“Ezra planned our way from the city, packing up as much as we could carry—four of us shouldering the load would give us a better chance at surviving, he figured, but it never came to that. We heard the sound of helicopters. Men in protective clothing airlifted us to a hospital in Ohio. We were kept in separate rooms, but I know that Steven died from radiation poisoning. I don’t know if Elizabeth died or not. I was in the hospital for nearly a year, a sickness so overwhelming that I figured each day might be my last, but I lived. I lived—”
5, 4 IBID.—
Dawn by the time we say good night. She shuts her door as I leave, soft enough I hear the click and dragging sway of her chain lock and the heavy fall of the bolts. Crimson hallway carpet the color of pomegranates, early morning light the color of wool. The scent of her apartment lingers in my clothes—coffee, oil paints, container orchids and soil. Leaving her feels like a mistake, somehow, a critical lapse now that I’ve found her—but last night Albion said if we hesitate here we both will die.
“Why? Who’ll kill us?” I asked. “Who are they? The men who killed Mook—”
Just after 3 a.m. when she brewed a second carafe of coffee. We sat facing each other on her couch, where we’d been all evening. Albion tugged on her earlobe—a little nervous tic when she’s thinking.
“I really wasn’t sure who they were until you found me, but now I’m certain,” she said. “Waverly’s brother, Gregor, and his sons. Rory and Cormac. Rory was just a teenager when I knew him. Cormac was older. He was married—I remember he liked showing us pictures of his two little girls. The brothers used to come up to the house during hunting season for weeks at a time and Waverly’s brother would stay for even longer stretches. There’s something odd about him, the brother—I don’t know if he can take care of himself fully. Sometimes he goes catatonic for hours at a time. They’re from Birmingham, in Alabama—”
“Timothy mentioned Alabama,” I said. “The first time I met him he told me a story about driving through Alabama and passing roadkill in the middle of the night. Miles of roadkill. He said he was with his wife—”
“If Timothy brought a woman to Alabama, then she’s dead,” said Albion. “He took her to his uncle’s farm—”
“Jesus,” I said—already assuming that Timothy had killed his wife, but the blunt image of his uncle’s farm still jolted me. Barns and sheds, maybe—decapitations and hands cleaved away, imagining what might be hidden in those fields. “Lydia Billingsley,” I said. “Timothy’s wife was named Lydia Billingsley. Her body was found in Louisiana. There are other women, too. Actually, I wanted to ask you about a specific young woman Timothy had a relationship with—”
“I’m sorry, Dominic,” she said. “I can’t help you with that—”
“Anything you know will help me. Anything you can tell me. I understand talking about Timothy will be difficult—I don’t want to take that for granted, but I believe he may have killed the young woman I’ve been researching—”
“Let her go,” said Albion.
“What?”
“Let her go,” she said. “The dead deserve their rest—”
—
My feet feel hammered flat from the walking I’ve done, blisters like water balloons between my toes. Starbucks for coffee and oatmeal—a window seat where I watch the traffic gather and clot as morning thickens into the rush hour commute. Click through offers for a free latte if I fill out a customer satisfaction questionnaire, but all I can think of is Albion and Waverly’s family and the desire to disappear. I need to think. Redraw my lines of inquiry into the death of Hannah Massey. Hourly forecasts, cloudless and radiant. Albion told me to let the dead rest and in the moment I assumed she meant Hannah Massey, but realize now she may have been referring to herself. I wick headlines from my line of sight—there’s a gas station across the way and sunlight glinting off windshields and chrome distracts me.
I notice the error message first—
Red text and a faint notification ping: identification failure.
The SFPD app I’ve left running in the background keys on a police officer at the pumps across the street but fails to identify him; 3× zoom, 9×—he’s wearing SWAT armor, without a helmet, an oily slick of hair and porcelain-fine features; 12× zoom—thin lips, like Timothy’s, and smallish eyes. I store his image. The app locks onto his badge number but again fails identification, reporting invalid as checked against the existing roll.
