Wayward State

by A. R. Shaw

  He stood and slid her bag and jacket across the table. “Ms. Talbot, here are your belongings. You’re free to go.”

  Dane wasted no time getting out of there before something else happened. She didn’t even wait to put her jacket on and by then, there was a steady light mist-of-a rain coming down, marring the blue sunny sky only moments earlier.

  She walked over a block away when, between the buildings, she heard the cries of a child once again. One familiar to her now and looked back at the guard station. The father she’d met earlier stood facing her as the mealy guard affixed handcuffs to his wrists behind him. A female guard held the screaming girl who was flailing in her arms and reaching for her father as she dragged…what was his name, Sawyer? the son away.

  Oh my God, what have I done? Dane couldn’t help but feel Waylon staring her down…he knew now. She’d planted Mr. Fletcher’s fob in his pocket. She stopped and stared back at him and mouthed…I’m sorry.

  23

  Matthew

  The phone rang a second time. He was an hour ahead and found himself checking the time anyway as if that mattered. It wasn’t like she lived in Washington State now. This was only temporary. Unless of course, she ended up in jail. Then she’d likely be a ‘sort of’ resident for a while. She wasn’t likely to pick up anyway.

  But then she did.

  “Matthew?” A groggy, sleepy voice with a bit of husk like the rind of an almond; both velvety and rigid.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called.”

  Silence.

  She cleared her throat.

  “You okay?” He realized the question seemed absurd after the disturbing call earlier. He ran his palm over his hair, matting it down against his scalp.

  She cleared her throat again. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  God, it was good to hear her voice even if it was far away and slightly annoyed and the fact that she was alive and not dead somewhere along the roadside was good, too.

  “Look. You must have accidentally called me earlier today. I heard this godawful sound. And then children were crying in the background. I was just…concerned.”

  “Oh. Sorry, that happened. Yeah, I was at a medical center and a…an alarm went off somewhere. Scared a lot of people.”

  “Oh…but you’re okay. Nothing happened?”

  “I…am not sure what the alarm was for.”

  Now he wasn’t sure what to say. He was pretty sure she knew exactly why the alarm went off, but he wasn’t going to press her on it. Why was this suddenly so hard? Small talk with Dane had always been a challenge but now it was like peeling a pomegranate.

  “Did you um…find what you were looking for there? You…mentioned the medical center.”

  “I…did. I’ll need more time. Are they giving you a hard time about my absence?”

  She’s trying to change the subject. “Uh, no…don’t worry about that.” More silence.

  “Dammit, Dane. I miss you. I’m worried…about you.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while.

  Why did he care so much?

  “Matt…I have to do this. We talked about this. You could have come with me. I’m sorry.”

  “I am, too.

  “I’ll return as soon as I can…if you still want me to. If I still can…”

  “Of course, you can. You know I want you to come back.” And then more like a whisper, “You know I want…this.”

  And because she didn’t say anything after that, he said, “Oh…I wanted to tell you, Rebecca’s back.”

  “She is? Is she okay? That seems a little too soon.”

  “Nope, she is not okay, and it is too soon. She’s struggling a little, but we’re taking care of her.”

  “That’s good. Give her space. Let her heal. Distract her with work as much as you can. Keep her busy.”

  “I wish you were here to help with that.” Matthew rubbed his hand down the side of his face wondering why he’d said that. He’d successfully redirected the conversation and he brought it right back to his own emotions again. What the hell was wrong with him?

  Dane let out a breath. “Look, Matthew. I wish I was there, too, but I’ve got to get back to sleep. I have things…to do tomorrow.”

  “Of course. Dane, please check in more often. It’ll keep me from going crazy.”

  “I’ll do that when I can. I’ll try. Listen, before you go…I’ve been getting these weird deposits in my checking account. Are you initiating sick pay or something?”

  “Ah…no...trust me, that’s not how it works.” He said with a chuckle. “If you’re getting deposits…I doubt they’re coming from us.”

  “Okay…I checked my account for the first time in a long time tonight. I rarely look in my account but since I’m traveling, I thought I’d look and there’s been regular deposits coming every week from an acronym I don’t recognize.”

  “I wouldn’t complain about mystery money but um, could it be from your dad’s estate perhaps? Maybe there’s a trust, or something set up and it just now kicked in?”

  “Yeah, I have no idea. I need to take the time to look into that.”

  “You should. Are we talking like a lot of money? Like a McDonald’s Happy Meal or like a nice dinner at the Olive Garden.”

  She chuckled, and Matthew found himself relaxing into the chair at the dining room table and played with the untied strings from the waist of his pajama’s pants.

  “More like if we took the whole crew out to the Olive Garden and each of us got the Tour of Italy, a couple bottles of wine, and a vat of tiramisu.”

  “Damn…that tiramisu’s expensive. Sounds like some kind of dividend. You should look into that because…I betcha you’ll owe a lot more in taxes by the end of the year. Make sure it’s not some kind of crazy mistake.”

  “Yeah, gosh. That’s a good point. Thanks for helping me there. I’ll need to hunt around for that information. I have no idea if he had a lawyer or an estate planner. I just never thought to look.”

