Madison looked as if she might agree. She was looking tired and worn, her makeup smeared or rubbing off, her eyes tired and bloodshot. She hadn’t, as far as Zachary could tell, had any drugs since they left the apartment and, if they had gotten her addicted to something, she was feeling it.
They were probably both thinking that they had made a mistake and should have just stayed with the organization.
“Get your stuff together,” Zachary said. “We’ll be leaving in a couple of minutes.”
Everyone just looked at him. It wasn’t like any of them had any luggage to pack. They had just run; they didn’t have anything to get ready.
“Use the bathroom, splash water on your faces, whatever you need to do,” Zachary said. “We’re going to be in the car for a few hours and I don’t want to have to make rest stops.”
Noah got up. Zachary met Madison’s eyes. “You’d better keep an eye on him.”
“I can use the potty by myself,” Noah growled.
“Last time you went in there you shot up. I don’t want that happening again.”
“I used up what I had.”
“I don’t know that. I’m supposed to believe you?”
“I don’t have anything.”
Zachary looked at Madison. “Unless you want a repeat, I’d keep an eye on him.”
She looked ready to argue. Zachary turned away from her, focusing his attention back on the phone.
“You have a plan?” Jocelyn asked dryly. “That’s your brilliant plan? You’ll just start out toward Canada and then turn around for New Hampshire. And somehow, you’ll know somewhere to drop them once you get there. It will all just magically turn out.”
“I have more in mind than that. But I’m not going to tell him what it is.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway,” Jocelyn conceded. “Do you really have somewhere to take them?”
“Well… we’ll see,” Zachary said. “I have an idea, but I need to think it over while I’m driving.”
“It’s pretty late to be driving. I don’t want my baby brother falling asleep at the wheel.”
“I won’t fall asleep.”
“That’s what everyone says. Right before they fall asleep.”
Zachary hung up the phone.
41
Before using the hotel bathroom to freshen up and prepare for the drive himself, Zachary told Madison and Noah about his plan to help them to escape over the Canadian border.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Noah protested. “We don’t want to go there.”
“It will be safe. Gordo’s territory doesn’t extend that far, right?”
“For good reason! It’s freezing up there. Even worse than here. And there’s nothing to do. It’s all just igloos and dogsleds. They don’t even have the real Netflix.”
“You want to be safe or not?”
“How are you going to get us across the border?”
“I know a guy at Newport. I called him to see when he’ll be on shift, and he’ll be there if we leave now. He’ll let me across without checking everyone’s papers. For anyone following us, it will be like the two of you were ghosts. The trail will stop at the border.”
“You know a guy.”
“Yes.”
“And how are you going to deal with all of the rest of the border guards? It’s not just one person, you know. Everybody is going to see us crossing, and they’re going to know something hinky is going on.”
“Trust me. Madison trusts me, don’t you?”
Madison looked back at Zachary, just as skeptical as Noah.
“And Rhys trusts me. Right Rhys?”
Rhys blinked at Zachary, then gave a nod and pointed at him, making a pulling-the-trigger motion. You da man.
“You see?” Zachary shrugged. “It’s no problem. I know how to get things done. That’s why Rhys came to me.”
He went into the bathroom and gave them plenty of time to talk things over before returning.
“Great, everybody ready to go now?”
None of them seemed very excited. But Zachary was confident in his plan. It was going to work.
At least, he had some confidence in his plan.
It was a good plan.
It had at least some chance of working.
Zachary took a quick look around the hotel parking lot as he waited for Madison and Noah to get into the car. Rhys was quick, grabbing the shotgun seat, but Noah and Madison seemed to be moving very slowly, a lot of looks passing between them.
He had a bad feeling.
He’d been confident when he was still in the hotel room. Or at least, he’d had as much confidence as he could have in the half-baked plan, but as he stood there in the parking lot, he felt exposed and uncomfortable, sure someone was watching them.
He looked for security cameras. Shapes in parked cars. Cars that had too many antennae. But he couldn’t see anything out of place. Not consciously. That didn’t mean that his brain hadn’t picked up on something, subconsciously. Something had alerted him to the fact that he was ‘off.’
“Just get in,” he told Madison and Noah, as they discussed which side each wanted to sit on.
They both looked at him, surprised at the sharpness that had crept into his voice.
“Get in,” Zachary repeated. “I don’t like being so exposed. Something… there’s something wrong here. So get in and be quiet.”
Noah gave Madison a ‘he’s cracking up’ look, and then slid into the seat behind Zachary. Madison waited for him to move in and, when he didn’t, she went around the car and climbed in on the other side, rolling her eyes at Zachary.
They could give him as much attitude as they liked, as long as they did what he said.
As Zachary got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, there was a loud bang.
Everyone jumped. Rhys clutched his hand to his chest, gasping and laughing at himself. “Backfire.”
But Zachary knew his car, and it was not a backfire. He looked all around, but couldn’t spot any attackers.
