Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  She raised her eyebrows. “If you’ll recall,” she said, “that was a movie.”

  “That was a documentary from the future,” said Peter. “I’m extremely concerned about the robot uprising. Those little self-directed vacuum cleaners are only the first wave.”

  “You’re worse than my crazy dad.”

  She’d mentioned him before. “Where does he live?”

  June looked away. “Up in the mountains,” she said. “He’s kind of a hermit.”

  “So he’s not in the picture, with your mom.”

  “God no,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in years.” She looked at her half-eaten burrito. “This is really good, but it’s cold already.”

  She was clearly uncomfortable with the topic of her dad. Although why did she keep bringing him up? Peter let it go for the moment.

  “Me too,” he said. “I’m freezing my ass off.”

  “So here’s the plan,” said June. “We need some clothes, and we need a hotel room.”

  “We should keep moving,” said Peter. “More distance is better.”

  “I thought I was the boss,” she said.

  “You most definitely are the boss,” he said. “But I’m your highly paid security consultant.”

  “Hmph,” she said. “I stink. I need a shower. And so do you, mountain man. I can smell you from here. Consult on that.”

  Peter sighed. She wasn’t wrong. “Yes, ma’am. But cash only. They might follow a credit card trail.”

  She gave him a look. How dumb did he think she was?

  She directed him to a big store that sold outdoor equipment and clothes, asked for his sizes, and peeled off a wad of bills from their supply. With the mechanic’s money and the cash from the dead men’s wallets, they had about thirty-two hundred dollars to work with. After basic necessities, it was enough for a few days, but no more. While June shopped for clothes, Peter went looking for a pair of prepaid phones and a cheap tablet with a prepaid data plan. When he picked her up again an hour later, she carried four large shopping bags and wore a stylish new rain shell.

  She did a little twirl in the rain when she saw him roll up.

  He laughed and reached across to open the door. “Did you buy everything they had?”

  “It was all on sale,” she said mildly. “Or most of it. Take this left up ahead. There are motels by the highway.”

  The place that suited Peter best was a long low building with a mossy cedar roof and deep overhangs, just a single line of rooms connected at the front by a wide cement walkway that faced the parking area. Definitely not a chain motel. There was a cheap vinyl bench to sit on while you enjoyed the view of your car and the row of scraggly mongrel bushes that concealed the parking area from the commercial strip. Perfect for the claustrophobe on the run.

  The plaster walls were patched many times, and the furniture was so old it was made of actual wood. “Gosh,” June said, stepping into the room. “You really know how to treat a girl. I can’t wait to see the spa.” But it was clean, didn’t smell of mildew or bleach, and when June turned on the light, nothing scurried into the shadows.

  “Is there Wi-Fi?”

  “Listen,” said Peter. He stood in the doorway to feel the open air on the back of his neck. His ribs and leg ached. “We need to set some ground rules. Okay?” She nodded. “The people hunting you managed to track your phone, right? They might be able to get into your bank records. So we spend cash only. No credit or debit cards. They might also be tracking your friends and family, so don’t call anyone you know unless we talk about it first.”

  “What about email and social media?” she asked. “I have work to do and friends who will start to worry about me.”

  She was clearly one of those hyperconnected people. It wasn’t a help, not now. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll figure something out. Maybe we’ll find you an Internet café, someplace anonymous. But don’t use your laptop. Not now, not here.”

  She made a face. “I wish I thought you were paranoid.”

  “Even the paranoid have enemies,” he said. “Are we okay on this, boss?”

  “Yeah yeah. I’ll stay offline. Shut up and go.” She waved him toward the bathroom. “Take your time in there,” she called through the closed door.

  He turned on the shower and undressed, the walls closing in around him. His lower leg and ankle were swollen up like a grapefruit, the skin white from the internal pressure. He told himself the shower would make a difference. The hot water sluicing down his body helped counteract the claustrophobia, but he could feel his heartbeat accelerate anyway. He told himself it was just the enclosed space.

  That June on the other side of the door had nothing to do with it.

  He closed his eyes and soaped himself twice, scrubbing at the blood in his hair, wincing when the shampoo found the cut on his scalp. The water ran red for a time.

  When he turned off the water and slid open the shower curtain, his old clothes were gone, and new clothes were folded neatly on the vanity, along with a tube of toothpaste and a backpacker’s compact toothbrush. He hadn’t even heard her come in. She’d bought him a pair of high-tech pants and a cool plaid button-down shirt with a performance T-shirt to wear underneath. New boxers and socks. An oddly intimate moment, dressing in clothes a woman had bought for him, the supple new cloth soft on his clean bare skin, then looking at himself in the mirror. He’d never been so fashionable in his life. He opened the door.

  “Everything fit?” she asked, scooping up an armload of her own new clothes. He nodded, and she slipped shyly past him into the bathroom. She’d laid out the rest of his new clothes on the bed. A plastic bag held the clothes he’d been wearing, for fumigation or disposal. He liked that she hadn’t just thrown them out. He laced up his new boots, grabbed his new fleece and his half-charged phone, and limped outside to watch the rain, trying not to imagine June in the shower.

