Escape (18 page)

Slowly but surely they began to walk Dmitri down the hall, keeping their eyes peeled for any more riffraff.

“Thank you,” he uttered, giving in to his tears again. “Thank you both.” He looked up at the two of them and then settled his
glassy eyes
on Gaia's face. “You truly are a princess,” he said. “A princess. . .”

The rich scent of expensive lipstick was floating from her lips.

Epic Proportions

HAD ED BEEN ANY LESS DEPRESSED, HE
would have noticed that Heather's benefit had turned into a party of
epic proportions.
Tatiana and the FOHs had handled the thing like seasoned professional publicists, cranking up the hype for the last forty-eight hours, building up the buzz, and then delivering. They'd decorated the place with black and white balloons, white roses, and funky candles. Tatiana had sketched an amazing abstract portrait of Heather. It looked and felt like a very real party. Pravda seemed to be literally rocking from side to side with thumping music, a giant crowd of beautiful people, and enough alcohol to get the entire state of Rhode Island soused.

Yes, there was a picture of Heather and a turnout that would have made the Hilton sisters envious, but what this party had to do with Heather's blindness. . . Ed had no clue. And the fact that there was a sign-in book at the doorway, with a placard hung over it inviting guests to write “encouraging messages,” only added to Ed's confusion. Was it some kind of twisted joke, or were Tatiana and the party-planning club so caught up in themselves that they'd actually forgotten that Heather couldn't read?

But Ed's skepticism didn't keep him from giving in
to a few beers. All right, maybe more than a few. He was now officially the world's most pathetic cliché. A country music cliché sitting at the most urbane gathering he had ever had the unfortunate privilege of attending. The lonely man hunched over the bar, drinking his sorrows away as he pined for the lady who had run off to God knew where.

It was just as Ed had figured. There was no sign of Gaia. No sign at the party, no sign at her house, no message, no e-mail, no nothing. She was off somewhere searching for her father. Alone, of course. Always alone.

What a shocker. Gaia disappearing on some lonely mission. When has that ever happened before?

This was an all-time low for Ed. He was being sarcastic with himself.

“
Okay
, Mr. Fargo!” Tatiana's voice screamed straight into Ed's ear from right behind his shoulder. He jumped slightly and tried to pretend he hadn't heard her. Even at this close distance, that was a legitimate possibility, given the deafening thuds of house music and the
penguinlike chattering
of the crowd.

“Hey!” she barked. “Mr. Fargo! I'm
talking
to you.”

Ed had never in his life heard Tatiana barking like this. She sounded like a professional wrestler trying to taunt her competition. But once he turned around, he understood why he had never heard her
talk like this before. He had never seen her drunk before.

Tatiana looked at him and grinned from ear to ear. She still looked just as ridiculously stunning as she had at the impromptu fashion show. Same black dress. Same vanilla shoulders. Same movie-star hair. Ed tried not to notice. One thing he did observe, however, was that she seemed to be swaying ever so slightly from side to side as she smiled.

“Well, it is official,” she declared, speaking successfully over the din of the party. “Gaia has reduced you to rubble.”

Ed frowned and grabbed his beer from the bar, taking a long swig.

“And do you know how this makes me feel?” Tatiana asked. Her voice was so animated, she almost seemed to be singing her words up and down. “Do you? I'll tell you how it makes me feel, Ed. I am mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!” She giggled slightly as she looked into his eyes.

Ed couldn't help but break a smile. “
Network
” He chuckled. “Did you just quote
Network
?. That's one of my all-time favorite movies.”

“Mine too.” She nodded.

Ed tilted his head slightly, staring at her with
progressively increasing puzzlement.

She tilted her head to mirror his. “You don't really know me very well, do you, Ed?”

“I guess not,” Ed admitted with a deferential smile.

“Well, I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” she bellowed, sticking out her hand. “Tatiana Petrova.”

“Ed.” He laughed. “Ed Fargo. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet
you
.” She nodded. “Though I must tell you. . . even though you are a
complete
stranger who I have never met before, I hope you do not mind my mentioning that you look awfully sad.”

