Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  “Gimme your ID number.”

  Peter gave him the first four digits of his Social.

  “That’s it,” said the man. He began to count out hundreds, five groups of ten and one group of five. He slid the larger sum into a paper envelope, pushed it through the slot in the glass, then held up the five C-notes. “Five hundred for the convenience fee,” he said, folded the bills and stuffed them into his pocket. He passed over three plastic cards in paper sleeves with the name Peter Smith embossed on the plastic. “Pre-paid credit cards,” he said. “I took the liberty of setting your PIN number. It’s the same as the ID number you gave me. Check the card balances in the reader.”

  He pointed at the card reader on Peter’s side of the counter. Peter swiped each card, punched in the PIN, and checked the balance. He was loaded.

  “Sign here,” said the man. Peter scrawled something unintelligible on the form and slid it back through the slot. “Pleasure doing business with you, Mr. Smith.”

  “Thanks for staying open. You’re a lifesaver.”

  The man’s eyes flickered with the only evidence of emotion he’d yet shown. “My pleasure.”

  As the locks slammed shut on the door behind him, Peter limped across the shining wet blacktop toward the minivan, June beside him. He was carrying over twenty thousand dollars in his pocket. The thought occurred to him at the same moment a two-door sedan pulled up, an older piece-of-shit Dodge, dark blue or black with cracked plastic fenders. It blocked the path to the minivan.

  The doors popped open and two men got out, trailing pot smoke and the smell of spilled beer. Long hair and armloads of tattoos, black short-sleeved T-shirts in the cool evening rain.

  “Give me what you got,” the man on the passenger side said, walking out to meet them. He had a three-day beard and the whites of his eyes showed overbright under the streetlight. He held a pistol down at his side. “Give it now or I hurt you bad.”

  “I hope you stole that car,” said Peter. “There are a whole bunch of security cameras covering this parking lot.”

  The tattooed man walked closer, raising his pistol. It was in his right hand. “Just gimme the money, assface.”

  His dumb smirk told Peter the cameras had already been turned off by the nice man inside the Fast Money outlet, who had almost certainly set up the after-hours robbery. He’d chosen the PIN on the cash cards, too.

  Peter shook his head. The whole thing just made him tired.

  “You want to die?” the tattooed man asked, closing in. The ink on his arms looked like smears in the rainy night. He held the gun sideways like a television gangster, stiff-armed and one-handed, right at eye level. Ten feet away, now five, now two. The driver wasn’t showing a weapon.

  Peter sighed. “June, get behind me.”

  It was an amateur mistake, thinking it was easier to shoot a man the closer you got to him, and easier still if you put the gun right to his head. Humans had evolved to kill each other with rocks and clubs, their brains were wired to think in those terms. With an antelope femur, closer was better.

  But firearms didn’t operate like that. From ten meters, a trained shooter had plenty of time to track and fire at a moving target. The target’s arc of movement would be relatively small across his field of fire, and he’d retain total control of the weapon.

  From two meters, it got harder. The arc of movement was larger and the time more compressed, but it was plenty doable.

  From two feet, the shooter had to be planning to fire, committed, already depressing the trigger. Because now his weapon was within reach, and the target might move faster than the shooter’s ability to adjust his aim.

  Peter moved fast.

  He snapped his hand up, grabbing the pistol body and shoving the muzzle sideways to keep his body and June’s from the line of fire. Then he twisted the gun a half turn counterclockwise, breaking the tattooed wrist of the idiot who hadn’t begun to consider that Peter might not be scared to death.

  The pistol fell to the asphalt.

  The tattooed man howled and clutched his wrist.

  Peter kicked the pistol sideways, hit the man hard with his elbow on the side of his head, then punched down on the side of his tattooed neck as he fell into a boneless sprawl.

  June scooped up the gun at the edge of Peter’s vision as he eyeballed the getaway driver, motionless behind the open door of the shitbox Dodge. “We done here?”

  “Shit.” The driver was shaking his head, disgusted. But he had more sense than his partner, because he slid back into the car, threw it into reverse, and got the hell out of there, leaving the other man heaped on the worn wet asphalt.

  Peter turned to look at June. She lowered the gun back down to her side, her finger still on the trigger. She took a deep breath, then let it out.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Not everyone would have picked up that gun,” he said.

  Her eyes gleamed in the sodium lights. “I had an interesting childhood.”

  She looked like she might be having fun.

  Jesus Christ, she was something else.

  16

  JUNE

  The hospital was in Eugene’s sister city, Springfield. It was a big modern building, brick and glass and lit up like a UFO had landed in the parking lot.

  June found the emergency entrance, pulled the car into a short-term spot, and turned off the engine. Her lip was throbbing, but she was still wired from the near-robbery. The gun was in her lap.

  Peter hadn’t taken his eyes off her. “Are you going to take that into the hospital?”

  She pretended to consider it. “I don’t know, what do you think?”

  “I think you’re astounding,” he said. “Where have you been all my life?”

