Infinite Possibilities (2 page)

When the cab pulls up to the airport, my nerves are scattered, but I force myself to get out of the car. I have a plan and it’s a good one. Good thing, too, since there is no plan “B” that makes sense to me.

I rush to the counter of a budget airline in an effort to control my cost and I am just in time to snag a seat on a flight leaving in less than an hour. I check in the empty bag, assuming a bag makes my flight look more legitimate than I intend for it to be, and keep the other with me. Once I have my boarding pass, despite my feet resisting, I press forward, reminding myself that there are cameras and security people everywhere. I’m safer here than anywhere else.

Fifteen torturous minutes later, I head to the gate, where I claim a seat near the counter so that I can call for help if needed. I do not move. I just…wait. And wait. And wait, it seems. Finally, boarding time arrives and I know this is when I have to plan things just right. I wait in line and the attendant scans my ticket and waves me down the ramp. I walk toward the entry and disappear onto the boarding ramp, then move to the wall, letting others pass. My hoodie comes off and I stuff it in my bag, then tug out the black ball cap I purchased and shove my hair underneath.

“Do you need help?” an attendant asks.

“My mother is meeting me and I’m worried. Do I have time to look for her?”

“You have about three minutes. Is she a confirmed passenger?”

“Yes.”

“What’s her name and I’ll call her on the intercom and check the manifest for her name.”

“Kylie Richardson, and thank you.”

She looks concerned and nods. “Give me a moment or actually continue boarding and I’ll find you. What’s your name?”

“Lara,” I say, speaking half of my real name for the first time in six years, and all but choking on it as I do.

“Lara Richardson?”

Brooks, I think, and for reasons beyond my obvious need for discretion my birth name no longer feels right. It no longer feels like me, and too easily, another alias flows from my lips. “Richardson. Lara Richardson.”

“Okay, Ms. Richardson. Go find your seat and I’ll find your mom.”

She turns away and I do not let myself dwell on the foolishness of using my real first name in an airport where I am surely being hunted. I creep to the edge of the walkway and peek around the corner to find the attendant walking toward the counter where another woman waits. The waiting area is empty. Like it had been that day I’d met Liam, when I’d thought I was going to be bumped, but instead ended up seated in first class next to him. Now, I wonder if that was a coincidence or by his design.

With the attendants facing away from me, I hear the announcement calling my fictional mother and I seize the opportunity presented to me. Darting from the walkway and to my right, my destination is the nearest exit sign, which I find quickly. Lifting my suitcase, I all but run down the escalator and straight toward the taxi stand.

Outside the building, I head directly to the male attendant and hand him cash. “I’m late to a wedding rehearsal dinner.  I need out of here fast.”

He glances at the twenty-dollar bill I’ve handed him and nods. “You got it, sweetheart.” He lifts his hand to motion to a cab and grabs my bag.

“In the back seat, please,” I instruct, wanting my few possessions where I can get to them if I need to make a fast departure. I can’t afford to throw out any more money after the cost of that plane ticket.

I’m just about to climb into the backseat when I hear, “Amy.”

For the flash of a moment, I freeze, the sound of Liam’s deep, intensely male and all too familiar voice radiating through me. No. No. No. He cannot be here. He can’t. But he is and that can only mean one thing. He had me followed. He’s been having me followed and it’s the confirmation that he was never just a stranger who touched me deeply. He is everything I do not want him to be. Everything I had prayed he wasn’t. 

I whirl around to face him and the attendant is stepping away, giving me a view of Liam standing there, looking every bit of Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome in faded jeans and an Izod shirt that is as perfectly aqua blue as his eyes. Close. Too close and he sways into motion. “Don’t!” I hiss, holding up a hand. “I’ll scream bloody murder, I promise you.”

He stills, and our eyes lock, his narrowing, holding mine captive. “Run to me, not from me.”

Those familiar words ripple through me, stirring a passionate memory of him saying them to me once before. And they hurt. I hurt. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“You know who I am. Who are you?”

