All Jacked Up (23 page)

Jack stopped dead in his tracks and turned around.

Aubrey forgot about the danger, bracing herself for one of Jack’s repertoire of cranky looks. Considering the situation, “not amused” was a good possibility, but “another dumb comment” was probably high on Jack’s list of appropriate silent commentaries. Instead he actually spoke.

“They’re going to expect me to steal a car,” he said.

Aubrey followed his line of sight, but she didn’t believe what she saw. “You can’t be serious,” she said. “You’re not going to steal a bus.”

“Why are you worried? You have a ticket.”

“A bus is hardly low profile, Jack.”

“Sure it is. Nobody pays attention to a city bus unless they’re waiting at a stop. Including the cops.”

He took off across the parking lot, again keeping cars between them and the terminal, staying low and avoiding the lights as much as possible. Aubrey hesitated for a bit, then she sighed and followed him. It was Jack or the cops or the hit men, and Jack was the only one who hadn’t tried to kill her. So far.

There was a line of buses in the next lot, interiors lit, doors open. Just waiting to be stolen. Jack stuffed her through the door of the first bus, climbing in behind her and taking the driver’s chair.

“Hunch down in your seat,” he said over the whoosh of the door shutting. “A man driving a bus in a work area won’t draw attention. If they see a woman in here, too, they’ll get suspicious.” And the bus revved to life.

“That was fast,” Aubrey said.

“The good news is the key was in the ignition.”

Aubrey didn’t ask the bad news. As far as she was concerned the whole thing was bad news. Okay, maybe not all of it; she’d gotten away from the hit men. But she was on the run with Jack once more, and before long the cops were going to be on them again, including the ones who’d shot at her.

The bus lumbered toward the exit, taking up about four lanes to get around the first corner. “At least it’s not another car chase,” Aubrey said, “this thing couldn’t outrun a Big Wheel, let alone a police cruiser.”

“I hate to disappoint you,” Jack said. “I know how much you like car chases, but there aren’t any cops behind us.”

Aubrey peeked over the seat back. Sure enough, they were the lone moving vehicle in the lot. She could see the red and blue lights of the police cruisers still sitting in front of the terminal, but she stayed low, just in case. “Who’s disappointed?”

“Car chases lost their excitement, huh?”

“The first one was exciting because I didn’t really understand what was going on. With the pickup I didn’t have time to do anything but react.”

“And this time people were shooting at you.”

“Not people, cops.”

“Yep.”

“Maybe they weren’t shooting at me.”

“Your memory give out?”

No, just her disbelief. She popped her head between her knees, making it look like cooperation instead of a desperate attempt not to throw up. The cops hadn’t tried to kill her. That couldn’t be true. “Maybe they just had really bad aim.”

“You were the only target. A half-blind eighty-year-old grandmother doesn’t have aim that bad.”

“Okay, then maybe it was a rookie, and he got carried away, you know like on TV when they’re doing target practice and they accidentally kill the innocent bystander.”

“It wasn’t a rookie, and it wasn’t an accident.” The bus swayed around a turn.

Aubrey sat up and watched Jack steer them out into traffic, hand-over-handing the wheel, back flexing, feet working the pedals. It took Jack’s whole body and some really inventive swearing to shoehorn them into the stream of traffic headed for I-75.

“The phone call you took at the motel was a setup,” he said. “You were never supposed to make the bus to D.C. The idea was to lure you to the bus terminal so Corona’s guys could get to you.”

“Tom—” She clapped her hands over her mouth.

“Tom wouldn’t do that?”

“No, he wouldn’t. I dated him for six months—”

“Tom’s the boring weekend traveler?”

“Yes. Trust me, he’d break out in a rash if he did anything wrong.”

“But he called you, and he arranged for the train ticket, right? And then Corona’s hit men showed up.”

“That doesn’t prove anything.”

“Maybe not, but I’ll bet you talked to him at Larry’s, and at Tiny’s—”

“I’ll give you Larry’s. I called Tom before you got there. But I didn’t call anyone from Tiny’s.”

Jack didn’t say anything, but his silence was talking loud and clear. She ran through the series of events, beginning with Tom’s phone call, extracting as much of the panic as she could in order to examine the facts Jack-style. For the most part she managed to remain cool and collected, but her heartbeat kicked up when she came to the only conclusion possible. “They were shooting at me.”

“Yep.”

“That means you saved my life again.”

“Yep.”

“I guess that means I should, I don’t know, thank you?”

“If we’re going to get all touchy-feely, can I pick the method?”

Aubrey saw no point in replying. It wasn’t really a rhetorical question, more like they both knew the answer already.

Instead of the interstate, Jack fought the bus into a neighborhood a little more desperate than the one they’d stayed in last night. Houses were built at the turn of the century, dignified but shabby, some of them burned out or boarded up. Streets were narrow, cars were one step up from junkers, and the alarm system of choice had a bite every bit as mean as its bark.

There was no one in sight except for a mixed bag of teenagers hanging out on the front porch of a nearby house, not far from where they’d parked.

“Why are we stopping here?” Aubrey asked.

“Remember when I said the good news was that the key was in the ignition?” Jack said, turning sideways in his seat. “The bad news was that line of buses must have been waiting to be refueled.”

“Remember when you said nobody notices a city bus unless they’re waiting at a stop? They’re apt to notice one parked in this neighborhood.”

“No shit.”

Aubrey gave him a look—the one that always made him defensive.

“It’s not like they’re going to call the cops.”

He had her there. “So what’s the plan?”

Jack hunched his shoulders and settled down in his seat.

“Do you have a plan?”

“Why don’t you come up with one for a change? You’ve read all those books, you should be able to figure this out.”

