Edge of the Heat 5

by Lisa Ladew

  “It could work. We’ll need an awful lot of luck and some divine help. If you’re a praying man, you better start praying.”

  Jerry nodded. He wasn’t a praying man, but he was going to start right now.

  “And we somehow have to get in contact with them, without tipping off Thorpe. That means we can’t call their phones. We can’t send them anything in the mail. We can’t tweet them or facebook them. And we can’t go to Westwood Harbor.”

  Jerry lapsed into silence. He didn’t need Sara to spell it out for him that their options were now exactly zero.

  “They aren’t in Westwood Harbor anyway. They are on their honeymoon. Both of them,” he said grumpily.

  “That might make things easier then. We could call their hotel. I’m sure Thorpe has computers monitoring the network, so we’d have to be careful what we say, but as long as we don’t say any triggering words, there would be no reason for our conversation to be picked out of the other millions. Do you know what hotel they are staying in?”

  Jerry thought hard. “Not Hawk and Vivian I don’t, but Emma told me what hotel she was staying in. I just can’t think of it right now. It’ll come to me.”

  “OK.” They lapsed into a short silence, their footsteps beating a metronome across the desert floor.

  “Money. We’re going to need money, too. A lot of money,” Jerry said, thinking out loud.

  “Don’t worry about money. I’ve got money,” Sara said.

  “I know you have money, but where is it? Neither one of us has an ATM card or even an ID. Or do you have an ATM card?” He looked suddenly hopeful.

  Sara shook her head. “I don’t have an ATM card either.” She pulled a small wad of bills out of her pocket. “I took this off Brian at the house. It’s not much but we’ll be able to pick up a few things as soon as we get into the city.”

  “But we are going to need tens of thousands of dollars!”

  Sara looked thoughtful. “Maybe. Maybe not. You let me worry about that.”

  “What about the guns? It’s going to be impossible to lay our hands on that many illegal guns in a few days, isn’t it?”

  Sara grinned. “We won’t need as many as you think. And I know how to find what we do need.”

  The moon smiled down on their journey. Jerry let his mind wander, hoping the name of the hotel would come to him.

  “Jerry, do you think there’s any chance that your friends would have realized something happened to you and are searching for you already?” Sara turned to him questioningly.

  Jerry snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “I never even thought of that! I bet they have! After they left on their honeymoon I was talking to Craig every day on the phone, asking for advice. He’s the one who told me to go to Vegas. And earlier when I talked to Emma she said ‘I’ll call you tomorrow’ but I haven’t seen my phone since you - well since you drugged me. It’s been what? 5 days?”

  Sara’s cheeks flamed red. She dropped her eyes.

  “Hey, it’s OK, Sara. I’m not upset about it or anything. Why did you do that anyway? We never did talk about it.”

  “Because I thought you were agency. You were carrying a gun.”

  “You thought I was with the DCIA?”

  “Yes. Or with somebody who was looking for me. I thought you were suspicious of who I really was and you were trying to flush me out.”

  “But if I were agency, wouldn’t I just know who you were?”

  “Not necessarily. I’ve had plastic surgery. I don’t look exactly like I used to.”

  Jerry studied her, trying to see the signs. He couldn’t. She looked as pretty and as untouched as a secret meadow. Another piece in the puzzle that was her fell into place though.

  Sara pushed past the subject. “Do you think they would fly home if they were worried enough about you?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “And Craig told you to go to Las Vegas? Would they come to Vegas and look for you?”

  Jerry turned his mind back to that last conversation with Craig. Had Craig told him to go to Vegas? No. Craig had just told him to take a vacation.

  “I don’t think Craig knows where I am. He told me to take a vacation and I said that sounded like a good idea.”

  “OK. I don’t know if that complicates us or helps us, honestly. Although it probably complicates things immensely. Too bad you weren’t on closer work terms with those two. They probably have a secret way of contacting each other in case things go badly.”