“Hey, lady,” the driver says. “You coming?”

“Yes,” I call out. “Yes. I am.” But I don’t look away from Liam. “I heard you, Liam. I heard you talking to Derek last night.”

“You don’t know what you heard.”

No denial. I’d wanted denial and not hearing it tells me more than words. I turn away and start to get into the car.

“Don’t do this,” he commands, but there is a hint of a plea to his voice I’m not sure is real. Maybe I just want it to exist. Maybe I just want to turn back time and make last night, and so many things, go away. “You need my protection,” he adds.

I laugh, but it is all pain and no humor. “Your protection was never what I needed.” It was his honesty. His realness that I now doubt.

“You need my protection,” he repeats. “That’s what I was talking to Derek about. Me protecting you.”

Is the camera feed live? he’d asked Derek. That isn’t protection. “Lies don’t protect me,” I bite out, and duck to get into the car again.

“I didn’t lie to you.”

I stop moving, grinding my teeth at the realization that I ridiculously want him to give me a good reason for what I’d overhead. There is no good reason, I remind myself as I had a million times last night. I let my guard down with him and I can’t. Not when my family is already dead and I could be next.

“I can’t do this with you,” I whisper, not even sure if he can hear me as I lower myself onto the leather seat. 

“I will find you,” he calls after me, and the words are pure conviction, a promise.

“You can try,” I say, and my heart is racing as I yank the door shut, lock it, and shout at the driver, “Go, go, go. Go now!” 

The car jerks into motion at the same moment that Liam pounds on the roof. Scooting away from the window, I watch as he tugs on the locked handle. “Amy, damn it!” he growls. The man I know to be private and in control, at least in public, is nowhere to be found. “Open up.” We keep moving and he runs beside us, leaning into my view. “Don’t do this. Stop. Stop now.” 

“Do we have a problem, lady?” the driver asks.

“Drive and we won’t!” I shout at him.

He guns the engine and we pull ahead of Liam and the absence of him beside me is both a relief and a blow. I twist around to stare at him, the baseball cap falling from my hair, my eyes desperately seeking Liam. He’s running after us. Running. Liam doesn’t seem like a man to run after anyone, but he’s running after me. 

My fingers curl into my palms and I force myself to turn and sit down. Liam was desperate for me. I know this. It was in his eyes, his actions. In his voice. And I am desperate for him, for the man who I believed finally ended what felt like an eternal hell of being alone. But I do not know why he is desperate for me, if there might be reasons beyond real emotion, any more than I know why I am hunted or why he might be involved. I only know that he could be. And right now, I know why I let six years pass before I looked for answers. Not knowing who to trust, or how to find out what I need to know without dying first, is terrifying. But not knowing was a facade of safety that never existed and is simply no longer an option.

I will find you. Liam’s words play in my head and I know he meant them. He will find me  if I give him the chance. My nails dig into my palms where my fingers are still curled. If I ever see Liam again, it has to be my choice.

I sit up straight and survey the area outside the car as we exit onto the highway and I think of the note in the JFK airport. Be smart. Don’t link yourself to your past. Stay away from museums this time. Be smart. We are traveling the expected path in a car that I’ve been spotted in by Liam. That is not smart, but calm slides through me as it had after the diner this morning, and I’m back in that ‘zone’ I’d found years before to escape the memories of the fire that had burned away my world. Stop and think, Amy, I tell myself. Stop and think before you act.

I resist the urge to scream for the first exit, thinking it, too, would be obvious. “Exit here,” I order several miles later, digging cash out of my bag and dragging the handle of my suitcase open. 

The cab takes the frontage road. “Right or left?” the driver asks.

My gaze lands on a truck stop and a light bulb goes off in my head. “Get back on the highway,” I order, slipping my hair back under my ball cap.

“What?” the driver asks, sounding irritated. “You told me to get off.”

