Only to Die Again

by Patrick Lee

  The Taurus eased forward in starts and stops, a few inches at a time. Prepared to move. Like a big cat, low in the weeds, tensed and ready.

  At the front door of the house, the kid rubbed his forehead again, nervous as hell.

  It crossed Dryden’s mind only briefly to consider that the kid might be working with the men in the Taurus. That he might be willing bait, a harmless-looking figure to make Dryden open his front door and let his guard down. It didn’t fly. If the kid was working in concert with the men, the two of them would have been standing right against the siding next to the front door, ready to move against Dryden as soon as he opened it.

  They were halfway down the block because they were hiding from the kid, too. It was clear he had no idea they were watching him.

  Dryden took in the geometry of the scene. The dynamics waiting to play out – the dynamics that would have played out. He imagined himself opening the front door, the kid turning to him, just beginning to speak. Imagined the Taurus angling out from the curb and simply rolling the hundred yards to his driveway – not fast, not revving or screeching, not doing anything unusual at all. It would have escaped his attention like any random car moving down his street, until the moment the passenger door opened and a man with a gun stepped out, thirty feet away.

  Neighbors heard gunfire …

  … saw a black sedan and a white SUV leave the scene.

  Maybe the gunman would have tried to force both Dryden and the kid into the Tahoe. Maybe the kid would have panicked and done something stupid. Maybe the guy would have just started shooting from the outset. The news report had not mentioned a second murder victim – just Dryden. Maybe the kid would have ended up forced back into his Tahoe at gunpoint.

  However it played out, it would have done so in seconds, brutal and unexpected. All Dryden’s training would have done nothing for him. You could prepare for some things. Others you couldn’t.

  Down at the house, the kid tried the doorbell one last time.

  The men in the Taurus traded looks, a few words. More nods.

  The pistol dropped back out of sight.

  The kid turned from the front door and went back to his Tahoe. He got in and reversed out of the driveway and drove off toward downtown.

  The black Taurus pulled out and followed.

  Dryden set the Zeiss on the passenger seat and started the Explorer.

  Chapter Twelve

  Apparently the kid was hungry. He parked at a restaurant off the main drag, got a booth by the window and ordered, and when his meal showed up it looked like he’d asked for about a dozen pancakes and half a plate of eggs.

  Dryden watched from a Walmart lot a hundred yards away; he was parked in its outer reaches but concealed well enough by a cluster of vehicles there.

  The two men in the black Taurus had been less cautious; they were right at the edge of the restaurant’s lot. Dryden could see the passenger better now, a blond guy roughly the same age as the driver.

  Dryden moved the Zeiss back and forth between the Taurus and the kid in his booth. The kid was mostly done with his meal now. He somehow pulled off looking nervous even while stuffing his face.

  In the Taurus, more quick discussion. More nods.

  The passenger’s gun came back into view.

  Then the man shoved open his door and got out and closed it again, tucking the gun into his rear waistband and letting his shirt fall over it.

  He crossed the lot to a bank of newspaper boxes just beside the restaurant’s entrance, no more than twenty feet from where the kid had parked his Tahoe. He paid for a USA Today and leaned his back against the brick wall of the building, two paces from the door where the kid would come out.

  In his booth, the kid called the waitress over and asked her something. A tight sequence of words. Maybe Can I get the check?

  The waitress nodded and moved off.

  Dryden lowered the scope and took in the layout of the restaurant’s lot. The entrance, the Tahoe, the Taurus, the man with the newspaper.

  The geometry of the scene.

  The dynamics waiting to play out.

  He saw himself standing in his own doorway, entirely unprepared for these men.

  About as unprepared as they were for him, right now.

  The whole thing had a kind of nasty symmetry he could almost enjoy.

  Inside the restaurant, the waitress walked past the kid’s booth again. She gave him a little gesture, an extended index finger, like Wait one, I haven’t forgotten.

  There would be a minute at least before the kid stepped out the restaurant’s front door.