  She tucked the gun under the seat. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said, and got out of the car to hide her smile. She’d never been called astounding before.

  Emergency reception was the usual antiseptic anteroom, with easy-mop floors and vomit-proof chairs. A scattering of people waited for their turn or for friends or family, focused on their own problems, uninterested in the newcomers. A fresh-faced young woman in pink scrubs and pigtails sat at the intake desk, flirting with an ambulance driver, but she quickly turned her attention to June and Peter.

  “We were in a car accident earlier today,” said June. “We went off the road. My friend’s a little banged up. His leg and his ribs, and he cut his head, too.”

  The intake nurse was looking at June’s fat lip, now black and blue. “You look a little beat up yourself,” she said. “Anything else other than the lip?”

  June held out her arm, starting to bleed again from the cuts of the window glass. “This probably needs a look,” she said. “Plus I’m sore all over.”

  “That’ll happen,” said the nurse. “Insurance cards?”

  “We don’t have insurance,” said Peter.

  “How about some ID?”

  June and Peter had talked it through, how they would navigate the questions. Peter thought it was possible that the hunters would have people checking the hospitals. He’d come up with a plan to make it harder for the hunters to gain information.

  “We don’t have that, either,” he said. “We were robbed, hitchhiking back from the accident.”

  The nurse looked at June, her face devoid of expression. June figured she’d worked the night shift long enough to have heard all kinds of excuses. They hadn’t fooled this woman one bit.

  “Names?”

  Peter jumped in before she could say anything. “I’m Peter Smith. This is my friend Marian. Last name Cunningham.”

  June gave him the hairy eyeball. The mom from Happy Days was a long way from Debbie Harry.

  “We’ll pay our bill,” he said. “I promise.”

  “I sincerely hope so,” the
nurse said politely. “Although federal law requires us to treat everyone, unpaid emergency room charges raise the cost of treatment for everyone. Billing address?”

  Peter gave them the address of the motel where they’d showered.

  Typing, the nurse nodded, then pressed a button under the counter. The door to the treatment area popped open. “Ma’am, I’ll take you back now. Sir, someone will be out to help you in a moment.”

  The nurse escorted June to a seat in an open exam area, then stepped to a nearby workstation and spoke to another woman in blue scrubs, who came over and pulled up a rolling stool.

  “Hi, I’m Sandra. I’m a nurse practitioner. I’m just going to take a look at your lip and your arm, okay?”

  “Listen,” June said quietly. “I’m in trouble and I need your help.”

  Sandra was mid-forties, with strong hands, a no-nonsense salt-and-pepper haircut, and deep lines etching her face. She was calm but intent. “Is it the man you came in with? Should I call the police?”

  “Oh, God no, please don’t call the police. The man I came with is trying to help me. The problem is my ex-husband.” This was part of their plan, to provide a more reasonable explanation of their secretive behavior. June had added the embellishments. “He’s been stalking me. He’s a lawyer, a powerful man, and he knows a million cops. Somebody drove us off the road this morning, and I’m afraid he’s getting ready to do something worse. I’m trying to disappear.”

  “Have you talked with the police?”

  “I have a restraining order, but my ex-husband doesn’t care about that. He might send people to look for us. Please don’t tell them anything you don’t have to.”

  “You’re certain he didn’t do this to you? The man you’re with?”

  “No way,” said June. “He’s one of the good guys.”

  Sandra put a warm hand on June’s shoulder. “Wait here a minute, okay? We’ll take care of you.”

  When she came back, Sandra walked June to an exam room with a hospital bed and a clutter of noisy medical equipment. The nurse practitioner asked the usual questions, but the only truthful answers June gave were about her physical symptoms. She was tempted to give the woman her real cell number. She didn’t know why. Maybe she wanted someone to know how to find her, even if it was just a nurse practitioner in Springfield, Oregon.

  For the rest of the world, she’d fallen off the map.

  When Sandra touched June’s swollen lip with an alcohol swab, June flinched. “Sorry,” Sandra said, dabbing only a little more gently. “It hurts, I know. It’s actually started to split at the impact point. You could use a few stitches and ice to bring the swelling down, twenty minutes every two hours, through tomorrow. Might as well start now.”

  She rolled her chair to a cabinet, pulled out a chemical cold pack, thumped it on the edge of the counter to activate it, and handed it to June. “Hold that on your lip.”

  Then she turned her attention to June’s shredded arm, again scrubbing harder than June liked, although she did dab on a topical anesthetic where she needed to use tweezers to take out embedded shards of glass. “Mostly scrapes and scratches,” she said. “A few more stitches here on this nice cut right below the elbow.”

  She pulled a suture kit from a cabinet, dabbed on some more anesthetic, and began to sew with a steady, practiced hand. June watched curiously as the curved needle passed through her skin. There was no pain, only the strange tug of the thread as it pulled the skin together.

  When the needle came toward her lip, she had to close her eyes.

