Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (16 page)

“You know I can’t take you there,” Dryden said. “It’s one thing to risk my own life. Yours, no way.”

“We can get within a few miles of it without any risk,” Rachel said. “If you want to look closer then, by yourself, I’ll understand, but you can’t leave me a thousand miles behind. Besides, there are good reasons to take me along. There might be things there that jump out at me that wouldn’t stick out to you at all. That place might jog a memory.”

For a long time Dryden didn’t respond. He looked at Rachel, then the computer screen, then nothing at all.

“I think there’s a lot more at stake here than us,” Rachel said softly. “Don’t you? I think we should go. Right now.”

Dryden rubbed his eyes.

“Christ,” he said.

Silence drew out. It was Dena who broke it. “You both know what I think, but I won’t try to change your minds. I’ve got a second car that my daughter uses when she’s home from school. It’s old, but it’s reliable. There’ll be roadblocks set up all around Fresno, I imagine, but … I could get you past those. You can hide in the trunk, and I’ll drive you north to Modesto and take a train home. If you’re caught, you’ll have to say you broke in and stole the car while I was gone.”

Dryden traded a glance with Rachel, then looked at Dena again.

“I don’t know how we could ever thank you,” he said.

“Don’t die,” Dena said. “That would do it.”

Dryden kept the unpleasant reply to himself: For almost any outcome he could imagine, Dena would never find out what became of him and Rachel. The girl said nothing in response to that thought, but she shivered as if a chill had crossed her skin.

CHAPTER TWENTY

They left five minutes later.

The car was a Honda Accord, ten or twelve years old. Its backseats could be folded down to open up the trunk space to the passenger compartment, but for the moment there was no reason to do that. Dryden lay curled on one side of the trunk, Rachel on the other. Three minutes and five turns after leaving the house, Dena called back to them, her voice muffled by the foam of the seatbacks. “They’re stopping drivers at the on-ramp. Stay quiet until I say it’s clear.”

The car braked thirty seconds later, then crept forward, start-and-stop. Dryden pictured a long line of clotted traffic, all of it washed in the LED flare of police lights. A moment later he heard the crackle of two-way radios. In the darkness, Rachel found his hand and held it tightly. Footsteps clicked on asphalt. Dena’s window buzzed down, and the sounds of the city came through.

A man said, “Evening.” Sharp voice, a practiced balance between hard and polite.

“Hi,” Dena said. “Is this about that thing on TV?”

“Yes, ma’am. Can you show me your ID?”

Seconds of silence. Then white light shone at the seam where the seatback met the trunk. It darted and roamed. The officer was shining a flashlight beam around the car’s interior.

“Can I ask where you’re headed tonight?” the man said.

“Just getting out of here for a couple days. If that guy’s here in town with that thing—you know—I’d rather not be here.”

It sounded like something Dena had been rehearsing in her head for the past several minutes. No doubt it was. Her delivery of the line was dramatic—too much so. Dryden tensed.

Another five seconds passed, and then the officer said, “Do me a favor and pop your trunk for me.”

Rachel’s hand convulsed around Dryden’s.

“Is that really necessary?” Dena asked.

“It won’t take long. Go ahead and open it.”

Dena said nothing.

Dryden had the SIG SAUER in his rear waistband, but he made no move to draw it. There was simply nothing he could do with it that would make any difference. There would be a dozen or more officers within twenty yards of the car, all of them prepared to encounter trouble tonight. There would be multiple choppers, local and federal, stationed above the city. There was no possibility of escape.

“Ma’am?” the officer said.

No response. In his mind, Dryden saw Dena at the wheel, her mouth working to speak, but nothing coming out. Everything falling apart right in front of her.

“Ma’am.”

“I have personal things in the trunk,” Dena said. “I’d prefer not to have someone going through it. Can I please just go?” Her voice was high and stretched. Everything about it would be a big red flag to a cop.

“Ma’am, I need you to open your trunk. Now.”

“Don’t you need a warrant for that?”

“I can have one on my phone screen in about thirty seconds. Would you like me to do so?”

“I just want to get out of Fresno,” Dena said. “I’m just scared out of my fucking mind being here, and none of this is helping me.”

