“What?”
He held the phone in front of Khan’s face. “I said, is this you? Because it sure looks like you.”
Khan squinted at the phone, but he couldn’t make out any details on the screen. “I have no idea what you’re showing me, but please get out of my way.”
“Until the police get here, you’re not going anywhere,” the man said.
“Police? What are you talking about? I’m going home now.”
Khan shook off the man’s grip and marched toward his cab, but before he got there, a heavy impact in the small of his back knocked him off his feet. The coconut bag flew from his hand. He hit the wet pavement, and the air burst from his lungs, leaving him gasping for breath. The fat man landed on top of him, pinning him to the ground.
Struggling, Khan elbowed the man above him and managed to squirm free, but the man hammered a fleshy fist down into Khan’s chin. Khan’s cheekbone struck the pavement, and the impact rattled around his head. He crawled away, but the man jumped on him again, and they grappled like wrestlers through the puddles of the parking lot.
He heard people nearby.
Someone shouted, “That’s him! That’s the guy!”
The two of them fought their way back to their feet beside Khan’s cab. Another thick fist landed in Khan’s face; his head snapped back. He lost his balance and grabbed for the man’s jacket to steady himself, and something spilled from the man’s pocket with a metallic clatter. He saw what it was, and he heard screams.
“A gun!”
“He’s got a gun!”
It’s not mine! Khan wanted to shout.
The man punched him hard in the chest, and Khan staggered back, colliding with the door of his cab. He saw the man squatting to retrieve the gun, and Khan took a step and shoved the man with all his strength. The stranger fell flush on his back, where his skull cracked against the asphalt. Khan kicked the gun under his cab, and then he ripped open the door and turned on the engine. Around him, people yelled and pointed and shouted for help.
The cab jerked forward. All he could think of was to get away. To go home. To see Ahdia. To see Pak. To find out why this nightmare was happening and put a stop to it. But he was trapped. Above the thunder of the rain, he heard a siren, and a police vehicle screamed from the north, cutting off the road that led home. He couldn’t go that way. Instead, Khan turned left, away from his house, away from his wife and child. He glued his eyes to the mirror and watched the police car swerve into the parking lot of the grocery store behind him.
Then he sped around the curve, and he couldn’t see anything more.
He drove, but he didn’t know where to go.
19
Gayle Durkin spent an awkward hour with her parents at the home near Amity Park where she’d grown up. Some families grew closer after tragedy; some built walls. She loved her parents, but after her brother’s death in Paris, she didn’t know what to say to them. Being in the old house, which they’d kept as a shrine to Ron, made it worse. As soon as she got there, she wanted to leave.
She kept seeing things the way they used to be. She remembered the Christmas tree in the corner of the living room, where she and Ron had opened their gifts. The backyard swing set was still in the yard, where she’d pushed him as a toddler. Her matchbox bedroom was where she’d pounded on the wall to complain about Ron’s bad guitar-playing. Right now, the volume of her memories was even louder than that awful guitar.
The report about Khan Rashid gave her a reason to escape. She kissed her parents and said she’d see them soon, which was a lie. When she headed out on the lonely stretch of Jean Duluth Road, she found herself torn between emptiness and anger. The Islamist terrorists had taken away more than her brother. They’d moved into her family home like monsters hiding in the coat closet.
Pulses of rain surged across the highway. It was nearly dark. She didn’t see another vehicle ahead or behind. Birches and fir trees lined both sides of the road, with only an occasional house carved out of the woods. She drove fast; she always drove fast. Her tires skidded where the water pooled. She wanted to get back to work, because work was the only thing that made sense.
She remembered Khan Rashid’s face, which bore all the tells of a liar. The nervousness. The fear. She wasn’t surprised to learn that he’d been spotted in Canal Park moments before the explosion, even though he’d claimed he wasn’t there. He was a typical terrorist coward, planting the bomb and running away. At least the bomber who killed Ron in Paris had done the world by a favor by blowing himself up, too.
