“This isn’t my home anymore,” I said, tasting a stream of hot salty tears mixing with the words. “Home doesn’t exist for me anymore, and it sure as hell doesn’t exist for Heather Gilmore.” There was that name again, never far, always chasing me, even on deserted streets.
Chapter Fifteen: The Rails
THE DRIVE BACK to the city was mostly a blur. I got off the exit for Manhattan just as the thick of the storm seemed to have passed. Even though the clouds were slowly opening up to reveal a new sapphire sky, stubborn herds of clouds still dropped wild rain that pounded the streets. The roads leading back to the Hilton were saturated to curb level from having taken in the buckets of rain dumped by the storm. The impatient driver on my tail had me going faster than I liked. I took a deep breath and let my muscles untwist as my fingers fiddled with the dial on the radio.
I heard a loud thunk and the car shook in such a way that I felt taken out of time. Once my wits had restored, I realized the car had struck the curb and taken out a city mailbox. I pressed on the gas, but the car only grunted. I got out of the car and saw that the front headlight was gouged out, and a metal pipe, which looked to be of importance, was hanging from the car’s undercarriage. The front of the vehicle was a crushed bumper of smoking tin and there was no way it was going to start up.
I walked a city block in the pounding rain until I hit a subway station to crawl into. I decided that I wasn’t going to call Rabbit. I would get back to the Hilton on my own. As I disappeared down into the subway, I noted sloppy graffiti bleeding down the walls, with the words, Never Trust Anyone Over the Age of Zero. I skimmed the train schedule, bought a ticket, and hopped aboard a train that would take me back towards the hotel. I eased into my seat and thought that I blended in well. As far as the big apple was concerned, I was just another punkish twenty-something with a wild streak and a streak of blue in my hair. There were thousands like me all over New York. I checked the time on my phone and estimated that I had probably fifteen minutes to kill until my stop, so I pulled out my phone and dialed the number of the hospital in Paris. The receptionist picked up and I asked her to page Ben.
He came on the phone a moment later. “Are you back in Paris, Alice?”
“No, I’m still in New York. Riding on the subway, actually, but I should be home later tonight, and I was thinking of us sharing a late dinner date.” The train made its next stop and the doors slid open, heralding a deluge of travelers, and when I glanced up I spotted Shoulder Pads from Cibix among them. Damn it.
“A late dinner?” Ben asked. “Mmm I like that idea.”
“I’m glad you like the idea,” I responded distractedly, as I sprang out of my seat to avoid Shoulder Pads.
“Hey! Hey you!” I heard her voice in my ear. She was waving me down. The train doors snapped closed in front of my nose. There was no escaping her now. I reluctantly turned around and did a courtesy wave at her.
Ben was still replying to my question. “Of course I like the idea, why wouldn’t I? I have really been looking forward to spending time with you.”
There was a packed train car full of people between us, but Shoulder Pads was adamant about shouting conversation at me. “How come you left so early? Did you quit on your first day? Did HR complain about your hair?”
I jabbed the phone pressed to my ear, indicating I was already in a conversation, but Shoulder Pads didn’t get it, she just kept blabbing. “Ben, can you hold a second?”
“Sure, Alice,” replied Ben.
I cupped my hand over the phone so I could shout my reply at Shoulder Pads. “I quit today. I got another job offer. Better pay, shorter commute. And they didn’t care about my hair.” Once the shuffling from the new passengers was done, I noticed that there was a man in a wrinkle-worn suit who appeared to be Shoulder Pads’ traveling companion.
“Jeff,” Shoulder Pads shouted at the man, even though she was standing right beside him, “this is the girl with the blue hair I was telling you about.” She turned her eyes back to me. “This is Jeff. Jeff would have been your manager if you stayed in the department a little longer.”
One of Jeff’s eyebrows pulled up in suspicion. “There are no new people in our department,” he said.
“She’s not really new,” replied Shoulder Pads. “She’s from the Parisian office. She just showed up today. Then she took off right after the mysterious fire drill.”
