The Shadow Tracer

by Mg Gardiner

  “Shit.”

  If Harker was here, it meant he had harvested the data on her phone. She felt a swell of fear and disgust, as if he’d fingered the panties in her underwear drawer. He was using the knowledge he’d gained to close in on Sarah.

  Hell. She had been sloppy. She hadn’t imagined that an FBI agent would palm her phone and illegally download everything it contained.

  She pushed open a side door and stormed toward the parking lot. “Idiot.”

  She needed a new phone, a throwaway. She jumped in the SUV she’d rented and headed into town.

  Dammit. Harker had already been in Roswell long enough not just to rent a car, but wreck it. What the hell was going on?

  In the fallow field between the barn and the abandoned trailer, Sarah washed Zoe’s face and hands with bottled water. She brushed glass from her hair. She carefully pulled the little girl’s shirt over her head and got clean clothes from her go-bag. Zoe took it all in with limp silence, as if she had become a reborn doll.

  “There you go, firefly,” Sarah said.

  Zoe stood in the sere yellow grass. It bent under the wind with a skirr. She looked very small beneath the sky.

  The trailer sat on cracked and flattened tires, listing to starboard. It was a fifties-era model, all curves and porthole windows, now grayed and rusting into a Steampunk artifact. A few feet away was the car that must have pulled it out here, a decades-old white Chevrolet with a gull-wing rear end.

  Teresa leaned against the pickup’s front bumper. “1960 Chevy Biscayne. A classic.”

  The car was flat against the ground, wheel rims empty. It looked as if it had dragged the trailer halfway into the countryside and died.

  Sarah said, “So this is where they keep the aliens.”

  “Some living quarters. Toothbrushes and probes, all lined up by the sink.” Teresa smiled weakly. Blood stained the collar of her green T-shirt.

  Sarah said, “You’re a nun. Will you be able to get out of trouble?”

  “Not here. Not over this.” Teresa spread her arms. “When the authorities look at me, they won’t see a sister in a habit with a wimple, an obedient little woman.”

  “I never thought nuns were like that,” Sarah said.

  “We’re not. Oh, I am obedient to Christ, as best I can be. But out here, in the Wild West? They’ll look at me and see a radical in civvies, helping a fugitive.”

  Sarah’s spirits fell. Overhead clouds skated past. Sunshine and shadow slid along the palomino ground.

  Teresa touched her neck where a steel ball had lodged under her skin—buckshot from Reavy’s sleek, black, Mossberg shotgun.

  Death had been that close. Sarah heard a buzzing in her ears. “I …” she tried.

  Teresa looked square at her. “You going to tell me?”

  Sarah blinked.

  “I mean, you going to tell me what’s really going on?” Teresa’s face grew stark. “Why’d you hesitate back on the highway, when I asked whether we should turn ourselves in to the FBI?”

  The air in the shadows seemed to leach of all heat. Teresa’s gaze was searching.

  Sarah tried to clamp everything down, but her circuits had fried. She put a hand over her eyes and took a hard breath.

  “Sarah,” Teresa said.

  She seemed to feel the lick of snow on her skin. “The day my sister was killed …”

  And she saw it again: the air white with swirling flakes, the forest nearly black, the house dead behind her. She had tripped over a protruding root and slid to her knees. Climbed back to her feet and saw her hand gashed. Zoe squirmed beneath her coat. She ran and thought, God, no—don’t cry, don’t make noise …

  The figure appeared silently from the trees. He was tall and sturdy, a carpenter’s build, his face raw in the snow and wind.

  “Sarah, stop,” he said. “Don’t move.”

  Adrenaline flooded her system. She pulled up. Her skin felt electrified.

  Nolan looked ragged and as terrified as she was. He stared at her and then at the cabin where he had once lived with her sister. His eyes, normally the carefree blue of an unclouded sky, looked chilly and strained, like thin ice.

  She couldn’t move. Her throat closed. “Beth …”

  His faraway gaze snapped back to her. He didn’t look lost and frightened anymore. He looked angry, like a cornered animal.