Gayle had barely driven a mile when the report reached her that Rashid had been spotted at the Woodland Market. Adrenaline made her fists tighten on the wheel. She knew exactly where that was; her parents shopped there. Just ahead of her, Jean Duluth Road became Snively Road, and if she turned right at Woodland Avenue, she’d reach the grocery store in five minutes. Police were incoming. She accelerated to join them. She wanted to be there when they took Rashid down.
When she crossed over Amity Creek, where she’d hiked a hundred times as a teenager, she heard the next update. Witnesses at the scene had reported seeing a gun during a violent altercation at the market.
“Rashid should be considered armed and dangerous. Use extreme caution.”
Gayle went faster, which wasn’t safe in the rain, but she didn’t care. She sped around a broad curve, and she was almost back in the heart of the city. Her sixth sense tingled. Every investigator knew that feeling, when something was about to happen. She was in the right place at the right time.
Headlights loomed ahead of her, and she knew. The car flashed by her in an instant, but she caught the streak of yellow in the rainy glow of her headlights. It was a yellow cab. It was Rashid. She shoved her brakes hard and spun the wheel, but she was going too fast. Her car did a 360 once, then twice, and she finally slid to a stop on the shoulder, pointed north.
She grabbed her radio and reported Rashid’s position.
Then she chased the taillights of the cab.
***
Khan’s first thought was to seek protection at the Muslim center near UMD, where he knew many of the students and faculty from the local mosque. Someone would know what was going on. Someone could help him convince the police that he’d done nothing wrong. However, when he stopped at the red light on Woodland at the intersection of Snively Road, he saw the whirling glow of police lights heading directly toward him. His cab was impossible to miss.
He ignored the red light and made a sharp left, heading along a high ridge. If he went far enough on the country highway, he knew a back road that would cut through the woods and take him to the city just north of his house. He could get home to Ahdia and Pak.
And then what? He didn’t know.
Khan found a news station on the radio, and he caught the announcer in mid-sentence: “. . . still don’t know whether the man in the photograph that has gone viral really has any connection to the bombing. We’ve had no confirmation from the FBI that this man is a person of interest, but that hasn’t stopped activists like Dawn Basch from declaring that the bomber has been found.”
His heart sank.
He knew what had happened: He was the man. He was the suspect. Khan thought about the fat man in the parking lot at the store, shoving a photograph on a phone screen in his face: “Is this you? Because it sure looks like you.”
Oh, Ahdia, Ahdia, what have I done? They’re going to kill me. When they find me, I’m dead.
He sped through the rain. Gauzy lights shined from houses on his left and in the valley to his right. People were home with their families, living quiet lives, which was all he’d ever wanted for himself. He tried to think about what to do. Where to go. Confusion and panic filled his mind.
For nearly a mile, he had the road to himself, but then another car passed him like a rocket flying in the opposite direction. Through the thunder of the rain, Khan heard the squeal of brakes. In his mirror, he saw headlights going around and around as the other
car spun. He didn’t need to ask what would happen next; the car came after him. Word had spread.
Look for the yellow cab.
Look for the bomber.
Khan made an immediate left turn from the highway. He found himself on a suburban street, and he drove fast with one eye on the mirror. Trees and lawns whipped by on both sides. He didn’t see the other vehicle behind him yet. He drove four blocks, squinting to see past the end of his headlights, and he almost piled into a tree ahead of him as the road split. He jerked the wheel right. The asphalt vanished and became a dirt road. The ruts and mud made the vehicle vibrate like a roller-coaster.
He kept looking behind him. One block. Two blocks. Three blocks, deeper into the woods.
No lights.
Ahead of him, the road ended in a T. He was going too fast to stop. His tires clawed at the wet dirt, and the cab shimmied, riding up a short slope and crashing into a metal fence, which caved beneath it. He jerked into reverse and hit the accelerator, but the cab rocked and refused to move. The mesh of the fence trapped the car like a net.
