Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (2 page)

Dryden looked at the cross bracing under the walk and saw the only solution available. He guided the girl underneath. She was shaking but seemed relieved to be getting out of sight. Below the surface planks, heavy beams ran lengthwise along the walkway. These were in turn supported by far thicker beams, running sideways like the planking. Above these lower beams were gaps, not big enough for a person to fit into, but big enough for a pair of feet or hands.

“Hold on to me,” Dryden said, and pulled the girl against his chest. She complied without hesitating; the footsteps of the approaching men began to shake the boardwalk.

With the girl hugging tight against him, Dryden reached up and grabbed one of the lower beams with his fingertips—it was far too big to get his hands around—and then swung his feet up and hooked them into the gap above the next beam, five feet away. He made a hammock of himself, with the girl atop him, and pulled himself as tightly against the underside of the boardwalk as he could. It was like doing a push-up in reverse.

It was immediately clear he could not hold this position for long. Everything about it was wrong. His fingertips had no traction on the giant beam, requiring him to apply pressure to hang on. The muscles in his forearms were burning within seconds. At the same time, keeping his body straight involved contracting half of his muscles in ways they weren’t meant to be used.

The girl seemed to understand, perhaps feeling his muscle tremors. As the footsteps thundered toward them, she put her mouth to his ear and whispered, “They have guns. They’ll kill us.”

A moment later, the gaps in the boardwalk above filled with flashlight glare. The men had reached the shoreline stretch of the walk and had begun to fan out along it.

One of them spoke, his voice ringing clear and strong. It sounded like a voice accustomed to giving orders.

“Search the beach. Search beneath the causeway.”

Boots scuffed the wood, then landed hard on the rocks nearby. The glow of the flashlights filled Dryden’s peripheral vision, though for the moment the beams remained pointed toward the sea. The girl hugged him tighter; he thought he could feel her shutting her eyes as she buried her face in his shoulder. The pain in his muscles was beyond burning now, but pain wasn’t the problem. There were ways to disregard agony—Dryden had learned them long ago—but at some point his muscles would simply fail. Willpower couldn’t beat physics forever.

He managed to swivel his head a few degrees toward the beach. The flashlight beams finished sweeping the sand, and then one by one they turned to scour the space beneath the boardwalk. Dryden looked upward again, to prevent his eyes from shining. Staring at the planking above his face, he saw the diffused glow as beams passed directly beneath him. If even one of the searchers was clever or suspicious enough to raise his light by two feet, it would all be over. Dryden waited for the blinding glare that would signal that very thing.

It never came.

The vague wash of light subsided. Darkness. Dryden counted to ten and risked another glance at the beach. The searchers had moved on to the north, inspecting the boardwalk as they went. It was time to swing down and try for a quiet getaway, whatever the risk. Every moment he delayed increased the chance that he’d simply fall, which would be anything but quiet. He was starting to slide his feet out of the gap when a sound stopped him.

Footsteps. Heavy and slow, on the boardwalk above. They approached from the south, the direction the searchers had come from. Dryden remained frozen. The man on the boardwalk stopped directly above him; traces of sand fell in Dryden’s face.

“Clay,” the man called out. It was the leader. The guy with the voice. He’d remained on the boardwalk while the others searched.

One of the men on the beach, Clay apparently, turned and approached, his flashlight playing haphazardly over the ground. He stopped at the edge of the boardwalk, looking up at the leader. Had he lowered his gaze and looked straight ahead, he would have locked eyes with Dryden, no more than eighteen inches away. Dryden dared not even turn his head upward again; the slightest movement could give him up. He hoped the shuddering of his muscles didn’t show as intensely as it felt.

Of Clay’s features, Dryden could see almost nothing. The man was barely a silhouette against the black ocean and sky. Only the backscatter glow from the flashlight beam offered any detail: medium-length hair, dark clothing, a weapon hanging at his side by a shoulder strap. A submachine gun—something like an MP-5 with a heavy sound suppressor.

