Proof (Caroline Auden Book 2)

by C. E. Tobisman

  Caroline knew they weren’t looking for her. They were just two cops ordering coffee and muffins. But in seconds, they’d notice her. There were probably dozens of those flyers with her photo all over the neighborhood. The likelihood that the cops hadn’t seen one recently enough to recognize her was next to nil.

  She was trapped. A waterfall of self-recriminations followed the realization. She’d survived a hit man. She’d survived sleeping on the streets. She’d survived old food and bad shoes and loneliness. And now she was going to get caught because she’d lingered too long instead of just waiting to send Albert the video clip from the safety of the hotel.

  The first police officer leaned back against the counter, making himself comfortable while he waited for the barista to make his coffee drink. The second police officer pulled a dollar from her wallet to put into the tip jar.

  Caroline turned her face away, wishing she could disappear into the patterned wallpaper.

  Perhaps she’d get lucky. Perhaps the police would leave without ever casually glancing up to see who else was in the café. Perhaps pigs could fly.

  A shout from outside intruded on Caroline’s terror. A woman’s voice, loud and frantic.

  “My bike! Someone just stole my bike!”

  The screen door flew open with a crash. A small woman lurched into the café. She looked around until her eyes found the police officers.

  “Oh, thank God! I thought I saw cops come in here. You’ve got to help me. A guy with a blue baseball hat and a silver jacket just took my bike. Grabbed it right out of my hands.”

  Caroline sat transfixed by the woman’s familiar face. It was Lani—the woman she’d helped at the distribution center. The small woman wore the same stained dress and red scarf she’d been wearing the last time Caroline had seen her, but now she’d paired them with combat boots and a fleece jacket. Fortunately, in the edgy neighborhood, she came off as fashion forward, not homeless.

  “He took off down East Thirty-Sixth Street,” Lani continued. “You can still catch him if you hurry. Please. You’ve got to help me!”

  The police officers left their coffees and muffins to hurry with Lani through the door.

  Through the screen, Caroline could hear her say, “There—you see him? He’s at the end of the block. Oh, you’ve got to get him. Please!”

  The sound of footsteps attested to the police officers’ belief in Lani’s ruse and their efforts to catch the phantom fugitive.

  Half a second later, the screen door clattered open again.

  Lani caught Caroline’s eye.

  And then they both ran.

  Caroline and Lani didn’t stop until they reached a spot behind a dumpster in an alley four blocks away from the café. Both women leaned forward, hands on knees, panting hard.

  “I don’t know how you did that, but thank you,” Caroline said when she could talk again.

  “I’ve been following you,” Lani said. “I saw you and your friends, and I wanted to thank you for what you did to Daryl, but then I just followed. And I felt safer near people who helped.”

  “How long have you been following us?” Caroline asked.

  “About four hours. I saw your big friend—he was at that food line near City Hall.”

  Caroline remembered. Jake had gone to find Enzo to lead them to Curtis’s underground lair.

  “There was a guy asking about you. A blond man,” Lani continued. “Offering money for information. Usually the volunteers would tell people like him to leave, but their manager let him stay until he’d asked everyone. It seemed wrong.”

  A shiver scurried down Caroline’s arms.

  “Anyway, I followed you. I’m good at making myself invisible,” Lani said, looking down.

  She was right, Caroline realized. The way Lani’s shoulders curved forward, the way she ducked her black-haired head, she seemed to disappear into herself.

  Caroline noted the dark circles under Lani’s eyes. She had to be exhausted. To Caroline, a night on the street had meant sleeping in shifts. Jake, Uncle Hitch, and she took turns, watching to make sure no one sneaked up on them. But Lani? She’d been all alone.

  “When I saw you go into that café, I was going to come and talk to you. But then—”

  “—you saw the police,” Caroline surmised.

  Lani nodded. “I wanted to help.”

  Suddenly, something occurred to Caroline.

  “You knew the police were looking for me, didn’t you?”

