by Patrick Lee
Beneath all the sensations lay something else, harder to name but more powerful. Some mix of hormones and oxygen-rich blood and uncluttered emotion. The simple, wild energy of being a child. It made him want to swing from the trees. If there’d been a drug to make a grownup feel this way, it would’ve put to shame all the shit his parents were probably already selling in 1978.
He looked through his doorway into the room across the hall, and saw his brother Jeff asleep in the blue-white glow of his Captain Kirk night-light. Jeff was seven and already a certified Trekkie. Travis resisted the urge to wake him and tell him the movie version was coming out next year.
Further away was the sound of the TV in the living room, cranked down almost to silence for a commercial break. His father had done that all his life, even before he had a remote control. Now the floor creaked and the volume rose. Trumpets swelled and cut out, and then Johnny Carson was talking.
Travis killed the light, rolled onto his back, and lay waiting.
His father went to bed at 1:07.
Started snoring at 1:12.
Travis waited five more minutes, then got up and dressed.
He’d expected walking to feel strange in this body, but it was fine—the same unconscious act it’d always been.
He took his dad’s keys from their hook in the kitchen, pocketing them so they wouldn’t jingle. He opened the silverware drawer, slid aside the compartmentalized tray and found the envelope that’d lain beneath it all through his childhood. Inside was a quarter-inch stack of tens and twenties. He took them all, then returned to his bedroom and eased the window screen from its frame.
The car was a 1971 Impala, shit brown and already rusting around the wheel wells. Travis had actually driven it lots of times—as late as 1984 it’d been pretty reliable. It was parked on the street; there was no garage. He slipped in and racked the seat forward and got his foot on the gas without a problem.
He hit Kmart and bought everything he needed. Bread, chips, cookies, crackers, peanut butter, a twelve-pack of Pepsi. It all looked absurd in its ancient packaging. He got a coil of clear plastic tubing from the hardware department, and a five-gallon drum with a pouring spout. The last two things he bought were a wire coat hanger and a slotted-head screwdriver.
The checkout girl gave him a look when he walked up alone.
He nodded toward the parking lot. “Mom’s feet are killing her.”
The girl shrugged and started keying the prices by hand.
He found what he wanted in the fourth nightclub parking lot he searched: a Chevelle, maybe five years old, lime green with a white racing stripe down the middle.
And heavily tinted windows—including the windshield.
It took thirty seconds to defeat the door lock with the coat hanger, and another thirty with the screwdriver to break open the ignition and hotwire it. Ten minutes later he was heading east on I–94, the needle dead on 55 and the night air rushing in through the windows.
Chapter Fifteen
The Grand Canyon, cutting off the whole width of the street, just like Bethany had said. The hole was three stories deep and stretched from one foundation wall to the other: the hospital on the south side, a seamless row of academic and research buildings on the north. There were sectional concrete barriers along each side of the chasm, plastered with orange warning signs for those who didn’t grasp the concept of gravity.
Traffic on Monument had been blocked at the cross streets—Broadway to the west and Wolfe to the east. There was a sporadic stream of pedestrians going in and out of the hospital and the academic buildings, but otherwise the street was bare.
Which was going to make it hard to stand around without drawing attention, especially for a ten-year-old. Especially as the night drew on.
It was six o’clock Sunday evening. The air was chilly and the long sunlight filtered through trees on the sidewalk. Travis was sitting on a bench near Monument and Broadway, far west of the construction zone. He could see the hospital’s nearer two exits, but not the other pair. He’d have to be two hundred feet closer to the gap for that, and standing—there were no benches farther along than this one.
As it was he’d already begun drawing looks, just sitting with a comic book in his lap, though he’d only been here for ten minutes.
Drawing looks had been the story of his weekend. Within the first hour of daylight on Saturday he’d realized the Chevelle’s tinted windows weren’t giving him perfect cover. For one thing, they naturally drew the focus of passengers in other cars. People saw tinting and instinctively wanted to see past it. And in glaring sunlight, maybe they could. They were seeing something, it seemed, if only his silhouette. Whatever the case, in the span of ten minutes two different cars going by in the passing lane had braked and run parallel to him for over a mile, then dropped back and veered hard for the first available exit, each no doubt bound for a pay phone to dial 911. Travis responded by ditching the freeway and taking to the back roads, crawling east on county two-lanes from Chicago to Cleveland before deciding he’d had enough. He hit another Kmart, bought a blanket to conceal himself in the backseat, and slept until nightfall.
Everything was easier in the dark. Even siphoning gas. All you needed was a big parking lot with a few cars clustered out near the edge. Duck out of sight among them, and the rest was simple.
He’d rolled into Baltimore this morning, half an hour past dawn, left the car at a meter three blocks west of the hospital—the closest space he could find—and set out on foot.
For much of the day he’d avoided attention easily enough. The trick was to move with purpose. If he stood still anywhere for even a minute, people stared. They saw him, looked around for a nearby parent, and failing to spot one approached him to ask if he was lost. But moving around had been easy, early on. Upon arriving he headed for Monument Street and checked out the dig site, then went into the hospital by the entry just west of the excavation. Though Bethany’s schematics had suggested otherwise, he’d held on to some hope that the building itself might provide a shortcut. A way to dart in on one side of the canyon and back out on the other, on the precise half chance that Ward would emerge where Travis didn’t want him to.
