

THIN LUCK

by

Cori Lynn Arnold

All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. The names, incidents, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author's imagination and are not to be constructed as real. The events in this book are entirely fiction and by no means should anyone attempt to live out the actions that are portrayed in the book.

Copyright © 2016 Cori Lynn Arnold

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Acknowledgements

About the Author

**Chapter 1**

Connecticut - Section 53a-110 (a)

Criminal Trespass

I STARED AT the same dull grey concrete. I traced over the cracks and etched out graffiti like I had so many days in my past, but this time my heart beat with anticipation. I would see my baby today, hear Kyle laugh for the first time, see his smile, touch his chubby little cheeks. His baby smell would clear my sinuses of all the rot they'd been exposed to for the last two years.

Today, I would be free.

"So, what, you're gonna lay there all morning?" Carla asked. My cellmate's voice grated as it always had, but the last few days made her voice sound more like a bolt in a blender—a strange mix of grinding and high-pitched whine.

"Yes," I said.

"Your loss," Carla said. "I'm going down for the bacon. Can't you smell that?"

I ignored her. Sure the bacon smelled like bacon, but it tasted like molded shoe leather.

Peterson showed up at my cell at one o'clock. "Ready?" she asked with a swing of her keys.

"Yeah."

Peterson pointed her stubby black finger down the hall. "This way."

I knew the way. Today wasn't my only taste of freedom. I'd left the prison two other times in the last two years. The first time, six months ago, I met with the state prosecutor. He was a dandy with his pink suspenders and purple polka dot bow tie. I got the feeling he spent as much time combing his hair as making illicit phone calls. Antique pieces covered in gold and marble furnished his grand office. I felt out of place in my plain khaki uniform. But I was just a prison snitch, no more important to him than the neatly stacked files on his desk.

The second time I walked out of the prison was less than a month ago. I testified in front of a grand jury wearing a dress so modest it looked stolen from an Amish girl who long ago left for her Rumspringa. Luckily I didn't trip over the hemline. I wondered if, in some cosmic twist of fate, the Amish girl wore a miniskirt I had donated to Goodwill.

Based on my testimony in front of the grand jury, Carla would do a lot more time. Even more importantly, the state prosecutor needed me to testify at Carla's trial about her methods for smuggling drugs into prison. Carla didn't know this, of course, or I wouldn't be breathing. She'd find out soon enough. The point of getting me out of prison was to press charges against Carla without me getting killed.

Once I passed the final gate, Peterson placed two manila envelopes and a plastic bin in my hands. "Personal effects. Take your stuff there. Change." Peterson pointed to the bathroom.

I never liked the fragmented sentences uttered by the guards, but I'd long ago suppressed my need to correct them. I corrected a guard once for saying "tooken" instead of "taken." She punched me in the gut. The stern warning echoed from my left ear through the pain in my abdomen and out through the cellblock. Carla liked to say that was my first lesson in manners, and she took over as my prison etiquette coach after that.

I didn't remember what was in the plastic bin, but the smell of my old perfume trapped inside for almost two years nearly knocked me over. The little black thong probably seemed like a great idea at the time. The skirt was too big. After handing Kyle over to the nurse six and a half months into my prison sentence, I'd lost nearly twenty pounds in the York Women's Correctional facility. The weight stayed off, even with the over-processed, fatty foods served in the cafeteria. Maybe I could write a book: _The Correctional Facility Diet_. It could be a best seller like all those other fad diets.

Wayne, my producer at WFSB, told me to lose fifteen pounds when I worked as an investigative reporter for _Channel 3 - Eyewitness News_. He got his wish, but I knew my days in front of the camera were over. No one wanted to hire a convicted felon for an on-air investigative reporter. I was just twenty-five when I walked into York. Sara, the middle-aged Executive Producer at WFSB, said when I got out I'd still be young enough to bounce back to investigative reporting once I'd paid my debt to society. But in Sara's day she could work her way up the print market while waiting for an opening at a local station. These days, local newspapers were on life support with eager national chains ready to pull the plug like million dollar beneficiaries. Local newspapers folded under as often as the statistics for heart attacks, likely one generating the other. One thing was true; I'd have to sniff out a good story—one even better than how drugs got into the prison—to go back to reporting in print or broadcast. That task was going to be harder than raking up leaves, cutting grass and shoveling snow in the city parks for the next six months during my parole.

Now fully dressed, I could see the details in the lace of my bra through my sheer white blouse. After two years of wearing a potato-sack khaki uniform, I felt exposed.

I fished in the first envelope for my wallet. There, inside, were my expired gold credit cards and a single hundred-dollar bill in the billfold.

The tattered edge of a picture just behind my driver's license poked out. Nick sat on a big rock at the edge of the water looking out upon the ocean with his arms wrapped around me. The breeze tousled our hair. His smile reflected his contentment, not the conniving smile I was more familiar with.

Nick came less and less often to visit me in prison, only bringing Kyle a handful of times. He said it was too hard to bring Kyle, with all the baby stuff he had to haul. But I knew he plotted something. I knew the look in his eyes when he schemed, just like he knew when I lied.

His curiosity about prison and constant questions over the first year slowly dwindled down to nothing when I'd had no more new information to reveal. He completely stopped coming four months ago, and I hurried to put my plan for release into action.

He had many excuses about not coming, usually something to do with his busy writing schedule or Kyle feeling ill. How could I argue with him? I wanted what was best for Kyle.

The next picture I pulled out of my wallet was a much newer one of us at a Christmas party thrown by Nick's publisher. Nick no longer sported his West Coast hairstyle—way too long and curly up top. At least he enjoyed it while he could. His hairline retreated faster than Napoleon's army. My hair was long, with flaxen blonde curls, perfect for my time in front of the camera.

Only now, my hair was short and frizzy, easier to take care of with the less frequent showers and lack of proper hair care products. My sunken eyes made me look like a zombie. I pulled out my designer makeup. My muscle memory guided me through the steps of applying the concealer, eyeliner, mascara, and eyeshadow. I slipped the ring on my finger, a hollow form of fidelity if there ever was one.

I stumbled walking out of the bathroom in my high heels. They used to be like second nature. Peterson stifled a laugh, or maybe that was my ever-present paranoia.

"Wait here," she said. "Stewart will call you when your ride comes." Peterson held my hands like she was someone truly special in my life, ready to dole out advice. "I don't wanna see you back in here, got it?"

"Trust me, this is the last you're going to see of me."

I sat on the orange plastic chair. I stared at the clock, 1:57. Nick would be there at 2:00, only three more slogging minutes. Each second ticked off, not on the second hand, but on the tedious minute hand. The motion was nearly imperceptible, but I watched it to the rhythm of my own beating heart.

The three minutes passed, and there was no Nick. I wrung my sweaty hands together. I wanted to clean them again before touching Kyle's precious little fingers, but I didn't want to ask Stewart, an aging Latina guard, to use the restroom.

My stomach growled. I was well past the scheduled feeding.

I looked at Stewart. Her fat ass was just about my eye level at the front desk. She turned around and looked down at me. "Don't worry. It takes time to get through the gates and check-in. He'll be here." When she turned back, I saw that her panty line was clearly visible through the stretched fabric.

Another half hour passed.

An outside door opened and closed. Crisp, fresh air wafted into the stuffy room like a cloud. My heart fluttered. My back straightened in the chair. Popping sounds emanated from my spine.

A minute passed. He wasn't there. I realized a few minutes later that the noises I heard were of a woman surrendering herself voluntarily, just like I did two years ago. The woman cried, just like I did. Perhaps this woman would take my bed, the top bunk in Carla's cell. Maybe she, too, would be kidney punched every time she snored.

At 2:30 Nick still wasn't there.

In the last two weeks, he hadn't answered his phone, except once. "Liz?" he'd asked.

"No, it's Robyn. Who's Liz? Why would she be calling you?"

"Liz the _maid_. Why are you so paranoid?" But he didn't wait for me to answer. "I'm in a meeting. What is it?"

"Did you get my messages?" I said. "I'm released next Thursday, two o'clock. Can you make it?"

"Yes. I got your messages. I'll be there."

"You'll bring Kyle?"

"I don't have anywhere else to take him right now. The babysitter quit. I had to get Jeremy to take my classes this week."

A noise picked up from the background. I heard a baby crying. A lump formed in my throat. My chest hurt.

"I got to go," he said. "I'll call you later."

"You can't call me. I have to call you."

"Fine, call me around..." He trailed off, and then his voice changed like he was talking to me through an echo chamber. "No, I can't do that. I—" Another voice was in the background. "Robyn, I have to go." The phone turned to dial tone.

I kicked the wall. My big toe ached as I worried the seams of my khaki uniform to tattered shreds while waiting. I never made it to the front of the line that night.

Stewart's eyes were soft when she said, "He's probably just stuck in traffic. Do you want to call him?"

"Yes." I didn't even think I could. Hadn't dreamed of asking. I dialed the number for his cell on the phone Stewart handed me. A curt electronic voice told me to leave a message reading back the number I dialed. I tried again twice and got the same message. I slumped back down in the chair. "I don't understand." I wiped my hands on my skirt, trying to rid the sweat from my palms while also keeping it from sliding down past my waist.

Stewart didn't meet my eyes. She had to be picturing some normal situation where the spouse of some hardened criminal ran off before the criminal got home. But it wasn't like that. How could I correct her when she wasn't saying anything but in my head?

At a quarter after three Stewart said, "I'm sure he's on his way, but I should start on the procedure for putting you on the bus just in case." She clicked through the computer screen. "Bus leaves at 5:00 p.m. from Niantic going to Hartford. That's your county, right? Says here in your file."

"Yes, Hartford." I choked on the words. How could he not be here? What did he know?

"You can ride the local bus from Hartford to West Hartford?" Steward asked, but it was more of a statement than a question.

"Yes."

I watched the clock. My hands shook. Where was he? What was he planning?

The printer came to life, whirring, buzzing making mechanical noises. Stewart pressed her finger on an intercom system. "Officer George to the front, Officer George."

The little room became even more still. I leaned forward, straining to hear any noise, but there was nothing.

Officer George walked into the cramped office a few minutes later. "What's up, Stewart?" He grinned ear to ear. He wore shiny boots and a pressed, fitted uniform. I'd never seen him before.

"Her ride didn't show."

"Uh oh." Officer George frowned, much like a clown, over-exaggerating the drama. "It happens. Let's go." He waved his arms.

"But—" I was frozen. I was stuck between staying in prison and leaving without Kyle. My cellmate would kill me when she found out about what I'd done. I had no choice. I looked at the two guards, wondering what they thought of me. They both pitied me. My cheeks reddened. I cracked my knuckles.

"Let's go," Officer George said. "You gotta make that bus or stay another night in prison."

That was enough to get me moving.

Stewart handed me the paper. "Get on the bus. Do not sell this ticket to anyone for drugs." Her voice was harsh, frightening.

"Yes ma'am," I said automatically, but I regretted it immediately. I was free. I didn't need to be a polite automaton.

Stewart handed me the exact change for the bus to West Hartford, not a dime more than what was required.

Officer George walked me to his little white utility truck. I shivered in the blowing wind. My shirt stuck to me then puffed away. My lacy bra peeked through my shirt like a naked woman set to a slow strobe in a strip joint: naked, then hidden, naked, then hidden.

