drove straight at the receding crowd.
“Oh, fuck,” he muttered.
A grey electric meter, the same color as the sky, stuck up out of the ground in the gap between the two pylons we were currently arcing through. There was no way to miss it.
Matt stuck out an arm in front of me but I slapped it away, screaming, “Hands down,” just before the impact.
The sound of the airbags was deafening, and the cab was suddenly filled with the rubbery white cushions, a fine powdery dust, and the acrid tang of sodium azide.
“You okay?” Matt’s lips said.
Before I could answer, the world exploded.
* * *
Time goes funny in moments like that. It was impossible for me to have heard the shower of gravel before the bomb went off. I couldn’t hear anything. But in my memory of it, tiny rocks plinked down on the windows, first a few, then an avalanche of them, and then Matt was pushing me down into the footwell of the truck, somehow fitting his large frame in under the steering wheel. Then something metallic dropped onto the roof of the truck, skittered down, and bounced onto the concrete, and the trees were on fire, and everything was shiny wet and smoldering and the crowd of people was drifting by again, slower, stepping around bits of debris and stripes of yellow police tape, stunned silent but okay.
Suddenly, time reversed again and resumed normal speed. As the dust seemed to settle both inside and out, Matt had a hand on my shoulder, shaking me.
“—say something, please—”
I opened the door of the truck and, forgetting how high up we were, promptly fell onto the pavement below. The air smelled like burning plastic and gasoline. Then Matt was helping me to my feet, leading me over toward the brick structure to our right, pressing a folded bandana to my nose, which was somehow bleeding, which was bizarre because my head felt no longer connected to my body at all. I threw up into a concrete planter and sagged against a small metal fence.
“Just sit down right here,” Matt said, easing me into a sitting position on the decorative curb.
The knee of my jeans was ripped open, the exposed skin scraped and raw.
“Is my nose broken?” I heard myself say from beneath the bandana that I held against my face with both hands.
“I’m gonna go with yes. So there goes your modeling career.”
I knew that I was supposed to laugh, but I wasn’t sure how.
He knelt down beside me. The airbag dust had settled on his beard and his shoulders and he had a cut under his eye, a perfect bead of blood hanging from it like a prison tattoo. He was holding his right arm funny, bent at the elbow and against his chest.
“You owe me a new truck.”
I kept my hands in place against the bandana but lowered eight fingers so that only the middle ones were extended.
“There she is,” Matt said.
CHAPTER 37
Aiden’s eyes went the size of dinner plates when he saw my face. “Is that from the door?”
I sat down in a chair next to his bed, wincing as the thick scab on my knee snagged on the inside of my jeans, tugging against the healthy tissue around it. A broken nose was no joke, and neither were the concussion and the pair of shiners that went with it. But the skinned knee was fucking terrible. “The door?” Then I remembered what he was talking about—the door he’d slammed in my face at Rebecca’s house. “No, in your dreams are you that strong.”
He smirked. “Was it because of him?”
“Airbag,” I said. “They save lives, but not faces. But yes, because of him, in a roundabout way.” I had a lot of questions for Aiden, namely why he hadn’t gone to the police when he first suspected that Joel Creedle—the him in question here—was planning an act of terrorism, or why he hadn’t just called me days ago.
But there was no sense in hindsighting something like this, no explanation anyone could give that would turn it into logic and sense.
So instead, I said, “What about you, did he do this?”
The kid looked down at his hands. His chest tubes had been removed and his body had fought off the infection. But although I wore my bruises on the outside, he was banged up far worse than I was, and even after he was allowed to leave the hospital, he was going to sport psychological scars for a long, long time.
“No,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow and regretted it—even my eyebrows hurt. “It wasn’t your—” I reconsidered the use of the word stepdad. “Joel didn’t do this?”
“It was the guy in the hat.”
“What guy?”
“The guy who showed Joel how to use the flash drive.”
“Start at the beginning.”
“Well, I was spying. I knew he was doing something bad. I just didn’t know what. I thought he was cheating on my mom but it was way worse, obviously.”
“So you started following him. You went to the St. Clair Club in Detroit.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I was following you—at least that last time.”
He smirked. “Huh.”
I motioned for him to go on.
“Well, I saw him talking to this guy there. I heard them talking about the flash drive. About using it to get the people who use Constance’s app to show up at a specific location. The guy in the hat told him don’t lose this because it’s the only copy, and Joel said he would put it in the safe at home. So I went to Walmart and bought one that looked just like it. Actually, I bought all the red ones because I couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like. Then I switched them.”
An imperfect, incomplete plan that ignored the existence of cloud storage or other means of copying data into more than one location. But in its way, it had worked: Creedle had to resort to stealing the Nora Health user data another way when he realized his flash drive was useless. “A blank one for the real one. That’s pretty clever, Aiden. When was this?”
“I’m not sure. Before Rebecca went to Columbus.”
“Where?”
“At the house.”
“Describe the guy.”
“I don’t know, a guy.”
“White, black, short, tall?”
“White, taller than me but not a lot.”
“Build?”
“Huh?�
�
“Fat, thin, muscular, what?”
“He had on a coat. I couldn’t tell.”
“What kind of coat?”
“Brown.”
“Hair?”
“I couldn’t see it, because of the hat.”
“How many times did Joel meet with him?”
“I don’t know. Four?”
“Always at the St. Clair Club?”
“Yes.”
“And then you saw him again when?”
“The day I got arrested.”
“Where?”
“I went to your office. I got the address off that card. But you weren’t there. So when I was leaving, he was out front. He saw me. He knew who I was, I guess. I don’t know how. He never saw me in Detroit. It happened really fast. I was just trying to get away from him, but he was punching me and kicking me and trying to reach into my pockets. It was like he knew I had it. I finally kicked him in the nutsack really hard and managed to get away. I was so jacked on adrenaline or whatever. Then I saw this cop car sitting in traffic and I just thought, if I can get into that car, I can stick it between the seats or something and nobody will ever find it.” He held up a wrist, which was scraped raw. “I forgot about how they handcuff you when they arrest you. I tried but I couldn’t get it out of my pocket.”
“That’s pretty clever,” I said. “But why not chuck it in the garbage somewhere? Throw it in the river?”
“They were following me. Who knows how many there are.”
How did the man in the hat know Aiden was even in town? I said, “How did you get down here? I know your car got impounded in Detroit.”
“I hitched with this truck driver.”
I almost said that’s so dangerous but caught myself. A nice suburban churchly stepdad seemed perfectly safe but turned out not to be. Conventional wisdom about danger didn’t always apply. “Why here?”
“Constance had a fundraiser here. They kept talking about how they wanted to do it here, to get the most people. I saw it on TV in a hotel lobby where I was crashing. I figured, I should come down here and talk to you and you’d know what to do.”
“Why didn’t you call me? I would’ve come to get you.”
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