by P J Parrish
The captain fell into step with Alex as they headed to the jet.
“You’re going to her, aren’t you?” Megan yelled.
Alex quickened his steps.
Megan caught up and grabbed at his sleeve, but Alex shucked her off and tried to keep moving. Finally, Captain Bailey stepped in front of Megan.
“I’m sorry, miss,” he said. “You’re not allowed out by the jets. Stay back, please.”
“Alex!” Megan yelled.
“Stop, miss, or I’ll call security.”
Megan’s voice rose above the whine of the jet’s engine. “My father is right! You’re a loser, Alex! You can’t do this to me, you son of a bitch!”
Alex climbed the steps to the jet, dropped into the first seat and turned toward the window. Megan was struggling with a security guard.
Captain Bailey appeared in the doorway. “Do you need anything, sir?” he asked.
“I need that door shut.”
“Yes, sir.”
With a thud and a gentle rock of the plane, Megan was muted. Alex closed his eyes and laid his head back.
“How long to San Francisco?” he asked softly.
“Just over six hours, sir.”
Alex looked at his watch, then to the window. Megan was alone now, no longer yelling or fighting, just standing on the tarmac staring at his plane.
Then, just as the jet started to roll, she turned and went back inside the terminal.
Alex closed his eyes. Six hours. In six hours he would be on the other side of the country, on his way to a new life. He would find Mel and make things right.
If she was still alive.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The bullet wound was only the size of a dime. But it had cost Buchanan one more day and night in the orange-curtained hellhole motel before he was finally able to trust his strength enough to begin the long drive to California.
Interstate 80, he had learned, went straight through and dead-ended right in downtown San Francisco.
He just hoped his chances to find Amelia didn’t. If Amelia was on her way to find Jimmy Reyes like he suspected, she had a two-day jump on him.
The first leg of Buchanan’s journey was a numbing drive through the emptiness of Iowa and Nevada where for more than seventy miles, the road never deviated more than a couple yards from a perfect straight line. He reached Wyoming and crossed the Continental Divide. Then came the Great Salt Lake Desert, where the signs warning about driver fatigue were the only relief from the flat landscape.
It was past ten by the time he checked into the Motel 6, dragging in his duffel and a greasy takeout bag from Burger King. After a restless night’s sleep, he was on the road by seven the next morning.
The second leg of the drive took another eleven hours, most of it through the lunar landscape of Nevada. The hours and miles crept by. There was too much desolation and too much silence, and his brain was filled with a white-noise buzz. He almost prayed to hear her voice, hear her call him Bucky, hear her call him by the name that only she said.
But she wasn’t there.
The emptiness outside his window was echoed by the emptiness inside him. It was something he had not felt since the weeks after the disappearance of Rayna and his son. His years of working had disguised it, but it was back, the awful hollowness, the feeling that he was truly alone in the world. And that there might not be a good ending on this road he had chosen.
But there was no other choice. He had to see this through. He had to find Amelia Tobias.
And then what?
First he had to somehow convince her—a woman who had shot him after he had tried to kill her—that he was now on her side. And then he had to find a way to protect her from McCall. There were only two options on that front. He could persuade her to go to the cops and tell them about Mary Carpenter. But what did he really know about that? All he had was a theory and a plastic flamingo. And he couldn’t count on Amelia remembering anything.
Which left him with only option two, the one he didn’t really want to think about.
He would have to make sure Amelia Tobias disappeared forever.
It wouldn’t be easy, but he knew it could be done. He had made a career out of tracking runners and renegades of all stripes, smart people with money and means who were desperate to disappear. Why couldn’t he reverse the process and help Amelia start over?
A fake passport, a little money, a new name, a ticket to some country where McCall would never think to look.
A new life.
And what about you?
It wasn’t Rayna’s voice he was hearing now. It was just the hollow sound of his own.
What kind of life would he have when this was over?
In all the hundreds of miles he had driven, all the hours of thinking, he hadn’t been able to answer that question because he couldn’t see any easy outcome. McCall might let him live, but Buchanan knew he’d always be looking over his shoulder. The indictment might not result in new charges, but his daughter would always be lost to him. His work, the one thing that had sustained and distracted him, he now saw for what it was—an exile to a place where he didn’t have to deal with the messiness of human emotions, a place as devoid of life as the desert now whizzing by his window.
And that little brass key in his wallet?
He’d never see a penny of McCall’s blood money.
Buchanan was getting drowsy, and his body was one giant rod of pain from the bullet wound in his shoulder. He flexed his hands on the steering wheel and blinked hard, concentrating on the road ahead. He was about to pull over and grab a quick nap when suddenly the road curved to the left, the first break from the straight-line route in hundreds of miles.
And then he saw it—green. There were trees ahead and the gentle rise of the Sierra Nevada foothills. He was almost to the California state line.
He sat up straight in the seat and flexed his hands on the steering wheel.
It was past five when he hit the sprawl of suburban Berkeley. The traffic was heavy, and so were his eyelids. He had to concentrate hard to make sense of the cacophony of signs directing him ever west. Then there was a spaghetti bowl of overpasses in Oakland, a pass through a tollbooth, and he was on the Bay Bridge.