"Hold on," he said. He ran back to the building. A yellow leaf hit the truck. In a few minutes, he ran back holding a red leather jacket.

"Put this on," he said.

I held it out in front of me; the style was from the late seventies. "Thanks." I felt warm the moment the wind was blocked.

"Donations," he said. "The clothes you girls wear for entry aren't always weather-appropriate for release."

The view on the ride, filled with every shade of autumn, was dramatically different from the two years I'd spent in prison. The view from the prison was plain. There were few trees, just off in the distance, not enough to notice the seasons change except by the temperature. The state prosecutor picked the best season to release me from prison, although I probably would have marveled at the snow, fresh flowers and budded trees, or oppressive heat in any other season. But the fall was the most colorful season in Connecticut. Towns across the state would buzz with urban dwelling leaf-peepers.

Officer George made sure to fill the drive with drivel. "Don't do drugs at the bus station. There are undercover police selling drugs there. Just don't do drugs, because they are going to test you the first day and those cleansing things don't really work that fast. Make sure you show up for your parole officer at the appointed time. Don't be late." I burned with rage with every condescending comment.

I didn't say anything in return, hoping he might stop, but he kept on talking for the entire ride. My nails dug into my palms. My teeth would become powder if the ride went on much longer. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that dandy state prosecutor with his bright blue bow tie on a campaign sign. His smile on the billboard was hypnotic. We used each other to get what we both wanted. He vied to be an Attorney General for the state, and I planned to be a mother—a far better mother than my mother. Perhaps the dandy prosecutor had plans to be a better Attorney General than the man in the current position.

When we arrived at the bus terminal, Officer George let me out with a quick, "Good luck," and then he was gone.

The bus station was small. A man in the throws of a passed-out-drunk sleep occupied one of the two benches. He snored like my dad did when he was drunk, talking to himself with an occasional snort. Another bench had a mysterious wet spot. I chose to stand. A few people stared at me. I tried not to make eye contact, staring straight ahead at the decrepit building. As I traced the calluses on my hands built over the last two years of prison labor, I burned with hatred for Nick. He should have been there. He should have picked me up. I should be kissing my baby right now.

My feet felt like rocks when the black woman at the counter mumbled, "Hartford, bay three, leaving in seven minutes."

The bus smelled like a mixture of puke, pee, mold, and cotton candy. Puke, pee and mold I was used to from prison, but the cotton candy overtones made me sick. Most of the windows were marred by bored people etching crap like "SLA + HAV 4 EVER" into the glass.

Brilliantly colored leaves blurred along the highway to Hartford. I caught a glimpse of a billboard showing the perky blonde that took my place at WFSB, "Sylvia – Three-time Emmy-Award-winning broadcast journalist, ready to take on the tough stories." Was Wayne producing Sylvia as well? What else had Sylvia done to replace me with Wayne? With three Emmys maybe he'd produced her even better than he had me.

I had just one Emmy. I won it for an investigative story into a school bus driver driving erratically. The ensuing accident left three children in the hospital. I discovered an eyewitness who said the driver was texting. The irony wasn't lost on me two years later during my trial, nor was it lost on the state prosecutor or the twelve members of the jury. I got a five-year sentence for mowing down a pedestrian. She'd never walk again, and I'd never live my life the same again.

When we pulled up to the Hartford bus station, I remembered a story I'd done here about a man dying on the bus. No one noticed when he died, and he lay there for the better part of the hot day. He then lay unclaimed at the morgue for two weeks before being buried in a potter's field. No one knew who he was or where he'd come from. If I died on the bus would Nick pick me up or would I be buried in a potter's field? What would Kyle know about me? Only what was in the papers? Would Kyle ever learn the truth about his mother?

It rained as I began my walk to the local bus stop. I zipped up the red leather jacket and held my gigantic purse over my head. But the rain drove sideways. No matter how large my purse was, it wasn't going to shelter me.

The nausea that started from the first bus continued on as the local bus twisted and turned along the route to West Hartford. I felt my hunger return as we passed the town's many restaurants. I looked forward to a fancy pizza from the long-standing Alfredo's, but that favorite from before my incarceration had closed and had been reincarnated into new place serving custom burgers. Weren't they all custom? Do you ever go to a burger joint and ask for just any old burger they can think of at the moment?

The closer I got to my street, the hungrier I became. I pulled the yellow chain too early, and the bus screeched to a stop as I made my way to the door.

My first step was into an icy black puddle littered with wet leaves. The rain fell in drops like pebbles on my head. I gave up trying to shield myself.

The unlit brick house sat before me in the middle of the street. Yellow and red maple leaves were plastered to the asphalt and guided my way to the back door in the dim light. As I rounded the corner, the security light clicked, then blinded me. My heavy set of keys hid in the dark silken folds of my purse. The key fit in the knob, but the knob didn't turn. I jiggled the key harder, but the knob still didn't turn. I stood back from the door, incredulous. He changed the lock. Why would he change the lock?

The door's window reflected my ghostly face. My hair was matted down and wet. The makeup I'd applied just a few hours ago was smeared. I rang the doorbell, although I was sure no one was home. "Nick? Where the fuck are you?" I pushed the doorbell until my finger pulsed with pain.

A light came on in the neighbor's house. A middle-aged woman's face appeared and then quickly disappeared from the upstairs window. Nick had mentioned a year ago that our elderly neighbor passed away. He didn't mention, and I'd never asked about, the neighbors that bought the house. Up and down the block, the neighbors were always suspicious of him after he cornered the man that lived in the yellow house down the street at a party. Nick interrogated him about his wife's illness. Nick wanted to know the intimate details of her pain.

In the mossy backyard, my heels sank into the tender earth. I proceeded to a door hidden behind a set of bushes. Another key from my ring should have fit in that door, but the lock was changed there too. I kicked the door with my wet shoe. As I looked down to see the long muddy mark left on the door, I spotted a flat boulder, not quite as natural as the other rocks.

The key I found within the plastic rock unlocked the door with ease. I took off my mud-caked shoes and stepped into the laundry room.

**Chapter 2**

Connecticut - Section 21a- 279

Illegal Possession of Dependency-Producing Drugs

I WALKED THROUGH the laundry room and into the main room. The house was empty, desolate. Empty boxes were everywhere. As if I was on an investigation, my mind invented stories of what had happened here. My theories ranged from the ridiculous—abducted by aliens—to the plausible—arrested for the crime we committed in college—to the most likely—he skipped town. The last theory took hold like someone grabbing my lungs and squeezing. I fell to my knees, weeping. How could he take my son? I repeated this over and over in my mind. I pounded on the floor. I cried until I drenched the carpet with my sputum and tears.

How quickly had my plans turned to disaster? I picked myself off the carpet. Crying wasn't going to fix anything. If I was going to get my son back, I was going to need a plan. Everything I'd put in motion to get released from prison was useless. Nick changed the game when he was losing, as always. We were halfway through a game of chess, so he switched to Battleship.

As I wandered into the kitchen, my stomach growled. The refrigerator was an affront to my nose. It was nearly empty, and what was left was old and moldy. I opened the pantry. It was also almost empty, just cans of soup with strange labels and one box of crackers. I remembered the soup was there when we moved in three years ago, left behind by the last renters. The crackers tasted a bit like the cardboard box they came in.

I looked for a can opener and upon opening one of the cabinets, the strong smell of oregano reminded me of pizza. Real pizza, not the cardboard, watered-down tomato soup version they served in prison. Pizza Haven boasted a thirty-minute or less satisfaction guarantee. I had the place on speed dial back in the day, but there was no phone in the living room, or anywhere.

I thought about the safe Nick had, and what he'd kept hidden in there. But when I walked into the bedroom it was entirely empty. Just four bare walls with sun print outlines where paintings used to hang and furniture used to sit. There was no bed, no dressers. The walk-in closet was empty. I mourned the loss of my shoes for a moment, but more importantly there was a bare spot on the floor where the safe used to be. The disappointment crushed through my chest. Why did I think for even one moment that Nick would leave the safe with its damning evidence behind? What made me think I could break into the safe here and now if I hadn't been able to after two years of trying?

I ran down the hallway, tripping and then falling forward onto the wall headfirst. I saw stars as I stumbled past Nick's office. I put my hand up to my forehead, but it didn't come back bloody. I'd always tripped on that step indicating the transition to the addition of the house. Who would put a step in a hallway?

The door to Kyle's room was closed. The door handle didn't want to turn, but with a little force, gave way to a room no larger than my former cell. The smell of Kyle—a mix of baby powder, sour milk, and hot nights—wafted through my nose and started my crying jag again. I took deep breaths between sobs, trying to retain that smell as long as I could.

Still weeping, I opened the closet door. At the bottom corner of the closet was Kyle's pacifier. I wondered if it was his only soother. What would he do to comfort himself without it? Or was he the kind of child who didn't need the pacifier? Perhaps Kyle had thrown it out himself? I stared at the thing. I tried to remember every little detail Nick had told me about Kyle. He did use a pacifier. Nick tried to break him of the habit. Was leaving this pacifier behind a way for Nick to toughen Kyle? I'd tried to tell Nick to let him use it as long as he wanted. He'd eventually grow out of it on his own. Grown adults don't suck on soothers, at least most of them don't. I put the pacifier in my purse and then searched through for something to blow my nose. I found an old receipt for Chinese take-out I'd shared with Wayne.

Just as I left the room, I spotted a dent in the back of the door. That dent wasn't there when we moved in. Nick's temper blew up again. What was it that Kyle had done? Babies cry and wake up in the middle of the night. Had Nick lost his temper over that? Maybe he was interrupted while writing? If Kyle had made Nick so angry, why did he take him from me? Why not just leave us both behind? But that wasn't Nick's way. His anger would flare up then dissipate. There was a matching fist-sized dent in our bedroom that had been patched over. He had been angry with me for a comment I made about his writing. We both won that argument. I didn't have to read any of his sloppy works in progress, and he didn't have to listen to my witty observations on his prose.

There was nothing left of my life, such as it was, in this house. I thought about where to go. My brother's house was more than two miles away, a distance I couldn't cover in the rain with the heels I had on. I left the house and walked a few blocks before I took them off. Within the next block, I stepped on a sharp branch. I lifted my leg to look at the damage. The bottom of my heel was covered in dirt and oozing blood I could barely see in the light of the street lamp.

I spotted a pair of gardening boots just inside a little glass greenhouse behind the house at the next corner. The door was locked. I picked up a rock and smashed the window next to the knob. The crack of the glass was loud enough to make my heart beat harder in my chest. I wondered who might be watching me. Could I be sent back to prison for stealing something so insignificant? According to the paperwork I'd signed the day before, probably yes. The moment I reached my hand into the void I realized I could have punched in the screen just above the glass instead. What kind of dumbass locked the greenhouse anyway? I looked back at the house. I knew this particular neighbor. He was the kind that thought he hid his porn collection when he might as well use it to plaster the siding on his house.

Again I set off towards my twin brother's house, in the rain, now wearing my newly acquired rubber boots. They were a few sizes too large, and smelled horrible, but protected my feet from further shrubbery damage. My limp was pronounced.

The lights were on at Justin's house. A warm glow emanated from the kitchen. The smell of oregano, parsley, and the memory of my brother's tomato sauce brought my stomach back to attention.

I knocked on the door.

"I'll get it," Justin's thundering voice could be heard through the thick rounded wooden door. When he opened the door, his face dropped. "Oh, you."