  His voice softened. “I understand. I’m happy to help. Just, Dane…please just check in more often. I need to hear your voice. I know we’ve both decided to do what we need to do but that doesn’t mean we can’t check in with each other occasionally.”

  He heard her take a deep breath as if she was trying to justify something in her own mind. “Okay. I agree.”

  He wanted to say something more. Something like…we only get to connect with a few people in our lives. We shouldn’t throw this away. Something like that but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Especially when he flashed on his dead ex-girlfriend, Sam, standing in that damn doorway. Her tanned legs beneath her yellow shorts. Christ, he’d left her for the same exact reason he didn’t go with Dane to Seattle, and had Sam died in an accident later that night.

  Instead of saying that, he said, “Good night, Dane.”

  “Good night, Matt.”

  24

  Dane

  She’d taken the light rail again that night after escaping the hospital grounds. It didn’t matter what direction she went, just as long as it was away from there and somewhere where there was a hotel with a vacancy and a decent bed for the night. She wasn’t going back to Bainbridge Island, yet. Riding that ferry and circumventing those checkpoints again…that wasn’t worth the time it took or the anxiety it caused. Instead, she looked for local hotel vacancies and found very few. They were all pretty expensive, and that’s when she checked her bank account only to find she’d had a lot more funds than she realized. After checking a hotel app for the closest vacancy, she found a room near Lake Washington at the Hyatt. One rainy Uber ride later, Dane found herself dripping on the cerulean blue low pile carpet of her room for the night, staring at the inviting white comforter of the double bed and remembering Matthew and the soap he smelled like.

  She cleared her throat as she slung off the backpack from around her shoulder. “Now where the hell is the office in this place?” From a boxy little room with no windows, it didn’t take her long to loca
te Bill’s place of residence on the hotel computer and his route-of-least-resistance to work each day. Seattle’s horrendous reputation for commuter traffic had one side benefit. Predicting how someone went to work each day. Their routes were predictable based on the point of entry. There were very few ways to get to work and no one had yet developed either flying cars nor teleportation techniques…so slogging it out each day with the rest of humanity was the only option. In Bill’s case, and in most cases…there were no better options than a bus route. Even though she was certain he had a fancy sports car in the underground parking lot of his building, to further his career and to pay the bills…one had to get to work on time and no one driving a single vehicle alone on the streets of Seattle. It just no longer happened that way. You either took public transportation or rode a bike. And Bill wasn’t the type to muss up his hair each day for a bike ride in the morning. Then she cross-referenced the bus routes and plans formulated in her mind. Then she realized she needed to get to sleep because her day would start with an early vengeance and if she had her way…the vengeance would endure through the night. So she took care of herself. She went on a long run through the rain to shed some of the excess stress running through her veins, so she could sleep better. She took a long hot shower after that and then ordered room service, a steak salad and lingered over the thought of having a glass of wine with that but held strong and stuck with water in the end.

  Hours later, after she’d fallen asleep, her phone rang. It was Matthew. And at first, she was annoyed that he’d called after setting herself up to sleep well through the night, but then hearing his voice gave her strength. She missed him but knew having a relationship with him was likely not in the cards in the future. She had to do what she had to do. And she couldn’t risk getting him involved and likely in trouble. Because what she intended was punishable by jail time and a lot of it, if, she were caught.

  While brushing her hair that morning, Dane looked at herself in the mirror. There was only one thing that gave her pause, and though she didn’t expect it, she didn’t like what she saw in her own eyes. It wasn’t what she was about to do. It was what she’d already done. It wasn’t leaving Matt back in Montana. It was Waylon. Slipping that fob into his jacket pocket and getting him into trouble…that was her fault. He was an innocent bystander. His only crime was existing her in her path. She smacked the back of the brush down against the marble counter, and said to her reflection, “You…are a piece of shit.”

  She wanted to do something to get him out of the mess she’d made for him. The new father was most likely sitting in a jail cell at that very moment after a flurry of interrogations. And it was all her fault. When his wife and newborn daughter were at the hospital and his little ones, Charlotte and Sawyer, were hopefully with relatives, and not in the care of children’s protective services.

  What have I done?

  “What have I done?”

  Tearing her gaze from her own eyes scowling back at her, Dane tossed her belongings into her backpack with no care and then pulled out a case containing her headphones, carefully, she plugged one end into her phone and then the buds into her ears. There were loops in the ends of these and she tucked them behind her ears, within the folds of her hair. The Calling by Zack Hemsey blared as she ran her fingers gently down the woven wires and tucked the phone into her side pocket. She slung the bag over her shoulder and headed to the closest nexus that would put her in the vicinity of Bill’s route to work. She reminded herself that she was getting him…and she would end this soon. That was her mission and a guilty conscious was a costly burden. Too costly at the moment.

  25

  Matthew

  “You little bastard!” Owen yelled.

  He and Lee were working on the vehicles when suddenly the rest of the crew spilled out of the house, their boots kicking up dust in the yard. Owen had Dustin by the loose neck of his t-shirt and shoved him hard against the ground.

  Matthew looked up from under the hood of the truck. “What the hell’s going on?”