  Lani nodded again.

  “But you still helped me,” Caroline said.

  “Someone who did what you did to Daryl wouldn’t have hurt that lady at that shop.”

  Caroline warmed at the unexpected compliment. It had been a long time since anyone had given her the benefit of the doubt about much of anything.

  “Do you want to come with us?” Caroline asked impulsively. “We’re going to a hotel.”

  Lani looked uncertain. “What’s there?”

  “A war room,” Caroline said.

  CHAPTER 23

  Caroline sat at a small Formica desk in the corner of the hotel room. Beside her laptop, she’d placed the burner phone she’d bought with the money Jake had retrieved from Western Union. Just knowing she now had the capacity to make untraceable phone calls calmed her nerves as she turned to marshaling the information she’d need to bring down Oasis.

  With Lani in the shower and Jake out doing “some more reconnaissance,” she had time alone to concentrate. Hitch had gone down to the lobby to offer the desk clerk a little money to store his shopping cart in the hotel’s garage. Though she’d hesitated to give her uncle any cash, the plan to secure his possessions had been the only way she could coax him indoors.

  Caroline glanced at the clock humming beside her—7:52 p.m.

  She still had a little time until she could call Albert. Before she spoke to him, she wanted to crack the firewall that had defeated her. She wanted to find the information secreted in Oasis’s server—information she’d trawled only briefly before getting shut out.

  Not this time, though, Caroline silently vowed. Oasis had run her out of her life. Now, Oasis would answer for it.

  But when she tried to reach Oasis’s server, Caroline retrieved an error message: Service unavailable.

  It could mean only one thing: Oasis had taken its server off-line.

  The move wasn’t unexpected, Caroline realized. Perhaps after Amy’s and her hacks, Oasis had gotten scared. Or maybe the charity’s security service had recommended the drastic measure in an abundance of caution until it could patch the holes that had been breached. Whatever the reason, Caroline needed some other way to find out more about Oasis.

  Fortunately, she had other sources of information.

  Linking again to the retrieval spot, she copied the BanCorp affidavit-withdrawal transactions onto her laptop. The Spreadsheet of Death had been only an abbreviated version of her haul. Now she had the complete data set, plus the title reports Amy had found.

  Once she’d sent Albert copies, she turned back to the raw data glowing on the screen. Like an ancient mystic examining strings of numbers, she tried to discern shapes and meaning from the information her father had allowed her to retrieve from BanCorp.

  Gradually, a pattern began to resolve itself from the columns of numbers and dates. There was something about the frequency of the affidavit withdrawals. Though the data stretched back five years, most of the bequests had occurred in the last two.

  Before she could study the pattern more closely, the lock on the hotel room’s door clicked open and Jake entered.

  “Only one ingress and egress, plus the back gate near the empty pool. Secured parking garage. One desk clerk,” he said, as if reporting up the chain of command.

  Caroline stifled a smile. Once a Ranger, always a Ranger.

  His mission accomplished, Jake settled himself on the bed closest to the door.

  “Did you happen to see my uncle down there?” Caroline asked. Hitch had gone alm
ost forty-eight hours without drinking, by her count. It probably wasn’t enough to have trusted him with cash.

  “No, but he’ll be back,” said Jake.

  Caroline appreciated the certainty in his voice. She wished she shared it.

  Jake lay back on the bed with a sigh that seemed to last for a full minute.

  “I forgot,” he said, closing his eyes.

  Caroline understood. The sight of a bed had brought her close to tears, too.

  “Have you ever tried to get off the street?” she asked.

  “No,” Jake answered.

  “But you want to?”

  With his eyes still closed, Jake nodded. “I’m not like Floyd.”

  Caroline studied the Ranger’s face. When she’d first met him, she’d seen only his mass. The corded muscles of his forearms. The knife. Now, she saw a shyness. And a quiet eloquence, both in his speech and in the shapes he fashioned out of wood.