"Yeah. Me." I stood staring at him, and he stared at me back. I looked over my shoulder, then back at Justin. "Aren't you going to let me in?"

He opened the door a little wider for me to step through. When the door shut behind me, he asked, "What do you want?"

"Nick left."

"Good for him."

"I'm serious."

"So am I," he said. "I can't figure out why you even care. That guy is such a douche."

"Because he took Kyle."

"Too bad for Kyle," he said, but then pushed out his hand. "Never mind, I don't want to get involved with you two." He looked down at my boots, then back up my full form. "God, you look like something the cat dragged in," he said. "What are you even doing out of jail?"

"Prison."

"Prison—whatever. Why are you out of prison?" he asked. "Did you escape?"

"Who is it, honey?" His wife, Susan, walked into the entryway and stared at me for a second. "Oh," she said with palpable disgust. "I'll be upstairs." I heard whispers and a door slam. My nephews were hidden away.

I talked in a whisper. "No. I didn't escape. I snitched to get my sentence reduced. I have to testify against my cellmate." I pulled my shirt away from my wet skin.

"Snitched, huh?" His face scrunched up, "What the hell is that smell?"

"These boots. I think I stepped in dog shit."

"Ugh, why are you here?"

"I need to find Nick. He was supposed to pick me up from prison this afternoon, but the house is empty."

"That doesn't answer my question, _Destiny_." He used the name mom had given me. A stripper's name I'd stopped using by the time I was ten.

"Don't call me that, _Justice_." I returned the favor. He'd waited to change his name legally at eighteen, and only changed it once, to Justin.

"Sorry, just _slipped_. Somehow I always thought that name your mother gave you would come back to haunt you."

"She's your mother too."

"Yeah, I know that. I've seen her in the last few weeks, have you? No. That's right you've been living off the taxpayers in your cushy _prison_. Watching television, eating three square meals. While I've been taking care of mom."

"I'm sorry."

"I doubt it."

"I—"

He interrupted me. "Don't make excuses. I don't want to hear them. Don't you think Dad gave us excuses enough?" I flinched as if he'd slapped me across the face. The pain might have hurt more than if he had slapped me. The fights in our family always ran down clear lines with Dad and me on one side, Justin and Mom on the other. There were never clear victors until Dad left one night and never came back. I was the shunned one in the family after that. Mom blamed me for Dad leaving. She thought I knew something. Maybe I did. My reaction would have been the same either way. I wasn't going to tell her anything. I was the third wheel in Justin and Mom's lives after Dad left. I was a drag on their scarce resources.

"I'm going to ask you again," he said. "Why are you here?"

"I don't have anywhere to go."

His face softened. He looked behind him. "You can't stay here. Susan would freak out. She thinks you're a bad influence on the kids."

I'd only met them once, but I'd been drunk. I'm sure I said something awful, but I didn't remember what. Like father, like daughter.

"Look, I'm freezing," I displayed my soaking wet self. "Can I just borrow some money and a change of clothes?"

"Yeah, go into the closet down the hall. There's a box of clothes labeled 'Goodwill.' Get something out of there. You're dressed like a stripper."

I flinched again. His words hit his intended mark. He was right; I was dressed like a stripper.

"Don't track those dog shit boots across my floor."

I took the boots off. I tiptoed through the hallway, so I didn't leave a trail of blood on the floor from the open wound on my heel.

The box in the closet had an assortment of mostly his wife's clothes. I pulled some of the clothes from the box: dresses with stains, summer shorts and nearly new pants that must have been too small. I found a pair of lacy underwear and dry heaved. Who donates underwear? Who would buy them? I stripped and then put all my wet clothes, including the thong underwear, back in the Goodwill box. I tried on a pair of black cotton dress pants with a perfect—albeit uncomfortably commando—fit. I pulled out a black blouse, low cut in the front and thankfully not translucent. What this outfit needed was a bangle to fit right in with the trendy bartenders, but I didn't have time to accessorize. None of Susan's shoes fit; her feet were meant for elves. There was a box of candy ready for Halloween on the ledge above.

I stood on my toes to reach the candy when Justin pulled the closet door open.

"The cops are here."

"What?"

"The cops are here, did you do something?"

I held my breath. Why would they be looking for me so soon? I had an appointment the next day with the parole officer; did they already think I wasn't going to show up? They trusted me less than my family, and that was a low bar to shimmy under.

"No."

"Then you should talk to them."

"No. Please. I just want to figure things out first. I just have to go to my parole officer in the morning, at eight."

There was a knock on the front door. I bit my lip so hard it bled. I pleaded with him without saying a word. My heartbeat accelerated. My veins tingled.

"Be right there," he shouted. He shut the door to the hallway closet. "Evening, officer."

"Hey, we're looking for your sister, Robyn. Have you seen her around?"

"Isn't she in prison? What did she do, escape?" He always had good acting skills.

"No... She was released this afternoon," the officer said. "You didn't know that?"

"We don't talk much." The easiest part of lying was telling the truth.

"Huh. We just need to check up with her, but she wasn't at her house. You are listed as an emergency contact on this form. So, you haven't seen her?"

"Nope."

I let the breath out, slowly, quietly.

"Whose boots are those?" the officer asked. I stopped breathing. The room started spinning.

"Mine," Justin said.

"You've been out in the rain?"

"Yup."

Time stopped. I heard the officer's boots squeak from the wet rubber on the hardwood floor. I expected that any minute he would walk the few feet down the hallway to my open closet door. I'd be taken away in handcuffs. Back to prison. But why? I hadn't done anything yet.

"All right then. If you do see her, just give us a ring. I'll give you my card."

"Sure. No problem."

When the door closed, I unclenched my jaw.

Justin opened the closet door. "Now you've got me into this. You need to go."

"Can you spare some money?"

His grin said it all: disappointment. "No. I'm spending it all on Mom's bills. I'm barely able to keep this house. You need to go. You're lucky Susan wasn't at the door. She would have turned your ass in. I can't believe I didn't, so get going before I change my mind."

"I'm going. I'm going." I needed to stall. I didn't have a plan or money, and I needed both. I didn't have a clue why the cops wanted to talk to me, but I figured it was just a welfare check they had to do. The brochure they handed me, "PAROLE: An Informational Brochure" did say something about random welfare checks.

"Just let me go to the bathroom," I said. "I'll only be a minute."

"I don't know why you don't turn yourself in," he called after me.

"I have to find Nick. He can't be far, can he?" I shut the door. "Just let me use the bathroom."

"Then you're out of here," he called through the door. "Don't call. Don't write. I don't want to know what you're doing."

"Yes. Out of your life," I shouted back.

I snuck another handful of candy and a winter jacket from the box before I left out the back door on my way to Wayne's.

But there was a bar, The Unicorn Pub, along the way to Wayne's, and I wasn't sure I wanted to face him yet. The place was small, just one row of booths and a handful of barstools up against the skinny bar top. The bartender had just enough room to turn around to reach for my drink of choice, a Tanqueray and soda. The green bottle and red label screamed my name. I slammed it down and ordered another, just to get comfortable in my own skin for the first time in months. When my next drink came, the older blonde guy next to me gave me a wink. He fiddled with the cuffs of his shirt, pulling them up past his large watch.

I didn't know what he was doing in a dive bar, but thought perhaps I could get him to buy me a drink. I smiled back at him. He dropped his look down to the point where the first button of my blouse made the two sides of my shirt meet in an illicit game of tug-of-war. My cleavage was clearly visible, and I was sure the drink I held would be free.

We got along fine for a bit, although the conversation was tough to keep over the sizzling speakers. Once they've blown, they never quite sound the same. These speakers probably experienced their hay-day in the late eighties, around the time I was born.

He held out his hand. "Mike," he said.

"Rachael," I said as I shook his hand. Using a fake name came so naturally to me I often forgot which name I used. But then correcting them later to another name was a source of fun as well.

After some small talk about his job (in insurance) and my made up one (in marketing) he sort of blurted out, "My wife is home with my son, Alex. He's special needs."

I wasn't sure why he told me this, or what it meant—other than he probably wasn't going to buy me a drink. But his smile was sweet, and I wasn't quite done with my drink, so I held on to the tendrils of our conversation a bit longer. When I was done I reached for that lone hundred-dollar bill in the inside pocket of my purse, but Mike said, "Going so soon?"

"Yeah, I'm going to meet up with my boyfriend." It wasn't exactly a lie; Wayne had been one of my lovers. If pressed he might call me his girlfriend, at least if his wife wasn't present.

Mike pinched his lips together, "Boyfriend, huh?" He gave me that look. I'd seen it so many times. It was a look of someone rejected, but not willing to give up on the idea he once had for getting me into bed.

"Yeah."

He looked me over and said: "I didn't see a car when you walked in."

I narrowed my eyes at him. "I walked."

"In this rain?"

"I'm not made of sugar." I _was_ probably made of high fructose corn syrup, red #40 and whatever artificial flavor makes that lingering cinnamon taste in your mouth that overpowers everything else.

"How far is your boyfriend?"

"A mile or so," I said. If he too hadn't run off like my husband.

"I'll give you a ride."

I shrugged. Why not?

He paid for the drinks with a twenty wedged under our empty glasses. We walked out to his silver BMW. The duct tape holding up the passenger window almost matched the paint.

"I hope your seat isn't wet," he said. "At least not from the rain."

He reached his hand between my legs and below the seat. He pulled out a flask. "Care for another drink?"

I took the flask. The top was practically welded on, but I managed to get it off and take a large swig. I was already feeling the warmth of the gin coursing through my veins, but this was a dirty scotch. I didn't like scotch at the best of times, but this one tasted adulterated by unnatural means with a hint of smoke and dirt. I almost spit it back out but managed to swallow it down.

He put the car in gear. "Which way?"

I pointed left, and he steered the car to the right out of the parking lot.

"Very funny," I said.

"Let's just ride around for a bit," he said. "Don't you just love driving in the rain? I'll have you back to your boyfriend soon, honey."

I gritted my teeth together. He merged onto the interstate. I took another swig from the flask. I might as well enjoy my time as his hostage. There was no traffic, but he wove through the cars just the same.

"Slow down," I said, but my lips felt numb.

"Feeling okay?" Mike asked.

"Just fine," I said taking another swig, and then another.

**Chapter 3**

Connecticut - Section 53a-252

Computer Crime

"HEY, YOU CAN'T sleep here," a man said. I looked up at him into the bright sunshine. He wore reflective gear and reflective shades. In them, I could see a twisted fun-house mirror version of my face, but for a moment I thought it was real.

"Yeah. Okay," I said. My lips tingled. Sharp pains stabbed me from anonymous places throughout my body.

He wandered off as I pulled myself up from the heavily etched wood bench.

My right hand was sore. My knuckles were raw. The pain in my neck felt like I'd been stabbed with a dull steak knife. I smelled like sweat and urine. I hoped it was my own.

I had no idea what time it was, but it was daylight, and I had an urgent appointment with my parole officer at eight. As I pulled myself off the bench, my head throbbed. I tried to squeeze out the sunlight, but I knew I had to get moving. I squinted to block out the sun and found my purse.

I had felt this dizzy, confusing fight against the sun before. I didn't know who drugged me then, but I was pretty sure this time it was 'Mike' from the dive bar. Did he really have a wife and special needs kid, or was that just a way of gaining sympathy and getting me into his car? Why did I fall for it? Why did my paranoia fail me when I most needed it? At least this time I didn't wake up next to a dead body. But the way my hand and head felt I must have put up a good fight this time.