“Parisian office?” Jeff stammered. Jeff, of course, in all his middle-management glory, knew there was no Parisian office. His eyes darted from side to side inside his face. Without saying another word, he left his spot and tapped the ticket taker on the shoulder. The two men exchanged whispers, ending when the ticket taker pulled out his two-way radio. He pressed it to his lips, quietly summoning a code into the speaker.
“Where’s your new job?” Shoulder Pads asked obliviously.
I kept my eyes on the ticket taker and didn’t answer her. A security marshal popped onto our train car and Jeff fingered me.
“Alice?” I could hear Ben’s fuzzy voice breaking through on the phone. “Are you still with me? Who is that talking?”
“Oh, sorry, Ben, it’s just one of my coworkers. She’s very chatty.” I glided around Shoulder Pads and squeezed my way through the crowded car.
“Oh, we all have coworkers like that,” said Ben. “They drive me nuts, personally. It’s like, I’m an M.D. not a psychiatrist, tell your problems to someone who cares. I’m sure some shrink with a nice long couch would love to hear all about it for a gazillion dollars an hour. Call me if you’re bleeding from a trauma wound, then we’ll talk. Am I right?”
“I totally agree.” My eyes were busily scanning the train. I was unsure how long it was before the next stop, but I needed to escape that train. I pressed my body up against the sliding doors and slithered my hand onto the emergency button. I slammed my palm against it and the train shook to a halt. There was a long, burning screech over the tracks that sent all the passengers thrusting forward. The stuffy car quickly filled with shrill cries of panic and terror amidst the turbulence. The metal doors popped open and I jutted my neck out to assess the situation outside. I coughed against the sooty vapor engulfing the tunnel.
“Are you still there?” Ben wanted to know. “You’re coming through a little fuzzy.”
“It must be my reception. I think we’re going through a tunnel,” I told Ben, as I peered into the vast blackness of the narrow tunnel that engulfed the train car.
“Where were we?” he asked. “Oh yeah, chatty coworkers. I mean it’s like, take a big fat dose of I-don’t-give-a-damn and a cookie and call me in the morning.”
I felt the train do a kick, as though preparing to rev to a start again. I knew my only option for escaping was to climb up onto the roof of the train car. I gripped one hand on the side and hefted the weight of my body upwards. I used the traction from the door joints to step my feet up onto the car’s overhang. Once I had managed to get all but my legs onto the roof of the car, the train marshal who had eyed me inside the car was already leaning out the door in search of me.
“Freeze!” the train marshal hollered at me.
I grappled with the cumbersome surface of the car roof, slippery and scaling. The marshal grabbed one of my ankles and attempted to yank me down. I kicked wildly until he broke off, and I felt the jettison of the train starting to take off again. The phone slipped from my ear and I caught it. “Ben? I asked. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here. Just checking off some discharge slips. So anyway, Alice, I was thinking maybe we could eat Tai food tonight on our date, what do you think?”
“I love Tai food,” I responded. The train took a rounded swerve, and I gripped the roof as my body dangled over a passenger window. “Especially the stuff with little spicy chili peppers. What’s that called?” I toppled my way onto the roof, sliding my body upwards and sideways, grappling tirelessly, until I was lying flat on top of the train car. I looked up and saw the blurry abyss of the sides of th
e tunnel as the train rocketed back to full speed.
“I think you’re thinking of orange curry chicken,” Ben said.
I heard the thunderous clatter of the train marshal’s boots bolting against the metal roof. How had he managed to get up there so fast? I whipped my head around and saw him standing behind me and he was beating a very nasty-looking metal baton over his palm. I staggered, on all fours, to get away from him. He grabbed me by the hair at the nape of my neck. I shoved my foot to him, causing him to fly backwards and land on his ass with a thump.
“No, it’s not chicken,” I said into the phone. “It’s beefy more.”