Khan tried to open the door and couldn’t; it was blocked shut. He rolled down the window and slithered through the small opening. Where he landed, sharp prongs from the broken fence tore his skin and drew blood. He had no idea where he was. The dirt road continued westward but dead-ended in the other direction. Behind him, on the other side of the fence, was a long stretch of darkness. Low-hanging fir branches blew in his face, and the storm pelted him.
Half a mile away, down the original stretch of the dirt road, he saw headlights getting larger and closer. The roar of an engine rose above the rain.
The car was coming for him. He was trapped.
Khan stood by his cab, paralyzed. He had to move. He clambered onto the hood of the cab and jumped over the fence into the weeds and flowers on the other side. Getting up, he ducked past the arms of the evergreens and started to run. Spongy wet grass sank under his feet. Rain blew into his face.
Lightning split the sky, turning night into day.
He was in a large cemetery, and he sprinted through rows of tombstones.
20
Officer Dennis Kenzie heard the radio update from the FBI agent who was on the trail of Khan Rashid.
“Suspect is on foot, heading west through Park Hill Cemetery. Requesting backup at this location.”
Kenzie, who’d been heading toward the Woodland Market in response to multiple 911 calls, brought his cruiser to an immediate stop. He’d just passed the entrance road leading into Forest Hill Cemetery, which butted up against Park Hill on the west, making one of the largest graveyards in the city. He did a quick U-turn, turned off his siren and lights, and headed silently up the entrance road into Forest Hill.
If Rashid was heading west with Special Agent Durkin in pursuit, Kenzie was perfectly positioned to intercept Rashid by heading east.
He called in his plan and got out of his cruiser into the rain.
Kenzie was young and single, twenty-four years old, with the beefy build of a high school football player and a fuzz of Nordic blond hair on his square head. He’d joined the Duluth Police only six months earlier. He was a Bemidji boy, growing up in the shadow of the town’s Paul Bunyan statue, and he’d gotten his criminal justice degree at Bemidji State. But his hometown wasn’t hiring peace officers, and Duluth was. Out of a hundred applicants, he was one of only four officers hired that winter.
In six months, he’d issued hundreds of citations for everything from speeding to indecent exposure. He’d intervened in domestic disturbances. He’d arrested a drug dealer outside the Seaway Hotel. He’d rescued an injured eagle on the Lester Park Golf Course and arranged its transport and rehabilitation through the local Wildwoods organization.
One thing he’d never done was draw his weapon.
Until now.
The grip of his gun was wet, and so was his hand, but he clutched the weapon tightly and kept it pointed at the ground.
“Assume that Rashid is armed and dangerous. Use extreme caution.”
In a flash of lightning, Kenzie saw the cemetery spread out in front of him. Graves climbed the hillside in terraced rows among the evergreen trees. He jogged up a narrow asphalt path and made his way past crypts that surveyed the valley like a series of royal thrones. He kept wiping rain from his eyes with his free hand. With each lightning strike, he looked for the silhouette of Khan Rashid, but the gravestones, the evergreens, and the summer trees offered cover everywhere for someone who wanted to hide.
When he stopped to listen, he heard a drumbeat of thunder and the slap of the downpour through the trees. The volume of the storm drowned out everything else.
Kenzie was scared. People thought cops weren’t bothered by fear, but that was crazy. If you were a human being running into danger, you got scared, and the only thing you could do was live with it and not let it stop you. He was still learning that trick. He could feel the speed of his heartbeat; he could feel a tremble in his muscles that he tried to quiet. He told himself: Don’t stop. Stay focused.
He slowed to a walk in the northeastern corner of the cemetery. His tree-trunk body shuddered in the wind. Lightning was his only light. Otherwise, the night was black. He left the path and marched onto the sodden grass, past dozens of marble stones. His boots sank into the ground with each step. Low branches from the evergreens brushed his hair.
Blackness. Nothing but blackness.