“Ma’am, I’m not going to say it again—”

All at once the cop cut himself off. For an awful second Dryden imagined Dena had done something to make him do that—like reach for the gear selector to dump the car back into drive.

But there was no sudden lurch of the vehicle. No sound or movement at all. Just silence playing out. Dryden could feel Rachel shaking, the sensation traveling through her hand into his own.

The silence held. Like fingers gripping a cliff edge.

Then the officer spoke again. “Alright, it’s fine. You can go on through. Have a good night.”

For another moment Dena said nothing. Maybe she thought the guy was kidding. Then his footsteps moved off along the pavement, right past the trunk to the next car in line.

Dryden heard Dena exhale shakily, and a second later the Honda was moving, weaving through the blockade and picking up speed. It crept through one last turn and then accelerated rapidly, and even over the revving engine Dryden could hear Dena up front, breathing.

“Okay, it’s safe,” she called.

Dryden pulled the handle that released the seatback from its hold and shoved it forward and down. Air and light from the passenger compartment flooded the trunk. He saw Rachel next to him, looking pale and almost sick.

“You okay?” he asked.

She managed a nod. She was still shaking badly.

“Come on,” Dryden said. He guided her forward onto the folded-down seats. Outside, the edges of Fresno were sliding by at seventy miles an hour.

Dena looked back at the two of them. She was as badly rattled as Rachel.

“I don’t get it,” Dena said. “I don’t know why he let me go. He just … did, all of a sudden.”

Dryden’s mind went to bad explanations first—old habit. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe someone with a thermal camera had seen that there were warm bodies in the trunk. Maybe there’d been standing orders to let anyone like that go through, to be followed, and someone had given word to the cop at the last second.

“Did the officer have an earpiece in?” Dryden asked. “Did he touch his ear like someone had told him something?”

Dena shook her head. “Nothing like that. He was right in my face, I would’ve seen it.”

“What about someone giving him a hand signal? Did he look away at another cop before he let you past?”

“No. I was watching him the whole time. He was staring right at me and then … he just changed his mind. I still can’t believe it.”

Dryden couldn’t believe it, either.
Didn’t
believe it. Not quite, anyway. He turned and stared through the back window. He could see the glow of flashers half a mile behind, pulsing against street signs and buildings near the interchange.

Dena seemed to pick up on his tension.

“What is it?” she asked. “Is there something I should know?”

Dryden watched the road behind them a few seconds longer, then turned forward again.

“I don’t know,” he said.

*   *   *

They reached Modesto just after two in the morning. Dena stopped first at a Walmart on the edge of town.

“There are things you’ll need,” she said, “and you’ll want to minimize the time you spend in public places like stores.”

Dryden and Rachel stayed in the car while Dena went in. She came back out twenty minutes later with several bags full of nonperishable food, plus a flashlight, batteries, and fresh bandages and antibiotic gel for Rachel’s arm. She’d also bought a baseball cap and a pair of wrap-around Oakleys for Dryden. “Better than nothing,” she said.

They were at the train station ten minutes later. Dena parked and left the engine running, and for a moment no one spoke.

“When I wake up tomorrow morning,” Dena said, “I’m going to lie there for thirty seconds and wonder if I dreamed this.”

Rachel leaned forward between the seats and hugged her. Dena held on for a long time, her eyes closed.

“Thank you,” Dryden said. It was probably the fifth time he’d said it.

Dena opened her eyes over Rachel’s shoulder and looked at him.

“Protect her,” she said.

Dryden nodded. “With my life.”

He hoped like hell it would be enough.

*   *   *

A minute later he and Rachel were on the freeway, accelerating into the sparse middle-of-the-night traffic. In his mind Dryden went back over the route he’d eyeballed on Dena’s computer. For a few seconds he couldn’t recall the name of the town right at the end—the one at the U.S. 50 interchange, where the two-lane led south to Elias Dry Lake. Then he remembered: The town was called Cold Spring.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Cobb woke an hour before sunrise, took a long steam shower, and went out on the balcony off his bedroom suite to have a smoke. The bedroom overlooked the valley, its mountain walls thick with snow. Every bit of it glittered in the sharp air, and overhead the brightest stars stood out in the predawn twilight.