  “All done,” Sandra finally announced, then applied some kind of goo to the worst areas, wound June’s arm with gauze from the forearm to the armpit, and wrapped it with a stretchy strip like an Ace bandage. “Take that off for cleaning every day, then apply fresh gauze. When everything’s scabbed over, you’re done, two days, maybe three. The stitches will dissolve in two weeks or so. The lip we’ll just leave open, no dressing. Those stitches you’ll need to have removed in three or four days. If things get red or inflamed, you may have an infection. You’ll need to see another doctor.”

  “I’ll do that.” June took the woman’s hand in her own. “Thank you.”

  Sandra gave her a gentle hug. “Your secret’s safe with me,” she said.

  “Thank you,” whispered June, returning the hug, absurdly grateful.

  • • •

  SHE MADE HER WAY through the maze of exam areas to the waiting area, but Peter was gone. The young woman at the reception desk told her that he was with the doctor, which June took as a good sign. “Would you like someone to walk you back to his exam room?”

  “In a few minutes,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  She went out to the car and got her bag, then walked back to a covered bench in the parking area outside the ER and opened her laptop. The first thing she did was turn off the cell modem and the Wi-Fi. It was killing her to stay off the Internet, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t make a few notes about what had happened that day.

  As she began to type, a notification popped up, announcing that the cell modem was now connected. She turned it off again, but it began to show the little circle icon that meant the computer was working on something. Then the cell modem notification popped up again.

  That was a weird little bug, she thought. Her laptop was getting peculiar in its old age.

  She shut down the laptop and put it back in the car, then returned to the reception area.

  “Is there a place for patients to get online?” If she could use a public computer, she could set up a new anonymous email account, type up her notes, and send them to herself.

  The woman directed her down a long hallway into the main hospital, where an alcove off the cafeteria had three small workstations, each with a computer and monitor. The far desk was occupied by a too-skinny teenage boy with a shaved head wearing a medical bracelet, sweats, slippers, and enormous headphones. He was engrossed in what appeared to be an elaborate role-playing game. June sat with the empty chair between them and logged on to the Web. The long bandage on her arm made the familiar motions difficult.

  She’d cut back on work because of the death of her mother, but she still needed to make a living. She was chasing an active story—she’d gotten a tip that a supposedly anonymous hookup app was selling user information to information brokers—and was waiting for verification from secondary sources. Leaving her phone back in the redwoods was harder than June had thought it would be.

  She used her phone so much she often had to charge it three or four times a day, and it was killing her not to be able to call, text, email, or do research. Much of her professional and personal life took place on the Web. She hadn’t been online since she’d abandoned her phone that morning. It felt like forever.

  When the technology arrived for permanently implanting a modem directly in her brain, June would be first in line.

  Short of that, a public computer seemed like a safe place to check in. She wrote about electronic privacy, so her security protocols were pretty good. She had serious multilevel passwords on everything, and she always entered them manually. Even if they’d hacked her phone—hell, if they’d hacked her laptop—she felt confident that whoever was chasing her hadn’t made their way through those passwords into her email accounts. She clicked through, looking for signs that she had been compromised, but there was nothing obvious.

  Of course, some asshole could be capturing every click and keystroke and she’d never know it. That could be true on any given day. It didn’t change the fact that she had work to do.

  June thought of herself as fairly disciplined with only four email accounts. One was work only, another was purely personal. A third was the account she used when buying things online—she thought of it as her spam account. The fourth was her college email address, somehow still live, which some of her climbing friends and other goof
balls from the old days still used.

  No answers yet to the emails she’d sent from her work account that morning, before Peter had shown up in the tree. Although it sure seemed like much longer ago than that. She’d set an autoreply on her work account saying she’d had a death in the family but that she would check email daily. Her personal email was full of further condolences from friends in the Bay Area and Seattle, and kind invitations to coffee or drinks or dinner when she was up for it. The spam account had the usual useless promotional bullshit that she always deleted without reading unless she was waiting for a package from Title Nine or Backcountry.com.

  Her old college account had an email from her mother.

  Which was odd, because her mother hadn’t sent an email to that account for years.

  And her mother had died exactly a week ago.

  The email was dated today, at noon. There was no subject line.

  June took a deep breath and put one hand on her chest, covering her heart. With the other, she clicked on the email.

  There was no text, either. Just an attachment, a video window, her mother’s miniature face frozen behind the play icon. June glanced over at the bald kid in the slippers. His headphones covered his ears, and he seemed pretty absorbed in his game.

  June clicked Play. Clicked again to enlarge the window.

  Her mother’s face filled the monitor, big as life. She wore the emerald green blouse June had bought her for Christmas the year before, and her black-framed hipster glasses. Her hair was in its most recent style, a short steel-gray no-nonsense cut, so the video couldn’t be more than a few months old.

  “Hello, June,” she said. “If you’re watching this, it’s because I’m probably dead.”

  17

  June hit Pause, stood up and stepped away from the computer, her heart beating fast. The kid glanced up from his game for a moment, then back to his screen.