  Time enough for Dryden to roll into the restaurant’s lot and get in position. Not revving. Not screeching. He had his hand on the ignition key, about to lower the Zeiss from his eye, when movement in the restaurant caught his attention.

  The kid was standing partly from his seat, feeling both his back pockets, then his front ones. Then turning to stare out at his Tahoe in the parking lot, mouthing something that had to be Shit.

  He’d left his wallet in the vehicle.

  ‘Oh hell,’ Dryden said.

  The kid caught the waitress’s eye and said something fast. She smiled and nodded. No problem.

  Like that, the kid was heading for the door.

  ‘Fuck,’ Dryden whispered.

  It happened so smoothly, nobody in the restaurant noticed. The kid stepped outside, and the blond man tapped him on the shoulder. One of the guy’s hands went to his rear waistband and retrieved the gun, though Dryden never caught sight of it. The blond man kept it low, mostly hidden by the newspaper, though visible to the kid.

  The guy said something. It took about three seconds. It ended with now.

  The kid nodded and continued to the Tahoe. He got in on the driver’s side, and the blond man got in on the passenger side.

  Just like that.

  The Tahoe started and rolled out of the lot, the Taurus pulling out ahead of it and taking the lead.

  For the second time, Dryden fell into place behind them.

  The two vehicles stayed tight together. They turned inland on a two-lane that led out of town toward the low, parched foothills of the mountains.

  Seeking a quiet place to stop and tie the kid up properly, Dryden was sure – or simply kill him. Holding a victim at gunpoint and making him drive was not a good strategy in the long term. It was good for a few minutes, maybe. Not even then, if the victim was clever enough or desperate enough.

  If the kid was who Dryden guessed he was – he was far from sure – then the clever part might be covered. Maybe the desperate part, too.

  Dryden took the turn and hung back two hundred yards. The traffic wasn’t sparse enough yet to give him away, if he kept some distance.

  He had no real plan for when it did get sparse. There was nothing to build a plan around. If they spotted him, they would react, one way or another, and he would improvise.

  A mile inland from town, the Taurus put on its blinker and turned right onto a gravel lane that led upward into the hill country. An old logging road from a hundred years back, maintained now for hikers and the fire department. The Tahoe followed.

  Dryden took the turn and saw the two vehicles ahead of him, passing through the outlying trees of the forest that covered the higher slopes.

  Just beyond the first curve among the trees, the Taurus passed a white pine on the right side of the road, as thick as a telephone pole.

  The Tahoe didn’t.

  It jerked to the right and slammed into the tree trunk at 40 miles per hour, taking the impact on the passenger side.

  Even from far behind, Dryden could see the windows on that side of the vehicle burst and spray pebbles of glass from buckled frames.

  The SUV’s back end kicked around to the left, like a toy vehicle struck by a hammer. It swung out into the narrow road, kicking up a dust cloud off the gravel and coming to rest with just enough room to get past its back corner.

  Dryden floored the Explorer, pushing it
to 60. The wrecked SUV and the dust cloud obscured his view of everything beyond the crash site – but he already knew what he would see there: the Taurus, stopped, the dark-haired man shoving his door open, pistol already in hand.

  Dryden steered past the Tahoe’s back bumper, burst through the dust cloud, and saw those things exactly.

  The dark-haired man was ten feet from the Taurus’s open door, gun low at his side, running toward the wreck.

  At the sight of the oncoming Explorer, the man froze. His brain was trying to process the new arrival, what it meant, and what he might do about it. He was a quarter second into that endeavor when Dryden hit him, still doing 60. The Explorer’s grille caught him low in the chest, punching him backward off his feet. His neck snapped downward and his face hit the vehicle’s hood with a heavy thud. An instant later the body was airborne, flung out ahead in a long, low arc, like the path of a thrown horseshoe.

  He landed deep among the trees beside the road, dead beyond any doubt.

  Dryden braked, skidded to a halt, dropped the Explorer into park, and shoved open his door. He sprinted for the crashed Tahoe, drawing one of Claire’s Berettas as he ran.