  Jerry’s brain felt like it had been kicked over. He had to struggle to get it righted again. Secret way to contact each other? There was a way wasn’t there? What was it? Hawk had used it when he had been forced on the run, trying to avoid getting fired and arrested by that senator … he and Vivian had fled into the mountains with only the clothes on their backs. There were phones and … and. It came to him like a brick slamming though his thoughts, breaking them all off at the knees.

  “They do have a secret way to contact each other! There’s an image sharing website. Imagers or something. They post a picture of - a picture of their headquarters maybe? And in the comments they tell each other what they want to know. Once the message is gotten, they delete the image.”

  Sara’s eyes lit up. “It’s perfect. And if they’re any good at all, they’ll check it for a message from you! They’ll know it’s a long shot but once they find your trail dry up at the hotel they’ll know long shots are all they have.”

  Jerry shot her a confused look. “My trail dry up at the hotel?”

  “Yeah, hear me out. So they are looking for you right. Somehow they figure out you’ve gone to Vegas, you were going next week anyway, right?”

  Jerry nodded. It was more like two weeks away, but that wasn’t important.

  “So they start searching for you in Vegas. Emma probably knows what hotels you like right?” She stopped long enough to see Jerry nod again. “So they check those hotels. They find out that you were in room so and so, but on Thursday that room was destroyed in a police search. So they request the police records. The police records say the room was raided by the FBI or the DEA and the police were just there as support. The DCIA always calls in a local police team as support. If they don’t have at least a few uniforms with them everything is more difficult and sometimes they even get into standoffs with local police. In your case, the police records would show one male suspect and one female suspect recovered from the room, with custody retained by the DEA, or whoever they were masquerading as. So then your friends will call the DEA, wanting to know who and where the suspects are. The DEA report might say ‘being detained for questioning at the federal penitentiary’ but when your friends call there, we won’t ever have come in and we won’t be there. So they’ll start to get suspicious. Most people would never get that far. But your friends are FBI. They know how things work. And they’ll know that real DEA agents don’t just disappear with their suspects. They’ll follow the trail till it ends in absolute mid-air and then they’ll be suspicious as hell. They might start to raise hell, which will be bad for them and good for them at the same time. Bad because it gets them on Thorpe’s radar, but good because obviously they don’t know where you are. But like I said, if they’re good,” she shot him a searching look, “they’ll exhaust every single option. And that means watching this image website that you just may have overheard them talking about for messages from you.”

  Jerry turned this over in his mind. He knew Craig and Hawk weren’t just good. They were amazing. And together as a team they thought of everything. He nodded to himself. It was perfect. And it was going to work. Then his mind caught on something.

  “Wait, if the DCIA guys were just pretending to be DEA, how would there be a DEA report at all?”

  Sara sighed. “That’s another messed up thing about the DCIA, they have sham agents everywhere. The DCIA isn’t supposed to exist, but we all pulled a paycheck from the government. So the agents are placed inside other government agencies and given liaison jobs
that keep them out of their home offices all but one or two days a year. They would just tap a sham agent and use that agent’s name/credentials to make everything look legit.”

  Sudden weariness crashed into Jerry. He gave a low whistle. “Our government really pulls some convoluted crap in the name of freedom, don’t they?”

  Sara barked out a harsh, surprised laugh. “They do.”

  She shot him a smiling look he couldn’t quite read, then grasped his hand. Jerry smiled back, his heart trying to jump out of his chest, his weariness forgotten. I’d die for that smile, he thought. You may just get a chance to prove that, his mind fired back at itself. Bring it, he thought as he turned his face to the moonlight.

  Chapter 34

  Sara pulled Jerry under the overpass. “There’s a Walgreen’s that way.” She pointed.

  Jerry shaded his eyes against the morning sun. Her eyes must be amazing, because he didn’t see a Walgreen’s. But he believed her.

  “Drop your pack here. We don’t want to look like vagrants. We don’t need the police to stop us or even give us a second look. When we get closer in to the city, there are going to be cameras everywhere. We’ll get hats, but still you want to keep your eyes on the ground as much as possible, that way no camera can catch your face.”