“Get your heads down,” he warned, still scanning for danger.
He hadn’t turned the headlights on and, if it had been an old model car, he would have been able to roll out of the parking lot without lighting up, but it was a new car, and it had automatic lights. Drawing the eyes of anyone within a couple of blocks.
Zachary pulled his door shut as he put the car into drive and let it creep forward.
There was another bang and breaking glass.
Madison started to scream.
Rhys looked wildly over his shoulder into the back seat, the whites of his eyes glistening in the streetlights. He made a loud moaning noise, a panicked noise of alarm. Zachary reached over to touch him reassuringly on the leg, at the same time pressing the gas pedal to the floor. He withdrew his hand to grip the steering wheel and make a tight turn out of the parking lot, tires squealing all the way. The passengers were all thrown from side to side as he navigated quickly through the dark streets, turning this way and that, hoping to lose any pursuers in the maze.
He had a picture in his mind of the city streets. He didn’t know every street in the city, but he had a pretty good mental map. He knew where he was relative to his apartment, the highways, and other familiar landmarks. He knew which direction was north and, after hopefully losing their tail, he pointed the nose of the car in the right direction on the highway and kept the gas pressed down.
“Everyone okay?” he asked, searching the rear-view mirror for any sign of a car that was following too close behind them. There hadn’t been any headlights behind him for the last few turns, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t send cars in every direction to find him again. It was a big organization, if Noah and Jocelyn were right, and he didn’t see any reason they would lie about it.
He patted Rhy’s leg again.
“Rhys? Okay, bud?”
Rhys was still making a throbbing groan, checking anxiously behind them and looking all around for any other dan
gers.
“How about back there? You okay now, Madison?”
He spared a glance in the mirror at Madison. She was no longer screaming—that had only lasted for a moment—but she was definitely still scared. Probably regretting that she had ever let herself be talked into walking away from the organization that could either protect her or harm her. Better to do what she was told and to be protected.
“Noah?”
There was no answer from Noah. Zachary couldn’t see him. He looked at Madison again.
“Is Noah okay?”
“He’s hurt,” Madison finally managed to get out. Zachary twisted around to see Noah. He could only take his eyes off of the road for a split-second, and then he was looking out the windshield again, part of his brain driving while the other part processed the image. One quick flash, and then his mind filled in the details as if he were developing a print from a negative.
Noah was slumped to the side like he had fallen asleep with his head against the window. Like a tired toddler who couldn’t make it home. There was blood on his face. It was his window that had broken.
“Can you look at him, Madison? Turn him toward you and tell me whether it’s broken glass or…?”
Madison sobbed. He could see, out the corner of his eye, that she was trying to do as he said, awkwardly moving in the confines of the back seat to turn Noah’s body and head around so that she could get a better look at it.
“I don’t know,” she said in panic. “I can’t tell. It’s all bloody. He’s bleeding so bad!”
“Head and face wounds bleed a lot. Lots of blood vessels close to the surface. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a serious wound.”
Zachary turned his face slightly toward Rhys, keeping his expression a calm, reassuring mask.
“Rhys, can you see? Can you tell whether he’s been hit, or whether it is just the broken glass?”
There was a break in Rhys’s moaning. He started to turn his head to look, but then stopped, as if he had encountered a wall. He seemed not to be able to turn his head past a certain angle. Had he been hurt? Maybe he got whiplash with Zachary’s reckless driving. A fine thing if he ended up having to take Rhys back to Vera injured. She would never let him see the boy again.
Rhys moaned. He covered his face with his hands and hunched forward.
42
Zachary was holding back the panic.
He was usually pretty good in an emergency. His own inner thoughts and anxieties could turn him to a pile of mush, but confronting actual physical danger, his thoughts sped up and he processed everything at lightning speed.
That didn’t always translate to being able to convince his body to react quickly. He often felt like he was moving in slow motion because his body just couldn’t keep up with his revved-up brain.
Rhys was incoherent, but then Rhys was usually mute and unable to answer any questions out loud. It really wasn’t that much of a change. But Zachary knew that this was far beyond Rhys’s usual muteness.
Madison was crying and bordering on hysteria, but she seemed to be unhurt. The bullet must have come from the other side of the car, breaking the glass on Noah’s side and lodging somewhere rather than hitting Madison or exiting through her window. Not a level shot, then, but something pointed down, maybe a sniper on a building. Zachary didn’t think it could have come from a low angle. He would have seen or heard someone close to the ground.
“Madison. I need you to calm down.”
“I can’t!”
“I need you to calm down so that you can help Noah. I need to know if he’s badly hurt. I can’t stop in the middle of the highway.”
“I don’t know. I can’t tell. There’s so much blood, and it’s dark out, all I can see is black.”
Zachary had processed more than that in his one quick glance, but Madison was not a trained observer.
He remembered Dr. Boyle helping him, coaching him through his panic attack. “You need to calm down. Take a few deep breaths. Make sure that you’re pushing all of the air out.” He knew what Madison was going through. He knew how hard it was to stop when everything was falling apart in front of her eyes.