“Women,” Ed grumbled. “You know how it is. Can't live with 'em. . .”

“Blah, blah, blah.”

“
Exactly,
” Ed agreed. “I think the only crucial point is that you can't live with 'em.” The more Ed actually thought about this point, the sadder he became.

“Oh,
no
,” Tatiana moaned desperately. “I am losing you again. Well, fear not, Mr. Fargo, I have brought you medicine.”

Ed had been so busy wallowing, he hadn't even noticed what Tatiana had been holding the entire time. Not until she raised her hands. In her right hand was an unopened bottle of Stolichnaya vodka. In her left hand were two shot glasses.

“Secret stash.” She smiled.

“Oh, Jesus,” Ed groaned, running his hands through his crunched-up hair. Four beers was already way more than his average alcohol intake. “I think I'll pass. I'm not really a vodka man.”

Tatiana took a step closer. “Let me tell you about
vodka,” she said, shaking the bottle with pedantic authority. Drunk, Ed realized, would not begin to describe her at this point. “In my country vodka is the primary cure for
all things
. You
need
to get your mind off Gaia right now, Ed. For your own sanity. And
nothing
gets your mind off things like a few stiff shots of Stoli. Believe me, it works. In my country we need to get our minds off
many
things. And a shot of Stoli makes Prozac seem like children's aspirin.”

One thing about a drunken Tatiana. She didn't mince words.

It was a little strange to see her so out of character, but on the other hand, with four beers to his credit, Ed wasn't exactly in character, either. And at this particular moment he didn't really mind that so much. The truth was,
out-of-character Tatiana
seemed to be the only person who could make Ed smile for any decent period of time right now. She was the only person capable of taking his mind off Gaia for even a few seconds. And if he added that to her staunch advertisement of vodka. . . that could equal some rather substantial time without this pathetically clichéd case of self-pity. All in all, it was a rather tempting combination.

“Okay, you win.” Ed threw his hands up and stepped off his chair at the bar. “Let's be drinking buddies. Where to?”

“Come, drinking buddy,” she said. “I have secured us a secluded spot.”

Nervous Twitch

THEY HAD ALREADY SURVIVED A SERIES
of agonizing trials in what should have been a simple journey back to the city. The walk through the woods to the highway felt like a marathon hike, mostly due to the snail's pace required for Dmitri's aging, ravaged body to keep up. Once they'd finally found their way back to the car after three hours, they had neglected to consider the fact that they would be hitting bumper-to-bumper commuter traffic on the highway. That was another two or three hours of unbearable slow going—two or three hours of Gaia basically slipping in and out of consciousness in the front seat, checking on Dmitri every time she awoke.

But there was no point in checking on Dmitri. He had fallen into a deep, near cadaverous sleep the moment he'd laid his head on the backseat. He probably hadn't slept a wink for days, trapped in that abandoned cell, praying for his rescue. Now Gaia had a feeling that his frail old body would need about a week of nonstop sleep just to try and recuperate, if recuperation was even an option for him at this point.

Gaia was eternally grateful to Sam for somehow being able to still stay awake and drive. He had, after all, not only been through the same life-threatening ordeal as she, and the same marathon walk through the
woods, and the same traffic from hell, but he was also still recuperating from serious injury. And judging from his strained, half-open eyelids, he was just as painfully exhausted as everyone else in that
rickety car.

But that, as it turned out, would be the final dagger. The rickety car. Gaia had been so exhausted that she'd nearly forgotten about the noise. The clunking that she had noticed right after they'd left the diner that afternoon. The clunking that had turned into a rattling once Sam finally cleared the traffic and sped up.

“Sam. . .” She spoke quietly, not wanting to wake Dmitri. Which was rather ridiculous, given the fact that a thirty-piece orchestra couldn't have woken the old man out of his bearlike hibernation. “Tell me you hear that noise this time.”

“Isn't that just the highway?” Sam croaked, doing his best to hide the fact that he was driving a car while half asleep.