  Then he spoke. And he didn’t sound like the Nolan she knew, the devil-may-care dude who only wanted to live in the sun-sprinkled woods, hammering nails for new houses and playing his guitar. He sounded like an older man, a man of wrath.

  “Give Zoe to me.”

  He sounded like his father, Eldrick Worthe.

  Sarah found her arms tightening around the baby. The snowfall coated Nolan’s head and shoulders. He held out a hand and gestured. Gimme.

  Sarah backed up.

  Nolan didn’t look surprised. He didn’t look frightened. He didn’t ask whether Grissom and the girls were chasing her, or whether they should hide.

  He didn’t ask about Beth.

  “Give the child to me,” he said.

  He might have been a puppet, a ventriloquist’s dummy. His mouth was open, the words rolling out, but it seemed to Sarah that his lips didn’t even move.

  He reached into the pocket of his ski parka and walked toward her. “Let me have the baby.”

  Nolan eyed the bundle beneath her coat like it was his salvation. He reeked of desperation. He wasn’t relieved to see his beloved child safe, but jittering to get hold of her because she was his last chance at staying alive.

  He tugged a gun from his pocket.

  Shaking, Sarah said, “A gunshot’s going to be heard, even in this snow.”

  “The house is burning and nobody’s going to notice any more noise.”

  Beth’s words snaked through her head. “Take her, Sarah. Protect her. Don’t let anybody else touch her. Nobody. You understand?”

  She turned and ran.

  He caught her after fifty yards. Snaring her arm, he spun her around. They fell to the snowy ground in a heap. The baby squealed. Nolan pawed at Sarah with his free hand, trying to rip the buttons off her coat and pry the baby away.

  “Not yours,” he said. “Give her …”

  Sarah kneed him in the groin. He gasped and buckled. She scrambled out from under him. The baby wriggled against her, little chest going up and down, a tiny squall coming from her mouth. She staggered to her feet and got three steps and Nolan caught her again.

  He swung, wildly, and smacked her in the face. Stung, she stumbled. He slammed her back against the trunk of a tree. And with one hand he grabbed her by the throat. Gagging, she clawed for his eyes.

  He grunted, close, breathing harshly. Peripherally she saw the gun, black and ugly. Jesus. He’d shoot her to get Zoe. She was his prize, his lotto ticket.

  She stopped clawing at his eyes and scrabbled for the gun. She couldn’t breathe. She felt it, edges, warm metal. As they struggled, his grip on it loosened. She pushed it against his stomach.

  The gunshot was so loud, so close, that Sarah cried out. The gun kicked and knocked her elbow back against the trunk of the tree. The barrel was buried in Nolan’s gut. He slumped against her. His hand slipped from her throat.

  He dropped to his knees and said, “Fuck. You shot me.”

  He toppled forward, facedown in the snow, and didn’t move.

  The white day turned red beneath him, a deep bloody pool seeping from his chest into the snow. The baby began to cry. Sarah stood over him, shaking. The snowfall seemed to turn to static, a hiss in her head. She pointed the gun at Nolan, but he lay motionless. Already new snowfall was sticking to the back of his coat and his jeans.

  She heard a noise on the wind, and jumped. She felt the Worthes like a sour breath on the back of her neck. A wail rose in her throat. Stifling it, she whipped around and ran.

  And twenty feet ahead of her, from out of the trees stepped a man she didn’t know.

  She drew up sharpl
y and raised the gun. Powered by fear and rage and her promise to Beth, she aimed it at his chest and said, “I’ll shoot you, motherfucker.”

  He stared her down. Pistol in his hand. He looked so alert, she thought he might go off like a stick of dynamite. He peered through the trees and saw the flames. He saw Nolan facedown, his blood emptied into the snow.

  He looked at the baby with open concern. He looked at Sarah again. “If you want to stay alive, let me help you.”

  He held up his star.

  In the field outside the abandoned barn, Sarah swallowed and held back for one last second. The wind swept across the yellow grass. She lowered her voice so Zoe couldn’t hear.

  “I can never go to the police,” she told Teresa. “I shot Nolan Worthe.”