“Count your breaths. Ten seconds in. Ten seconds out. Just hold it for a moment. It will be okay, Madison.”
He was looking for an emergency turn-out. He didn’t want to stop; he wanted to keep moving so that whoever had been waiting for them in the parking lot or on top of one of the nearby buildings could not catch up with them. But he had a wounded child in the car. Maybe more than one. It would be irresponsible to keep going without evaluating them.
He found a place where the shoulder was wide enough to pull over and slowed the car, signaling, sliding over until they were rolling to a stop. He put the car into park and opened his door.
He had to be careful, because there was a lot of traffic zooming by, and there really wasn’t a proper turn-out. Open his door or step out incautiously, and a passing vehicle might take him out. He watched the traffic and started to slide out of the car, looking back at Noah.
There was another crack like lightning striking, and Zachary jumped backward in alarm. He tried to spot the source. Where was the shooter?
“Call 9-1-1,” he told Rhys.
But Rhys didn’t move. Zachary strained back and forth, trying to see the shooter in the traffic behind them.
A car slowed as it approached them. Because it was the shooter, or just because someone was being cautious and didn’t want to accidentally hit Zachary’s car or an opening door?
The other phones were all with Zachary. He had hung on to them to make sure that Madison and Noah would not be able to call to warn anyone where they were going until he was ready for them to. Sooner or later, he would need to give Noah the opportunity to reach someone in the syndicate, to tell them that Zachary was headed for the border. But he hadn’t expected a shooter to attack them right as they were leaving the hotel. He had thought that they would have plenty of time and not have to worry about a physical attack until they were much closer to the northern border.
Zachary shifted into drive and screeched into the driving lane without even shutting his door. The movement of the car slammed it shut.
Madison was shrieking and sobbing, all semblance of calm, reasonable thinking gone.
“Rhys. Your phone. Get it out.”
Rhys kept his hands over his face and didn’t move.
Zachary hit the car’s Bluetooth button, but didn’t get the answering tone that said it was listening to him. He pressed it again. He held it in, willing it to connect to his phone, but it didn’t.
The other phones were in Zachary’s pockets. He would have to drive, trying to avoid the pursuer, and get out one of the phones and place an emergency call, all at the same time. Maybe another driver who saw him driving recklessly or heard the gunfire would call it in. Maybe Zachary would be surrounded by police cars in a couple more minutes.
But he was not so lucky.
Zachary pulled one phone out and looked at it. Madison’s. Using Noah as her unlock code. Not very secure. And Noah had sent Zachary a message from her phone, not his own, so he knew the password. He had probably given her the phone in the first place.
Both phones had probably come from the same source. The trafficking syndicate. So that they could reach their workers at any time, night or day.
Zachary swore. Even if Noah and Madison didn’t answer any incoming calls or messages, the organization could still track their positions.
He transferred Madison’s phone to his right hand, which was also holding the steering wheel steady, so that he could find the button to roll down the window with his other.
Tracking the phones. He should have thought about it earlier.
He had picked out a hotel where the traffickers didn’t have anyone installed, but they didn’t need anyone at the hotel to tell them where Zachary and his young charges had gone. All they needed to do was to follow the phone signals.
He should have thought abo
ut it. He knew better. He’d tracked phones and he’d had to outsmart others who were tracking them.
The technology was not new. It wasn’t hard. It could be used by mothers to check on the location of their children, or professionals to track down their phones if they were lost or stolen. Certainly, a big organization like Gordo’s trafficking ring would have plenty of resources for tracking employee cell phones on the fly.
With the window down, Zachary transferred Madison’s phone back to his left hand, then tossed it out the window.
There were screeching tires behind him. Maybe he’d manage to hit the pursuing car with the cell phone. Two for the price of one. He looked into his rear-view mirror at the black van. Nice and anonymous. Invisible.
He knew what he was looking for this time. The next time, he wouldn’t. That meant he had to lose his tail and not be caught again.
He worked another phone out of his pockets. This one was his, so he dropped it into the center console. He felt for the last phone. It took a while to locate which pocket he had shoved it into. He was always temporarily losing his phones. Kenzie told him if he always put it in the same pocket, he would always know where it was.
But she lost things in her purse, so who was she to tell him how not to lose his phone?
He transferred Noah’s phone to his left hand and chucked it out the open window too. Then he rolled the window up.
“Now they can’t track us,” he told the others. “Watch out the back. Tell me if anyone else is following. I’m going to do my best to lose them.”
Rhys was still holding his hands over his face. Madison turned her head to look out the rear window, but she was still crying and trying to tend to Noah, and Zachary didn’t know if she would be any help.
He needed to lose the tail and keep them from picking him up again, and he wasn’t going to have any help from the teens. He put on blinders, hyperfocusing on driving and escaping anyone following him.
She Told a Lie Page 21