“Well,” he finally says, “you’re the reason my brother decided to break radio silence after a year, so I guess that’s good for me, right?”
“Yeah, that’s gotta sting a little.”
“More than a little, but I appreciate your understanding.”
“Sure. So which way are you gonna go?”
“The 101.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she says.
“Really?”
“Can you take Bennett Road around the fort? That should get us there, right?”
“And it’ll add about forty-five minutes to the trip.”
“The library’s open till five, right?”
As he slows and shifts lanes to avoid leaving the valley, he gives her a long, stony look. Scans her from head to toe, it seems. Only then does she remember she’s got the URL for the chat room where they’re supposed to meet Bailey written on a Post-it note in her pocket, and unless Luke memorized the thing when she wrote it down, the note’s the only connection he has to his brother. She didn’t set it up that way, but it’s how things are. For now.
A few minutes later, they’re heading south on Bennett Road, past horse farms and spreading oaks and golden fields.
“You couldn’t have traveled back-road and surface streets the whole way here,” he says.
“Says who? You don’t know where I was coming from. But, you know, nice try trying to get me to tell you.”
His tongue makes a lump under his upper lip, and it’s clear he’s trying not to smile.
“You really afraid of freeways right now?” he asks after a brief silence.
“I’m limiting my use. Not the same thing. You know, it’s like the option on the GPS. Avoid freeway usage, or whatever.”
“I’ve heard of it. But most people don’t use it to run from the cops.”
“I’m not, either.” I think.
“Good thing, ’cause you’re riding with one.”
“Yeah, and he didn’t stop to ask me what kind of trouble I was in before he got in the car with me,” she says.
“I did, though.”
“Did not.”
“Did. I asked what kind, and you said big,” he says.
“And that was good enough for you?” she asks.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
She looks at him until he feels the force of her stare and glances in her direction.
“What?” he asks.
“Are you just gonna keep asking me random, rhetorical questions until I give you the information you want?”
“They’re not random. And only one was rhetorical.”
“The last one.”
“Right. The last one.”
She looks out the window, amazed suddenly to be back in this familiar valley. It’s like the past couple of days have blown the newer layers of sand and grit from her life, leaving only the rocky fundamentals underneath. Or some crazy rearrangement of them.
Her grandmother’s on-again, off-again boyfriend is now her temperamental bodyguard. Her former bully blushes in her presence when she teases him. While chauffeuring her places.
Maybe this is what growing up feels like for people whose lives aren’t marred by serial killers and stalkers. Things shift underfoot only slightly. Some people remain but change roles.
And maybe this is exactly what Dylan wanted, she thinks. For me to go home again, back to Altamira. Why?
“Charley?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to tell me who’s after you, but tell me this.”
He waits until she turns her attention to him.
“Is it who you’re going to ask my brother to find?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
Luke nods. If he’s about to say anything else, it’s cut off by the chirping sound that suddenly fills the Jeep.
Jason’s phone is ringing.
“Pull over,” she says.
23
“Charlotte?”
She walks slowly toward the shade offered by the nearest oak tree. Her heart’s pounding from the sound of Dylan’s voice. It’s filled her with all the feelings his drug relieved her of the night before, and the night before that. Made her feel weak, flushed, and powerless.
Will a simple conversation with Dylan be enough to set her recent dose of Zypraxon, almost an hour old by now, loose in her system?
As if any conversation between her and Dylan will ever be simple again.
They never were.
Once inside the tree’s umbrella of shade, she turns. Sees Luke standing in front of his Jeep. Steadily he looks back and forth in both directions along the empty two-lane blacktop, his hand resting against his gun hip protectively. Protecting her, it seems. That’s a comfort, at least.
“Charlotte?” Dylan says.
“I’m here.”
“Looks like you’re building some sort of team. Are you sure you can trust them?”
She scans the empty fields, the mountains on either side of the valley. They’re in the middle of someone’s definition of nowhere, but he can see her.
“Trust is important,” she manages.
“In certain situations, yes.”
“But not in ours?”
“I’m here for you, Charley. I’ve always been here for you.”
“Always?”
“From the beginning of our relationship, I mean.”
“You call this a relationship?” she asks.
“Of course it is. Not all relationships are sexual.”
“I’m asking about your relationship to the concept of trust,” she says.
“Ah, I see.”
“Do you? Do you see me right now? Is that how you know I’m not alone?”
“I thought Altamira would be your last choice, to be frank. But I guess it makes sense. So what did it come down to? The choice between San Francisco or your old hometown, or the choice between Kayla and Marty?”
This is a safe guess based on what he knows about her, the fact that she’d call Kayla or Marty for help. Maybe she’s overreacting.
“So where are you headed now? An overnight in Cambria? Maybe a nice little bed-and-breakfast close to the beach with your handsome new friend? You might want to give him permission to relieve himself. He’s looking a little shifty, if you get my drift.”