  Then tears stung her eyes. “I killed him. And Lawless helped me get away.”

  36

  Lawless rolled west on U.S. 380. He didn’t worry about leaving Curtis Harker in the ditch. He did feel an itch at the base of his spine, like a creepy fingernail running up his back. Harker would not forget this. Harker held a grudge.

  Harker would mark it in black against him, another point on the scorecard of shame and disappointment and letting him down that was part of his everlasting quest to destroy the Worthe clan.

  But Harker was ten miles back, stuck with a twisted axle. What worried Lawless right now was the empty road. He saw no signs of the police, no signs of the silver Navigator or Sarah’s black pickup. Where had they gone?

  Ahead on the asphalt, glass glittered. He pulled over and got out into the heat.

  The glass was clear and pebbled—auto safety glass. He walked the debris path. The glass was spread along the centerline of the highway. No skid marks accompanied it. It had come from a vehicle moving at high speed when the window exploded.

  Teresa was at the wheel. Only an experienced rally driver would have kept the truck driving absolutely straight down a highway when the window shattered. She hadn’t swerved. Not even when the Worthes shot at the truck.

  He walked along the highway, phone in hand, pushing Redial every ten seconds.

  How had Harker and the Worthes found Sarah so quickly? Things should never have unraveled this fast. Not if Sarah was half the woman he thought she was. Either she’d screwed up, massively, or both he and she had underestimated the resources and deviousness of the people pursuing her. No—the clan, and Harker, had lied, pressured, probably stolen information to track her to New Mexico.

  He felt a pang, like a shard of metal in his gut.

  He was the expert in fugitive apprehension. And he should have helped prepare Sarah better for what was coming down the pike. She’d had to learn on the fly, under intense pressure, with no training, no help, while caring for a newborn. He was the one who had told her: Run.

  He’d sent her out here without any backup but a woman sworn to nonviolence, and the scorpions had caught up with her.

  “Damn.”

  After five minutes he found a shotgun shell lying on the edge of the asphalt. A minute later he spotted where a heavy vehicle had run off the road into torn brush, sliding sideways, tires losing purchase and skidding to a messy stop. But whoever had spun out here was long gone.

  Teresa—where are you? Are Sarah and Zoe safe?

  He called her again and listened to the phone ring.

  Danisha came out of the Roswell shopping mall with two prepaid cell phones. She waited in the shade of the entrance, eyeing the parking lot for law enforcement or anybody watching her. She was no expert in countersurveillance, but she thought she had good radar. And she didn’t think she was being followed.

  She turned on one phone and took the scrap of paper from her pocket, the one with Sarah’s alternate burn phone numbers. She started with text messages, hoping that those were harder for the authorities to intercept.

  Sarah, I’m here.

  She hoped that was enough.

  Harker sat for ten minutes in the new rental car at the Roswell airport. This close.

  He’d been this close to them, and they’d gotten the upper hand. The silver Navigator—of course the clan had the means to rent a rugged beast of a vehicle. He was only surprised they hadn’t bolted a bull bar to the front, or spikes mounted with human skulls. But the blue Bonneville that sideswiped him—that he hadn’t foreseen.

  Never underestimate the Worthes.

  And that black Dodge Ram pickup—Sarah Keller was not alone. He’d glimpsed two adults in the cab. Keller had a confederate.

  Scratch that—confederates. Michael Lawless.

  Lawless always turned up at the wrong moment: just in time to rub salt in the wound and tell him, Let it go. Harker took out a packet of antacid tablets and popped two in his mouth.

  Think it through.

  Sarah Keller had help. Perhaps Lawless had hooked her into some underground railroad for people who wanted to disappear. Lawless knew the dank and septic workings of Witness Security. After all, the Marshals Service had given new identities to around ten thousand federal witnesses—and not one of those in WITSec was a decent citizen. They were mob accountants and drug mules and the women who slept with them. Lawless knew all about scrubbing slime from the public record.

  Harker was going to need more resources. Backup, tactical support.