  “What happened to you?” Caroline asked, almost to herself. She imagined the answers he’d give if he decided to answer her open-ended query. He’d probably seen combat. Maybe he’d seen friends die. Maybe he’d killed someone.

  “After 9/11, I joined the service,” he began with his eyes still closed.

  Caroline nodded to herself. His story began like so many others.

  “I wanted justice for those who’d died,” he said, his eyes open now but trained on the stained ceiling of the shabby hotel room. “But I just wasn’t down with it.”

  Cocking her head, Caroline listened for the story to get back on the rails. The expected path.

  “I was a combat fatigue casualty,” Jake continued, “which is just a stuck-up way of saying I was a coward.”

  “What? No.” Caroline had never heard the phrase combat fatigue casualty, but whatever it meant, she didn’t think it applied to Jake. Sure, he could seem withdrawn, but he’d never shown any fear at the horrors of living on the street. And there were so many . . .

  “Every time we were out on patrol, every sound was an IED. Everyone I saw was an enemy combatant. When we actually came under fire, I couldn’t sleep afterward. Or eat. My commander ordered me to a critical event debriefing so I could get my head together.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No. But I completed my deployment anyway.” There was a trace of pride in Jake’s voice. Or masochism. “The army wasn’t like I thought it would be.” He paused and shook his head. “What I mean is, I wasn’t how I thought I’d be.”

  Caroline understood. His private mythology hadn’t matched his reality.

  The bathroom door opened, and Lani emerged. She wore the same stained red dress, but now her hair was wet. As if sensing the serious conversation still hanging in the air, she sat down on the rollaway bed farthest from the door. She tucked her feet under herself, making herself small.

  “Coming home—it’s been hard,” Jake continued, as if oblivious to Lani’s presence.

  “Didn’t the government take care of you when you got back?” Caroline asked.

  Jake let out a bitter laugh. “I had a good doc at the VA—so good, he got transferred.”

  “What about a new doctor? What about counseling?”

  Jake just shrugged. “You can’t run from what’s inside.”

  “No, I suppose you can’t,” Caroline agreed quietly.

  “The only thing worse than worrying about getting killed was worrying about having to kill somebody. Those people in Iraq—they wasn’t the ones that hit us on 9/11.”

  “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that you couldn’t kill people,” Lani volunteered from the rollaway bed.

  “It is when you’re a Ranger,” Jake said.

  Though Caroline agreed with Lani, she knew Jake would not be convinced.

  “Why are you helping me?” she asked instead.

  “I owe Hitch,” Jake answered simply.

  Caroline’s face grew warm with annoyance. She’d just finished demonizing her uncle and the addiction that eclipsed everything else in his life. She didn’t want to entertain the possibility that someone could depend on him when she didn’t trust him to come back to the hotel room.

  “Some skinheads was out bothering homeless people one night. Hitch helped me. He’s a good man.” Seeing Caroline’s scowl, Jake continued, “He don’t hurt no one. He pays his debts.”

  Caroline knew that a person’s word counted for a lot in the noncash world of the streets, but she still couldn’t accept that her uncle was worthy of his good reputation. Or that Jake wasn’t deluded in thinking he owed risking his life to help Hitch’s wayward niece.

  “But what if they get you?” she asked. She wasn’t sure who “they” were. Aside from the hit man, she wasn’t sure who else was trying to find her. But she did know she didn’t want anyone else to get hurt on her account. Especially this strangely gentle giant.

  “I’m already a dead man walking,” Jake said. “People say you can’t ever really come home from a war. That’s the truth. You come home all messed up. There’s no fixing that.”

  “That’s not true. There are always choices.” Caroline heard the vehemence in her voice and knew where it came from. In her mother and uncle, she’d seen cautionary tales. She’d felt the same tugs toward oblivion. But she’d clung to the belief that she had free will. Genetic predisposition was a reality, but so was self-determination.

  Jake’s deep, rolling laughter filled the hotel room.

  “What?” Caroline asked, suddenly embarrassed by her speech.