To my surprise the hundred-dollar bill in the side pocket of my purse was still there. That would certainly be useful once I figured out where I was and where I wanted to go.

I stepped out into the street and just started walking. I'd figure out where I was based on landmarks, eventually. I'd lived in every corner of the Northeast United States, but in the last eight years I had made Connecticut my home.

A few blocks down the street I recognized the clock from Keney Tower, but I couldn't make out the time. So I was in Hartford, not too far from Wayne's after all, since he lived in the West End. A taxi drove by, and then another. I stuck out my hand and flagged the next one driving by.

"Where to?" he asked, his accent thick, like marbles took up most of his mouth.

"What time is it?" I asked back.

He looked at his plastic digital watch. I remembered Mike's bulky watch. The taxi driver said something in response, but I couldn't understand it. I looked down at myself again. I was a mess, and I needed to clean myself up before walking into my PO's office. I didn't need to risk looking like I'd spent all night out on the street high on drugs, even if that's what I had been doing.

I gave the taxi driver the address to Wayne's. I couldn't understand him, but when I saw we were headed in the right direction—west—I leaned back in the seat. I took a candy bar from my parka's pocket. The chocolate was already warm. The bite-sized candy swirled in my mouth, invading my taste buds. A smile formed involuntarily.

When the taxi driver pulled up to the house in West End, I held out my hundred-dollar bill.

"No," he said.

"What do you mean?" I'd heard him and understood what he said for the first time, but I couldn't understand why he would say "no" to money. I pushed the money back his way.

"No hundred," he said. Although the 'hundred' sounded a lot like 'hunner.' He pointed at the sticker plastered on the window with his gnarly finger: "WE DO NOT ACCEPT $100 BILLS."

"I don't have anything else," I said.

"Visa," he said. "Masta-card."

I looked down at my purse. The expired credit cards taunted me. I handed him a gold card, a useless piece of plastic. He smiled as though I handed him a glass of water in the desert.

He didn't notice the date, but the machine did. The buzz hit my head like a tiny electronic jackhammer. "No good," he said.

"Look, I'll go inside here and get some money." I reached for the door handle.

"No," he said. "I call cops."

I felt flush. This wasn't how I was going to get caught, not after all I'd been through. I wasn't going to let this asshole get in my way. "Look, take the money."

"No." He picked up his phone.

"What are you doing?"

"Cops."

I panicked. If he called the cops I would be caught before I had a plan to get out of the mess I was already in. I reached to grab the phone from his hand. He leaned away from me. "Give me that." I scratched my hands on his jacket. My fingers felt like tendrils of pain. A bit of memory came floating back of my fist connecting with Mike's face. I blinked a few times to clear the thought from my mind.

"No," the taxi driver said. He pulled the phone back to himself and started dialing.

I redoubled my efforts. I reached for his face with one hand, the phone with the other.

The door flew open. A man stood at the door. "Are you all right?" he said.

"No," my voice shook. "He won't take my money."

"Robyn?" he asked. His voice cracked.

My eyes pulled in and out of focus, "Wayne?"

Wayne looked at the taxi driver. "How much does she owe you?"

"Five fifta," he said.

He patted his body and then pulled out a wallet. His eyes didn't break from examining me. He held out a ten. "Here," he said. "Now go away before I report you to the police for assaulting this woman."

Wayne held out his hand for me, and I took it. I exited the car like a Hollywood model, albeit one wearing rubber boots and smelling like an urban park bench. "Thank you."

In the harsh light of the bright sun, the deep lines in his face were exaggerated. He looked older than his thirty-seven years. The silver streaks in his hair outnumbered the black curls.

He broke the silence. "Why didn't you come here sooner?"

"What do you mean?" I was surprised he knew I was out of prison. I hadn't talked to him in almost two years.

"The police are looking for you," he said. He looked over his shoulder. "We should go inside."

The house was different, empty. There were blank spaces where the paintings used to hang. He shuffled around the room closing every blind. My eyes focused first on the black leather couch.

I glanced at the clock in the entryway. It was already half past ten. I was very late, but there was no way I would walk into the PO's office smelling like this. One peep into the full-length mirror told me my looks weren't going to get me far either. I got by on my good looks. This look wouldn't get me through the front doors of hell. My pants were covered in leafy debris. Worse, blood was caked on my face. I hoped it was my blood, but I didn't see any wounds big enough for so much blood.

I took off my boots and parka. The room was warm. A stronger cloud of urine and sweat wafted under my nose. "Do you mind if I take a shower?"

He laughed. "You've changed." His head shook.

"What?"

"You never used to ask permission for anything," he said. "You took what you wanted."

"Oh." I stared at him, still waiting for an answer. But maybe his observation was enough of an answer. I shrugged and then walked up the stairs. I thought about that couch and those missing paintings.

Three years ago, before I hit that jaywalking girl, there was a town councilman missing with a whole lot of the town's funds.

"We need to find this guy, Wayne." I did circles around the room. I touched every single one of Wayne's paintings. His wife loved them, coveted them. That was why I liked to fuss with them. I craved his nervous reaction. "The cops are looking, but they can't find him. If we locate Tisher, we could ask him questions. We could find out why he stole that money before he has a chance to consult with his lawyer. The exclusive could have us both in the director's office. Maybe earn me another Emmy." My voice squealed.

"I don't know..." Wayne looked up at me. He sat in front of the computer, his hands on the keys. I knew exactly how to push his buttons into action.

My fingers followed along the scrollwork in the tiny still life. "You said you knew how to do it. We won't get caught. Who's going to care about how we got the information? He's a _felon_. He took money from the city's coffers. They'll be happy we led them straight to the guy. I could always say I got the information from an informant."

He hesitated. "I guess you're right."

I just needed to reel him in. "We need this story, Wayne. We need an exclusive to stay ahead of the other networks." My fingers fiddled the smooth gilded frame of the impressionistic painting. "It won't be complicated, right?"

He turned back to the computer. "No. My buddy said you just have to send him an email from this program. He said the best way to do it was with a well-crafted email and the pdf attachment option. The software does the rest."

"What did he mean by a well-crafted email?"

"Just has to look like a link he would want to click on."

I stopped pacing and leaned over him, letting my flowing red blouse fall open. His eyes migrated from my eyes to my breasts. Could he see my nipples through the sheer bra? "The guy is motivated by money, right?" I said. "Why not send him something from someone who wanted him in on a real estate deal? Everyone is buying up real estate right now."

His stare didn't break from my open blouse. "Yeah, real estate."

I spun him back to face the computer. "Download one of those logos from a real estate investment firm. Tell him he only needs a five-thousand-dollar investment to double his profit in just a few months. Tell him if he wants to invest more though, he'd have to make an appointment to speak with the director himself. We don't want to give him the impression it's too good to be true." I tapped on Wayne's shoulder. He turned around to look at me, but his eyes didn't stay at my eye level for too long. "Use a real name from the investment firm," I said.

Wayne went to work on the task, and I went on with my pacing. "I'm getting more fluff pieces, Wayne. I have to try a lot harder. I have to invest myself in these real stories so people will take me seriously..."

A short while later he pushed away from the desk. "It's done."

"Did you find him?" I asked.

"No, we have to wait for him to open the email and click on the link. When he does, I'll get an email and a link to connect to the control server."

"What do you want to do while we wait for him to open the email?" I said. "I can think of a few things..."

He stood up.

I unbuttoned the top button of my red blouse; then another button; then another.

He moved closer to me. His soft hands worked their way from the back of my neck to the bone between my breasts. His fingers languished on the uppermost secured button. The front clasp of my bra fell away with a twist of his wrist.

I undid the rest of the buttons, one at a time, so slowly I could watch the desire in his eyes turn to flames.

He pushed me onto the black leather couch. The sound alone made me react like Pavlov's dog, thirsting for more. He was frightened of using the bed. He thought his wife would find out if we made love in her bed.

I didn't care. I loved the angle of the couch, and the squeaking leather sounds of our passion. Wayne whispered things in my ear I couldn't understand, and I didn't care. All I heard was the rhythmic creak of the leather.

Afterward, I sat on the couch, gasping for a breath. "I'm starved."

He ran his hand through his curly black hair. "We could order food."

"Excellent."

When he finished the order, he checked his email. "Nothing yet." He stared at my naked body on the couch. My arms and legs were akimbo.

I watched him thinking, but I was too tired to analyze his thoughts. I knew he wasn't a threat, not like Nick.

As if he knew what I'd been thinking at that very moment he asked, "What are you going to do about Nick?"

"Not this again. You're married. I'm married. Nick is convenient, stable." _And he knew where the body was buried._ I threw the blouse over my head.

"But what if he finds out?" Wayne asked.

"I don't know." I picked up my skirt. "What about Liz?"

"I loved her so much," he said. His voice trailed off, "I thought I'd love her forever." Wayne thumped his fingers on the table.

I slipped into a fresh pair of underwear from my bag. I always carried fresh underwear. "Why do you care about Nick?"

"Don't you? What if he finds out one day about who you really are?"

The thought had never occurred to me. What did he mean by who I really was? I sat down on the couch. The noise didn't make me excited anymore. Pavlov's dog was well fed.

"Liz wanted kids," he said.

"I know, Wayne."

The Chinese food came, but before I had a chance to eat even a bite, the trill of his email resonated from the computer.

He hurried across the room.

"Well?" I asked.

"I'm not sure."

"What do you mean?"

"Hold on." A few seconds ticked by. "Yes. We're in."

The next morning I confronted Tisher in his hotel room. He was resigned to getting caught, but I doubted Nick would be so easy to give up Kyle.

I thought about where he might go with Kyle while I stuffed my clothes in Wayne's washer. He was a loner with no family and barely any friends. In college, I'd always asked about his friends, but never met more than the two guys he got high with. He didn't have a lot of money. His books barely sold for the miniscule advances he was given. I racked my brain for any idea of where he might hide, but came up with nothing.

I felt a bump in my pocket while putting my pants in the washer. I pulled out the pacifier. Tears fell down my face, salting the wounds I'd acquired the night before. I played back in my mind every little detail I could remember about Kyle, which was very little. Even the things I could remember, like the shape of his head while I fed him for the first time, would be different now.

But all of this mess was Nick's fault. Why did it take me so long to figure that out? As soon as I found Kyle, I could get both of us away from his twisted sphere of influence.

My first private shower in two years was heaven. No one watched me with her perverted eyes. The water didn't randomly change temperatures. The soap smelled clean, not like a cheap perfume shop. The water ran over all of my wounds, old and new, cleansing them.

I rooted through Wayne's dresser, finding a pair of his boxers and one of his old t-shirts that read 'Turing Test Rejects.' He had a large collection of t-shirts he bought in college for bands that hadn't lasted more than a few months. He called it his 'Memory of Destroyed Friendships' collection.

When I came back down, he sat at the computer. He spoke without turning around. "The police say you broke into a house."

"I didn't know he moved out," I said.

He made a noise; one I couldn't interpret. "You assaulted a man?"

"What?" I rushed over to look over his shoulder. 'Breaking News' scrolled across the WFSB web site. "Man Hunt in West Hartford for Recently Paroled Woman, Ex-reporter for WFSB News Team" screamed the 30-point headline.