Then lightning sizzled practically over his head, followed immediately by deafening thunder that shook the ground and made him twitch. He heard a crack, and close by, he smelled burnt wood. He was momentarily blinded, but in a split second, he saw the landscape of the cemetery spread out in front of him. He saw the chain-link fence that marked the eastern border of Forest Hill, and beyond it, the dirt road that split the graveyards in two.
The lightning vanished, the rain poured down his face, but he blinked and saw something else, too.
Not even thirty yards away, a man was running directly at him.
* * *
Behind him, Khan saw a flashlight sweeping back and forth across the cemetery. Whoever was chasing him was on foot now, pursuing him among the headstones. He ran, but between the lightning strikes, he found it almost impossible to dodge the nearly invisible tombstones in his way. His clothes were soaked. His ankle was twisted. He pushed water from his glasses with his thumbs, but the world was a blur.
He heard a shout, but in the storm, he couldn’t make out the words.
Ahead of him, he stumbled up to a fence on the border of the graveyard. The mesh of the fence was low but slippery, and the top was unfinished, with sharp barbs twisted into forks. He tried to kick it down with his shoe, but the fence didn’t yield. The stone support pillars were too small to give him any leverage, so he backed up and charged the fence and threw himself over. His feet slipped in the tall grass as he left the ground. The claws of the fence-top raked his arm and tore his shirt, and he fell, bleeding, into the weeds on the other side. He pushed himself up and staggered into the middle of a dirt road.
Run.
Khan limped along the road, but he hadn’t gone twenty feet before he saw headlights beyond the curve and heard the whine of sirens. Turning back, he saw flashing red lights from the other end of the road, too. They were coming for him from both sides.
He thought about giving up. He stood, frozen, waiting for them to find him; then he panicked.
They’ll shoot me.
If he stayed there, he was dead.
He ran for the fence on the opposite shoulder. He pushed himself up and over, and he picked himself off the ground and ran again, into the heart of another graveyard. He made it to the nearest headstone and stopped, catching his breath. The police were closing in. The flashlight behind him looked like the searchlight of a prison.
Khan sucked air into his chest and charged forward.
Lightning cracked, as bright as the sun. Thunder exploded like a bomb. He covered his face, but he didn’t st
op running.
In front of him, someone bellowed a warning.
“Freeze! Police! Khan Rashid, put your hands in the air!”
Startled, Khan put a foot wrong and spilled forward. His body sprawled into the mud, and he landed hard on his shoulder. His head struck the earth; his glasses flew from his face. He crawled, his body sheltered by the headstones. His hands pawed the earth, hunting for his glasses. Without them, he was blind.
He heard the police officer in front of him shout again.
“On your feet right now! Hands in the air!”
Khan’s fingers brushed against stiff plastic stuck in the grass. His glasses. He grabbed them by the temple, where they dangled from his right hand. He pushed himself up from the ground, his feet slipping. He stood there, wet and cold, with nowhere to run. The night was black, and he couldn’t see a thing.
Lightning.
Lightning erupted again, and he saw the blurry shape of a police officer not far away. By instinct, Khan went to put his glasses on. The frames glinted silver in the on-and-off illumination of lightning. His right hand moved higher.
And then he heard a shout. A female voice screamed from the fence behind him.
“Gun! He has a gun!”
Khan saw a pinpoint flame. The police officer in front of him fired.
* * *
Gayle Durkin leaped the first fence with the ease of a runner, and she was at the second fence leading into Forest Hill Cemetery when she heard the shout of a police officer, and she saw Khan spill to the ground. The police officer shouted again, and Durkin saw Khan scuttling in the grass like a crab.
Looking for something.
Something he grabbed. Something in his hand.
Everything happened at once. It was chaos. Police cars roared in from the left and right, sirens blaring, lights making a kaleidoscope on the dirt road. Lightning, like a comet, dazzled her. Thunder cracked like dynamite. She squinted through the pouring rain, seeing Khan standing up. A flash of silver glittered in his right hand. She saw his hand moving. Coming up. Pointing.
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