Call 911 for immediate confirmation?
What would happen if I called the cops on him? The car he’s filling is a San Francisco PD cruiser—steel cages over the fenders and slim-profile lights along the roof. Worst-case scenario: Waverly has police cooperation, they track my 911 call, flush me out, find Albion.
“Dismiss,” I tell it.
Fuck. I schedule an AutoCab pickup and receive a ping just a few minutes later when a cab pulls into the Starbucks lot. I nestle into the rear seat and decline when the cab prompts me to load my personal account.
“Cash,” I tell it, scrambling in my wallet for enough to cover the fare. I tell the cab the hotel address and decline options for a scenic route or self-guided city tour. A last glimpse through the rear window as the gas station recedes into the distance: he’s still at the pumps.
Call Albion.
Her avatar’s an image of a sparrow.
“Dominic?”
“You have to leave—you have to get out of your apartment right away. I’m in a cab right now on my way back to my hotel and I saw him, one of the men who killed Mook. I think it was one of them—”
“Slow down,” she says. “Tell me what’s happening—”
“There’s a Starbucks near your apartment, with a gas station across the street. A Shell, I think. I think I saw one of the men who killed Mook. Only one of them—dressed like a cop. I don’t know where the other two are. He’s right by your apartment, he might be coming for you. You have to leave. Now—”
“Dominic, are you safe?” she says.
“I’m okay,” I tell her. “I don’t think he saw me—”
“Go back to your hotel and wait there,” she says. “Call me when you get there. Be ready to leave. Lock the doors. Don’t open for anyone, do you understand?”
“You need to leave,” I tell her.
“I will,” she says. “What hotel are you staying in?”
I forward her the hotel’s address and she disconnects.
“Can I interest you in discount events at Candlestick Park?” says the cab.
“Cancel,” I tell it, but the voice drones on, BOGO deals and spa retreats for the women in my life, cycling through its litany of offers. I scan out the rear window and spot the police cruiser, a lane over and two cars behind. We turn the corner onto Oakdale Avenue, an open stretch of smooth concrete glaring in the harsh sun. Wide lanes lined by pastel houses and apartment buildings on either side, like art deco dyed for Easter. Trees dot each block, leafy puffs on thin trunks. The police cruiser’s immediately behind us, now, drawing closer. A siren squawk. It flashes its lights.
“Don’t pull over, for Christ’s sake, keep going,” but the cab says, “You are instructed to prepare your driver’s license and valid state ID. You are instructed to place your hands on the headrest in front of you—”
I try the door but the safety locks are engaged. Fuck, fuck. Squealing breaks as the cab pulls over through the bike lane to the curb.
“Cab, what’s the badge number and name of the officer who’s pulled us over?”
“Working . . . Working . . . Your patience is appreciated . . .”
“Cab, call 911. There’s an emergency. Call 911—”
“Great news!” says the cab. “The police are already on the scene!”
“Son of a bitch—”
The cruiser pulls behind us, about two car lengths away. There’s still only one officer, the one I
saw at the pumps.
Call Albion—but she’s not answering.
“No, no, no—”
Oakdale Avenue’s streaming with traffic, cars flashing past too fast to flag someone down from the backseat of the cab, although I try—but even cars that rubberneck are just blurs of color sweeping past. He could shoot me here—locked in the cab, he could shoot my brains all over the backseat. The officer waits for a slight gap in traffic before he steps from the cruiser. He makes his way toward me along the edge of the street.
“Call 911. Unlock the fucking doors. I want to talk to a fucking human. I want to speak with my account representative—”
“Holding . . .”
The cab’s front windows slide down. The officer leans in the driver’s side. Moussed strands of hair have come undone from the rest of his slick. He’s pale. His lips are bloodless. He’s chewing, or maybe just grinding his teeth, and for a moment I let myself wonder if he’s as nervous as I am.
“Are you John Blaxton?” he says, his voice silky with a southern accent, a little higher than I would have guessed.
“What do you want?”
“I think you and I have some things to discuss, don’t you?”