I skimmed through the article. "I don't know anything about this," I said, repeatedly. I couldn't even imagine what set of circumstances would have resulted in what they reported. How had I gotten away?

The first picture in the article was the generic picture of the Hartford County police headquarters. As I flipped through to the next picture, I saw a headshot of a man with a large bruise on his cheek and a recently stitched eyebrow. The last picture made my heart beat so fast I expected it to leap out of my chest and slap me in the face for being so stupid. His watch was the first clear thing in my memory. I'd gotten wasted, he must have made a pass at me and then somehow I fought him off so hard he reported the beating to the police. I guessed he had to, when he got home to his wife and special needs kid looking like that. And then how did I get to the park in Hartford from Manchester? I guess he got what was coming to him, but how was I going to explain this to the police? They would lock me up before I had a chance to explain. Carla would take care of the rest.

I had to stay out of prison. If I went back, I would be killed once Carla found out about me going to the state prosecutor. They would make it look like a suicide or an accident, or maybe they would just kill me with a shiv to send a message. Carla even knew how to get to people in the vulnerable persons unit. One woman had tried to escape Carla's wrath by seeking protection. The woman lived after the attack, but she could only speak in a whisper after Carla had her hanging by her neck for fifteen minutes. She could touch the floor, another woman told me, but she slowly suffocated. I wasn't going to talk to Kyle in a whisper.

When I finished reading the article, I spun Wayne's chair around. "Look, I met this guy last night," I said. "I drank too much."

His eyes walked up and down my body, not failing to notice his boxers peeking out from under the oversized t-shirt.

"But," he said, "why didn't you just come here?"

"I didn't know Nick left."

"Why did you go to a bar first?"

I stared at him. I didn't have time to make up a good lie, and the truth would only disappoint him. He looked down at my breasts. And then I realized what this conversation was. There was hunger in his eyes. Sex. He expected sex. He wanted sex. I wielded this power over him for years. I always played a game of do and reward with him. But it had been almost two years since he had mind-blowing sex. His wife was always too busy, too plutocratic to do anything sexually adventurous.

His breathing was shallow. His eyes wandered back up to my eyes. His face got a little closer, but I pushed him away.

"I'm here to find Nick." And Kyle, more importantly, but he didn't know about the baby. I was only two months pregnant when I left for York. He'd mentioned I gained weight, but he never knew why. I explicitly told him not to visit me in prison.

"Right." His cheeks were redder faster than I'd ever seen.

"Remember that time I was here?"

His brows furrowed. There were so many times I was here, of course. They all included sex, on the couch or in other places in the house, except for the bed of course. He looked over to the couch and then back at me.

I shook off the pleading in his eyes. "No, I mean, the time we tracked down Tisher."

"Who?"

"That town councilman. The one that stole all that money."

"What about it?"

"I want you to do that again, but with Nick."

He looked back to the computer, down at the couch, and then back to me.

"I don't think—"

I cut him off before he could say no. "It was so easy for you the last time."

"But you—"

"No one will find out. They didn't the last time."

His eyes wandered down my body.

"Just find Nick and I'll—" I turned toward the door.

"Don't leave. Stay with me... or I could go with you."

"What are you talking about?"

"Nothing... it might take a while. I don't have the software. I uninstalled it after we..."

He didn't finish the sentence, but I felt a compulsion to finished it for him. "Hacked into Tisher's computer."

"Yes. I formatted the computer and rebuilt the whole thing." His arms swung in emphasis to how exhaustive this undertaking was.

"How long do you think it's going to take?" I paced the room. The wool rug was gone. I thought about the burn on my back from the last time I was in this room, just one day before my trip to York Correctional.

He weaved his fingers through his silver hair, straighter and shorter than it used to be. "About an hour to find the software. Shouldn't take too long to install, but like last time we'll have to craft an email and wait for him to open the attachment."

"I already have a plan for that. I'll start writing an email on a piece of paper. And he'll open it quick, he checks his email a lot." He got emails almost hourly during the day from magazines rejecting his stories. He had to cast a wide net to get published at all. I almost felt sorry for all of those editors reading through his stories of those depraved people and their devious plans.

The hour went by faster than I expected. I finished the letter to Nick. I moved the clothes from the washer to the dryer. I did my hair and makeup. I interrogated the refrigerator, but as hungry as I was it was void of anything that didn't look and smell like prison food. The irony of prison food was that it was so bland, yet smelled like it spent just enough time in the refrigerator to rot before being served. I picked up the phone and ordered Chinese with his credit card, our usual order, plus some Chinese doughnuts. They were just like regular doughnuts, but they came from the Chinese restaurant.

He called from the other room. "You spelled 'strategy' wrong."

I walked into the room to clarify. "It's 'stratagem.' "

"Oh, that makes more sense." He went back to typing but not before staring at my body.

I held up the plastic. "Can I borrow this credit card?"

He looked back up at me, "What do you need? I could—"

"Just for a day. If you stay here all day tomorrow, you could report it stolen at the end of the day..."

He shrugged. "You could just stay here."

"They'd find me, Wayne." I wasn't sure where Nick was yet, but I needed to get Kyle away from him before I could deal with anything else. With the cops after me, that might be complicated.

"Right." He went back to typing. A few minutes later he stopped typing.

"Is it done?"

"Yes, look over it and tell me if I got everything right."

"I'm sure you did. Send it off," I said with a wave of my hand. "I want to get this over with."

He made a big show of pressing the send button with his finger two feet over the mouse button. On the click he said, "Okay. It's done."

He met my eyes. I could feel the hunger in them. He stepped closer to me. I didn't make a move toward him or away. His head tilted, any moment he would lean in for a long kiss followed by some time on the couch. Maybe it would be short. After two years of suppressing my sexual desire, I just didn't want to start it up again to make life more complicated.

I thought about the missing impressionistic painting in the office. I knew what to do to kill the mood. "Tell me what happened to Liz," I said.

He turned his back to me. He rubbed his hands on his pants. "She left. She found out about us."

"How?"

"I told her." He turned around and met my eyes. "I told you. Didn't you read any of those letters I sent?"

"Shit, Wayne," I remembered the letters. I remembered them filling up the wastebasket. I remembered Carla using one as toilet paper when we ran out. It clogged the toilet, causing the guard to put me in solitary for a day. "You shouldn't have told her."

"She knew something was wrong," he said.

"But why did you tell her about me?"

"I don't know."

"Shit. Maybe she told Nick." I stomped my foot on the floor. "You fucked this all up, Wayne."

"I'm sorry... I just don't know why it matters. I can't understand why you stay with him. What does he have on you?"

I cringed. His accusation hit the mark so squarely.

Wayne's email dinged the magic sound. We both looked over at his computer.

"Is that it?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. But before he looked further into the email he turned the chair back to face me. "What are you going to do when you find out where he is?"

"I don't know yet."

"You should turn yourself in." His voice was frantic. "The state prosecutor needs you for his election. They aren't going to send you back to prison." His voice trailed off, "I don't think they will."

I couldn't understand why he thought that was even a remotely good idea. I had a blackout, no telling what else I'd done. An illegal drug in my system was an instant parole violation. They would haul me back before I could complete a sentence. I tried to read his mind, but nothing I came up with made any sense. "Please, just tell me where he is. Last time we figured it out by activating the webcam, remember? We saw the big clock from the Aetna building and figured out which hotel Tisher stayed in. And then when I showed up at his hotel room door with the camera..."

He sat in front of the computer. "I remember." His fingers tapped on the keys. The doorbell rang.

"Probably the Chinese food. I'll get it," I said. But the blue light flashing off the front window's blinds stopped me in my tracks. "Shit," I said under my breath. I backed up, trying not to make any noise. I walked into Wayne's office, "The police are here. Did you call them?"

"No. I would never—"

"Well, they put two and two together a little faster than our spouses, I guess." The doorbell rang again. "Go get that. Make him go away."

"I will." He leapt out of his chair. Running to the front door, he said, "Hold on."

I held my breath again.

"Good evening, officer."

"Hey, we are on the lookout for..." I heard papers shuffling.

"Robyn Hughes, right?" Wayne asked.

I swallowed hard. I was caught for sure. I should have just pity fucked Wayne. Why didn't I? What had changed with him? What changed with me? He used to bring out the wildcat in me. That last time we made love on the wool rug I still felt the burn two weeks later.

"That's right. Have you seen her?"

"Well...I have actually."

Fuck. I started looking for somewhere to hide, somewhere to run. Could I jump out of the window without being noticed? But then how would I find Nick? I couldn't just wander the streets hoping I'd bump into him.

"You have?" The officer asked, sounding as surprised as I was.

"Yeah. She came here about...an hour ago. Took a shower..." I couldn't understand what Wayne was doing. "...had a cup of coffee. I gave her some money and sent her on her way."

I stopped looking for an exit. I wondered if there was a bat somewhere to knock Wayne out with. He was a better liar than even my husband.

"You gave her some money?"

"Yup."

"Sir, she is wanted in connection with a burglary and assault of a man in Manchester."

"Yeah, I just found that out on the computer."

"Did she happen to mention where she was going?"

"New Haven, I think," Wayne said.

I slowly let out a breath I hadn't known I held back.

"Why New Haven?"

"She said she had a friend down there."

I did have a friend down there. A boyfriend thief I'd met in college. You know the type. They can't date someone unless that person is already dating one of their friends. I didn't mind getting her into trouble with the law. She could handle herself. She might even lie and say I was there, just to mess with the cops.

"Did she mention the friend's name? We don't have any records of a friend in New Haven."

"Nope."

"Can you give me a description of what she was wearing?"

"Yeah. Ah...she had a coat. Um...let's see. She had a red baseball cap on, Boston Red Sox. Go Sox. Right?"

"Would you mind coming down to the station and giving us a statement?"

You went too far, Wayne.

"You know. I have to work this evening. Anyway, Robyn is a little vindictive. If she found out I ratted her out there's no way she wouldn't exact some sort of revenge."

"I see." There was a long silence, followed by a series of confusing shuffling.

"Wait a minute," Wayne said.

I thought about those boots, the same ones I left at Justin's house. Was he the same cop? Would he recognize the boots? I braced myself for being discovered, standing in Wayne's boxers. I went back to trying to find a hiding place or deciding to shimmy out of the window.

"Here you go," Wayne said. A plastic bag crinkled.

"Sir, I suggest you check to see if you have any missing items. If you wouldn't mind coming down to the station this afternoon, we could figure out a way to keep your identity secret."

"Thanks. I'll think about it. Bye now." A plastic bag crinkled. "Getting hungry."

My stomach realized the Chinese food had arrived before my brain was able to process all of the sounds.

"Have a good afternoon, sir."

I was on the verge of tears when Wayne walked through the door.

"You scared the shit out of me." I was afraid to raise my voice over a loud whisper. I smacked his shoulder with my hand, but it hurt me more than him, I'm sure.

"Vindictive, just like I told that cop." He smiled. "Let's eat."

My hands shook as I pointed toward the computer. "Just tell me where Nick is," I said. "I need to know."

His eyes met mine. His shoulders slumped. "He's in San Francisco."

**Chapter 4**

Detective Joseph Turner

DETECTIVE JOSEPH TURNER put the finishing touches on his final report for the week. His hunt and peck method at the keyboard could type faster than the squad's administrative assistant could touch type. But she was young, sexy and had ambitions that didn't involve words per minute.