Water . . . gray and white-capped. Suddenly it was there on his right. Was it San Francisco Bay? He didn’t know. In all his travels for his skip tracing, he had never been to San Francisco. The Bay Bridge traversed a green island and then he was back out into the open again, on the top span of a grand suspension bridge. The setting sun was blinding, and he flipped down the visor, his head pounding with fatigue, his tired eyes hypersensitive to the light.
He had expected fog. Wasn’t San Francisco shrouded in fog? But then he finally saw it—a city of pale buildings set down on undulating hills backdropped by an orange Creamsicle sky.
His thought at that moment hit him like a bullet in the shoulder.
What a beautiful place to die.
Interstate 80 emptied onto a broad four-lane boulevard called Van Ness Avenue. As beautiful as the drive across the Bay Bridge had been, this was an ass-ugly stretch of highway, a row of muffler shops, car dealerships, and storage units. Once he crossed Market Street, the scenery changed to granite civic buildings. He leaned forward when he saw the Pantheon-like façade of the opera house. Buchanan’s Google of the San Francisco Ballet’s schedule had told him the company was getting ready to open The Nutcracker, but the opera house looked dark now.
No matter. He was heading to Jimmy Reyes’s apartment.
Reyes lived in a neighborhood called the Tenderloin, just a fifteen-minute walk from the opera house. Yesterday, when Buchanan had found Reyes’s address he had also booked a motel nearby. He didn’t know the city and couldn’t waste any time trying to figure out where things were.
He turned onto Eddy Street. The M
irage Motel was a puke-yellow relic from the sixties. Buchanan checked in, tossed his duffel on the stained bedspread, and was back outside in a few minutes. The pool in the courtyard was filmed with algae, and he had to step over a drunk near the motel entrance. But it was eighty bucks a night, the parking was free, there was a liquor store across the street, and he could walk anywhere he needed to go to get this job done.
He pulled up the collar of his jacket against the chill and headed back toward Van Ness on foot. His belly was sending up rumbles of hunger, he was tired and his shoulder ached like a sonofabitch. But he wanted to get to Reyes’s apartment and start a stakeout. He walked slowly, in no big hurry. The burner phone in his pocket had been silent for hours, and as long as McCall believed he was still on the hunt, Amelia was in no danger.
Once he crossed Van Ness, the streets narrowed and the buildings shrank in scale. The walls were scarred with graffiti, the windows covered with metal grates. The writing on the tattered awnings and dirty windows was mostly Asian, and the smell was a fetid brew of urine and frying meat.
Reyes’s apartment building was a four-story green Victorian on the corner of Geary and Larkin. The ground floor was occupied by a bar, but Buchanan spotted the apartment’s metal grated door. He peered inside to the tiny vestibule. There were twelve mailboxes, but he couldn’t read the names.
Buchanan stepped back, debating his next move. He noticed a red FOR RENT sign in the window of a second-floor unit. The printing on it said RING BELL FOR OWNER. NO APPTS AFTER 8.
He glanced at his watch. Five after eight. He rang the bell.
It echoed in the tiled vestibule. After the second ring, an interior door jerked open and an old guy with flowing gray hair and a beard, wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt, looked out.
“I’m here about the rental,” Buchanan said.
“What, you can’t tell time?” the guy shot back.
“Give me a break. It’s only five after. I’d like to see the place, please.”
The bearded guy came forward to peer at him through the grating. Buchanan stared back, knowing that even as ragged as he felt, he still looked better than ninety percent of the people who passed by this old hippie’s doorstep.
“All right,” the guy said, unlocking the grate. “It’s on the top floor. You go up first. I don’t go first up no stairs.”
On the top floor, Buchanan waited while the old guy unlocked the door and slapped on the wall switch.
One room with bare white walls, scuffed dark wood floors, and bay windows covered by a fire escape. The kitchenette had scarred counters, a toy-sized stove, and a wheezing circa-1950 fridge.
“The bathroom’s over there,” the old guy said, pointing to a door.
“Where’s the bedroom?” Buchanan asked.
“You’re standing in it.”
Buchanan decided to finish the ruse. “How much?”
“Fifteen hundred a month.”
Buchanan choked back a laugh. He couldn’t afford to offend the guy. “It’s very nice.”
The old guy was eyeing him. “Where you from, Mississippi?”
“How’d you guess?”
“My ex was from Natchez. You sound just like her.”
Buchanan gave him a tight smile.
“You want it you better grab it tonight,” the old guy said. “You won’t find a place this good at this price.”
“I know. That’s what Jimmy told me.”
“Jimmy Reyes? You know Jimmy?”
“Yeah. He told me you had a good studio for rent.”
The old guy gave him a hard stare and then waved a hand at the room. “So, yes or no?”
“I need to sleep on it.”
“Your loss, dude.”
He turned off the light, locked the door and they headed back down the stairs. In the vestibule, Buchanan did a quick scan of the names on the mailboxes. No Jimmy Reyes.
“Which apartment is Jimmy’s?” he asked.
