Challenge (17 page)

70.

Steel’s first instinct was to run, but the woman had Cairo.

“Give her back,” Steel said, on his feet and facing the woman.

“Not until you agree to go back to the hotel. I warned your mother…”

“And if we agree?” Kaileigh asked.

Steel shot her a look; he felt betrayed.

“This is dangerous for all of us,” the woman said. “The farther away from here, the better.”

“We know about the lottery,” Steel said. “We know what you’re up to.”

“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” the woman said. She sounded sincere, and Steel didn’t know what to think. “I’m in trouble, too, you know? I stuck my neck out to protect you. And now—”

“Protect
me?” Steel said harshly. “I don’t think so.”

She looked scared. He wasn’t sure if someone could fake that. Her eyes jumped around in her head like she was trying to look a hundred directions at once.

“I’m here because I believe there are people—bad people—after you,” she told him. “That may be my fault, and there’s nothing I can do about it now, except get you away from here. I tried to tell your mother to get you out of here. It’s not my fault that she didn’t listen. But I’m warning you…” She looked Steel and then Kaileigh right in the eye. “You do not want to get anywhere near this guy. This guy is the worst of the worst. Totally bad news.”

“He has a lady. A hostage. A preacher’s wife. We’re going to find out where he is and call the police. It’s that brick building, isn’t it?” He pointed.

“Listen, Sherlock, this is
not
a game. It’s not a video game,” the woman said. “This guy is bad news, and he’ll hurt you
and
your friend and your dog if he finds you. That’s if you’re lucky. You messed things up for him. And he is not the kind of person to forgive. He’ll make an example of you.” She whispered, “I think they mean to kill you, kid. Why do you think I stuck around?”

“Steel.” Kaileigh had gone as white as Wonder Bread. “Let’s just do as she says.”

“How do we know it isn’t a trap?” Steel said. He meant this for Kaileigh, but he never took his eyes off the woman, and more specifically, her hand holding Cairo’s leash.

“How’d you get here?” the woman asked.

“The subway,” Kaileigh answered.

“Shut up!”
Steel told her.

“I’ll walk you back to the subway,” the woman said. “I’ll give the dog back to you there.” She apparently hadn’t missed Steel’s attention on his dog.

“I don’t believe you,” Steel said. “You lied to me in Chicago—said the briefcase wasn’t yours. If you hadn’t done that…If you’d just
taken
the stupid briefcase…But you lied. And that’s the reason all this happened, so don’t go blaming me. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

“The briefcase wasn’t mine,” the woman said, angry with him now. “I was delivering it, is all. You stupid idiot. If you’d just left things alone…”

“He’s going to kill the preacher’s wife. If I’d left things alone, no one would know any of this.”

“Listen, you know more than I do,” the woman said, somewhat ashamed. “I was a mule.”

“A mule?”
Kaileigh said.

“A courier. I delivered the briefcase. That’s all I was in for until you came along. But then…You want to save the world, kiddo, that’s your business. You want your dog back?” She passed Steel the leash. “Okay. You’ve got the dog back. But you go into that brick building, and you’re never coming out. Not alive, you aren’t.”

“Steel?” Kaileigh said. “I think we should listen to her.”

“It’s a trick,” Steel said. He passed the leash to Kaileigh. “Don’t let go.”

“I’m outta here,” the woman said. She turned and walked away. Away, not only from them, but from the brick high-rise as well.

“Wait!” shouted Steel, trying to stop her. “What floor are they are on?”

“No clue,” she said without looking back. “And I do
not
care.” Then she stopped and turned. “You’re making a big mistake. I’m getting out of here. That’s where I’m starting: staying alive. I’m not going to stay here debating with you. But trust me, you’re crazy if you go into that building. And
you,”
she said to Kaileigh, “have the right idea. Get the heck out of here. The guy in there is nothing but trouble.”

“I need to circle the building,” Steel said, pleading with Kaileigh. “Not get inside, only circle around it. We’ll leave here after that.”

“No,” the woman said. “That’s a stupid idea. What if he sees you? No way.”

“Steel, I think she’s right,” Kaileigh said.