  And failing miserably.

  • • •

  HE DISTRACTED HIMSELF by calling Lewis again. They were burning through money at a ridiculous rate, and he needed to replenish.

  Lewis sounded a little lonely.

  “You sure you don’t need me out there? Only take me a day and a half to drive.”

  Peter smiled. “Domestic life a little slow?”

  “Domestic life fine, motherfucker. But I gave up working, that was my deal with Dinah. You know we don’t need the scratch.” Lewis sighed. “I got to say, I miss it, you know? Packing lunches and minding your money ain’t the same fun as hustling for a living.”

  “Trust me, I’ll let you know if I need you. We’re headed to Seattle. You had a contact for me?”

  Lewis gave him a name and a phone number. “It’s a big law firm, got branches in twenty-two cities. We their clients now, gives us confidentiality and access to services.”

  “We? Who’s this ‘we’?”

  “You don’t call, you don’t write.” Peter could hear that tilted grin again, could practically see the elaborate shrug. “I mighta signed your name a couple times.”

  “Lewis. What the hell am I into now?”

  “Can’t let your money sleep, Jarhead. Got to put it to work. But first you got to run it through the wash. We got some apartment complexes, we bought into some IPOs, we doing a little venture capital. We got all kinda shit, and we just getting started.”

  Peter said, “Tell me again how you learned all this?”

  “Gotta do something. ’Sides, I don’t like to get bored. You know the most dangerous man in America? Black man with a library card.”

  Peter laughed at the Malcolm X quote. “I’m pretty sure you know more about money than most people working on Wall Street.”

  “Gone bust a cap in yo’ ass, muthafucka. Talk like that gone get you killed.” Lewis really had the street in his voice now. He could also sound like a Pakistani cabdri
ver, a Nigerian prince, or an English professor. Or, as far as Peter could tell, anyone else he wanted to. Lewis was, more than anyone Peter had ever met, the product of his own creation.

  “You want to shoot me, you’re gonna have to wait in line,” said Peter. He told Lewis a shortened version of the story. June’s mother. The men who had tried to take June, then followed her to the redwoods, and the car chase and wreck afterward.

  “Man, I’m coming out there. I can fly into Frisco and drive your truck up north. Find a gun show on the way, grab some supplies.”

  “What I really need is intel. Can you find out more about June’s mother? Her name is Hazel Cassidy. Business partners, employees, so-called friends. There’s an ex-husband out there somewhere, too. Anyone who might have a reason to make her dead.”

  “You said she was killed in a hit-and-run. But now you’re thinking her death might be connected to the rest of it?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  June opened the door behind him and stepped outside carrying the depleted shopping bags.

  “Listen, I gotta go,” said Peter. He didn’t want June to know what he’d asked Lewis to do. If it turned into something, they’d have the conversation. If not, there was no need to rock the boat. “How do I get some hard money on the road?”

  “I’ll set that up tonight,” said Lewis. “One of those cash-advance places, I can just wire it in. You got about a zillion to choose from. They can do straight cash, although there are limits to how much they’ll give you. They can also do prepaid credit cards, which might come in handy.”

  “That sounds fine.” Peter consulted the map he carried in his head. “How about Eugene? Call me when you know where.”

  “If I came out there I could just hand you a stack of hundreds.”

  “Maybe later. Good-bye, Lewis.” Peter hung up.

  June said, “Your friend?”

  Peter nodded. “He wants to help. He might show up. You’d like him.”

  “You never really told me what you do for a living,” she said.

  “Right now, I’m not sure I know myself,” he admitted.

  “Did that shower help your leg?”

  “It’s fine,” he said. “We should keep moving.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Let me see you stand on that leg.”

  Peter gave her a look. “It’s fine.”

  She stared right back at him. “Can you bend the ankle? Will it even hold your weight?”

  He didn’t answer. She put out her hand. “Give me the keys.”

  “June,” he said. “We need to keep moving.”

  “I’m the boss, remember? And you’re broken. So I’m gonna get you fixed.” She waggled her fingers. “Keys, motherfucker.”

  She’d like Lewis, Peter was pretty sure. They certainly spoke the same language.

  15

  Eugene was an hour up the road. It was a university town, and likely to have good medical resources. Peter didn’t like it, but June wasn’t wrong. He couldn’t protect her if he couldn’t move.

  Aside from slowing them down, he could see several other problems immediately. His leg certainly needed some kind of help, but they’d take one look at June and want to treat her fat lip and sliced-up arm, too.

  The hospital would want Peter and June to identify themselves, and would plug their names into the system. Hospitals liked to know who they were treating in order to make sure they got paid.

  The hunters obviously had funding and access to serious tech. If they could get into hospital information systems and started looking for June’s name, they’d come running. He mentioned his concerns to June.

  “The emergency room doctors have to treat us,” she said. “It’s a federal law. We can give them false names and addresses. They can’t even demand payment.”

  Peter could understand taking free medical care if he was broke and homeless, but he wasn’t. Or at least he wasn’t broke. And he’d always pulled his own weight. He’d pay the hospital, but at least he didn’t have to worry about June getting on some medical database. “Who do you want to be?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. Debbie Harry.”