  Jerry dropped his pack, trying to think if there was anything in there he needed. No. All of it was scavenged from the house. None of it belonged to him. He didn’t want anything to do with any of it. Except the aid bag. Jerry dropped to his knees and pulled the military aid bag out. “I’m bringing this.”

  She glanced at it then nodded. It was worth the risk, besides it was cleaner and smaller than their packs.

  She pulled the two guns they had taken from the house out of her bag. She looked down at her clothing. It was filthy and torn. Neither of them had any sort of a holster. Jerry’s boots were in good shape but not big enough to hold either of these guns.

  “We’ll have to put the guns in the bag.”

  Jerry nodded and opened it. Sara found pockets to stow both guns in, then practiced pulling each out of the pack a few times quickly, without getting it hung up on anything. Jerry watched her intently. She nodded to him. “Now you try. Start with the bag zipped. Get a feel for what could possibly hang you up if you need to get to a gun fast. Jerry did, unzipping the bag and pulling each gun out quickly until he felt he could do it under pressure with no slip ups. As soon as he was done, though, he prayed that he didn’t have to shoot anyone today or ever.

  Jerry shouldered the bag and they headed towards the Walgreen’s. Inside, they bought a cell phone with points and a data plan, plus two hats. They needed clothes and food but Sara wanted to save as much money as possible for a cheap motel room.

  An hour later, they had found a motel that they had enough cash for, plus the man behind the counter just winked at Sara when she said she didn’t have any ID.

  As they entered the room, Sara was reminded forcefully of Manny. She bit back a grimace and swallowed the memory. At the time, it had seemed her only option if she wanted to save Jessica and Zoey. She glanced at Jerry’s handsome face and wondered what he would think of it. He seemed to have forgiven, or at least come to terms with the killing she had done under the auspice of the DCIA and its missions, but what about this thing she had done with no one’s approval but her own? What would he think of that?

  Jerry took their bags to the desk and started opening and setting up the phone. Sara locked the door and drew the curtains, her heart suddenly pregnant with guilt. If only she had found Jerry the day before her last meeting with Manny. Maybe she would have done something different. Zoey’s little face swam in front of her eyes. And then baby Zoey would have grown up in that mess. Maybe been used as a pawn to get her mother to do things she didn’t want to do. Maybe worse. Could she trade Zoey’s actual life for her own potential life as a normal person?

  Sara bit her lip. She knew she couldn’t. And one epiphany locked into place for her. No matter what happened, she would never be normal. Even if they managed to make it through this mess alive and out of jail, the house, the husband, the normal life were never going to happen for her. What was that saying? You can’t turn a killer into a housewife? Something like that.

  She looked longingly at Jerry, then mentally shook her head. They had at least a few days before they implemented his plan. She would make it be worth a lifetime.

  ***

  Jerry turned to her, his face triumphant. “We’re online!” He turned back to the phone and searched for the image sharing website. “This is it - I’ve found it!” He clicked on ‘register’. “What should our name be?”

  “How about ‘LostOneWH’,” Sara said.

  “Perfect.” Jerry registered then scrolled to user submitted. “I’m not sure what kind of a picture to upload. I thought it was a picture of their headquarters when Hawk went on the run, but that doesn’t seem right to me. I think it was actually something else. Besides, we don’t have a picture of their headquarters.”

  He glanced through the hundreds of pictures then set the phone on the desk and looked at Sara.

  “Something that will catch their eye, and remind them of you. Maybe a picture of an ambulance? Or the Westwood Harbor fire station?”

  “Yeah, that’s worth a try. Or just a picture of me?”

  Sara thought about it for a second. “No, that would be too risky. The NSA runs facial recognition software all day every day on the Internet. If someone in the DCIA was using that software we could get ourselves caught pretty quickly.”

  Sara picked up the phone. “We can upload more than one picture, right? Let’s make a list.”

  Jerry grabbed a pad and pen and wrote down what they had so far. Sara scrolled through the hundreds of pictures users had submitted and read a few titles to get a feel for what the website was all about.

