Stop at Nothing

by Michael Ledwidge

  Her thighs were starting to burn on an upslope of her return loop five minutes later when her phone vibrated. She took it out of her waist pack and blew her sweaty bangs out of her eyes to look at the screen.

  “Hey,” she said, relieved to see it was only Lori.

  “You okay?” Lori said, sounding sleepy.

  “Of course. What’s up? Is Ally okay?” Ruby said as she slowed and stopped.

  “Yes, yes. Fine. Did you forget your key or something?” her sister said.

  “What? No. I’m not home yet. What is it, Lori?”

  As she stood listening, she heard baby Alice start crying.

  “Somebody is knocking on the door,” Lori said. “That’s not you?”

  Ruby sprinted across Penton and up to Lori’s corner on Norton Street.

  And saw them—all of them—there in front of the house.

  34

  Midway down the street in front of Lori’s little house were a half-dozen vehicles. They were gray unmarked cop cars, and they were parked sideways out in the street, completely blocking it.

  Alongside them stood half a dozen figures in blue raid jackets.

  Ruby gasped when one of them turned and she spotted the three impossible-to-miss frightening Day-Glo yellow letters scrawled across the back.

  FBI? Ruby thought.

  There was a roar of a diesel engine and then from the other end of the street came some kind of armored van. It was a giant gunmetal gray SWAT truck and from its running board hung a team of tactical officers. They had shaved military jarheads and khaki-colored ballistic armor and military rifles that looked like something out of a middle schooler’s video game.

  Then it happened. As the heavy armored FBI SWAT van mounted the sidewalk in front of Lori’s house, the reality of what she was in the middle of finally slammed into Ruby like a wrecking ball to the chest.

  She suddenly remembered the reporter’s words.

  They are real, Ruby. There really is a They.

  “Ruby, what should I do? Someone’s knocking hard now. What the hell is this?” Lori said in her ear.

  Ruby stood there speechless. She stared mutely at the agents, at the houses around her. There was no one around. No one to notice the world going nuts.

  Move, dammit! she thought. Snap out of it! Do something!

  Ruby ripped her eyes from the cars and mayhem down the block and took a deep breath and quietly crossed the intersection. When she made the other side, she looked at her phone and saw that Lori’s call had dropped off.

  She ran at top speed into the dead end at the end of the side street. She hopped over someone’s short back fence, darted across the yard, came around the house back into another cul-de-sac and made a right down McNeil, the street that ran parallel to Norton.

  When she was about halfway down across from Lori’s house, she quietly hopped another fence and went into someone else’s side yard and crouched by some ornamental grass.

  Over the house’s backyard fence, she could see onto Norton. There was one of the double-parked FBI cars there with two male agents and a female one.

  She looked at the hard expressions on their faces. Their drawn guns down by their legs. Like they were coming after a hijacker. A terrorist holed up with a weapon of mass destruction.

  Her fear suddenly flipped to pure anger. What bastards, she thought, looking beyond them at Sean’s Playskool scooter and kick balls under Lori’s modest brick bungalow’s carport.

  They couldn’t see that there were kids in the house? People’s children. They didn’t care about that?

  She was watching the agents consult solemnly with one another when somewhere off to the left someone yelled out in a football coach roar.

  “Open up! FBI! We have a warrant!”

  And then there was a crunching boom and a shatter of glass as the sons of bitches actually broke down Lori’s door.

  Even from a block over, she heard Lori scream as a file of FBI agents ran in over her front lawn.

  Ruby stood up breathing hard, a hand to her mouth. She was feeling nauseated now, helpless and numb, like she was coming out of herself.

  The sound of little Sean’s screaming cries snapped her out of it and she lifted her phone.

  “911. What’s your emergency?”

  She was going to say “There are FBI agents entering my sister’s house,” then stopped herself.

  “Help me! Someone just kicked in my door! A break-in, a break-in! Someone’s in my house! 334 Norton. 334 Norton. Help me, please. Send someone, please. They have guns. Help!”