  “Who?”

  June rolled her eyes. “The lead singer of Blondie? Some people have no culture. You should be, oh, let’s see.” She put one hand to her chin and contemplated him. “Clint Eastwood. Definitely.”

  “You’re trying too hard at this,” he said. “The goal is to be forgettable.”

  “For you, maybe.” She flashed a brilliant grin. “For me, not possible.”

  “You are a piece of work,” he said. But he knew she was just messing with him, trying to distract him from another, more significant problem.

  The static wasn’t going to like being inside a hospital.

  His phone rang. It was Lewis.

  “I got three Fast Money stores in Eugene where I can get you up to twenty thousand without approval from corporate. That work?”

  “Yeah, that works. Make it five in cash and five each on three different cards.” That would be enough to pay for an ER visit, Peter hoped, with some left over for walking-around money.

  “Got it. I’ll put it in the name of Peter Smith. But they close at nine. How far are you?”

  Peter frowned. “I don’t think we’ll make it.”

  “They charge a pretty fat fee, something like five percent of the total. They might stay open late for that. You want to add a sweetener?”

  “Sure, add another five hundred cash to the manager to keep the doors open until nine-thirty.”

  “If that don’t work, we’ll find something else. I’ll tweak the numbers to include the commission and max your payout. They’ll prob’ly want some kind of ID number. I’ll use the first four digits of your Social.”

  Peter didn’t want to know how Lewis got his Social Security number.

  He said, “If your financial empire doesn’t work out, you could always get a job as a personal assistant.”

  “I ain’t wearin’ no French-maid costume,” said Lewis. “Call me tomorrow and I’ll tell you what I dug up on that other thing.” June’s mom and whoever might be connected to her.

  “Thanks, Lewis. Seriously.”

  “Damn, Jarhead. What else I got to do?”

  Peter hung up and turned to look at June, who had her eyes firmly on the road ahead. But he was sure she’d heard every word.

  • • •

  IT WAS HARD FOR PETER to get a sense of Eugene at night, but in general, he liked college towns. Smart people, good cheap food, plenty of oddballs. There was always this weird undercurrent, too, of people who fed off the college crowd, which was simultaneously naïve, demanding, and easy pickings. Dope dealers, sex providers, professional gamblers, thieves.

  Fast Money was a payday loan and check-cashing place, a vacuum cleaner into the pockets of the working poor and immigrants both legal and illegal, taking a significant percentage of every transaction. The commission for accepting an electronic money transfer and disbursing the funds was astonishing but not unusual. Peter was willing to pay the premium for speed.

  Their location on West Seventh was a newer stand-alone building on a busy commercial strip like any other in the American West. Maybe nicer than most, with the buildings in decent repair and mature trees lining the streets, but still a testament to the creative destruction that was American Capitalism.

  He didn’t want to go inside, but it wasn’t negotiable.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, pulled on a baseball hat, and climbed out of the car. June shut off the engine and got out after him. She wore her new fleece, zipped up. Peter looked at her across the front of the van.

  “What?” she said. “Of course I’m coming. You’re sweating already, and you’re still outside. They’re going to think you’re here to clean out the register. The cops will be here in three min
utes.”

  Peter thought about the inevitable security cameras. Every contact June made with the modern world was problematic. Dealing with hard cash in quantity, Fast Money would be a magnet for armed robbers and likely had state-of-the-art technology. High-res cameras archived off-site for weeks or months. And it was corporate, so that video was likely easily accessed by law enforcement, and maybe also by professional hunters in black Explorers. Any picture of June could be used to track them.

  He didn’t even want to think about security in the hospital.

  But she was right about how he looked. He’d be automatically less suspicious with June beside him. “Do you have a hat in any of those bags?”

  “Waaay ahead of you.” She held up a big floppy rain hat and put it on with a flourish. If Peter wore it, he’d look like a serial killer. On June, it looked like a fashion accessory.

  “Very stylish,” he said. “Just don’t look for the cameras. That’s the best way for them to get a good picture of your face.”

  The Fast Money door was locked when Peter tugged on the handle, but the lights were still on. Through the barred window, he saw someone hustling out from behind the counter.

  “We’re closed,” the man called through the heavy glass. Only a few years older than Peter, he had a drinker’s face, with sunken eyes, puffy skin, and the bloom of broken veins in his nose and cheeks. He wore a polo shirt with the Fast Money logo, a dollar bill with wings.

  “My name is Peter. You have something for me?”

  “Got a last name?”

  “Smith.”

  The man nodded. “Yeah, come on back.” The chain rattled as he released it and stepped away from the door. “Let me lock this behind you.”

  Peter and June stood at the plastic counter while the man let himself through a heavy steel door into the employee area, protected by thick security glass and at least six cameras that Peter could see. June leaned her back on the counter with her head down and studied her fingernails. Riot Grrrl was a natural.

  The man studied Peter. “You got ID?”

  “You know who I am,” said Peter. “Let’s get this over with.” His shoulders were climbing up to his ears. Fluorescent lights, vinyl floor, the chemical stink of industrial cleaners.