Sure enough, Luke is pacing slowly on the road side of the Jeep. He must be wondering what the hell he’s gotten himself into. But from a distance he probably looks exactly like someone who needs to pee.
Jesus Christ . . .
The wind knocked out of her, she looks to the sky, to the fibrous strands of clouds threaded across the dome of blue. She’s thinking of satellites and drones and all the other so-called technological marvels shrinking the world down to a screen. Somehow Dylan has access to such tools.
But then she realizes what he doesn’t seem to know. Like the fact that she and Luke are headed for a library in Paso Robles. Or what they talked about with Bailey before they left. Or who Luke even is. Or maybe he does and he’s holding it back to see how much she’ll tell him. Or worse, he’ll learn those things in time now that he’s caught up to her.
“Trust is one of those words that’s lost its meaning—don’t you think?” he says. “It used to mean the ability to keep a secret when someone asked you to. Now it’s an unreasonable request we make of people we’re trying to control, a demand that they buy into our illusions of who we are. That they never question our fantasies. That they never introduce anything into our world that upsets us, changes us. Educates us.”
“You’re a sociopath.”
“Maybe. But I get a lot done.”
“Who are you?”
“You can tell Kayla to stop digging in to my past. She won’t find much. Not the juicy stuff anyway. And as I’m sure you know, the best cover stories are as close to the truth as you can make them. I only told you one real lie, Charley. My last name. The rest? Well, they were sins of omission mostly. And let’s just say none of the w
ork I did on behalf of Uncle Sam is sitting on a server waiting for a diligent lawyer to find it.”
“Is that who helped you track me to the middle of an empty field? The military?”
His laughter is gentle. “Oh, no. I’ve traded up from the military. Way up.”
“But you’re still afraid to confront me face-to-face. And so are they, apparently, whoever the hell they are. What with my ability to break their arms and all.”
“I see. So you’ve taken it again, have you? Is that what you did last night? Break some arms? Did they deserve it at least?”
“Wouldn’t you know if I had?”
Silence. She just scored a point without meaning to.
He doesn’t know. So whatever the net of surveillance he’s thrown around her, and Kayla and Luke and Marty, it’s got gaps. Limits. Or maybe there was a delay. Maybe he didn’t pick her up until she reached Altamira.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Dylan says.
“I’ve given you more of my thoughts than you had any right to.”
“We’re not out to hurt you, Charley. Not me. Not the people I’m working with.”
“Safe to say you and I have very different definitions of the word hurt. And maybe every other word in the dictionary.”
“Perhaps, but you’re too valuable to us now. Jason Briffel, on the other hand, he was out to hurt you, and I took care of him. As promised.”
“I never made you promise to kill him. I never even wanted to lay eyes on him again.”
“I know,” he says quietly, “but I killed him anyway. Don’t worry. I didn’t leave a mess. Nice work on his shoulder, by the way.”
And there it is, she thinks, the breath going out of her as if she’s being gradually squeezed by a giant hand. She figured he’d kept his word, but she’d done everything she could not to linger on the possible details of how.
Shouldn’t she be flooded with relief to hear that Jason’s corpse isn’t still lying on her kitchen floor? Well, she isn’t. If anything, this seems to have joined her fate to Dylan’s.
“And now you’ve replaced him,” she says.
“That’s nonsense. You’re still in shock.”
“He said my house was a prison, and he was going to set me free. He thought I was valuable, too.”
“Interesting. I wouldn’t have called it a prison. I’d say it was a cocoon, and you were ready to hatch. Where Jason and I disagreed was on what you should become once you were hatched, and whether or not he should live to see it.”
“So has Abigail Banning handpicked you to fill his shoes?” she asks.
She assumes his long silence means he’s simply lost patience for their back-and-forth, but when he speaks again, his voice sounds reedy, weak, as if, for the first time, she’s managed to knock the wind out of him, and not the other way around. “You are better than this,” he growls.
“Better than what? You?”
“Better than these . . . base insults. I am not . . .” His attempt to clear his throat actually forces him to cough. “I am not a serial killer,” he finally whispers.
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Tell me who you really are.”
“I’m a scientist and a soldier, and perhaps a bit of a crusader. A revolutionary, even. And, yes, you are my test subject, and, yes, I have very high hopes for you.”
He’s off balance and his tongue’s gone loose. Was it comparing him to a serial killer that did it? Or just the Bannings? He seems to have no real compunction about murder, and Abigail Banning is about as far from being a Harvard graduate as you can get. Maybe the real Dylan Whoever is a classist asshole above all else, and she’s just discovered his sore point.
“So you’re a scientist who just happens to have an army of drones or spy satellites or hackers at his disposal, or are you working with someone who does? Are they scientists, too?”
“They’re one of the wealthiest corporations on the planet. When they put their eyes on you, they cannot be outrun. So don’t even try.”