  She hung up and stood in the side yard of the house stock-still with her hands clasped in prayer as she waited. When she heard the sirens another long two minutes later, she hopped back out of the person’s side yard and headed back into the street.

  As she ran out toward the corner, she saw them coming at her up 70th. Two radio cars, Pensacola’s finest, roaring up, lights flashing, as they made the left onto Norton.

  She speed-walked down to the corner and saw the cops getting out, some of the agents rushing over showing credentials. Lori’s neighbors were now out on their porches and scrub grass front yards wondering what the hell was going on.

  Then Ruby started running, booking for all she was worth, past Norton and down 70th before they figured out she wasn’t there.

  35

  Ruby ran all the way, a full three miles more, up to the Mobile Highway. The first car rental place she found was on the strip between a mattress store and a Church’s Fried Chicken. The bell on its door jangled loudly as she nearly took it off the hinges coming through at an almost dead run.

  “Hello and what have we here?” said a guy sitting at a desk behind the counter. He was young and had one of those silly mountain man hipster beards that went to the chest of his corporate polo.

  “I need to rent a car,” Ruby gasped, red-faced, sweat dripping onto the carpet tile.

  “Let me guess. Got tired of running? Figured, let me try this car thing,” said the rental clerk snarkily as he laid down the cell phone he was playing with and stood.

  “I just got into a damn car accident!” Ruby said loudly, acting only a little more in shock than she actually was. “My Mazda got completely totaled! The fire department had to cut the door off! I almost died.”

  “No way,” the clerk said, wide-eyed, no more snark or irony in sight.

  “Yes. Two miles down the road there. Some dumb little twit was texting on her phone and T-boned me. If her front end came in another inch closer, I’d be dead right now.”

  “I’m so sorry,” the guy said. “Are you okay? Can I get you something?”

  “No. I’m sorry for yelling. I’m still shook up a little, I guess. I just need a car real quick. My mama just had back surgery over at Sacred Heart. I need to pick her up. She has a bad heart, too, and she worries.”

  “You poor thing,” the clerk said. “We’ll get you fixed up. We just got a minivan in, a Honda Odyssey, a nice new one. Would that help you? I’ll even charge you for a compact.”

  “Perfect,” Ruby said. “Thank you.”

  “We’ll get you right out of here,” he said as he handed her a pen and a clipboard.

  She sat in a chair, dripping sweat onto the paperwork, as he left to get the van. The clipboard shook in her hand as the enormity of everything came crashing down around her ears.

  She thought about her sister and the children. She thought about Mark Thanh, her coworker, quarantined somewhere. And Steve, the diver, gone missing. He was just a kid.

  She looked out at the traffic. On her run, she had been thinking that she would head to someplace safe in order to figure out what to do next. Call some friends. Maybe call a lawyer.

  But she knew what she had to do now.

  Ruby took out her phone and opened the back and pried out the battery as the gu
y with the beard arrived outside with the van.

  36

  Maryvale Baseball Park, Cactus League home of the Milwaukee Brewers, was a sprawling, newly revamped spring training facility in West Phoenix.

  Gannon, standing by the third baseline seats, glanced out onto the sunny infield where Declan was demonstrating his bunting skills to some scouts and coaches. He fouled off the first, but then dropped down a beaut up the third baseline as he began to book.

  Gannon placed his phone down in his lap and clapped.

  “Way to go, son. That’s the way,” he yelled and immediately lifted his phone back up and went back to reading yet another completely fake news story about Director Dunning’s tragic death by stroke in Rome.

  “Hey, is that your kid out there?” said a guy from behind him.

  “Yep,” Gannon said without turning around.

  “Wow. That’s some slider he has. Just nasty. You have to be pretty proud.”

  “Yep,” Gannon said as he flicked at the screen.

  The gaggle of baseball people broke up after a minute, and Declan jogged over to where Gannon was sitting.