He’s not nervous at all—all that chewing must be some sort of restraint, or the anticipation of shredding me with his teeth.
“I don’t have anything to discuss with you,” I tell him, my life dwindling to a series of limited moves before an endgame. “I was working for a man named Timothy Reynolds,” I tell him. “If you need to discuss me or my work, you can talk with him—”
“Get out of the car, John,” he says, reaching inside the cab to override the locks. I know I’ll die, but even so I obey him, simply obey him—shifting my bulk across the backseat, conjuring enough nerve to spring from the opposite side of the cab, to put the car between us and break for the pastel houses, but I’m already jelly-kneed and know I couldn’t run. He could instruct me to fall to my knees so execution would be easier and I would obey, I would obey him—every clench of self-preservation already gone craven, paralyzed. Out of the car, I realize how tall he is—taller than me—wiry and athletic. He rests one hand on the handle of his nightstick.
“What do you want from me?” I ask him.
“Walk with me to the car,” he says. “Ride in back. I’ll be your chauffeur—”
The man’s hands are white, white like they’ve never felt the sun, with long fingers and distorted knuckles that look more like bony protuberances than proper knuckles—one hand rests on the nightstick, but he’s holding the other to his chest, drumming little rhythms against the smooth metal of his badge.
“What’s your name?” I ask him.
Along the edge of the street, not on the sidewalk. An intersection’s up ahead, but the traffic streaming past is heedless, the posted limit’s forty-five but these cars are blowing past that. I can smell the man’s aftershave or cologne—despite the breeze I can smell him and I wonder if this is what Mook smelled when he died.
“Did you kill Hannah Massey?” I ask him.
This draws a reaction—a puckish sneer like he’d cracked the vault of something sacred and defiled what he’d found. A little over 280 the last I weighed myself, but that was years ago when I was slimmer—I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds or more. Almost without thinking, certainly without considering many outcomes, I step into him—pushing with both hands and shouldering, leveraging my weight into a headlong thrust. He keeps his balance, but stumbles several feet into the nearest lane. I can’t tell the make of the car—but I’m sure the driver never sees this man suddenly in the street. Driving into the glare of the sun. There isn’t a shriek of breaks or even tires squealing away in a tight swerve, only the plastic crunch of the car striking him, the fender cutting him at the knees and plowing through his leg and hip. The man pinwheels onto the hood, back bouncing against the front windshield and buckling the safety glass. His body flips away from the car and straddles the center lane. The car slides to a stop. Other cars stop. Distant horns. Someone screams. The man isn’t dead—I can’t tell how injured he is, but he isn’t dead. He’s already on his hands and knees, spitting blood and vomiting. I run.
Across four lanes, through the intersection—between houses, cutting across lawns, odd artificial patches of neon grass. I slip to my knees. I collapse. Facedown in the cool grass. What have I done? God, I killed him, I tried to kill him. Sirens, approaching sirens. Fear paralyzed, winded: the man’s body buckling the windshield, all that blood splashing from his mouth. Fuck, fuck. One knee at a time. I stand. I stand and run. Onto another street, a cross street. Sides stitched, cramping, so I walk as fast as I can, stitches of pain coursing through my chest, my arms. A bus approaching. Is this a heart attack? I lift my arm at the corner and the bus pulls over, the door folds open.
“Hey, mister—Are you okay?”
I collapse into a front seat, searching my pockets for bills to pay the fare—the bus already pulling away from the stop, turning a corner. The air-conditioning’s like a frigid suffocation. I can’t catch my breath. I don’t know where I am, where I’m going—focal points on my Adware disoriented, useless. Two bills to pay the meter. A police car screams past in the opposite direction. A woman across from me holds her groceries to her chest like she thinks I’ll steal them. I’m trying to catch my breath.
“Are you all right?” says the driver. “Do you need a doctor or something?”