  This close. The Worthes were in the wind again, and now they knew he was in pursuit. But they wouldn’t go to ground. They couldn’t afford to. And, more to the point, they didn’t want to. Lurking was in their nature, but once they had the scent of their quarry, they would never back off. They would finish it. They were animals.

  He put his hand on the ignition and paused.

  Why had Keller come to Roswell? To meet up with some hippie at the Gatecrasher Festival? Possible. Probable. But not just any hippie—somebody who knew how to handle himself at high speed. Somebody who had training in defensive driving and, possibly, threat evasion.

  The music festival—that’s where the police call had originated. That’s where he needed to start. He fired up the ignition.

  37

  Teresa stared at Sarah for an endless minute, then at the empty ranchlands that unrolled to the horizon, piebald with sun and shadow. She sat down in the doorway of the pickup, hands hanging from her knees.

  She said, “I’m listening. You’d better talk.”

  Sarah talked. When she finished, Teresa looked up.

  “Lawless left you at the side of the road that day? To fend for yourself?”

  Sarah leaned against the side of the truck. “No. He said he’d find me, and he did. That night he came to my apartment.”

  At the time, she was living in a second-floor walk-up in Cupertino. When he knocked on the door she nearly jumped through the ceiling. She was pacing in the kitchen, rocking Zoe. The baby wouldn’t stop crying. She knew now that her own grief had leaked into the little thing. But that night, when she let Lawless in, she just thought she was in Hell.

  He shut the door and scanned the apartment, seemingly evaluating it for threats. “You okay?”

  She simply stared at him. In her arms Zoe screamed and flailed. Sarah didn’t even own a pack of disposable diapers. She’d pinned a pillowcase on the baby instead. She’d tried to spoon milk into her tiny mouth.

  “What am I going to do?” she said.

  He spoke in measured tones. “The Worthes fled the scene. We don’t know if they saw you. Have no idea if they know your address. You should go to a hotel tonight. Get some things together.”

  “Done. Then what?”

  That was when he noticed that she was already packed. A heavy backpack sat by the door. And he saw the map of the world that took up an entire wall. Pins stuck in it. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Chiang Mai, Bangkok. Mumbai, Jerusalem, Rome, Marrakech.

  “My flight’s tomorrow. Round-the-world ticket.” She bounced Zoe. “Don’t worry. I’m not going.”

  He shifted, seemingly surprised and impressed.

  “I’m not supposed to be back for three months,�
�� she said. “Got a leave of absence from Past Link.”

  She’d planned to retrace her mother’s journeys, then explore corners of the planet even Atlanta Keller hadn’t managed to reach. She bounced the shrieking baby.

  She wanted her mom, and Beth, and to go back twenty-four hours. But all her bridges were burned to ash. Her eyes shimmered with tears.

  She’d killed a man. Killed Zoe’s father. “I’m scared out of my goddamn mind.”

  Lawless had an incredible intensity about him, as if he had injected rocket fuel into his veins. But his voice was calm.

  “You’re going to be okay.”

  “How?”

  He put a hand on her arm. “Listen to me. This is my job. I keep people safe.”

  “But Nolan …”

  Behind his eyes, turbulence rose. “Yeah. We need to talk.”

  Somebody pounded on the door. She jumped again, like a crazed cat. “God.”

  He gestured her back and checked the peephole. Wariness overtook him. He opened the door. On the walkway were two men in U.S. MARSHAL Windbreakers.

  He told her, “Sit tight.”

  He and the other marshals jogged down the stairs to the sidewalk. Sarah paced by the window, bouncing the screaming thing that Zoe had become, and watched them through a slit in the blinds. They stood under a streetlight, huddled in harsh discussion. Lawless seemed fraught.

  Did they know she was the one who’d shot Nolan? What was he telling them?

  Five minutes later he returned, subdued.

  Her nerves knotted. “Are you going to arrest me?”

  “No.”

  She nodded out the window. “Are they?”

  “Nobody’s getting arrested. They don’t know it was you. They don’t even know it was Nolan.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He stepped closer and tilted his head down to meet her eye. “Nolan’s gone.”

  “You mean he’s alive?”

  “His body is gone,” he said.

  “Gone where? What are you talking about?”