His reports always caught the attention of the Lieutenant, for their attention to detail. This report, he knew, would tickle the man's funny bone, but not until he came in on Monday morning.

A string of pizza shop robberies in the Farmington and Avon areas had been committed over the last seven weeks. All of them had the same M.O.: Two men would walk into the pizza place, one man holding a rifle, the other emptying the cash register and safe. Turner had visited the scene of three of the robberies. Over the next week, he went to seventeen more pizza shops looking for information. Had anyone matching the description cased the place in the last month or two? Did they look familiar? What security do you have in place?

The owner of Pizza Heaven, in his late fifties and looking like he spent every one of those years in the kitchen, pulled out his Glock in response to the last question. "Haven't had a chance to use this yet," he said holding up the shiny gun. "I hope those fu—I mean idiots, excuse my language—come around here next. I'll be ready for 'um."

Turner asked for the man's permit and gun license, to make sure the handgun was legitimate. The paperwork was in order, and Turner visited a few more pizza joints. None of them was as prepared as the man from Pizza Heaven.

Sure enough, yesterday the robbers held up Pizza Heaven. Everything went as planned for the robbers until the men ordered the owner to open the safe in his office. Behind the door was the owner's shiny gun. His first shot passed through the arm of the man holding the rifle. The second shot hit the other man's thigh.

The owner didn't call 9-1-1. He calmly picked up Detective Turner's business card from the pile on his desk. "I got those fuckers you've been looking for right here," he said. His voice was calm. Turner could hear the robbers wailing in the background.

Detective Lena limped over to Turner's desk. As thirty-year veteran with the force, he counted down the days to his retirement on his desk calendar. The countdown helped him answer the phone, "Detective Lena, fifty-six days left." He was sick of sitting at his desk since the accident. He knocked his knuckles on Turner's desk as Turner hit send on the computer. "Hey. I've got a favor to ask."

"Favor, huh? I thought you already owed me a few of those."

"I know, I know. But I'm good for it, I swear," Lena said with a smirk. "So, I got a call from a PO earlier. They say a woman who's testifying for a state prosecutor is missing. She just got released yesterday and didn't show up for her meeting this morning."

Turner raised his eyebrow. Parole officer calls were in Lena's purview. He always dealt with them, since he had experience being one.

"The PO has some black and whites tracking down her known associates," Lena said. "They think she may have broken into her house. And I think maybe she got involved in an assault in Manchester yesterday. The man from Manchester, or actually his _husband_ , recognized her from a picture I had up on my computer."

"She assaulted a man?"

"Yes, and his _husband_ brought him in."

Turner didn't want to talk about gay marriage with Lena. Lena was an Italian Catholic and had already made his position entirely clear.

"I don't know what either fags' connection to the fugitive is," Lena said.

Turner cringed and changed the subject. "Wait, how do you break into your own house?"

"Her husband was renting it, but he moved out in a hurry. The owner of the house already changed the locks. He didn't return the security deposit. There were some holes in the wall."

Holes in the walls were classic warning signs for domestic abuse, and domestics were the most dangerous situations for uniform police officers. People were passionate about their spouses, and if a man moved in the middle of the night before his wife was released from prison, there was probably pretty good justification. Men didn't like to call in the police for spousal abuse. They always thought they could handle the situation until it spun out of their control and someone usually ended up in the hospital, or worse, dead.

"Do they have a history of domestic calls?"

"There were no reports of calls to their house." Lena continued, "If you could just look into it?"

"Yeah, I'll look into it," Turner said. Another weekend he'd be spending at his desk, or hunting down a fugitive, and there were only so many weekends left before the golf courses closed for the season.

"Good, because my mother-in-law is in town, and Penny is going crazy. She just called saying that her mother was cleaning the kitchen and broke half of our wine glasses. If I don't get back home in the next half hour my mother-in-law is going to break the rest." Lena leaned into Turner's desk. "Look, ninety percent of these cases get cleared up without me intervening at all. Women—most are found right away. I just need you to cover this case until my mother-in-law is back home safe in New Jersey. Otherwise my wife is going to be under arrest for murder."

Turner laughed. "All right, Lena. For Penny," he said. "I wouldn't want to have to bring her in on homicide charges."

Lena slapped Turner on the back. "Thanks. I'll have Penny bring you in some of those goodies she makes."

He turned to go, but Turner stopped him, "Wait, you haven't told me this woman's name."

"Oh, you'll get a kick out of this. Her name is Robyn Hughes."

"Like that actor?" Turner said. He put his hand to his chin. "What was the name of that show?"

"Windless." Lena said. "Remember they kept going to new planets? And then Robin Hughes would walk out..." Lena put his hands up to his heart.

Turner and Lena recited the famous line together: "Dude, let's create a better world."

Turner shook his head, "Did he ever do another show?"

"Yeah, they made some space cowboy movie based on the TV show, but it flopped. I think he gained a hundred pounds after that. Rags at the checkout line have pictures of him bloated and sweating all over hot chicks."

"Could be worse, I guess. Maybe he can go on one of those reality shows for celebrities needing to lose weight?"

**Chapter 5  
Connecticut - Section 53a-123**

Larceny

I LAUGHED AS though Wayne made a joke. "What are you talking about, San Francisco?"

"He's in San Francisco."

"But you didn't even activate the web camera or...look through his browser history or anything."

"I didn't have to. He connected from an IP Address from San Francisco."

"Why would he be in San Francisco?" I asked as if Wayne might have seen something on Nick's computer he wasn't telling me.

"I don't know. Does he have any family there?"

"No. He was adopted. His adoptive parents are dead. He was in foster care for five years. He was an only child. Even his biological mother died a few years ago."

"Maybe he got a job out there?"

"He writes novels and twisted short stories about men killing their wives." I said. "You can do that—" I stopped before saying 'anywhere.' My eyes lost focus. The room felt like a high-speed elevator.

Wayne reached out to touch me and I jumped.

"Maybe he just wanted to write novels in San Francisco," Wayne said with a shrug. "What's wrong with you?"

"I have to get to San Francisco. How am I going to get to San Francisco?" I said, my voice reaching a fever pitch.

"You could fly," Wayne said.

"No. I can't fly." My voice failed on the word 'fly.'

"Why not?"

"Because I can't." I turned my back to him.

"I don't think the manhunt for 'Robyn Hughes' is to the point of shutting down the airports, you'll be fine."

"I can't fly, Wayne," I said. "First of all, I don't have any money."

"You already talked about stealing my credit card."

"Second of all I just..." I swallowed back tears. "Can't."

He laughed. "Wait, you're saying you are scared of flying?"

"It's not funny."

He laughed even harder. "Sure as hell seems funny to me." He stopped laughing. His eyes lit up, "Oh my God! It all makes so much sense now. You didn't go to that awards banquet in Los Angeles. You told me you had to go to Nick's book signing. I knew you wouldn't prioritize his accomplishment over your need for the limelight. I never knew why. Wow. You think you know someone."

I stood there, in his boxers, and contemplated punching him in the face, but I still needed him for his credit card. More importantly, I didn't want him to call the police. My nerves settled and I smiled. "I don't suppose this software gave you an address?"

"No. And I don't want to poke around on his computer. I'm not sure what he's capable of. Anyway, it's bad enough I've lied to the police, provided you money, and hacked into his computer. I don't want to do anything more."

"So you're drawing a line at three felonies?" I backed out of the room and started toward the dryer.

"Stay and eat," he said.

I stopped half way up the stairs. "I can't. I've got to get going. Are you sure he's in San Francisco?"

"That's where his computer connected from. He could be using a proxy, but I doubt it."

I ran up the rest of the steps. San Francisco. California. That was thousands of miles away. He knew I couldn't fly. That's why he chose San Francisco. Might as well be Alaska. At least he hadn't gone to Hawaii. I pulled on pants still warm from the dryer. Wayne's boxers stuck out of the top like the way some thugs wore their pants to show the tops—or more fashionably the whole ass—of their underwear.

I wrangled the bra back on, tucked the t-shirt in, and pulled on the blouse. I found and stole a toothbrush in its original wrapper at the bottom of Wayne's medicine cabinet. I took the stairs two at a time.

He waited for me at the bottom. "I just don't understand why you need to get to him..."

"He's a witness." I'm not sure where this lie came from, but I decided to go with it. "To a story I'm working on." I stumbled over the words while gathering my few things. The last thing I needed was for him to think Kyle was _his_ son. While it might be true, I didn't want it to be true any more than I wanted Nick to be the father of my child. Kyle was mine. No one else deserved him.

"What story?" he said.

"I'll call you about it?"

Wayne pulled my arm back, "Is it about a murder?"

I stared into his eyes, wondering how he could possibly know.

"Isn't that how you got out? You made a deal with a state prosecutor? Did you witness someone dying? I heard that happened while you were there. I was going to ask you about it, but you said..."

He only knew half the story. I smiled. "Yes, that's it. I have to go."

"Here." He held out a little white waxy bag.

"What's this?"

"Egg rolls. I know you love them."

I took a deep breath, thinking about food with flavor and texture. "I haven't had an egg roll in two years."

"Eat them before they get cold. You should stay; eat the rest of the food. The police won't be back..."

My stomach growled in agreement. But I needed to move, and I didn't want to stay and plan out how to get to Nick with Wayne as a witness. His silence could only be trusted for so long. "I can't stay." I put my heavy coat on.

"I love you, Robyn." His voice had a catch.

I zipped the jacket. "What?" I asked, as though I hadn't heard him, but I had. My feet slipped into each of the rubber boots. I didn't look up.

"I..." He hesitated.

My hand was on the knob. "I've got to go. Thanks for everything. Bye, Wayne." I was out the door, walking down the street before I had a chance to think about what Wayne said. I popped an egg roll in my mouth. My stomach roiled. I'd been too long without eating something substantive. The sugar from the candy bars made me jittery. The lack of real food made me nauseated. I popped the second egg roll down, defying my digestive system.

There was a distinctive sound of a bus's screeching brakes and rumbling engine from down the street. I ran to the stop I saw just a block away. I caught up just before the bus arrived.

I dropped a handful of coins I'd taken from Wayne's change jar into the slot. The bus was empty.

"You wanna transfer?"

"No."

The old man smiled. He was missing a tooth in the bottom row. His arm was covered in a full sleeve tattoo I'd originally mistaken for the sleeve of his shirt.

I found a spot near the middle door. I could rent a car, but what if the car had Lojack? Connecticut police might find me. I could use Wayne's card to buy a plane ticket. Suck it up, how bad could it be? People flew everyday, right? But not everyone had survived a plane crash.

I needed wheels. One of my stories from WFSB came bubbling up. A string of baffling robberies in East Hartford were tracked down to one clever thief stealing car remotes from ladies' purses. I yanked hard on the yellow cord as we approached downtown Hartford.

Three blocks on the right, the City Steam Brewery stood before me. The 'Naughty Nurse Ale' called out my name with its spicy, bitter bite and malty aftertaste. The smell of the grease from a bacon cheeseburger pulled me onward.

A woman standing in front of me waiting for a table was preoccupied with her companions. She held her wide-open brown leather Louis Vuitton purse behind her back. That purse alone was worth more than most people's monthly salary, but I was going to steal so much more. The iPhone swung in front of my view, back and forth. I dipped my hand into the purse, and came up with the prize on the first try. _One theft down, three to go._ I had a real talent for pickpocketing without the need for misdirection.

