Flight of the Scarlet Tanager

by Bevill, C. L.

  “Later,” she muttered.

  Fitch made a face. “Loose enough blood and there won’t be a later.”

  Teddy took a deep breath. She tried to regain some of her natural energy. She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d gone out on the hospital’s third floor ledge, but she had gone through a myriad of emotions that rocked her from one end of the spectrum to the other. She felt like a wrung out rag. “Okay,” she snarled. She grabbed a rag with her left hand and pressed it to her forehead.

  “So where are we going?” asked Fitch politely.

  “Drive. Just drive,” answered Teddy. She didn’t have a plan. Running could be accomplished. Solid plans always helped. Changing directions frequently. Paying cash. Hitching was good, when no one was right behind you. Even stealing a car for a short period of time wasn’t bad in attempting to shake a pursuer, although this had been the first time she’d actually had to commit that crime. She tried to think, scrambling for something, anything. Stealing a car wasn’t bright. Kidnapping someone was less bright. Especially since one of them had seen it all. Think, dammit. Think. Change my appearance. Leave the area. Leave all indications of Teddy Smith behind. And do it as fast as I can. It was all she had. “You got a place?”

  Fitch made a little noise in his throat. She stared at the side of his head, trying to determine what was going on inside. He asked in a self-possessed tone, “Why don’t you just let me off here? Take the Jeep. I’ll take a while getting to a phone. Lincoln City’s about five miles down this road. Unless a cop comes along. And your bud. Whoever he is, he’s not interested in me. He won’t mess with me, except to ask which direction you drove off in. I’d be happy to point him in the opposite direction. Cops aren’t my bosom buddies, for sure, and you could make some serious distance in the Jeep.”

  Teddy looked at him and then at the stick shift. She muttered something under her breath and he asked, “What did you say?”

  “I said, I can’t drive,” she snapped out all at once. “You have to.”

  “Who doesn’t know how to drive?” Fitch asked of no one in particular. “Four gears. Clutch on the left side. Brake in the middle. Gas on the right. Simple hand-eye coordination. I learned how to drive when I was ten years old on a VW Bug the neighbor had out in the garage. Takes more than that to fire that gun you’ve got in your hand.”

  Teddy regarded him. “I never learned how,” she replied and her voice wasn’t composed.

  “Okay,” responded Fitch slowly. “That’s not an option. But I can drive you to your place and you can be on your way. Simple as pie. You’re whack if you think...”

  “This is a Glock G18,” Teddy said coldly and with a voice that brooked no argument. “It has a keyhole opening cut into the forward portion of the slide that provides a venting area that allows more control over the rapid-firing pistol. It is fully capable of automatic fire, which makes it an incredibly illegal weapon and incredibly dangerous. It has a seventeen-bullet magazine in it and it’s only been fired once. This is a silencer on the end so no one is going to hear anything, except after I’ve fired at least three more times, and the silencer starts to lose its effectiveness, but by that time the target should have been dead and buried. All of which should tell you something very important.”

  “That you don’t know how to drive, but you do know a shitload about guns,” Fitch rattled off, the first thing to come out of his mouth. He knew exactly what she was trying to get across. She looked like a little girl with too much make-up on. She was pretty and she knew how to unnerve someone who wasn’t taking her seriously.

  “That we’re going to your house, right now.”

  “Sure you don’t want pizza?” he asked flippantly and instantly regretted it.

  •

  Gower joined Redmond on the front lawn of Lincoln Memorial Hospital. The two men looked to the west, where the Jeep had disappeared. Redmond said, “She got your Glock.”

  “It’s not traceable.”

  “I’m a little surprised, Gower,” said Redmond.

  Gower didn’t bother to reply. How could he explain to a man like Redmond, who made few, if any, mistakes? The blonde-haired man had been chasing this little girl for three years. A little girl. For three years. He’d picked up her trail and stayed behind her. Sometimes weeks behind her. More often, months. Typically, fugitives didn’t elude him for three days. But not this one. Not Theodora. Teddy. And he’d finally come face to face with her in a basement room. She was just as magnificent as he’d visualized. She hadn’t given up in the face of the enemy. She’d only fought harder. Not like the dozens of people he’d become so proficient at tracking down and capturing. They begged for their lives. They tried to bribe him. They used deceit and attempted to bargain for their freedom.