  The wreck was spectacular. The passenger side was compressed around the pine trunk as if its hood were made of aluminum foil. The crumple zones in the front three feet of the vehicle had done their job, but all the same, hitting a tree at 40 brought all kinds of unforgiving physics into play.

  Dryden reached the driver’s-side door. The window there had burst, too, though the door itself was mostly undamaged.

  His eyes went to the details of the vehicle’s interior, logging them in rapid succession.

  The blond gunman was dead. He had worn his seat belt, but the passenger air bag had apparently been switched off. Maybe the kid had known that. Maybe he’d even hit the button to disable it, in the instant before jerking the wheel. Either way, the gunman’s head had collided with the metal windshield column, which had bent inward in the crash. The guy’s body hung slack, leaning forward over the footwell with his arms and head draped. There was blood coming out of his head at about half the volume of a faucet tap, pattering the floor with a sound like rain spilling from a downspout. Cerebral hemorrhaging. The guy was long gone.

  The kid was alive.

  His eyes were open and he was staring through the window frame at Dryden.

  And holding his stomach, just below his diaphragm. There was blood seeping out between his fingers.

  ‘You’re the guy,’ the kid said. His tone was flat and matter-of-fact, the way people often talked when they were in shock. ‘You’re Dryden.’

  Dryden was still staring at the bloodstain, expanding through the fabric of the kid’s shirt. Then his eyes picked out something on the passenger side floor, gleaming in the darkness there. A single brass shell casing.

  ‘He got me,’ the kid said. ‘Christ, he got me.’

  Beneath the kid’s hands, the blood was running in rivulets down the front of his T-shirt. Pooling in the folds of his pants, and on the Tahoe’s leather seat cushion. A huge amount of blood.

  Dryden knew human anatomy from training and from experience. He knew about the thoracic artery, running down through the abdomen and branching to form the two femoral arteries in the legs. A person stabbed or shot through just one femoral artery could bleed out and die inside of sixty seconds, if nobody was around to apply a tourniquet.

  The thoracic artery carried twice that much blood, and no tourniquet could be applied to it.

  The kid’s face had lost a bit of color even in the ten seconds Dryden had been standing there. He was going fast.

  ‘Are you Curtis?’ Dryden asked.

  The kid’s eyes had begun to drift. Now they fixed on him again. He looked surprised to hear that name spoken, but only a little.

  The kid nodded.

  ‘Came to find Claire,’ Curtis whispered. ‘I thought she might be with you. She told me all about you.’

  A shiver went through Curtis’s body. The morning air was easily seventy-five degrees, but the kid reacted as if it were forty. To him, it was. He forced himself to keep talking. ‘I guess she found you, then.’

  Instead of verifying the statement, Dryden leaned in through the empty window frame and spoke carefully.

  ‘Curtis, the people who attacked Bayliss Labs have a place they call the interrogation site. Have you heard of that? Do you know where it is?’

  Curtis’s eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Dryden said. ‘Think as clearly as you can.’

  Curtis nodded, and when he spoke again, his voice was only a whisper. ‘All their language is careful. All their e-mails, the stuff on the server. No locations. No names. I copied all of it, though. Took it with me. Figured a lot of it out …’

  He was losing strength by the second. Fading.

  ‘Curtis,’ Dryden said.

  ‘I’ve been hiding three days,’ the kid said. ‘I printed it all, got it organized.’ He nodded weakly toward the space behind the front seats. ‘It’s all in a bag back there, for Claire. I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.’

  The shivering was getting worse.

  ‘I tried to be careful,’ Curtis said. ‘I made sure they couldn’t find me with their … system. Maybe they found me the old-fashioned way. Jesus, I went to my old coffee shop this morning. Maybe they were just watching …’

  His eyes were wet now. The shock was losing ground to the pain, or else the fear.

  Then something changed. Curtis blinked and exhaled hard and forced himself into a state of alertness. He turned and stared out through the shattered passenger window, then swept his gaze left in a slow arc, eyes darting everywhere.

  Looking for some threat out there in the woods.