I peeled off the glittery cover, switched it to silent and stuffed it in my own purse, a fifty-dollar special from a consignment shop. Now my phone looked just like everyone else's. The women all walked, giggling, to their table near the front.

I was seated a few tables away. The reupholstered pink velvet settee I sat on was in full view of the gaggling women. "Oh. My. God. _She didn't!_ " One woman said.

_Yes she did_ , I thought.

"Did you have a chance to look at the menu?" the waitress said. Her tone hit the mark of insincere familiarity.

I looked up at her and smiled. I hadn't even cracked open the menu yet. "I'll have a Naughty Nurse and a double bacon cheeseburger."

The waitress tilted her head, "Wait, Robyn? Is that you?"

_Shit. I need to get out of this fucking town._ I tried to keep myself from flinching. I should never have walked into an old haunt. I wouldn't make that mistake again.

She frowned. "We don't have those anymore. We switched the menu like, last year. Where have you been anyway?"

Thankfully this waitress didn't know my situation. "You still sell burgers?"

"Yeah, but they all have weird stuff on them now."

"Whatever. Just bring a burger and a beer." _Just any old burger._ "I'll give you a twenty dollar tip if it makes it to my mouth in fifteen minutes."

"Damn, Robyn. I missed you." She twirled around without any more explanation. I had channeled my previous self. I was confident, authoritative, the self the waitress looked for. The confidence felt like something growing inside me. My paranoia would kick in any moment and attack it like an invading species.

The women continued laughing. The television blared a Red Sox game. Apparently they were up three to one in the division series. One more game, tomorrow night, and the series would be over. Or so said the commentators. These same commentators would be paraded in front of cameras to pay for their sins if the Red Sox lost the series.

"Who was the guy in that movie?" The woman with the Louis Vuitton purse asked. "I gotta know."

I watched the woman dig through her purse. My smugness warmed me right to the core. I pulled out the phone and deleted every picture in three quick swipes of my finger. Bye-bye little rat dog with a pink studded collar. Bye-bye pictures of a fat ass baby.

The beer arrived, followed shortly by the burger. The waitress earned her twenty-dollar tip. Although I felt bad I wasn't going to be leaving any money at all. My nausea subsided with the first few bites from the sizzling spicy burger. The layer of guacamole chilled the grilled green peppers perfectly.

The waitress wandered over, laughing and shaking her head. "I hope you're doing better than those women over there. One woman lost her phone." She glanced up at the television still prattling on. "The other woman can't find her wallet and the third one can't find her keys." She stared at the television, talking a bit slower. My name and picture were plastered on the screen. "They swear they had them when they walked in..." I wonder if she was a little pissed to see I wasn't there, or possibly a little intrigued by the excitement in an otherwise boring shift.

The air outside was even colder than when I walked into the restaurant, but at least it wasn't raining. I pushed down the button on the car keys I stole from the Louis Vuitton purse and waited expectantly for the echo of a car alarm. The panic button was a boon for desperate car thieves. I'd just steal cars, one at a time, across state lines.

The klaxon call of the car alarm echoed through the parking garage across the street. I didn't see the blinking yellow light, though. I wandered through the levels one at a time. Another set of footsteps echoed on the stairs. I hoped the gaggle of women didn't decide to go find the car. I was almost out of breath at the top of the third set of stairs when I finally saw the yellow blinking lights of the black Escalade.

"Hey," a man's voice called out from behind me.

I froze.

**Chapter 6  
Ohio - Section 2921.331**

Fleeing Police

I SWALLOWED HARD. I slapped a happy drunk smile across my face. When I turned around a fat security guard looked at me puzzled.

"Are you all right?" the man said.

"Yeah. Ha. I just totally forgot where I parked my car." I rolled my eyes and tried to sound like a woman who might be driving this huge Escalade, sickening sweet around strangers.

"Well, turn off the alarm, okay?"

"Oh, yeah, sorry." I clicked on the button. We shared a deep breath of silent air. "I'll just be on my way now. Sorry about that."

He took a few steps closer. "You been drinking?"

"Definitely not," I said, all smiles and bright eyes.

"All right, have a good afternoon. Drive home safe." He adjusted his heavy belt, laden with radios, flashlights and whatever else you might need for fending off the riff-raff. He turned toward the elevator and pressed the button. The guard went back to whatever mindless thing he'd been doing before the klaxon call, maybe watching unrated television shows on Netflix or diddling himself in the confines of the guard box.

I would be driving safe all right, but not home. I didn't have a home. Nick made sure of that.

The fastest, most direct way west was through New York and Pennsylvania down I-84, but I wanted to get out of Connecticut fast, so I plotted a mental map up through Massachusetts. Hartford was only twenty-five minutes away from the border going the speed limit. The toll roads through Massachusetts and New York would be easier to navigate as well. I knew it would be ages before Connecticut state police coordinated with the other states nearby for my return. Hopefully by then I'd be on the West Coast holding my baby in my arms.

When I pulled the car out of the garage I spotted the women walking on the sidewalk. I ducked down, but they didn't seem to notice me at all.

E-Z Pass provided an excellent line-free way of avoiding the tedious tollbooths I remembered from my youth, but it would provide an all too easy way for the police to track me across the country. The plastic piece hung on tight with its Velcro attachment. I wrestled it off and tossed it out the window. Bits of plastic exploded in every direction like a grenade.

Over the next two hours the silence picked away at me. After two years in prison, I wasn't used to driving. I don't think I'd ever driven at the speed limit in my entire life, but I didn't need the cops to have any reason to pull me over.

I tried the radio, but the static cut in and out through the Berkshires. The CD player only had pretentious classical music. I didn't want to fall asleep. I concentrated on thoughts of my baby. Every fifty miles or so, I rubbed my hand against the pacifier in my pocket. I thought about how confused he must be by moving to a whole new place. I didn't know much about San Francisco, other than the often-repeated line attributed to Mark Twain, "The coldest winter I'd ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." Turns out he never said that, but why ruin a great story with the truth?

The miles drew on through Massachusetts and then westward through New York.

These were the roads of my youth. Once Dad had left, my mother rarely stayed in one place too long. Either she was afraid he might find her, or shatter her worldview by actually paying child support. We skipped out on rent in the middle of the night more than once. Sometimes I was able to pack a few of my things in a suitcase before we left, but often I didn't. The first time I remembered sleeping in a car the street lights and freeway noises kept me awake, but I devised techniques for covering my eyes and ears. I never did figure out a way to keep Justice from kicking me awake though, other than to punch him.

The toll road was designed for very little distractions, only a few exits every fifty miles or so. I filled up the gas-guzzler in a rest stop a few miles outside of Rochester. Wayne's credit card was still working.

Dusk turned to dawn and dawn turned to morning. Trees along the freeway had already lost their leaves. They looked like black skeletons ready for Halloween.

The first exit sign for Cleveland advertised a gas station and Denny's restaurant. I looked at the gas needle in the greedy Escalade. Both the car and I could use some sustenance soon. A warm cup of coffee and an omelet could sustain me for eight more long haul hours, far more than the Escalade's full tank of gas.

The red and blue lights flashing in my rear view mirror made my stomach sink. I hadn't noticed the speed limit sign. Had I been speeding? The car was definitely reported stolen by now. Was the cop already looking up the license plate? Every muscle in my body tensed. I pulled over on the curb in front of the gas station. A plan had yet to form, but I was sure there would be one any moment now. My usual method for getting into great parties and out of sticky situations, using my good looks, didn't seem like it would work for driving a stolen vehicle. Speeding, maybe, but definitely not fleeing the state with a stolen vehicle.

The officer swaggered out of his patrol vehicle as if he were much taller than his five-foot six-inch frame. As he approached the left side, just a few steps from the side mirror, a thought formed in my mind. I put the Escalade in gear and stomped on the accelerator. I sped through the streets, weaving in and out of traffic. I ran through a red light with my breath held. Screeching tires to my left, and a car horn made one long angry note to my right.

When I spotted the Denny's parking lot a quick plan took hold of my mind. The cop hadn't caught up. I pulled into a spot just behind the restaurant, one of the few places left to park. I left the keys in the ignition and the door wide open. I walked into the restaurant like I owned the place.

The smell of bacon permeated every corner of the diner. A man looked up, then back down to his newspaper. Every booth was taken. I walked over to the man reading the paper. "Hey, mind if I join you?"

He rustled his paper. His eyes bore into me. "Whatever," he said.

I stuffed my coat and purse into the end of the booth. I flipped over a cup, dumped two sugars and spilled half his cup of coffee into mine. I took one of the empty food plates and placed it in front of me along with a well-used napkin.

"What are you doing?" he said.

I didn't say anything, didn't look at him. My eyes followed the cop car pulling into the parking lot. Everyone turned to stare at the lights. When the cop got out of the cruiser I realized the height estimate was overstatement, he might not be taller than five three. Didn't they have height requirements for being a cop?

My dining companion's mustache and red plaid shirt gave away his sense of adventure, but the ring on his finger kept his adventurous dreams in check.

The cop started walking up and down the aisle, staring the patrons down. I held my breath. I didn't dare turn toward him. Just before he got to my table the sound of peeling tires filled the diner. The Escalade exited the parking lot in a spectacular fashion.

The cop followed the car with his eyes. "Shit!" His gear jangled as he ran out the door.

My dining companion grinned, "What's your story then?"

"I'm a skip tracer." This lie didn't even make sense, but I decided to go with it even if pressed. Every time I lied I wondered about my tell. Nick always knew when I lied, and he said I had a tell, but he never told me what it was. I never met anyone else that didn't believe most of my lies, because I learned the best way to lie was with a good backing of truth.

He chuckled, "A skip tracer? Like a bounty hunter?"

A waitress walked up to the booth still staring out the window. "No idea what that was about." She motioned with her carafe of coffee, "Refill?" She looked at me, "Oh, hi there." She looked down at my mysteriously half-full coffee cup with a raised eyebrow.

I sucked down the sugary half-cup of coffee and then held out my cup. "Yes, please. Can I see a menu?"

The waitress looked over at the man, "Who's this, Paul?"

"Ol' friend of mine. Late as usual," Paul said.

The waitress filled both of our cups and then left with her apron strings swaying. When she came back, she slapped the menu on the table. "Be back in a minute to take your order."

Steve adjusted himself in the booth. His eyes looked at me, full of excitement. "So, who are you after?"

"A woman that skipped town before surrendering herself to prison."

"What was she going in for?"

"Assault with a motor vehicle."

"Shit. Did the guy live?"

"Teenage girl. Yeah she lived, but it took her months to learn to walk again. Her mother sent hate mail letters everyday during trial. Some of them had pictures of her daughter's wounds. They started tapering off after that. She was probably busy with taking care of her kid." All truth, except the 'she' was 'me.'

"Did you read any of them?"

"I read a few of them, but the grammar was atrocious." Irregardless, for instance, is not a word.

I looked over the menu and chose the 'Grand Slam' breakfast. "Tell me something. When was the last time you did something adventurous?"

"Are you offering?"

"No. Something about you..." I took a sip from my coffee. The warm bitter bite, much lower on the sugar than the last sip, snapped me into reality.

He grinned. "Okay. Adventurous, huh?" He took a sip from his coffee. "I went on one of those rope adventures with my son this summer. I 'bout scared the shit out of myself. I had all this rigging on, but you never know... stuff happens."