“If I leave, there’s no way that marshal is going to let me come back here. And they won’t know what floor she’s on. What room she’s in. That means there’ll be no way to sneak up on that guy. And if he hears them going room to room, or sees them or something, who knows what he’ll do to the woman in the chair?” He spoke to the stranger. “It’s like you said: he’s a bad person. He could do anything to her. Are we supposed to just let that happen?” He paused. “I can’t do that.”

He looked at Kaileigh. “If you have to leave, I totally get it. No problem. Do what you’ve got to do. But I’ve got to take a lap around that building whether that’s risky or not. Take Cairo to the station. I’ll meet you there, if you wait for me.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“If you’re staying, I’m staying,” Kaileigh said. She glanced over at the woman with a worried expression.

“The more of us, the worse it is,” Steel said. “I get that much. He knows about Cairo. Maybe not about you. But if he sees a couple of kids and a dog, he’s going to know it’s us. One kid walking alone is a lot less likely to draw attention.” Steel looked to the woman for support.

“You’re crazy,” the woman said.

“Maybe. Yeah, you’re probably right,” Steel said. “But you and that briefcase started this, not me.” Excited and scared at the same time, he had to get moving. Standing in one place was not happening. “Give me twenty minutes,” he told Kaileigh. “If I’m not at the station in twenty minutes, get back and find my mother, and tell Larson everything.”

Cairo pulled at the leash, trying to follow the scent that still drew her. Kaileigh looked as if she might cry. She tugged at the dog, and finally Cairo followed her off in the direction of the station.

71.

Steel was no hero. He wasn’t doing this to prove something. He just couldn’t leave without gathering all the information available. It was like the lady tied in the chair was a science project he had to complete.

The sidewalk had decayed into fragments of concrete and trapezoids of bare dirt—a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing. The curb looked as if some kind of bacteria had eaten it away. Still a block and a half from the brick high-rise, Steel kept his left shoulder nearly touching the decayed storefronts—a former Laundromat, its windows missing; what had once been a corner store now looked like a bombed-out bunker. The closer he drew to the building, the more it dominated the sky, its rows of broken windows like unrelenting eyes looking down on him.

He stopped, hidden partly behind a bashed and dented refrigerator that stood improbably on the corner like a phone booth.
Click, click:
he captured the rows of windows on the building’s north side and tried to match them with what he’d seen in the Polaroid of the preacher’s wife. He remembered to flip the image in his mind’s eye, knowing he was searching for the reverse image. Nothing he saw fit the pattern.

He mentally grabbed them in groups of four—the number of windows behind the hostage in the photo. Grabbed them; flipped them; compared them. But the process was painstakingly slow, for he knew it could be any combination of any four windowpanes in a single line. His mind tired with the effort—it was worse than the memorization games he’d played to impress his friends and teachers. His brain was like an overloaded computer—it heated up. He got a headache.

He looked ahead to the end of the road and the dark brown waters of the river, where a lonely barge moved slowly behind the effort of a tugboat. This was the only sign of human life. His anxiety burned a hole in his stomach. He thought he might puke. He looked the other way. No Kaileigh. No woman. No Cairo. Gone. Just an empty street lined with empty houses.

What was he doing here? What had he been thinking?

He came to the end of this block and crossed again, reaching a bent and twisted railing that rode a seawall at the end of an empty parking lot, the river’s water churning only a few feet away. He turned to look back at the south-facing wall of the abandoned brick structure and its row after row of vandalized windows.

His eye picked it out like a string of letters in a word scramble. The kind where the word is spelled backward and the grouping of letters is tucked into the second line from the bottom. But his eye saw it without any kind of prompting for analysis: four windows that when flipped left to right created the
exact
geometrical pattern he’d committed to memory the first time he’d seen that Polaroid.

And there, in the second window over: a pair of eyes.
His
eyes. Only the eyes. No face. No hair. No body to go with them.

Steel felt his lungs freeze. He couldn’t have been more exposed: standing all alone against a railing in a crippled parking lot. It had been the only place from which to get a decent look at the east wall, but now that he saw where he was, he realized he couldn’t have been more stupid. It might have been okay had he just kept his head down and walked along—a dejected kid walking along the seawall. But he’d been caught facing the building—
studying the building
—drawn to it by his brain’s uncanny ability to decipher geometric shapes.

He heard rapid footsteps to his left—a person running. He looked but saw no one.