  “You don’t even know your privilege.”

  “And you don’t know me. I might not have gone to war, but I’ve seen darkness.”

  “Nah, you’re a rich white girl who only thinks she’s seen the dark.”

  “And I also think I see a good man who’s given up.”

  Jake grew quiet.

  “You always so damn optimistic about human nature?” he asked finally.

  “No,” Caroline admitted, the fight going out of her. “But what’s the alternative?”

  Jake shook his head, his lips pursed.

  Caroline looked away. She’d said something wrong, off base. She’d presumed things about Jake and made judgments. She’d revealed her own cluelessness and presumptuousness when she’d lectured the ex-soldier on how to make his life better. No wonder he’d dismissed her as an errand he was doing for her uncle.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sound like an Oasis pamphlet. I’m still learning to mind my own business.”

  He snorted—the joke was her peace offering, and his laugh was an acceptance.

  “So, you gonna figure out how to end this damn thing with Oasis?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Caroline said. Her voice held resolve. She had no alternatives now. No other options. The only way forward required her to slay the beast. And so even if she had to do it alone, she’d find a way to bring Oasis down.

  “Cool,” Jake said. “I’ve got your back.”

  At 8:16, Hitch returned. In his right hand, he held a large paper bag.

  He paused at the door and looked down.

  “Everything okay with your cart?” Caroline asked. He’d been gone more than long enough to pay the desk clerk to stash his belongings in the garage.

  “Yeah.” Hitch’s eyes remained down on the ugly brown carpet.

  Opening the bag, he removed the contents, setting each on the small table beside the door of the hotel room.

  “There was a mini-mart two doors down that had some supplies. Orange juice. Ding Dongs. Ho Hos. Coca-Cola. Froot Loops,” he narrated in a whisper.

  Then he took the last item out of the bag: a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

  One can was missing.

  Wordlessly, he put the cans beside the junk food.

  Eyeing the blue label of the cheap beer, Caroline swallowed thickly. As she’d feared, he’d caved to his addiction. And yet, he hadn’t slunk off to drink the whole six-pack. And now he was offering the remainder to her. The act was
as honest as it was unexpected.

  “I’ve tried to pinpoint when it went wrong,” he began in a quiet voice, his eyes still downcast. “You know, the moment when I had to numb things.”

  Caroline wasn’t sure if he was referring to the last twenty-four hours or the last fifty-six years. So she stayed silent, waiting to hear the rest of what her uncle wanted to say.

  “That watch that got stolen from your grandma—it came from my best friend’s dad,” he continued. “You know that, right?”

  Caroline nodded again. She remembered the story. The tragedy of a boy who’d escaped war only to die too young.

  “I’m not sure I ever really trusted the world again after Nazim died,” Hitch finished.

  Then he fell silent.

  Caroline tried to decide what to do with the confession. The introspection it suggested was heartening, but she’d long ago ceased thinking of alcoholism as a lock that could be picked with a revelation or two. The disease was far more complicated. And far more intractable.

  “Thank you,” she said, making up her mind. “You are an important member of this team.” She knew the words were professional-sounding, not at all familial. “If we’re going to survive this, we’re all going to need to function at our very best.”

  In her peripheral vision, she saw Jake look down at his hands.

  “I don’t have to tell you what we’re up against,” Caroline finished softly.

  Her eyes settled on the puke-colored walls. The clunky computer. The comforter that looked like it had escaped one of the dumpsters downstairs.

  She compared her surroundings with Simon Reed’s. His lavish development offices. His state-of-the-art tech. He was building a skyscraper in the middle of LA. He was hobnobbing with politicians and charming the public. What was she doing? She was relying on a wheezing laptop and a crew of homeless people, hoping not to get bedbugs from the cigarette-stained sheets. The odds of prevailing felt daunting.

  Giving a curt nod, Hitch came to stand beside Caroline at the desk.

  “What have you got so far?” he asked. His tone was professional.