  He smiled to himself. In some strange way he was glad that it wasn’t over. He still had to inform their employer of the problems that had ensued, but then they were back on the trail and Theodora wouldn’t have more than minutes for a lead. There would be no time for her to lay false trails, no time for her to cover up, and she was leaving a track a blind man could trace.

  He retrieved his cell phone from inside his jacket and tilted his head to listen. Police sirens were approaching fast. There was no way to chase the two in the Jeep and still cover up for themselves. Gower had to waste minutes recovering the videotapes from the photojournalist’s broken video cameras before joining Redmond. “We’ll have to use local law enforcement now. With bodies there’s no way around it. What was the license plate of the Jeep?”

  Redmond rattled off the letters and numerals. “What about the driver? It seems too coincidental that he be here at the right time, at the right place.”

  Gower shrugged. “It doesn’t matter about the driver, except that he might be able to lead us to her.”

  •

  “This is your house?” asked Teddy incredulously. She looked at it and she couldn’t believe it. It was a beach house and it was on the beach. More precisely it sat imperially on the cliffs above the beach, a modern house with lots of glass so the owners could look out at the Pacific Ocean and the sunset and anything else their little wealthy hearts desired. It sat on its own piece of land that was bigger than the town of Sullivan’s Bay, which was obscene considering the value of beachfront real estate. They’d driven through a wrought iron gate with elaborate curlicues that Fitch had opened by pressing a button on his key fob, and Teddy’s heart had sunk. A home like this on property like this meant that other people were undoubtedly home, and it meant cameras, and it meant that the person that she’d been forced to kidnap was a little more affluent than a rusting, decades old Jeep would have indicated. It meant more attention than she wanted to have.

  “It’s my dad’s,” admitted Fitch. It was a nice beach house. His grandfather had it built in the sixties, and it had passed to his father when his grandfather had died. Fitch had spent every summer he could remember at this beach house. Climbing up and down the cliffs, fishing with his grandfather on the beach far below, flying kites from the peak of the roof where the wind rushed over them like it was trying to shove them off. He thought that maybe one day his father might leave it to him and his brother because both of them loved it so much. Besides which Edana didn’t like the beach all that much, even though she’d insisted he leave his dog with a frat brother. She didn’t spend that much time here if it could be avoided and his father wouldn’t let his second wife come between him and his sons. So the beach house would belong to Fitch and his brother, Milo. One day anyway, if Fitch didn’t further the gap between himself and his father.

  “Jesus Christ,” Teddy murmured as they pulled up to the house in the Jeep. The outside lights were on as if someone were home. She took in a deep gulp of air and instructed herself to relax. All she needed was minutes and she could be away from here, widening the breach between herself and imminent danger. “What have I done?”

  Fitch snorted. “What’s wrong now? There’s no one else here. I’ve been e
xiled. You can put on some of my step-mother’s clothing and take care of that cut, Teddy.”

  “What?” squawked Teddy, swinging her head back at him. “How do you know my name?”

  “Are you kidding?” he questioned incredulously. “They had CNN on the T.V. at the office all day long.”

  Teddy’s mouth dropped at the same time she dropped the end of the Glock.

  Chapter Eight

  August 15th

  An excerpt from Routen’s Birds of North America, edited by Houston Routen, Cacky Press, 1992, pg. 205: The Peregrine Falcon, Falco peregrinus, is one of the fastest birds on earth, plunging to kill their prey at over one hundred miles per hour. An elusive bird, once perched on the edge of extinction, they are reinstating their place in the wild, demonstrating their distinctive nature and fascinating habits. They mate for life, have a migration path of as much as 1,500 miles, and inhabit every continent on earth except Antarctica. The reasons why these birds of prey spiral toward their intended victims when they reach within about one and a half kilometers have recently been speculated upon. Scientists theorize that the birds’ vision is most clear when they turn their heads about 40 degrees to one side. However, turning their heads while diving to kill their prey at one hundred miles an hour produces a drag on them aerodynamically, and would make the animal a less effective killer. Consequently, when the spiraling event occurs it enables the Peregrines to keep an eye on their designated quarry, while they rocket downward, rapt on the process of life and death...