He saw right away that it was no good. All the north entrances opened at the ends of long, separate wings running up from central areas of the complex, and though there was a main east-west corridor tying them together deep inside the old building, the whole idea of cutting through this place in pursuit of Ward felt risky. It was understandable that Ward himself, shuffling along in street clothes, could make it past the staff without being stopped. A ten-year-old sprinting hell-bent through the corridors would be a different story.
For good measure Travis went up to the coma unit, on the fourth floor and dead centered in the hospital’s footprint. It was easy to see how Ward would get away unseen by the nurses: the nearest station was down the hall and around a corner from his room, and in the opposite direction was a bank of elevators. Travis spotted Ward’s room easily; it was the one with two guys in crew cuts and black suits flanking the door.
He walked by and tried to look casual while stealing a glance inside. Ward was right there, occupying the room’s only bed. His head was shaved smooth as Travis had expected, given the likelihood of EEG testing.
Nora was seated beside him. A beautiful woman with haunted features. She’d look worse by this time tomorrow, and stay that way for at least the next three months. Probably a lot longer.
The last thing Travis’s eyes picked out was the notebook. It lay on the deep windowsill behind Nora’s chair, a pen stuck into its spiral binding. Its black card-stock cover was already worn by weeks of use, and the word Scalar was just visible at the lower right corner. Travis had all of half a second to stare at it, and then he was past the door frame and moving on.
Now, some twelve hours later, he sat on the bench on the west end of Monument, trying to avoid the increasingly frequent stares. He turned a page of the comic book, for appearances. Star W
ars #10: The Behemoth from Below. On the cover, Han and Chewie were blasting away at a giant green lizard. Travis wondered what a mint copy would be worth thirty-four years from now. Probably about five bucks. Not that he could bring it back with him anyway.
Neither could he bring back Ward’s notebook if he got his hands on it. The plan was simply to hole up somewhere and read the damn thing a hundred times. Read it until he could shut his eyes and recite it word for word. Then he’d snap out of the memory and transcribe the whole thing. Paige had already set up a laptop on the dining room table, the cursor ready and blinking in Microsoft Word.
Travis looked up at the hospital again. He watched people come and go from the two exits he could see.
The lack of a shortcut was trouble, but not disaster.
The lack of a stakeout position was.
It was the one problem he and Paige and Bethany hadn’t been able to plan around. No way to know exactly what he’d find on the north side of Monument Street, in terms of hiding places. In his most optimistic scenario there’d been a Dumpster sticking out of an alley, full to the brim with trash he could hide in and stare out through. No luck there—no Dumpsters or alleys along the north side of the street. Nothing but the unbroken row of buildings.
Travis had seen all of that this morning, then spent the day wandering the city trying to think his way through the problem. As an adult he could’ve solved it any number of ways. Buy a cheap harmonica and a little wooden box and stand there on the sidewalk busking. Wouldn’t matter that he sucked at playing harmonica—it would help push attention away from him, in fact. People would consciously not look.
But even the busking would’ve been unnecessary. A grown man could just walk up and down Monument, from the dig site to either intersection, back and forth all night long. Hours and hours, the same circuit, four hundred feet east and four hundred feet west. If anyone noticed the repetition and found it strange, would they even consider asking him about it? Not likely. People tended to see strangeness as trouble, which in turn they tended to avoid.
But none of those options existed for a ten-year-old.
Shit.
He turned another page of the comic book. Let his eyes drift over the images and words without processing them.
A shadow fell across his lap.
“Excuse me.”
Travis looked up and saw a woman in her thirties, a five-year-old girl in tow. The girl stared at Travis with big eyes and tried to hide behind her mother’s leg.
“Do you need help?” the woman said.
Travis offered a quick smile and shook his head. “I’m good. Thanks.”
Another trick—when you weren’t moving with purpose—was to be direct and certain. Let no ambiguity into your words or your tone.
He turned his eyes back to the comic book and ignored the woman.
The shadow stayed put.
“You’ve been alone here the whole time I’ve been waiting for the bus,” the woman said. “If you need to call someone, I have change. And we can wait here with you if you like—”
“Really, I’m fine,” Travis said, looking up at her again. “My dad always meets me here at six-fifteen sharp. He says it’s a safe spot ’cause it’s busy. I’m just early, that’s all.”
The woman frowned. Looked like she wanted to wait anyway, if only to have a word with his father about this arrangement.
“Seriously,” Travis said, “don’t miss your bus. I’d feel terrible.”
Another frown. The woman started to say something else, but didn’t. The little girl tugged on her hand, gesturing with her whole body back toward Broadway.
The woman exhaled deeply. “I don’t like it,” she said, and then she was gone, back to the knot of people at the intersection.
Her bus came two minutes later, and when it’d left, Travis stood and stuffed the comic book into his pocket. He stood there thinking, getting the mental equivalent of a test pattern. It could be nine hours before Ward staggered out of the hospital, and Travis couldn’t imagine how to stand watch for even thirty minutes.