Above, on the boardwalk, the leader said, “This is out of hand already. Go back to the van, set up coverage of police channels in a twenty-mile radius. Call Chernin, get him working on personal cell phones of officers and whatever federal agents are based in the area. Gold-pan the audio for keywords like
girl
and
lost
. Try
psych ward
while you’re at it.”

“You think if she talks to anybody,” Clay said, “they’ll think she walked out of a mental hospital?”

Dryden suddenly felt his fingertips slipping from their hold on the fog-dampened wood. No amount of exertion could stop it; he was going to lose his grip in a matter of seconds.

“Solid chance of it,” the leader said.

Dryden’s fingertips held by a quarter inch. He felt that margin shrink by half in the span of a breath.

“And if we lose the trail anyway?” Clay asked.

For a second the leader didn’t answer. Then he said, “Either she gets buried in the gravel pits, or we do.”

Dryden tensed for the fall, trying to imagine any way he could get on his feet and escape with the girl.

At that instant he felt her move. Without a sound, she took her arms from around his chest, reached past his head to the beam, and clamped her hands as tightly as she could over his fingertips. The minor force she could apply was enough to make the difference; his grip held.

Above the clamor of thoughts demanding Dryden’s attention, one briefly took precedence:
How the hell had she known?

A second later Clay pocketed his flashlight, climbed onto the boardwalk, and ran off in the direction the group had come from. Dryden waited for the leader to move off as well, but for a moment he only stood there, his breath audible in the darkness. Then he turned and thudded away to the north, following the searchers. When his footsteps had grown faint, Dryden at last slipped his feet from the beam and swung down. Blood surged into his muscles like ice water. The girl got her balance on the rocks and leaned past him to look up the beach. Dryden looked, too: The searchers were a hundred yards away.

The girl sniffled. Dryden realized she was crying.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Her voice cracked on the first word. “I’m sorry you had to do that for me.”

Dryden had a thousand questions. They could all wait a few minutes.

He turned and scanned inland for the best route away from here. There was a comforting span of darkness between the boardwalk and the harbor road. A block north along its length, the back streets of El Sedero branched deeper inland, into the cover of night. He and the girl could take the long way around and circle back to his house, half a mile north on the beach.

Taking a last look to make sure the searchers were still moving away, Dryden guided the girl under the boardwalk and into the long grass beyond.

CHAPTER TWO

Neither of them spoke until they were three blocks in from the sea, moving north on the dark streets of the old part of town. Even there, Dryden kept watch for Clay, on the chance he’d gone this way en route to the van—the marine fog wasn’t dense enough to provide them cover. For the moment, though, they seemed to have El Sedero to themselves.

Dryden spoke quietly. “Who are they? What is this—are you a witness to something?”

He couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

The girl shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t really know.”

“You don’t know if you witnessed something?”

“There’s more to it than that,” she said.

Dryden could still hear a hitch in her breathing, though she’d stopped crying a few minutes earlier.

“It’s not too late for you to keep yourself out of this,” she said. “What you’ve already done is more than—”

“I’m not leaving you out here by yourself. I’m taking you somewhere safe. We can still go to the police, even if these guys can listen in.”

The girl shook her head again, more emphatically this time. “We can’t.”

“There are police stations that have a hundred officers in them,” Dryden said, “even this time of night. You’d be protected, no matter who knows you’re there.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then explain it to me.”

The girl was quiet again for a moment. She looked down at her bare feet, padding silently on the concrete.

Dryden said, “My name’s Sam. Sam Dryden.”

The girl looked up at him. “Rachel.”

“Rachel, I’m not going to think you’re crazy. I saw them. I heard what they said. Whatever this is, you can tell me.”

She kept her eyes on him as they walked. If Dryden had ever seen a kid look more lost, he didn’t know when.

“Where would you be safe?” he asked. “You must have family. You must have someone.”

“I don’t know if I do or not,” she said. “I don’t remember.”

She seemed about to say more when an explosion of sound cut her off, ripping through the mist in front of them. Rachel jumped and grabbed Dryden’s arm, but already they could both see the source of the noise. A cat had knocked a metal trash can lid to the sidewalk, seeking some unseen quarry among the garbage inside. Rachel calmed, but kept hold of Dryden’s arm as they started forward again.