  Fitch disengaged the security system, keeping a wary eye on Teddy, who stood beside him at the front door with the deadly looking Glock still in her hand. He noted that the slender extremity continued to tremble, and thought that she probably couldn’t hit the broad side of a Goodyear blimp if she tried to shoot. On the other hand, if she did hit a blimp, it would probably blow to pieces. He screwed up his face at the combustive mental image and hit the last key on the security pad next to the door. The red light changed to green and blinked obediently at them.

  Teddy was concentrating on staying on her feet. She felt like her legs were made of some unnaturally heavy material and she had to drag them through a pool of Super Glue. She couldn’t make herself concentrate, but was trying to run through lists in her mind. Change clothing. Tie up the guy. Leave quickly. Don’t look back. Change cars in the nearest big city. Salem. Portland. Eugene. The coast highway is too easy to block. The only highway around. The only avenue of escape. Then how to get out of here? Not a car. Not a plane. A...boat? They won’t expect that and they can’t stop every ship on the ocean, not even if they called in the Navy. I could use Sailor Jack’s boat. She disregarded that immediately. They would have gone there first. It’s probably where they would go next. Here and there. That’s what I would do.

  Opening the door, Fitch glanced at Teddy. The blood at her temple was starting to slow to a trickle. It had stained the side of her face and marred every bit of one side of the hospital gown. She looked like she’d been in a blood bath.

  The television in the office had been on all day long. Since it was Saturday, the lawyers didn’t care, and it made the day pass faster. Fitch had watched Teddy more than once that same day on CNN, listening to the others comment about the rescue. He didn’t know exactly how or when he’d made the connection. The girl saving a little boy from drowning didn’t look like the girl holding a gun on him. The basics were the same, young, slender, Caucasian female, but the make-up made a huge difference. Perhaps it had been the hair and the nose stud. The news said she’d been admitted into the hospital, and then went on to replay the segment again, showing that close-up of her face. That face that one of the legal secretaries had said looked so familiar. But as Fitch drove through the night with Teddy at his side, he put it together that this was one and the same girl.

  It was puzzling to say the least. Girl rescues boy. Girl goes to hospital. One day later, girl runs out of hospital with big gun in one hand, blood from a cut on her head streaming down her face, and man chasing her. Girl kidnaps another boy and carjacks Jeep. What doesn’t fit here? He held the door open and motioned for her to enter ahead of him. She leveled a look at him that actuated his moving through the passageway first and without further ado. “The guy that took the video was a tourist,” Fitch said, conversationally. “There to take a whale watching trip with the fam. The wifie and the kiddies. Even bought the tickets right from you. Other people got some of the rescue on their smartphones, but that guy, he got it from beginning to end. You trying to do an emo thing? It doesn’t really go with the hospital gown.”

  A vague memory of a man with a camcorder came to Teddy’s mind. The man must have raced to CNN to sell the footage, with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth. Boy, is he going to be pissed if he ever found out what he really has, and how cheap he sold out to the media. That was how they’d found her. Someone had seen it on T.V. That was why the guy in the hospital room with the hernia had said I looked better without makeup. That’s what I get for being a Good Samaritan. Footage on CNN that was a big, neon sign blinking out, ‘Here I am!’ Maybe one of these days she might even get to see it. She didn’t think that was going to happen anytime soon. “You have a boat?” she asked hopefully. Big one. Big engine. Lots of gasoline. A Navstar GPS system. A way to escape. Please. Please. Please. She thought she could run a boat. She’d seen Sailor Jack do it for the last two and a half months.