“I’m good,” I tell him. “Just a few blocks. I’m okay—”
They must think I’m having an aneurysm—fat drops of sweat roll off my face. I settle in, slump, I tried to kill him, headlines scroll but I’m too agitated to read, TMZ’s going viral with a vid of a girl who’s lit herself on fire—suicide-dare.com. The girl douses herself with lighter fluid like she’s at a wet T-shirt contest; she lights a match. The video’s playing out, millions of hits—she ignites in a blue flash, then runs screaming around her bedroom, bouncing against the walls, burning alive. Someone’s overlaid 8-bit Nintendo music over the vid and it’s like she’s writhing to the music. #SuicideDare trends in the global feeds. Coupons for Dunkin’ Donuts, coupons for McDonald’s. I try to call Albion again, but she’s still not answering.
I don’t know where I am. I hop off the bus after twenty minutes and request an AutoCab pickup. It’s a different cab from the one I’d had before so I have to decline the chorus of offers as I ride. Apartments and strip malls, gas stations and traffic. I ask the cab to pull over across the street from my hotel and approach around back—no police cars, nothing unusual. I keep the lights off in my room, calling Albion while I pack, rolling up my Steelers hoodie and sweats, changing into my Adidas. I pack up my new books and Albion’s artwork.
She calls.
“Dominic? Where are you?”
“At my hotel. Are you all right? I’ve been calling you—”
“Look for a green Prius. It’s light green, almost silver—”
I find her in the lot, idling near the entrance. The backseat and rear hatch of the Prius are filled with suitcases and garbage bags stuffed full. She must have been packing when I tried to call, taking whatever she could gather in just a couple of trips, leaving everything else behind. She rolls down the window and says, “Get in—”
Awkward, my suitcase between my legs, my knees splayed out so I have to cringe to the side in order for Albion to shift gears—she drives fast, rolling through stop signs and pushing intersections, rarely stopping. Her posture’s prim, her hands kept at 10 and 2—she leans forward, scanning the traffic for spaces to slip through, aggressive. I hold my hand to the dash and see my fingers still shaking—I can’t quite calm down.
“I tried to kill one of them,” I tell her. “I pushed him—he was hit by a car. I can’t believe, I, almost I—”
“Who was it?” she asks. “What did he look like?”
“A young guy,”
I tell her, flashing the image I captured. “He looked like a stoat. Pale—”
“Rory,” she says. “Did you kill him? Is he dead?”
“No, I don’t think so—”
Albion cries as we cross the Golden Gate Bridge—a self-controlled sobbing that amounts to little more than tears in rivulets down her otherwise stoic face. Hallucinatory women float like angels in the Adware, singing daily deals and half off admission to tourist traps. Auto-Toll with Adware registration but Albion waits in line to pay with cash, paranoid our connection might have been hacked. I stare out over the bay, at the white flecks of sailboats and gulls against the expanse of impossibly blue water, the phantom weight of the man’s body against my palms as if I’m still pushing him—He’s not dead, I tell myself, it’s all right, he’s not dead. I haven’t killed anybody.
“We wasted too much time,” says Albion, panic edging her voice. “We should have left hours ago. We should have left the moment you found me—”
She has a checklist for disappearance—her first few steps scripted years in advance. Up 101, distant folds of mountains and grass verges and overpasses, medians lined with skinny pines. She pulls over at a McDonald’s in Novato, one she’d picked out because the parking lot’s hidden from view of the road, transferring her checking and savings into a floating account. She stops again just outside of Santa Rosa at a place called Good Stuff Auto and trades her Prius for a used Outback and five thousand in cash—she’s bilked on the deal, but adamant that the Outback is featureless, no GPS, no OnStar, Adware hookups only to the stereo, no other account access. She signs her papers using a Washington state ID that lists her name as Rose Callahan. The salesman knows the ID’s bullshit, but he’s happy to deal—even helping us repack our luggage in the new car before counting out a hundred crisp fifty-dollar bills. We grab burritos from a roadside grill before backtracking south down 101.
“Now tell me who you are,” she says. “I need to know why you’re here, how you found me—”
Tomorrow and Tomorrow Page 24