“All I can remember is the last two months,” she said. “In that time, no, I don’t have anyone.”

There was a worn-out quality to her speech that no kid’s voice should have. It would’ve fit a soldier, months or years into combat deployment. The spoken counterpart to the thousand-yard stare.

“Where did you come from tonight?” Dryden asked. “Where were they chasing you from?”

“From where they were keeping me. Where they had me the whole time I can remember. They were going to kill me tonight. I got away.”

They passed the cat in the trash can. It paused from its hunting to regard them warily, then went back to business. Dryden stepped over the lid in his path, and then a thought came to him. It skittered like fingertips down his spine. Even as the notion took shape, Rachel froze and stared at him with wide eyes, seeming to react to something in his body language.

Dryden looked at her, briefly distracted by her uncanny perception, then let it go. He turned his attention back on the fallen lid.

“We need to get off the sidewalk,” he said.

He was moving even before he finished saying it. He guided Rachel into the shadows beside the nearest house and around to the back side. Here, the adjoining rear yards of two rows of homes formed a channel that paralleled the street. Dryden picked up their pace, north through the channel, determined to get away from the trash can as quickly as possible.

“They’ll come to that sound, won’t they,” Rachel said.

“Yes.”

He’d no sooner said it than running footsteps thudded on concrete, somewhere nearby. He shoved Rachel behind a shrub and ducked in alongside her; they were sandwiched between tiny branches and the foundation wall of a house. Staring out through the gap between the shrub and the concrete, Dryden had a limited view to the south, back the way they’d come from. He saw a shape flash by, two houses away. Seconds later the searcher’s boots stopped on the sidewalk Dryden and Rachel had abandoned a moment before. Silence. Then came the beep and hiss of a communication device. In the still, dense air, the man’s voice reached Dryden with clarity.

“Three-six, north of three-four’s position. No contact.”

A voice came back over the communicator, distorted but perceptible as Clay’s. “Copy, this is three-four, on my way back from the van.”

Now a third voice came in; Dryden recognized it as that of the leader. “Three-six, continue the street search. We think the girl doubled back. Resweep of the beach picked up a lead.”

“Copy, what’d you find?” the nearby man asked.

“A man’s wallet,” the leader said. “Under the causeway, right where we lost the trail.”

Dryden shut his eyes and exhaled. He didn’t even need to check; his ass against the foundation wall told him what was missing from his back pocket. He checked anyway. His wallet was gone.

Over the communicator, the leader said, “Double set of tracks in the sand, inland from the wallet toward your position. The team’s coming to you now. Coordinate with them and sweep the neighborhood. Three-four, meet me at the van; the wallet’s owner lives just north of here.”

CHAPTER THREE

Martin Gaul stood on the private balcony outside his office. He had his phone in his hand. He was holding it tightly enough that he could hear its glass display stressing.

The balcony faced south from the top floor of the building, overlooking Los Angeles from Sunset Boulevard. Gaul stared down on the nighttime expanse of the city—a thousand square miles of lighted gridwork, crisscrossed with freeways like the fiber-optic veins of an electronic life form.

He shut his eyes and tried to steady his breathing. Tried to choke the anxiety that had arrived with a phone call three minutes earlier.

Curren’s team had lost the girl.

Gaul turned from the rail. He paced to a table near the sliding door and set the phone on it, willing the damned thing to ring again, this time with news that everything was taken care of. He stared at it a moment longer and then went back to the view.

There was a taste in his mouth—a mix of low-burning fear and tension. He had experienced it before, thirty years back, the summer between college and the army, when he lived in Boston. He’d gone to a Sox game with friends and hit a bar outside Fenway afterward, and a lot of shots later he’d come out alone, vaguely aware that his friends had already gone. There’d been a girl he thought he was doing pretty well with, but then she left without saying good-bye, which put him in a rough mood. He remembered wandering outside and walking toward what he thought was the bus stop, and much later ending up down by the river, near Harvard Bridge. He was looking for a spot to take a piss when the trouble happened.