“Alice, I don’t think they eat a lot of beef in that region of the world. Are you sure it wasn’t just pork?”
“You’re thinking of Indian food, not Tai food. Tai menus have plenty of beef.”
Suddenly I felt the train marshal’s heavy palm latch onto my shoulder, thrusting me backwards and throwing my body down so hard it made my teeth rattle. I swallowed a teaspoon worth of blood. I lifted my cheek from the cold, rough surface of the train’s roof. I hobbled to my feet and began sprinting and crossing the length of the train cars, over the perilous gaps between the rickety metal tethers.
“Alice?” Ben asked. “Is this a bad time? You sound choppy. There must be poor reception on the subway.”
The train marshal tackled me with his full weight from what seemed like out of nowhere. “You’re right, it must be the tunnels,” I said, struggling to get my breath out, my rib cage restricted by the heavy weight of the marshal sitting on my back. “I’ll have to call you back.”
Now my phone was being stuffed into my pocket and my fist was aimed straight for the marshal’s face. The punch I delivered rattled us both. A spate of blood sprayed from his nose and hit my cheek like hot syrup. “That was my boyfriend all the way in Paris,” I shrilled at him. “Couldn’t you just let me have a normal life for five freaking minutes?”
He used his weight to get on top of me and then he pinned my arms down so he could spit into my face unhindered. I turned my chin to avoid his slaver. He swiped the back of his palm across his nostrils to clear away the dripping blood. “Word is you might be involved in an act of terrorism that happened at Cibix headquarters this afternoon,” he said in a heavy Brooklyn-soaked accent.
“What?” I gave an insidious smile. “Did old gray tell you that back on the train? He’s just a sugar daddy I shorted and he wanted to give me a hassle. Don’t you rent-a-cops get any training in assessing a situation before reacting?”
We were rolling back and forth over the top of the rickety car. I waited until I had an advantage and kicked him in the chest so that he flew back enough to give me time to jump off at the platform at the Bronx station. I landed on my side and rolled onto the platform with a thud that felt bone-shattering. I got up and dusted the dirt off me, dragging a trail of the blood all down my collar. I ran through the crowded platform, towards the gray-washed daylight that peeked down from above ground.
Chapter Sixteen: The Olympian
RABBIT WAS BUNDLED in his raincoat, shoving his phone into his pocket when I got back to the hotel room. I thought I had heard his voice from the hallway. I wondered who he had just been speaking with.
I didn’t trust him.
For one thing, he had tattled to Motley about my lip lock with Pressley. Second, blondie showing up on time, all the time, made me wonder if there was a mole in the operation. Rabbit looked an awful lot like a mole.
“Alice, where have you been? Look at you. You’re a wreck. You’re completely soaked, and for heaven’s sake, is that blood on your knees?”
“The subway got a little rough.”
“Subway?” His lips knotted and his hands cupped onto his hips. “Why were you on the subway? Where is the rental car?”
“Parked somewhere on Broadway. It popped a flat in the rain so I had to ditch it.”
“You are so irresponsible, Alice. I can’t believe it.”
“Spare me the lecture.”
“What about hair dye?”
“What about it?”
“I don’t see you holding any. You said the reason you had to go out was to buy dye to fix the blue streak in your hair.”
“I got sidetracked. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Who were you just talking to on the phone?”
“That was Motley.”
“Let me guess, you were calling him to report that I had gone rogue and taken the rental car.”
“I was letting him know that I have discovered the identity of our blond would-be saboteur.”
“You have?”
“Yes.” He pointed to his laptop. The screen was populated by a magnified black and white photo of the blonde. The blurry image appeared to have been captured that morning inside Cibix. “I used stills from the security cameras I hacked at Cibix to match her face to a database of online images.”
“What match did you come up with?”
“A cereal box.”
“A cereal box?” I asked.
“Yeah, as in, Wheaties. In particular, a box with a cover that was distributed and sold in French supermarkets following the Winter Olympics four years ago.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Her name is Ophelia Le Fur. She’s a French Olympian. She won the gold medal in Curling.”