“Reyes is gone. He moved out about a month ago.”
Shit.
“Do you know where he went?” Buchanan asked.
“I think he’s in Cole Valley. Look, I have to get—”
“Did he leave a forwarding address? I’d like to look him up. He’s a really good friend.”
The hippie arched his brow. “You don’t look like his type.”
Buchanan held out forty dollars. “It’s worth a lot to me.”
The hippie plucked the two twenties from Buchanan’s hand. “I’ll get it for you but it’ll have to be tomorrow morning. Take it or leave it.”
“I’ll take it.”
The hippie jerked open the metal grating, waiting impatiently. When Buchanan didn’t move, he sighed again. “I’ll be here,” he said. “Eight in the morning. Now get out of here.”
Buchanan nodded. “Thanks, man.”
The metal door banged shut behind him. Buchanan stepped out into the street. The temperature had dropped a good twenty degrees since he had arrived and a cold fog was curling in, blurring the streetlights and neon. Or maybe he was just so damn tired his eyes were finally giving out on him.
The homeless men were starting to stake out their doorway beds. Buchanan headed toward Larkin Street, intent on getting back to the Mirage to crash.
But when he stopped at the corner to wait for the light to change, he heard a buzzing and turned. His eyes went up to the blur of flickering red neon above the entrance of the bar.
The Outsider.
Jimmy Reyes would have to wait until tomorrow. Sleep would wait a while longer. Right now, he needed a drink.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
How could she be here, in a place like this?
It was dark, the fog blurring the red neon sign above the entrance of the bar. But no amount of fog could mask the ugliness of this place. Junkies shivering in doorways, homeless people pushing shopping carts around drunks passed out on the sidewalks. A woman in hot pants and halter top standing on the corner screaming obscenities at the night sky.
Alex shuddered and reached for the vodka bottle on the seat of the rental car.
Mel was so much better than this, so much better than this man Jimmy Reyes. How could she allow herself to step so far down?
It was her brain, he decided. It was still damaged, and he could only assume that at this point, she didn’t know any better.
He took a drink, set the bottle between his knees, and focused on the doorway of the green Victorian building. It hadn’t been hard to find out where Jimmy Reyes lived. The firm had excellent software for locating people, and he had his own account, which he’d used to get Reyes’s address. The man lived above a bar on Geary Street, in an area of the city called the Tenderloin. From Alex’s vantage point a half block away, it looked like the upper floors of the old building had been divided into six or eight small apartments. Behind the zigzag of the fire escape, he could see a FOR RENT sign in one of the windows.
He had been tempted to go barreling in, but he had learned something from his confrontation with the old woman in Georgia. If there was a way out through the back, Mel would run from him.
That night in Georgia had taught him something else, too, though he had not listened at the time.
She’s a different woman. And you’re going to have to be a different man to get her back.
As much as it gnawed at him to admit it, Buchanan had been right. He did need to be different, and he would be. He’d be smart and calculating and patient. He would wait until she was alone to confront her. That would give him the element of surprise and, even more to his advantage, allow him to isolate her from Reyes.
A siren wailed, and he glanced in the rearview mirror to watch a police car pass by in the intersection behind him. His eyes drifted back to Reyes’s apartment building.
He shifted in his seat, uncomfortable with the lowlifes who r
oamed near his car and the smell hanging in the wet air. Uncomfortable, too, with the smell of his own body. It had been two and a half days now since he’d shaved or bathed. Maybe he should’ve taken the time to check into a hotel and clean up. But he had wanted to get here, to this place, as fast as he could.
Was Mel up there?
Was she still alive?
He took another drink of vodka and closed his eyes.
When he had been a defense attorney, he’d met people like himself—people hoping a missing loved one would suddenly walk through the front door alive and well. Parents were the worst, always so sure their baby was still alive. They talked of weird psychic vibrations, dreams, and even physical sensations that connected one body to another; feelings, they said, that would not be there if the child was dead. He’d always thought they were just in denial.
But now he had to wonder, because he felt the same thing for Mel. Like he was tied to her by an ethereal thread of energy that allowed him, inside his own body, to feel the soft beat of her heart. He had felt it all during the six hours it took to fly here, and he was still feeling it now.
She’s here. She’s here.
Alex opened his eyes, looking back at the apartment’s door just as metal grating opened.
He straightened quickly and peered hard through the windshield. Standing in the white glow of the streetlight was a man. But it wasn’t Jimmy Reyes. This man was light haired, too broad.
It was Buchanan.
Alex’s eyes shot up to the windows of the apartments. All were lit by lamps except the one.
God, god. Mel is dead. The bastard had already been inside. He had already killed her.
And now he was just standing there, taking in the street like a tourist. He had nothing in his hands, and from what Alex could see, no blood or stains on his clothes.
Alex opened the car door and got out, his eyes bouncing from the apartment windows to Buchanan and then up and down the street. But he didn’t even know what he was looking for. A police car?
No . . . no cops.
If Mel was dead and he got the cops involved, everything he had done—and everything McCall had done—would eventually come out. He’d never get out of the country.