  “What’s up, son?” Gannon said, his eyes still glued to his phone.

  “We’re still waiting on the assistant GM himself,” Declan said. “Then we’re going to start the simulated game.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Did you hear me, Dad?”

  Gannon looked up.

  “I’ll be right back,” Gannon said, standing.

  “Right back? Where the hell are you going?”

  Gannon headed back outside the stadium altogether into the truck. He turned it over and cranked up the A/C as he pressed on the video he had just found on YouTube.

  He turned up the volume on his phone as a lean middle-aged man appeared on the screen, walking along what appeared to be a New York City street.

  The man had neatly cut light brown hair streaked with gray, and he was wearing a nice overcoat over a business suit with no tie. It almost looked like a camera crew was following along with the guy, taping him as he walked, but he was probably holding one of those selfie stick things, taping himself.

  The man’s name was Eric Wheldon, and Gannon had already quickly learned that he was some kind of alternative news reporter with a YouTube channel.

  His channel had hundreds of videos with thousands of hits on each. The videos had all-caps titles like: BREAKING: STATE DEPARTMENT DENIES AMBASSADOR JOYCE’S TIES TO MUNICH HOOKERGATE! And, LATEST NSA HACKER UPDATE: IS MESSERLY STILL IN LONDON? And, CHINESE DELEGATION MEMBER LU DIES IN SUSPICIOUS HEART ATTACK!

  What was of special interest to Gannon in his current state of panic was the title of the video he was now watching.

  MYSTERIOUS PLANE CRASH IN BAHAMAS. IS IT REALLY WHAT THEY’RE SAYING?

  “Hey, everyone, greetings from freezing-cold NYC and welcome to episode 349,” Wheldon said.

  “What shall we talk of today, my friends?” he said. “How about plane crashes? Yesterday, a little birdie told me about a very curious one down off the coast of sunny Florida. This little birdie works in one of our vaunted armed forces divisions, and said he was recently sent out to a site near the Bahamas.”

  Wheldon paused, smiling into the camera. Gannon looked at the building he was passing. It had brass doors, and in the granite beside the door, a shining brass plaque said 485 Park.

  “Is that right? I said to my friend,” Wheldon continued. “I believe I heard about that Bahamas crash on the news. You’re talking about that Cessna Denali turboprop that went down, right? About that poor married couple who tragically lost their lives? Well, my friend said. The crash was in the Bahamas, that’s true. But it was no prop plane. No? I said. How do you know that?”

  Wheldon stopped walking and stared into the camera.

  “Because how could it be a prop plane, my little birdie told me, when we fished two Rolls-Royce jet engines out of the water?”

  Gannon felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He couldn’t believe this. The FBI director. Now the crash.

  Everything was starting to snowball. It was all blowing up now.

  And he was smack-dab dead center in the middle of it.

  “That’s a pretty darn good question, isn’t it?” Wheldon said.

  “I’ll say,” said Gannon, dry-mouthed.

  “Anybody out there know the answer?” Wheldon said.

  37

  Atop the concrete subway steps, Ruby stopped and stood still in the massive flow of hurrying people.

  She gaped up at the giant TV screen billboards. The cartoons and lingerie ads. The streaming ABC News electronic billboard beside her that said it was twenty-nine degrees.

  She checked her watch. It was almost midnight. Her train had arrived in New York City at eleven fifteen, but it took a little while in the chaotic disorienting swirl at Penn Station to figure out which subway she needed to take to get to Times Square.

  Disorienting, Ruby thought, looking around.

  Yep. Disorienting was the theme of her week all right.

  Even after a full minute, she kept standing there, staring. She knew she looked like a tourist, but she didn’t care.

  She had one or two other things on her mind right now, she thought.

  She found a Starbucks half a block west of the subway and went in and got a tall black. Looking out through the foggy, greasy glass to get her bearings, she could see there was some kind of frantic commotion going on at the corner. People were stopped and staring and some of them were pointing phones at some other people there on the ground.