  Owen was pissed off and Matthew could tell he was resisting the well-earned urge to punch the kid in the face.

  For his part, Dustin only smiled up at him through the black-framed glasses that sat askew across his face.

  Instead of smashing his face in, Owen dropped him to the ground and his boots ate the gravel across the driveway toward Matthew.

  “He’s been sneaking our food stocks when we’re gone. There’s food missing. I asked him about it and he outright lied to my face.”

  “Wait, calm down, Owen. What do you mean? Look, he’s scrawny. The kid could use a few more pounds.”

  “Not this way. Matt, no. He’s stealing our food. I keep a count of everything that comes in the weekly boxes. He’s taking stuff out before I even get to it.”

  “What? How do you know that?”

  “Victor,” Owen said.

  “What? Who the hell’s Victor?”

  “He’s the cook over in Helena. He said they got in a couple of butternut squash, but they don’t like them, and did I want to trade them for the canned peaches we got last week? I said, not likely since we didn’t get any damn canned peaches last week and he said, the hell we didn’t because we get the same stuff as St. Regis and since they got canned peaches…we got canned peaches. So, I called Reggie at St. Regis and yep…they got five jars of canned peaches.”

  Matthew took a deep breath. This was getting a little crazy. They were fighting over peaches now. Grown men. Firefighters, hell, smokejumpers, and they were fighting over canned peaches and butternut squash.

  Matthew wiped the accumulated grease on the side of his hand over the rough denim of his jeans. “Look, Owen, first off…there’s no way in hell that butternut squash is anywhere equal canned peaches, so Helena can shove that deal. Second, let’s not lower ourselves to dusting up over food.”

  Owen began to say something, but Matthew held up a hand. “No. We’re not like the rest of the country. We’re not fighting over food. We’re better than that.”

  “Canned. Peaches,” was all Owen said next attempting to get his point across.

  And though it was stupid, Matthew began to salivate. “I get that. Now get back to work.”

  26

  Dane

  For reasons that eluded her, Dane’s palms sweated against the canvas strap of her bag. She continued to wipe the moisture off onto her jacket sleeve. This was not what she’d expected as she rode the bus to the next transfer station. One more ride and she’d make it to his stop. There was only one line of predictable trajectory for her target on his way to work and she was on it and closing the space between. That at least made things a little easier. She even felt him nearer. That thought crossed her mind many times in the past and how’d she feel about it. Normally, it bothered her in a way that made her skin crawl. Now…it was different. Things had changed. She had changed. And instead of pushing the hate and fear away…Dane coveted, held and fed off the waves enough to close that space between them, one final time. Dane stood a little taller, watched out the rain-streaked windows and like that, her hair damp against her cheek, her eyes gleamed and she smiled.

  On the final ride, the rain ceased, along with her jitters, though the grey remained. Now, she was ready. So calm. No stray thought. Only the tunes rang through until they didn’t when the bus stopped.

  He’s here.

  She stepped forward gracefully down the aisle along with the others. Removing her earphones carefully, Dane stripped the wires contain the buds out easily enough. She’d practiced many times. She dropped the buds and coiled the rest of the wire carefully around her left hand. Her hood up, she followed along the person in front of her. Later she would remember the mother, carrying a little boy who kept looking over his mother’s shoulder at her. She could only remember his dark hair and bright blue eyes, though she never looked directly at him. They turned right off the bus as she turned left.

  Dane scanned the passengers waiting for the next bus und
er the eaves of the overhang. It wouldn’t be long now. He’s here. Then she heard his voice before she saw him and pointed her head down to the ground. He was on her left and she crunched the pebbles on the asphalt in front of her. Each boot, slicing into them, impaling them into the rubber crevices, the squiggly tread made hatch marks along the damp ground. All the while, she gaged the distance around Bill and the bus stop. There were a few other commuters, each of them in their little circle mostly checking out their phones. As for Bill himself, he stood there looking out at the puddle of water in the road before him completely oblivious that he was about to die.

  Circling around the back of the bus platform, Dane glanced at him to the left, three feet or more to work with. Hood down. Perfect access.

  She made her way to his right at about twenty-five feet away and then people started to move. Shift position, step slightly forward. Even him.

  The bus. It was coming from the left.

  His phone must have buzzed then, because he reached into his pocket and stopped as the others lined up to board the approaching bus. He stopped, glanced at his phone’s screen.

  “Bill.”

  He turned. Looked at her. His eyes squinted. His head turned to the side in a soft jerk.

  She smiled. “You remember me. Don’t you? Or have you harmed so many between here and there that we all blend in?”

  Then she saw that look in his eyes. He did know. He knew exactly who she was. “Dane.” He turned around then, diverted his eyes from hers. Began to walk in line with the others headed for the bus.

  But by then, Dane closed that distance in a few quick strides. Her right hand in one loop of the wire from her modified headphones. Her left, in the other. In three quick strides, she threw a silver arc over his head. Her boot made the same squiggly watermark from her tread on the back of his rain parka. Before he could react, she’d already braced her weight into him and with one long, quick pull, the razor wire cut well enough to spill his blood in a river down his front.