“I got confused,” I say and he stops at the light directly ahead of us and I open my door, tossing him cash.

My zone does not seem to stop my adrenaline from spiking like gasoline through my veins at the danger of being out in the open, a danger I’m ready to have behind me. Shoving the bag I’m using as a purse onto my shoulder, my singular suitcase in tow, I dart across the road. This will be over in a minute and I will be out of danger. I have a plan that is much better than the one I started with this morning.

The instant I’m inside the truck stop, I make a beeline to the back door that I can tell leads to the industrial gas pumps for the big rigs. I’m bypassing my Plan A, which had been to buy a cheap car off of Craigslist, one I wouldn’t need an ID to buy, and drive out of the state. Dangerous as it might be, I’m hanging onto my cash, and hitchhiking. It’s dangerous, but so is staying in the city any longer than necessary.

Stepping outside again, my plan is to find the most un-serial-killer-like person as possible but as I exit, a short, bearded man in jeans and a cowboy shirt grabs the door from me and stops a few steps from me. “You need help, sweetheart?”

Already this is seeming like a bad idea. “No, I’m good.”

He squints, thick lines around eyes that spend way too much time moving up and down my body, before he asks, “You need a ride?”

“She’s with me.”

I glance up to find a thin, fifty-something red-haired woman kicking up dust with her cowboy boots. She stops beside me. “You ready to head out?”

The look she gives me is all motherly authority and my heart squeezes with the memories of my own mother. “Yes,” I say, no hesitation in my reply. “I’m ready.”

She motions me toward a big red rig and I fall into step with her. “I’m Shell, honey. I’d ask what you’re running from but I’ll spare you a lie. I ride with my hubby Frank. You can join us if you like. Where you headed?”

“Away from here,” I say. “That’s all that counts right now.”

Sadness seeps into her eyes and quickly is banked, but I see it. I feel it. Oh how I feel it and once again with a stranger, I feel a connection. But then, all I have in my life are strangers. Who else would I connect with?

“Who do we have here?” A happy looking gray-haired man with a beer belly asks as we approach the shiny red truck.

“This is…” Shell begins, and glances at me, a question in her expression.

“Amy,” I say, clinging to the name that is the only thing I’ve managed to keep for six years.

“I’m Roy, Amy. You know how many truckers it takes to pump gas into a rig?”

“Ah…no. How many?”

“None. We make our wives do it.”

Laughter bubbles from my throat and Shell snorts. “He doesn’t make me do anything, honey.”

 Ten minutes later I’m at the window seat of the rig with Shell between me and Roy, and my laughter has taken a nosedive. Roy pauses at the exit to check the road and my chest is suddenly killing me, a crushing sensation pressing against it like the big rig I’m riding in is rolling over me instead of the hot pavement.

We pull onto the access road and while I felt regret leaving New York, I feel none over leaving Denver. But there is plenty over leaving Liam. I still want my Godzilla slayer, which is exactly why distance between him and me is good. I don’t know who I’m running from or if I’m wanted dead or alive. I simply know I have enemies and that it’s time I find out why. I will do that by being my own hero and the hero that honors my family the way they deserve to be honored.

Chapter Two

Silver City, New Mexico

Population 15,000

“Where the hell is Amy?”

I rush through the back door off the kitchen of ‘The Dive’ just in time to hear the grumpy question asked by our bald, often cranky, cook. “I’m here,” I reply quickly, hanging my black backpack on the rack on the wall just inside the kitchen. “Ready for my shift.” 

“You’re late,” George grumbles.

Grabbing the clip on the outside of my bag, I tangle my long blonde hair into a knot at the back of my head and glance at the clock that tells me I’m actually two minutes early despite a flashback that had brought me to my knees. But I don’t argue, just like I haven’t done anything else to bring attention to myself these past eight weeks. “Sorry,” I offer, and Katy, the bottle-blonde waitress whose been here three years to my two weeks, casts me a friendly, sympathetic look.