  Like Claire had done in the desert.

  Exactly like Claire.

  Dryden’s scalp prickled. He turned fast and raised the Beretta, studying the surrounding trees.

  Nothing there.

  He pivoted slowly counterclockwise, his eyes and the pistol tracking around, a few degrees per second.

  He ended up facing back the way they’d come from: toward the paved two-lane road, which was just hidden from view by the curve in the gravel lane through the forest.

  A hand seized his arm. He spun toward it, reflexively.

  Curtis had reached out through the driver’s-side window frame and taken hold of him. The kid’s eyes were intense, keenly aware.

  ‘Hide our bodies,’ Curtis said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You can’t leave any record for anyone to pick up on. The people we’re up against … if there’s anything tying me to this place and time, then … they’ll send other killers here. They’ll have … already sent them. Hours ago. They’d already be here waiting.’

  As crazed as the kid sounded, his words lined up eerily well with what had happened in the desert.

  The gunmen there had already been in place. Claire had begun looking for the threat once it was clear the cop was going to stop and question the two of them.

  Once it was clear there would be a record of their presence there.

  At that place and time.

  Dryden felt the dots trying to connect. In some sense they did, but only partly.

  ‘Hide our bodies,’ Curtis said again. ‘Me and these two guys. Put us in their car and hide it someplace. It has to stay lost for a long time.’

  The kid’s burst of alertness was leaving him. The skin of his face was paper white. His voice was back to a whisper.

  Dryden said, ‘But this Tahoe –’

  Curtis shook his head. ‘Can’t be traced to me. I was already careful about that. Stolen plates. Filed off the VIN. Just burn it.’

  He took a deep breath. It looked like it hurt.

  ‘Do it,’ Curtis sighed. Then a strange little smile crossed his face. ‘I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.’

  The odd smil
e stayed on his face as his eyes went still.

  Gone.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Aubrey Deene pulled into the carport in front of her apartment, one of the maintenance guys was mowing the lawn. Her eyes fixed on the mower: an old Husqvarna, like the kind her father had beaten to hell every summer of her childhood back in South Bend. Sometimes a fouled spark plug would set him off, and he’d burn up a day’s worth of anger in five minutes of wrench throwing in the garage. Other times the mower would only get him warmed up, and then Aubrey and her sister and her mother would have a long night in store for them. Rod Deene had been dead for five years now – heart attack a month before Aubrey finished undergrad at Iowa State – but the damnedest things could shove him right back into her head.

  The engine of her ancient Miata coughed and threatened to die. She killed the ignition and pocketed the key, then turned and rummaged through the textbooks and folders on the passenger seat. Any day now, the car was going to give up the ghost and leave her hitchhiking. Which would be fitting, in its own way. Her life had taken on a distinctly hitchhiker kind of feeling lately. Like her future was no more plotted than that of a paper cup in the wind.

  Not so far off the mark, you know.

  That internal voice had an irritating, teen-angst edge to it. If there was anyone less welcome in Aubrey’s head than her father, it was her own younger self, two months out of high school, pulling out of her parents’ driveway in her rusted-to-shit VW Beetle. Leaving South Bend and heading for the world. Iowa State, then MIT, then whatever Ph.D. program looked right. The girl with all the answers, all the dominoes lined up and ready to fall.

  They had fallen. For a while. Iowa State had gone swimmingly, and MIT had played out like a well-rehearsed dance number, exhilarating and challenging, leaving her winded but with her feet right on the intended marks. She’d had her choice of doctoral programs, and she’d picked Cornell, and for a time, things there had followed the game plan, too. She could remember feeling like it was all still clicking along. There were beautiful afternoons on the plaza, maybe her favorite place in the whole world. Sometimes she would take her textbooks and sit inside Sage Chapel, though she had never been religious and never would be. Most of the time the chapel was empty except for a few tourists, moving in little groups, whispering, taking pictures of the beautiful architecture. Aubrey had sat in the shadowy pews, way back from the lit-up altar, and let the silence of the place envelop her like water.