“And why does this powerful company have its eye on me, Dylan?”
“Would you like to know my final diagnosis of your situation, Charley?”
“I’d like to know what you’ve signed me up for. Again. Without my knowledge.”
“You were waiting. That’s what you were doing in that house, with a gun in every room. You were waiting for someone to come after you. That house wasn’t a fortress. It was a trap. For them. For whoever came first. That’s what was truly plaguing you out there in the desert. Not terror. Not dread. Not nightmares of your past. But your desire for revenge.”
Maybe, she thinks. Maybe she went down to that arroyo every evening not just to fine-tune her defensive skills but to practice for an eventual, gratifying kill. People spend their whole lives, their whole professional careers, trying to put a thumbtack through the precise moment fear turns into aggression. No way in hell can she let Dylan distract her with such a vain pursuit now.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night, dude.”
He laughs.
“Why did you call me, Dylan?”
“Because it’s time for you to get to work. Enough with the hometown reunion. I didn’t give you those pills to watch you dawdle in Altamira, trying to make an army out of your uncle Marty’s former drunks. And . . .” She hears papers shuffling, the creak of a desk chair. He’s either been handed something or is reading something. “Really?” he says. “Luke Prescott? The asshole from high school? I thought you hated him. He’s grown up to be quite a looker; I’ll say that much.”
Why does this get to her worse than all the other things he’s said? This suggestion that his surveillance of her, of them, is being updated and expanded even as they speak. Are they all being watched 24-7 now? Kayla, Marty, Luke, and maybe his brother, too, if they continue their road trip south. What good will come of having Bailey look into Dylan when the guy seems to be five steps ahead of them and armed with the same tools as the NSA? That could only get Bailey and Luke in more trouble than they already are.
Focus, she tells herself. Focus and remember who you’re dealing with—a liar and a murderer.
“What do you mean,” she finally says, “get to work? What is work?”
“The world is full of bad men, Charlotte. Go find some. Show them what you can do.”
“Show you what I can do,” she says. “You and whoever you’re working for.”
“With. Working with. Try not to kill anyone. Although if you do, don’t worry. We’ll clean it up. Just make sure they’re worth killing.”
“I’ve only got three pills left.” She says these words without thinking, and he laughs gently. Laughs, she figures, because he thinks he hears a craving for more Zypraxon in her voice. Really she’s just trying to throw up a last-minute hurdle, grasping for any complication she could find. Or maybe not. Maybe it is a craving.
Or maybe Dylan’s in my head and I need him to get the fuck out right now.
“I’ll fix that soon enough,” he says. “And I’ll be in touch when we need you to come in.”
“Come in where?”
“You’ll see.”
“Yeah, well, maybe when you come for me in person, I’ll have a surprise for you.”
“Charley, the company I’m working with had over twenty-five billion dollars in revenue last year alone. They employ private security contractors who have removed dictators from power. I’m watching an image of you right now that’s giving me heat signatures of every living thing in the field you’re standing in. There’s a small animal twenty feet away from you, probably a gopher, and some deer nosing through the woods at the base of the mountains to the west. And your new friend Luke is still bouncing on his heels. Trust me—from here on out, there is nothing you can do to surprise me. Happy hunting.”
Silence.
Just silence. Just the wind rustling the tall grass around her.
Just rage.
She tries to crush the phone in one hand.
<
br /> It doesn’t work.
So just wanting to pound Dylan into the dirt isn’t enough to turn me into the Incredible Hulk, she thinks. Bummer.
24
When Luke sees her approaching, he goes still. She figures his tight, uncomfortable-looking smile is meant to mask his concern.
“Do you need to go to the bathroom?” she asks.
“Um . . . no, not really. Why?”
“Can you get behind the wheel?”
“What?” he asks.
“Just get behind the wheel.”
“OK. But are you . . .”
When she walks to the back of the Jeep, he throws up his hands and gives in to her command.
She places Jason’s disposable phone behind the passenger-side tire.
“Start the engine!” she calls to him.
“Are you getting in?” he asks through the open window.
“In a minute. Just start the engine.”
“And then what?”
“Back up a few feet.”
He does. At first it looks like the phone’s going to get spit out from under the advancing tire, but then the tire catches just enough of its bottom section to crush it with a loud crunch.
“Again!” she says.
Luke rolls the Jeep forward a few feet, then repeats the action. There’s a series of soft pops as the interior of the phone gives way. When Luke pulls forward again, the tire leaves behind a spray of broken pieces that are close to being unrecognizable. She kicks them into the dirt beside the road with one foot.
Then, before she can think twice about it, she raises both hands and gives a double middle-finger salute to the empty field, the tree she stood under, and the sky overhead. She spins in place, hands up, birds out, until she finds herself standing next to the Jeep’s passenger-side door. Luke stares at her.
“So I guess the call didn’t go well?” he asks.
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