“
No
, it's not the highway; it's the engine. The engine has been making that noise since we left the diner.”

“Well, I'm sure we'll make it back,” Sam mumbled. “We're only about an hour away. . . .”

As if on cue, the loudest clunk yet sounded from under the hood. And then the car began to slow down.

“If you're not worried, then why are you slowing down?” Gaia's frustration was getting the better of her after this day of endless trials and tribulations.

“I'm not slowing down,” Sam said, sitting up
straighter in his seat and pounding his foot harder on the gas pedal. “The
car
is.”

“What?” Gaia scanned every readout and display on the dashboard. Every needle was dropping bit by bit—most importantly, their speed. “Well, what the hell is wrong?”

“I have no idea,” Sam whispered, his own frustration mounting. “The car is just. . . dying.” He tried to pump the gas again, but the pedal was becoming nearly nonresponsive. “We need to get off the highway, Gaia. We need to get off now before we go belly-up in the middle of the road. . . .”

No, no
. They needed to be
on
the highway. This day from hell had to come to an
end
. They needed to be home. Dmitri needed to be home. Gaia needed to get home so she could straighten things out with Ed, and Tatiana, and even Natasha.

Sam flashed his eyes up at the rearview mirror with that same
nervous twitch
she'd seen earlier—that half-second glimpse behind them, just like he'd made before turning off to the diner. Was it just the turnoffs that still made him a nervous driver?

“What's going on, Sam?” Gaia whispered urgently. “What's going on with you? Why are you so nervous?”

“What? What's going on with
me
? Nothing! I'm just trying to pull a dying car off a highway and force it down the road to that motel. What's going on with
you
, Gaia?”

She had rarely seen Sam get so openly angry, but she realized that she'd chosen the wrong time to quiz him on his awkward driving habits. He was right. Whatever had happened to their car, it was now running on fumes, and if he couldn't gun it a hundred more yards to the blinking neon light of the motel at the end of the road, they'd be pushing that pile of junk themselves. This nightmare day had turned into a nightmare evening. And it still wasn't over.

The car did manage to putt its way up to the tiny office of the S-Stay Motel, and then it simply died. Two plumes of black smoke streamed out from either side of the hood. The engine let out a series of horrid coughs and burps and groans, and then all the sound gave way to a complete and deadly silence.

Sam and Gaia sat motionless in the front seat for quite some time, just staring at the smoke—just trying to accept the inhumanly cruel nature of fate. Dmitri's steady snoring didn't make this any easier. Nothing said “cruel twist of fate” like the sound of a snoring ninety-year-old man in a
crappy motel parking lot.

“What time is it?” Gaia muttered in a monotone, staring out the smoky windshield at the S-Stay Motel's garbage dumpsters.

“It's almost eleven,” Sam replied just as numbly, not moving an inch.

Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. Just problem solve,
Gaia. All you can do is keep problem solving. . . if you ever want to get home.

She didn't want to admit it out loud, but she had no choice. Because no one in the car had a triple-A card, and there sure as hell wasn't a twenty-four-hour mechanic in the neighborhood. “We're never going to get it fixed tonight,” she announced bitterly. “I don't know
what
the hell happened to the car, but I know we are never going to get it fixed until morning. . . . We have to stay here. We have to get rooms at the freaking S-Stay Motel, and then we get the car fixed first thing in the morning and we drive the rest of the way home. That's it. That's the whole thing. That's all we can do.”

“I know,” Sam replied, staring straight ahead at the overloaded dumpsters. He let out a long, painful sigh and slid down farther in his seat, shaking his head. “I know.”

Gaia would have to accept Dmitri's snoring as his vote of agreement. “Come on.”

Gaia and Sam just about fell out of the car with exhaustion, closing the doors behind them quietly and dragging themselves into the three-foot “office” of the motel. A middle-aged Pakistani man had fallen asleep at the front desk with a newspaper still open on his lap. Gaia cringed when she realized he'd been reading the Macy's underwear ads.