Aubrey thought about that for a minute and concluded it wasn’t a bad idea. How would they do it in books?

“We have a little breathing room, so I’m going to think this through,” Jack said when she didn’t respond, “instead of blindly reacting.”

It was time she did the same, Aubrey decided. She’d been naive—she never would’ve admitted that to Jack, but when she thought back to that day in the Library of Congress, she could see how clueless she’d been. It had all seemed like a movie, right up until the time she understood that the guns really were pointed at her, and they weren’t loaded with blanks.

Not a great revelation to be having fifteen minutes
after
the cops tried to kill her, but hiding from the truth would be just as dangerous as not knowing it to begin with.

Wanting to go home wasn’t all about figuring out her connection to Corona, either, she admitted. It was about being in places she knew with familiar people who didn’t have any hidden agenda. That she was aware of.

Well, it was time to make a plan and stick with it. And like it or not, Jack was it. Going home might still be the answer, but they didn’t have to make the trip physically.

She pulled her backpack into her lap and unzipped it. “Maybe you can start with this,” she said, handing him the list she’d made at the bus station.

Jack took the pages and leafed through them.

“Anything jump out at you?”

He handed it back to her. “You read off the names and let me think.”

“What, you can’t read and think at the same time?”

Jack didn’t say anything. Worse, he didn’t even glare at her. It was so unlike him it had Aubrey thinking wild things. “You can’t read? No, that’s ridiculous. How can you be a spy if you can’t read?”

“I can’t read your handwriting,” he mumbled, sticking his hands in his armpits and looking out the driver’s side window.

“What are you talking about?” Aubrey asked. “I write in block printing like a five-year-old. I learned it at the Library of Congress, so when I write reference numbers anyone can read them. All the librarians write . . . like . . . that . . .” Librarians. He hated librarians. And books. “You’re dyslexic. That’s why you hate librarians. They made you feel stupid because you don’t read like everyone else.” And that explained some stuff about Jack, like why he treated her the way he did. Payback.

“Now you get smart,” Jack muttered. “Can’t figure out the cops want you dead, even when they’re shooting at you, but you can figure out I’m dyslexic just because I hate librarians.”

Her instant reaction was to hug him, but pity was the wrong way to deal with Jack. “And you call me a freak,” she said.

“You are a freak, and a mutant.”

“At least I don’t sit around feeling sorry for myself.”

“I don’t feel sorry for myself.”

“Right, you take your anger out on everyone else. Librarians aren’t to blame for your problem.”

“Who else should I blame?”

“How about the teachers who didn’t realize you had a problem?”

“Teachers aren’t at the top of my list, either.”

“Why stop there? Maybe you should hate all the writers, or heck, how about the people you got the genes from?”

That seemed to amuse him. “You’re blaming my mother?”

“Well, sort of, I guess.”

“How about I take you to meet my mother and you can tell her that in person.”

“You want to sic the woman who raised you on me? I don’t think so.” She sat back, arms crossed, good and worked up. “You know, you’re not the only one who had to deal with being different.”

“Right, it’s terrible being the smartest person all the time.”

That did it. She went from worked up to pissed off. And not Jack’s version of pissed off. This was more like PMS and cheating boyfriend and road rage all rolled into one. She was seeing red.

“You think my life is a picnic, Jack? You think it’s so great remembering everything I see and hear? I made the mistake of watching a
Gilligan’s Island
rerun once. How would you like to have that theme song stuck in your head for twenty years? Do you want me to sing it? Because I can.”

He laughed.

“Sure, laugh it up, chuckles. When you have a disability everyone feels sorry for you. Everyone wants to help. I was a freak, just like you said. I went to college when I was fourteen. I had a master’s degree by the time I was twenty. Do you know why that is, Jack?” She sat forward, ticking the indignities off on her fingers. “I had no life, no friends, nothing to do except study. Nobody helped me. Why would they when I had such a gift?” She sat back. “Gift, hah. All I ever wanted was to be normal.”

“So you’re blaming everybody else because you’re a social outcast?”

“No.” But she was, she realized, and it took some of the hot air out of her. “Maybe.”

“At least your mutation works to your advantage.”

“Yours hasn’t exactly held you back.” And she had to admire how he’d overcome his handicap when it was obvious that formal education had let him down. “It’s not like either of us had a choice, Jack, but we’re doing the best—”

He wrapped a hand around her wrist, but the look on his face as he peered toward the rear of the bus was what really got her attention.

Aubrey looked over her shoulder and saw a van roll to a stop behind them. It was pretty dark in that neighborhood, but she was pretty sure she saw Danny get out of the driver’s side and walk up to the bus. Jack pulled his gun and opened the door.

“What are you doing?” Aubrey hissed.

“Seeing what he wants.”

She stuffed her list into her backpack, jerking the zipper closed. “He wants to shoot you. And then he wants to shoot me.”

“Yeah, that’s a possibility.”

“And you’re going to sit here and let him?”

“It’s either us or them.”

At the end of Jack’s pointing finger was Carlo, hidden in the shadows at the edge of the yard where the teenagers were still congregating. Aubrey didn’t figure his hand was in his pocket because it was cold.

“If there are roadblocks, how are you going to get us out of the city?”

“Drive,” Carlo said. “That’s why we’re in a van.”

“They saw us together at the bus station,” Aubrey reminded him.

“A rookie cop saw us,” Danny said, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Trust me, they’re not looking for us, they’re looking for you. And him.” He stabbed a beefy finger at a rumpled blanket in the back of the van. Under the blanket was Jack, disarmed, hands tied, unconscious. Or maybe dead, which had been a pleasant fantasy but wasn’t all that great in reality.