  A picture of a firefighter in full turnout gear caught her eye. She read the title California Fireman Missing. She tapped the picture, her heartbeat suddenly drowning out the noises of the motel. Only one comment. Cali ff missing. Please call bff.

  “Jerry,” she said, turning the phone to him. “What do you think of this?” He studied it, his brow furrowed.

  Finally he looked up. “It couldn’t be, could it?”

  She nodded. “It could be. Let’s comment.”

  “OK, and say what?” he said, his finger poised over the tiny keyboard.

  “Say ‘ff fine. Needs help.’

  Jerry typed it in and held his breath as he pushed save. He watched the small screen, tongue clenched between his teeth. Nothing happened.

  “Give them some time to see it,” Sara advised. She plucked at her shirt. “I really want a shower, but I don’t want to put dirty clothes back on.”

  “I saw washing machines at the end of the hall.”

  “Yeah, it just would take so long to wash and dry our clothes,” Sara said wistfully. “What if they reply?”

  Jerry looked down at the phone. “They did.” Sara crowded close. The two-word reply said ‘Can call?’

  ‘No.’ Jerry typed.

  ‘Can meet in LV?’ came the reply, a tense moment later.

  “They’re here!” Jerry yelled, exuberant.

  “Maybe.” Sara’s eyes narrowed. Her instincts weren’t telling her that this was a setup— but she was careful by nature.

  Type in ‘East Apple Park.’ That’s the park we walked past. They could meet us there.” Sara’s eyes turned dark. “And if it’s not your friends, we’ll see them before they see us.”

  The reply came: ‘35 minutes.’

  Sara took the phone and typed in two more words. ‘Delete this.’

  ***

  They left immediately. Sara wanted to find a vantage point from which to watch the park. They were there in 10 minutes and Sara found a hotel across from the park with a second floor balcony. She looked down at herself, then at Jerry. “If I walk in there they’ll throw me out in a heartbeat. You at least look like you
could be a construction worker. I’ll watch from that cafe there,” she pointed down the street, “and you watch from the balcony. Make sure you can’t be easily seen from the park. Watch for your friends, but stay alert for anything else too. If you see adults climbing trees or more than one parked car with people sitting in it, come down and get me quick.”

  Sara kissed him quickly on the corner of the mouth and watched him go, her heart heavy with the knowledge that soon they would say goodbye for the last time.

  She walked to the cafe and chose a table outside, facing the park. When the waiter came, wrinkling his nose at her, she ordered an iced tea and a danish and put the last of their money down. If it wasn’t Craig or Hawk coming, they would have to resort to stealing. If we make it out of here at all, she thought sourly.

  The danish woke more hunger in her than it satisfied. The iced tea, similarly, seemed to activate some primal need for fluids that she hadn’t realized was lurking. She ate them both as slowly as possible, sweeping her eyes across the park. Cars pulled in to the parking lot, but she couldn’t see who got out. Nothing looked out of the ordinary to her. Her intuition was still silent.

  Heavy footsteps pounded the pavement near her. It was someone running. She tensed, ready to run herself.

  It was Jerry. “It’s them. I saw Emma and I saw Craig, come on!”

  He didn’t stop for her, just veered across the street, barely looking both ways. Sara followed at a walk, suddenly aware that she was quite scared. Not scared because Jerry’s friends were dangerous to her, but nervous because of what she’d gotten him involved in. If they didn’t hate her now, they were going to hate her soon.

  In the parking lot, next to a small blue sedan, Jerry hugged Emma tight, picking her up off her feet. Craig stood by, a companionable hand on Jerry’s back. His eyes narrowed in suspicion when he saw her. Oh great, here we go, she thought.

  Jerry broke free from Emma and hugged Craig, forcing him to take a step backwards with his exuberance. Emma smiled at both of them and couldn’t seem to stop touching Jerry. “I was so worried about you Jerry,” she was saying. “When we couldn’t find you I even had nightmares that you were dead. It was so scary.”