When he looked again for the eyes in the window, they were gone. Panic stung him. The man from the train was coming after him. He felt certain of this. He
knew
it with absolute conviction.

He had to pick a way out from the dead end he’d put himself into: the subway station was a long way off. Which side of the building would the man use to try to intersect Steel’s escape route? Left or right? West or east? He had to outguess him.

Wait a second! he thought. If it was the man from the train chasing him, then wouldn’t the hostage have been left alone? Wasn’t this the perfect time to go inside and find her?

Steel caught movement out of the corner of his eye: a man running toward him from his left.

It was much too soon to be the man from up in the window.
Then who?
Steel wasn’t going to stick around and make introductions.

He sprinted for the nearest door of the abandoned building.

72.

Steel tried the door: locked. He kicked at it, but it held firm. He fought the urge to look back as he fled to his right.

He rounded the corner, very much aware that the man was still behind him. It wasn’t a door he spotted, but a sheet of gray plywood, one corner warped and no longer screwed into the window frame. Steel yanked on the plywood and peeled it open just wide enough to slip through.

He dropped down off a ledge and into a puddle of water. Light seeped in around the perimeter of each piece of plywood, leaving a dozen glowing frames on the wall. It was enough light to make out the immediate area, a lobby or large office space, with square pillars set at regular intervals. The squishy thing beneath his shoes was a soggy carpet. Light fixtures hung bent off the wall like beckoning fingers.

The windows he’d spotted were five stories up. He hurried to the end of the room and pushed through a pair of swinging doors, entering into a dark corridor. Behind him he heard his pursuer kicking a door. It raised the hair on the nape of his neck. Then he heard the screech of plywood—the man was close….

Steel tried one door after another—all locked—before finally spotting a rusted panel to the right of a steel door indicating a stairway.

He leaned a shoulder into the stairway door and it came open, revealing a dimly lit stairwell. He pushed the door shut behind him and took off up the stairs.

He passed cigarette butts, matchbooks, and fast-food litter. The light was dim, coming from somewhere high above. The air stank.

Up…up…up he went, as fast as he could run. He passed an exit door at each level bearing a huge block-printed number:

2

3

And then, from behind him, came the rapid slap, slap, slap of heavy feet.

Steel took two stairs at a time. If he could just make it to the next level, maybe…His legs burned. His pursuer was moving fast now, quickly closing the distance between them.

Steel knew what to do. He would surprise the man by turning and kicking out at just the right moment.

He slowed enough to allow his pursuer to gain on him.

Just as he reached the fourth-floor landing, he turned, grabbed the rail, and kicked out. He caught the man squarely in the chest with the sole of his shoe. His knee locked. The man didn’t simply lose his balance, he
flew
off the stair. Launched into midair.

The man was carrying a small but powerful flashlight. Its beam wobbled, a circle of bluish white light danced on the dripping undersides of the stairwell above them. Then, as the man fell, Steel got a good look at the man.

It was his father.

73.

Kaileigh regretted having left Steel behind. He was the only friend she’d had for days now. Walking along with the woman—
a complete stranger
—she worried she’d done the wrong thing. She couldn’t sort out what was wrong and what was right. If Cairo hadn’t been there, she’d have been even more scared, but just the presence of the dog calmed her some.

“That’s about the twentieth time you’ve looked back,” the woman said.

“I’m worried about him.”

“He made his choice,” the woman said. “He’ll have to live with it. Or not.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I warned him.”

“I should have stayed.”

“Two wrongs…” the woman offered. “He’s the one making the bad decision, not you.”

But Kaileigh wondered. She knew very little about this woman, and what she did know wasn’t the most reassuring: a gang member, a criminal. What had she done, agreeing to go off with her? What if the woman was trying to kidnap her?

“I can find the station from here by myself,” she said.

“In this neighborhood? I don’t think so.”

She wanted to turn around and find Steel; she wanted to jerk on Cairo’s leash and take off. But how far would she get? The woman had longer legs and looked to be fit and athletic. She wouldn’t make it far.

She looked around, searching for some way out of this.

At that exact moment, two men jumped out at them. They had guns.

“U.S. Marshal,” the taller man announced in a deep, thundering voice.

“Hands on the back of your head!” said the other.