He heard the patio door slide open right beneath him. The twins came out and crossed the pavers to the edge of the pool. While they waited for its thermal cover to retract, they peeled each other’s clothes off, taking their time with it, kissing, whispering to each other in whatever language it was they spoke. They weren’t really twins; Cobb had simply thought of them that way since the day he’d met them. They looked like each other, that was all—same skinny little bodies, same big dark eyes and pert little tits, same pouty expressions when the whiskey or the vodka or the pot ran out, though there was always someone by to restock it inside of an hour. Cobb didn’t even know the girls’ names. In his head he called them Callie and Iola, for shits.

He watched as the steam from the uncovered pool filled the air around them—the girls insisted on keeping the damned thing at 100 degrees, and Cobb didn’t argue; he sure as hell wasn’t paying the energy bill for this place. Before the steam cloud obscured them, Callie slipped into the pool and Iola seated herself at its edge, her feet dangling in the water. Callie went under the surface and came up again right in front of Iola, her face between her thighs. The girls were only shapes in the steam now; Cobb watched as Callie’s face dipped forward and Iola leaned back on the pavers, her breathing turning into cute little moans. Cobb glanced over his shoulder at the nightstand clock in the bedroom. Thirty minutes until his shift started. Plenty of time to go down to the pool and join them.

It was the damnedest thing, the turns life could take. A year and a half earlier he’d been a logistics specialist—which was to say a warehouse worker—stocking shelves at a supply depot in Ramadi. In addition to killing camel spiders the size of his Christ-loving hands, that life had consisted of squaring away pallets of toilet paper and potato chips and coffee for the private American army in Iraq—about the same size as the real army that’d withdrawn a few years before. Cobb had woken up every morning there in his shitty little particleboard housing unit, his twenty-third birthday just behind him, his framed diploma from Ohio State six thousand miles away at his folks’ place in Rochester, and he’d thought the same thing he so often thought now:
How the hell did I end up here?
Hadn’t that always been the million-dollar question, though? Yes indeedy. Seth Cobb, the directionless wonder. Where will the wind take him next?

Where it had taken him about fifteen months ago was to a hiring office out at the edge of the company grounds, there in Ramadi, after someone had stuffed a bright green flyer under his door in the middle of the night. The flyer had been both vague and right to the point.

GENEROUS PAY / EXCELLENT LIVING CONDITIONS (NON MIDDLE-EAST LOCATION) / MUST BE WILLING TO CUT OFF CONTACT WITH FAMILY, LOVED ONES FOR FIVE YEARS / EXTENSIVE PHYSICAL AND PSYCH TESTING REQUIRED

Cobb had family and loved ones, but he was more than willing to miss out on their company for five years, and he was quite sure the feeling was mutual. So just like that, he’d found himself sitting at a little desk in the run-down building the flyer had directed him to. It was a disused hangar of some kind; he could see fuel stains on the concrete floor. There was a door to a back room, and every time someone opened it Cobb got a glimpse of bulky, high-end medical equipment inside. One of the machines was an MRI, he thought.

Before he got any closer to that room, there were written tests to complete. These would turn out to be the strangest part of the whole process. None of the questions were difficult, exactly. There weren’t even right and wrong answers, only judgment calls, like
Your house is on fire and your dog is trapped inside; do you risk your life to save him?
Or
Would you play a single round of Russian roulette to save a loved one from certain death?
After two days’ worth of that stuff, the written tests had culminated in something that deeply puzzled Cobb—at the time, at least. He had been made to sit off in a corner of the big room, away from any other applicant, and a man in his thirties had sat down directly behind him, saying nothing. The man just sat there while Cobb paged through one final test packet. This last test, he saw, contained no questions. There were just instructions, like
For the next five minutes, think in detail about the worst things you’ve ever done and gotten away with
or
Have you ever deeply hurt someone you cared about? Think about it, in specifics, for the next five minutes
.

What the hell was the point of this, he wondered. He could sit here running Pink Floyd lyrics through his head and they wouldn’t know the difference. But for the hell of it, he went ahead and obeyed the instructions. He found it oddly stressful, after a while; it even seemed to give him a headache, or at least a funny chill at his temples.