  She thought maybe it was a fight. But then the crowd parted, and she saw it was a smiling Buzz Lightyear and green-painted Lady Liberty break-dancing together on a flattened cardboard box.

  “My, my, my,” she said.

  On the morning of the day before, she’d left the rental van in the parking lot of a mall near Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport and taken a series of cabs to Yemassee, South Carolina, where she got on the Amtrak to New York.

  It was Eric Wheldon’s idea that she ditch the van for the Amtrak. She’d called him the moment after she bought a new prepaid burner phone. The first thing he told her was to take out as much cash as she could from an ATM and not to use her credit card.

  She had wanted to call her sister, Lori, to make sure she and the kids were okay, but he said no way. That they would definitely be tapping her line. Which thoroughly sucked, but at least her brother-in-law, Mitch, would be home by now.

  She slammed back the last of her coffee and dropped the cup into the trash hole and pulled the door back out to the grim, frigid sidewalk. She was supposed to meet Wheldon on the corner of 44th and Broadway, and when she arrived, there was a crowd on the corner. It was some kind of nightclub opening, and there were photographers standing by a red carpet and a velvet rope.

  She looked at people, searching for Wheldon as she passed. In his YouTube videos, he was a neatly dressed reporterish-looking middle-aged white guy.

  There was no one who looked like that in front of the red ropes, so she went to the corner and waited on the light. On the opposite side of it, she saw a couple of dog walkers standing there, allowing their dogs to greet each other.

  Of course, she thought.

  Why not take the dog out for a stroll at midnight in Times Square in the freezing cold? To meet Buzz Lightyear for a break-dancing lesson maybe? Makes sense.

  As she arrived at the opposite curb, she realized one of the dog walkers was staring at her. He was a pale, fiftyish man in a long dark overcoat.

  Was it Wheldon? Ruby thought. The neat hair and reporterish look were the same, and he seemed to be about the same age. Though he hadn’t mentioned any dog.

  Or had the FBI found her? Ruby thought, gnawing on her lip. They looked reporterish, too.

  They di
dn’t break eye contact as she went past him north up Broadway. She was coming to the corner of 45th when she noticed that he was coming up behind her. She stopped short, freaking out a little. He handed her something before he kept going like a shot with the dog around the corner of 45th.

  She kept going straight up Broadway and waited until she got across the next side street before she looked at it.

  It was a flyer for an Irish pub on 50th Street.

  12:30 was written in Sharpie along its bottom.

  38

  The hearty, happy smell of steak and Guinness made Ruby smile when she came in out of the cold through the door of O’Lunney’s Times Square Pub.

  After all the traveling and cold and walking and worrying, she suddenly felt ravenously hungry and very tired.

  She looked at the people at the half-filled bar, the jewel-colored rows of shining bottles behind it.

  “Hey, there you are. This way, miss,” said a pleasant-looking goateed man in a dapper gray suit as he came out from behind the bar.

  He led her down some steps to a downstairs bar and past it to a dark booth where the neat man from the corner stood as she approached.

  “Welcome to the jungle, Ruby,” Wheldon said as she stepped over.

  “Where’s your dog?” Ruby said.

  Wheldon laughed as she sat.

  “What dog?” he said with a wink.

  “You are Eric Wheldon?”

  “At your service,” he said.

  “An Irish coffee, please,” she said to the waitress when she came over.

  “I’d also like a menu, too, if we’re staying. I’m starving,” Ruby said, unbuttoning her coat as the waitress left.

  “No, we should actually be leaving in a minute,” Wheldon said, glancing at the stairs. “We should keep moving.”

  “Are you kidding? I haven’t slept an hour straight since I called you. I’m about to drop. Is it really necessary?”

  Wheldon took out a folded sheet of paper from inside his long coat and put it on the tabletop. He flashed the light from his phone on it to show her.