  Fitch stopped in the hallway and turned on the light. With his other hand he unbuttoned the top three buttons on the white shirt he wore. She suddenly noticed that his eyes were the color of amber. Golden brown amber. Bright eyes. Intelligent eyes. He wasn’t afraid of her. He wasn’t afraid of the gun. But his interest was piqued. It wasn’t good. He answered her question, “A dinghy. Ten feet long. Not even with a motor. No one used it since my grandfather died. I don’t even think he used it since the seventies. Probably sink if you put it in a puddle.”

  Teddy slammed the door shut with her bare foot. She reached behind her and threw the deadbolt. “What else? Security cameras? Guards who drive by every hour on the hour? Another keypad on the inside?”

  “Uh,” Fitch studied her carefully. What kind of girl knows about guns and security systems, but doesn’t know how to drive? “You don’t have to worry about that. It’s just you and me, kid. I’m not calling the cops on you and you don’t have to do anything to me. It’s a good deal. I can order us a pizza. I love anchovies and I can do without the pineapple if your stomach won’t take the combination.”

  “Clothing,” she said, keeping it short and simple.

  “You want clothing on your pizza?” Fitch deliberately misconstrued.

  Teddy said it slowly, “I want clothing. Women’s clothing. But yours will do if I have to.”

  “Oh, yeah.” So, she didn’t have a sense of humor. Fitch could kind of understand that. She probably wasn’t at her best at the moment. “My stepmother’s got some stuff here. For when she has to rough it.”

  “This is roughing it?” Teddy was amazed. He beckoned with his finger and led her through the house, turning on lights and lamps as he went. The inside was early modern Danish, similar to the outside. Everything was blonde wood or lightly tanned with neutral colors. Only the paintings on the walls showed a brilliant array of colors. The living room was bigger than some apartments that Teddy had lived in and even the hallway had an abundance of elegant bric-a-brac that any millionaire would be proud to possess. A set of Wedgwood vases on the corner table with unassuming pastel colors. A Brancusi sculpture sat on another table, a flying bird made of lustrous marble. Some framed prints that she might have guessed weren’t really prints, but the real thing. And only a bit of fluff security system to protect it?

  Fitch shrugged. “My family thinks that anything west of the Potomac is the sticks and that being here is roughing it. Why pay for a caretaker when they’ve got me to tend to the old homestead?”

  “Well, bully for you,” replied Teddy and the gun po
inted for her. “Show me the clothes.”

  They climbed a delicate, wrought iron staircase, obviously created by the same designer of the huge set of gates to the estate. It sat in the back of the cavernous living room and led up to the second floor, open and displaying its opulence. Wrought iron was topped with polished mahogany that had been buffed until it glowed. The floor of each step was a glossy zebrawood, striking and exotic. The second floor’s banister was an elaborate railing that repeated the intricate and ornamental forms of the staircase and prevented someone from tumbling down into the living room. Teddy could even see that cleverly constructed skylights allowed the homeowner or guests to glance up and see an array of stars above. The house had been contrived and arranged to be a feast on the eyes, coursing lines, luminous woods, colors that soothed and tantalized at the same time. She couldn’t really appreciate it but the symmetry and shades struck her, even though her mind was racing with plans of escape.

  Fitch took it slow and easy and watched Teddy from the top of the staircase. She paused at the top step and returned his remarkable gaze, finding some kind of inner strength from deep inside. “You’re not afraid of me,” she stated.

  “It’s hard to be afraid of someone in a hospital gown,” Fitch returned with a half-smile. “I caught a glimpse of your ass just then. Nice ass. You must work out.”

  Teddy stared at him. “Maybe I should just tie you up. Duct tape?”

  “No, oh, no. No duct tape in this house. Scotch tape. But no duct tape. Come on. I promise I won’t say anything else about your ass.” He raised two fingers up in the air, like a boy scout would in a solemn oath. “Oh, man, but it’s a cute ass. Good legs, too.” He saw her expression. “No more. I promise.” He paused. “But how are you going to keep a gun on me and get dressed at the same time?”

  “Let’s see what she has,” replied Teddy, morosely.