He wandered toward the construction zone. The crew was still at it. From beyond the waist-high barrier and far below came the shouting of men and the rattle of air-driven tools. There was a stereo blasting Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights.” The glow of halogen worklamps shone upward onto the inside face of the far barrier, just beginning to compete with the dying sunlight.
Absent a Dumpster, the closest Travis had come to a plan had been a vague thought of hiding within the site itself. Slip over the barrier and stand on the edge of the chasm, and hope to find some kind of material scraps with which to conceal himself. Three or four wooden planks might’ve done—stand against a foundation wall on the north side of the street and lean the wood around himself in a jumble. In darkness it would’ve been hard for anyone to see him among the boards, and maybe he could’ve arranged them to create viewing angles on all four exits.
But there were no scraps of wood or anything else, and with the workers still on the job it was a moot point.
Travis stopped fifty feet shy of the concrete blockade. “Hollywood Nights” finished and “Still the Same” kicked in.
Travis ran his hands through his hair. How much longer could he loiter out here before somebody waved down a cop?
That thought had hardly formed when another shadow slid into view, paralleling his own as it stretched away down the pavement. Footsteps scuffed to a stop behind him, and a man softly cleared his throat.
Travis turned, half expecting a cop already.
Instead it was a guy in a dress shirt and khakis, fortyish and visibly awkward.
“Hey there,” the man said. The voice was gentle. He might have been addressing a stray kitten. Behind him there was nothing but wide-open street all the way back to the intersection. This guy had come a long way to say hello.
When Travis didn’t answer, the man stepped closer. Ten feet away now. “You look a bit lost. I couldn’t help noticing. I live right back there.” He nodded absently behind him, toward the block immediately beyond Broadway.
Travis shook his head and looked down at the roadbed, suddenly unable to stand the guy’s nervous expression.
“Just waiting for my dad,” Travis said. “I’m fine.”
The man advanced again. “You don’t look like you’re waiting. I saw you on the bench, and now you’re standing around down here. How would your dad find you if you’re all over the place?”
The voice was still soft, but under the awkwardness there was an edge of excitement.
“You need a place to sleep tonight?”
Jesus Christ. So there were two problems he and Paige and Bethany hadn’t planned around. He pictured them laughing their asses off when he told them about this one.
Another step. The man was close enough to touch him now, and when he spoke again he was almost whispering. “Nothing has to happen. Nothing you don’t want. I promise.”
Travis was still looking down. He fixed his eyes in the deadest glare prison had taught him, and raised them.
The man stepped back as if shoved.
“You better get the fuck out of here,” Travis said.
The guy nodded quickly and didn’t say another word. A second later he was gone, walking away down Monument at just less than a jog. He’d gone thirty yards when a fragment of his pick-up spiel came back to Travis.
I couldn’t help noticing. I live right back there.
Travis looked past the intersection of Monument and Broadway. The next stretch of Monument, west of Johns Hopkins, had a parking garage filling most of the south side and a row of town houses on the north. No doubt most of them had been converted to multiple units.
Any one of which would offer a perfect viewing angle on all four of the hospital’s north exits.
“Mister!” Travis yelled.
Chapter Sixteen
He introduced himself as Garret and led Travis up to his place on the third floor, four units west of Broadway. Gar
ret’s every move was nervous and excited. He had a high, quick laugh with which he interrupted himself in almost every sentence.
He opened the door to his apartment and ushered Travis directly into the living room. The air smelled like a mix of candlewax and macaroni. Travis hardly noticed. His full attention had gone at once to the bay window overlooking Monument. Through the 45-degree pane on the left, facing Johns Hopkins, he would have a better vantage point than he could’ve dreamed of.
There would be a delay issue, of course. He’d be fifteen seconds getting down to the sidewalk from this place, and another ten or more sprinting to the intersection. But that was fine. He’d have plenty of time to catch Ward if he emerged from one of the nearer two exits, and if he came out beyond the Grand Canyon, well, that was always going to be a pain in the ass. Even starting at a Dumpster right across from the hospital, Travis would’ve been forced to backtrack a couple hundred feet before heading north on Broadway to circle the block. Garret’s bay window was as good a starting point as he could’ve hoped for.
Travis took in the living room’s details. The coffee table was littered with magazines and beer cans and used paper plates and three heavy ceramic mugs. Travis crossed to the room’s midpoint and came to a stop with his shin at the coffee table’s edge. He heard Garret stop a foot behind him. Felt him standing there, holding his breath.
Travis turned around and looked up into his eyes. Garret returned the stare, then glanced at the top of his head. Travis knew his hair was matted from sleeping in the car yesterday—he hadn’t been able to fix it since then.
“You can take a shower if you like,” Garret said. “Or I’ve got bubble-bath soap, if that’s better. It’s an oversized tub, if … you know …”
He left the sentence unfinished.
Travis didn’t respond. He waited until Garret was looking him in the eyes again, and then darted his own gaze just past the man’s shoulder and flinched hard.