“Why is some French Olympian after the dynamite stick?”
“The question is why a disgraced French Olympian would be after the dynamite stick?”
My eyebrow shot up. “Disgraced?”
“Yeah, shortly after her win, she was busted in a steroid sting operation. Turns out, she had been juicing when she won the medal.”
“So, you think she knows about the dynamite stick, and her motive for destroying it, like so many of us liars, is that she wants her past kept erased? But she’s French, not American, so what do Social Security numbers matter to her?”
“Actually, she has dual citizenship, due to the fact that she married an American shortly before her Olympic win. Some nobody named Elijah Coke. He was a physician, so that’s Dr. Elijah Coke. He was the reason for her downfall. Turns out he was her handler for abusing prescriptions.”
“So, maybe the shame of being stripped of her medal caused her to go mad, and she is seeking the dynamite stick as some psychotic retroactive attempt to control her destiny. She thinks it will somehow make the past better.”
“Either that or she fell on some hard financial times after being stripped of her medal, and she’s working for someone who is paying her to find it. Just like we are.”
“Either way, we need to lose her.”
“Agreed.”
I noticed all Rabbit’s stuff was packed and sitting by the door. “Are we taking off soon?”
“The storm has passed and the airports are reopening, so we’re good to leave as soon as you’re ready. I guess we will need to take a cab since you screwed the rental car.”
* * *
We boarded our plane with a tense silence cushioning the space in between us. I didn’t trust him. He didn’t trust me. Yet each of our survival depended on working together.
The sting of lights bouncing from the airplane’s wing was so strong that I had shut the plastic lip on my window somewhere over the doldrums of the Atlantic. That was also when Motley called.
“Alice,” he said in that very precise way he always says my name that send shivers, like sharp pins, rushing down my spine. “Good job on the servers at Cibix.”
“Thanks, Motley.”
“There is one thing, though.”
“Oh?”
“When you land back in Paris, I want you to come to my house. Rabbit says you were acting a little off during your job in New York City. I’m not sure what’s going on with you, but I want to watch you for a while to make sure you’re feeling okay.”
“But Motley –,” I began choking out my protestation.
“You’re an asset to m
e, Alice. I need to protect my assets.”
Being an asset sounded good. Much better than being a liability. “Of course, Motley. I’ll see you in a few hours,” I said, looking up over the seat at Rabbit, who was avoiding my eye contact.
Chapter Seventeen: The Hallway
WHEN WE ARRIVED back in Paris I took a cab from the airport to my apartment to grab some clothes and makeup to bring over to Motley’s, since I had no idea how long I would be staying there and thought it best to be prepared. My clothes and makeup weren’t just gauche accessories. I considered them to be fatigues and war paint.
As I turned the hallway corner leading to my apartment, I caught a glimpse of a man standing in front of my door with his back to me. I could make out his profile, darkly shadowed by black hair, and the outline of his face was cut by a strong jawline. The man had one of his hands behind his back, clutching something. When I got closer I realized it was a bouquet of flowers.
“Ben?” I called out.
He turned to me with a smile. He was wearing a stylish buttoned shirt and his hair had been freshly moussed.
“Alice.” A shimmer of affection was in his eyes.
“What are you doing here?”
“I know it’s late, but my shift at the hospital ended an hour ago and I wanted to see you. You said you would be home tonight and I thought we planned on grabbing something to eat. Tai food, remember?”
“I wasn’t expecting you to just pop over.”
Ben looked me up and down, taking in the details of my haggard appearance. “You’re a wreck. You look like you’ve been mauled by an angry tiger. What happened to you?”
I tried to picture what I looked like at that moment. I knew it was an amalgam of torn stockings, drippy makeup, and matted hair. I reached for a quick lie and told him, “I’ve been out partying with the other flight attendants, celebrating a successful landing.”
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