"Tell me about it," I said. _Planes fall out of the sky. Husbands fly off to San Francisco with your kid when you are locked up._ "I knew you were the adventurous type."

"So, tell me, how did a fine woman like you end up in skip tracing?"

"Just my calling. I like finding out about people and their dark secrets." Very true.

The waitress came and put down my Grand Slam with a grand slam to the table. "Anything else you need?" Her eyes were accusing, like I'd been honing in on her waitress/customer sexual fantasies.

"Nah," I said, and she wandered off to the next table.

Paul took a sip from his coffee. "How long will she be prison?"

"Probably two years." I scarfed up those eggs like a woman on a mission.

"Is that all? Shit, my buddy was in for a nickel on a possession charge. Just for having a little bag in his pocket."

"She _was_ sentenced to five years, but she'll be out by the end of the second year." I shook my head as if I were ashamed for the imaginary woman. "And she could have pleaded out for eighteen months in the first place, but her lawyer said she had a good defense. The teenager was jaywalking."

"Jury didn't go for it?"

I told him while eating a sausage: "Prosecution had witnesses with her on the phone. Then there was a traffic cam. She was texting." The world was now just how George Orwell described it. Cameras were everywhere monitoring your every mistake.

He cringed, "My sister's kid hit a tree while texting and driving. Dangerous shit."

"Yeah."

We sat in silence for a while. I ate and Paul stared at me. Eventually he went back to reading the paper.

I finished the meal and placed the cutlery on the plate. When I opened my purse Paul shook his head, "It's on me."

"Thanks."

He put his paper back up, "Good luck finding your fugitive."

I walked out of the Denny's and into the chilly air. I zipped up the coat a little higher. A fire truck, lights and sirens blared, horn honked, drove by. Then another fire truck drove by with a ladder. Two cop cars drove by in quick succession.

The problem with stolen cars was the license plates. A few blocks later, the ramp for interstate 90 West lay before me. I walked halfway up the ramp, turned around, and stuck out my thumb.

**Chapter 7**

Connecticut - 21a-267

Use, Possession or Delivery of Drug Paraphernalia

Six Years Earlier

"WHO THE HELL is that?" Nick asked.

"Who?" Jeremy looked around the living room for anyone Nick might not know.

"The girl in the tank top." Nick stared at her.

"Oh, man. You do not want to get mixed up with her. I mean I heard she's a fucking good lay, but that's it. You have to get out from her clutches before she puts her hooks in you and leaves you for dead." Jeremy handed the joint back to Nick.

Nick couldn't take his eyes off of her. It wasn't that she was stunningly beautiful exactly, but he could see the quiver of excitement she radiated. Her smile was both charming and dangerous. He took a drag, let the smoke linger in his lungs and then let out a big exhale, never taking his eyes off the girl in the tank top. "What's her name?"

"Robyn, man. I think. But Brendan calls her Stacey for some reason. I heard he roughs her up," Jeremy said taking back the roach.

_She likes it rough?_ "What do you know about her, exactly?"

"I've seen her at Bookworms in the middle of the night more than once. She just blew me off when I tried talking to her, though," Jeremy said. "I think she's too much for you to handle, man."

Nick scoffed. "Jeremy, no woman is too much for me to handle."

**Chapter 8**

Indiana IC 35-42-2-1

Assault with a Deadly Weapon

THE LAST TIME I hitched I was sixteen years old. It was summer, and I had much better assets then, skinny legs and a tight miniskirt. A family of four picked me up. I sat between the baby's car seat and the toddler's booster. I lied about my age and destination. I said I was eighteen, on my way to college to stay with some friends before the semester started. The family thought it was a wonderful coincidence we were going to the same place, but they had a bumper sticker that said they were 'UCONN Alumni,' headed toward Storrs so it wasn't that much of a coincidence.

But there was no miniskirt on this chilly day, and no skinny legs. Many cars whizzed by. One car honked at me, and I gave him the finger. But the next car, an older model station wagon, pulled over.

The bumper stickers said things like 'Friends don't let Friends miss out on Jesus' and 'Sin is the Disease, Christ is the Cure.' I popped my head into the open window, giving the driver an opportunity to change his mind, somehow hoping he might. To say the man was fat was an understatement. He took morbid obesity to a whole new level. I'd done a story on a man so large they had to saw a hole in his apartment and hoist him out with a crane. This driver could look forward to the day he would need to be removed from his home through a conspicuous hole carved out of his bedroom wall in full view of his neighbors. He'd be spending his fifteen minutes of fame on the front cover of the local paper.

His chest pressed up against the steering wheel. "Are you saved, lamb?" the man asked.

I shook my head no.

"Where are you headed?"

"Oregon." I contemplated telling him about my lesbian lover waiting for me there. Maybe then he would wave me off.

"I can get you as far as Chicago." He started throwing papers and fast food wrappers to the back. "Hop in."

I shrugged, and opened the door. The smell of rotten food made my stomach lurch. The seat had a greasy feel, like years of fast food wrappers had languished in this seat. The floor was littered with breakfast sandwich and hamburger wrappers. My rubber boots had melted cheese plastered to them the moment I sat down.

He put the car in gear and then we were off with a sputter. The radio bellowed the Christian station. I didn't listen to the talking so much as the sudden stop in conversation with 'Amen' repeated several times.

"God sent you here to me, lamb." His voice was so low I could barely hear it over the radio.

I put my hood up. My head rested on the window. I concentrated hard on staying awake. I alternated pushing up on the lids of my eyes until my eyeball was dry. A loud siren penetrated through the fire and brimstone on the radio.

The obese man switched off the radio. "Looks like an accident." In an effort to get closer to the windshield he rested the folds of his chins on the steering wheel.

There were four fire trucks and a few police cars. In the center of it all were two red mangled vehicles and a black Escalade with Connecticut license plates. "Shit," I said.

"I hope they were all saved," the obese man said. He stopped in front of the wreckage, craned his neck past me.

It was the Escalade I stole, it had to be. I took the time to wipe down what could, but I didn't take that much time. How long until the police put together the pieces?

The obese man finally drove on after a good long look at the carnage, more than I could stand. I rolled down the window for a breath of grease-free air.

"Are you too hot? Why don't you take off that heavy coat?" he asked. "My name's John, by the way." He put his hand out to shake.

"Jenny." I didn't put my hand out, didn't even look at him. My hood went back up. I put my head against the window.

"Tired, huh? Are you... I mean... Do you work at night, so to speak?"

My jaw felt tight. "Are you looking for a hooker, John?"

"No. I... I just want to save your soul. I believe God wanted you to get into my car."

"Is that right? What did God want me to do for you? Did he happen to mention it?"

John didn't respond.

I sized him up. While he was certainly a little crazy, he was probably mostly harmless. The hell and damnation continued on the radio. I tuned it out, just like I tuned out Carla's rants in prison.

I resisted the need for sleep, but my head bobbed every few minutes. My eyes were heavy. I could hear my hard breathing echoing in my ears over the noise on the radio. I rubbed my eyes as they teared up involuntarily. I stared straight ahead to the dashed white lines until they had me under hypnosis. I tried to think ahead to keep myself awake, but my worried brain resisted thoughts any deeper than where I would sleep and how soon it would happen.

A jab in the head with a hard object woke me up.

"Hey," John said.

I took off my hood. The first thing I noticed was the car was stopped. We were parked in the woods somewhere. But then I saw John's gun. I didn't like guns, especially not one that pointed at my head. "What the fuck?"

"God didn't bring you here," he said. "It was the devil. He brought you here for temptation."

My eyes focused on the gun, but the jerking movements of his left hand made me look down. He fucked himself. My throat burned from the bile inching up. His pants were on the floorboard around his ankles.

"It has been too long since the flesh took over. I need sweet release, and you are going to give it to me."

The thought, just the thought, revolted me. I didn't even try to conceal the disgust like I did with the guards. "No fucking way."

"Yes. You walk the streets, Jenny? How much do you get paid? I'll pay you."

"I'm not a hooker."

"Oh." He looked disappointed, but the gun was still pointed at my face.

"Look. I'll just get out of the car, and you can go get yourself a real hooker."

His face balled up like a baby's. The sobs came out, but the gun stayed up. "I failed, I failed," he said over and over.

I put my hand on the door handle. I was ready to risk being shot.

He stopped crying. "No!" The gun thrust into my temple.

"You don't want to do this, John."

He started playing with himself again. But when he reached for the handle to push the seat back, the hand holding the gun slowly started to dip toward the floor. I pushed it the rest of the way down. His weak arm was unable to fight back, but in the process of fighting against me the gun went off.

**Chapter 9**

Detective Joseph Turner

TURNER LOOKED OUT the window to the sun and puffy clouds. Today would have been a good one for golfing. The temperature had dipped down to the mid-forties, but then the greens would be less crowded with fair-weather golfers.

He'd been up all night with the victims of Robyn's assault. The best way he knew to track a fugitive was to work their crimes backward, starting with the most recent. Turner separated the husbands, Steve, and the victim, Addison, into two different interview rooms. The story Lena documented was sketchy at best. He never documented how Steve recognized Mrs. Hughes if he wasn't there for the assault. Steve crumbled under fifteen minutes of interrogation. He suspected his husband of cheating, and had followed him that night after dropping their son off to his sister's house. Steve was shocked to learn that his husband cheated on him _with a woman_. Addison drove around in circles for almost an hour after leaving the bar. When he and _that woman_ pulled over at a park, Steve gathered up all his strength and went to confront Addison, but he had to pull _that woman_ off of his husband. She was beating him, and took a swing at Steve too, but he pushed her out of the car and drove Addison to the hospital. Steve had convinced Addison they needed to go to the police with a story about the assault before _that woman_ told her side of the story. Only when they walked into the police station did Steve recognize Robyn from the picture on Detective Lena's computer.

Addison kept to the fable he had concocted with his husband until Turner pushed Steve's confession in front of him.

The next morning Turner read through all of the reports concerning Robyn Hughes, including her time at York. He wanted to know what exactly what he was getting into. The pressure for finding her was greater than he'd ever experienced or expected for a parole violator. They fell through the cracks all the time. He'd never seen such a manhunt—or rather woman hunt—on the basis of a parole violation. But after the talk with his Lieutenant, the situation became clear. The state prosecutor, Nathan Welch, was taking a run for State Attorney General. He based his entire platform on cleaning up the prisons. He'd given a number of speeches on drug use in prison and how he planned to stop the flow. Unfortunately, his first witness in the women's prison could no longer speak since her voice box was crushed. Although Welch ardently denied it, someone found out she was a snitch and tortured her for it.

Robyn, a former investigative reporter and model prisoner, would be a star witness with her charisma and attention for detail. She also happened to be the former cellmate of Carla Brooks, the woman under indictment. Welch needed Robyn, but not to put her back in prison. She needed to be the reformed prisoner in the jury's eyes. Welch hadn't done his homework, however. He didn't know Robyn's husband wasn't going to be there to pick her up, or he would have put her in protective custody right away. Even now, if Turner could find her, he was instructed to put her in custody, not in jail. He was specifically given instructions from the Lieutenant not to charge her with anything. But none of the other cops were supposed to know that.

The fact that her husband, Nick, wasn't there to pick her up needled at Turner. Most of his investigations were with missing persons or homicides. He was interested to hear in this case, at least eventually, both sides of the story. So often he only got to hear one side, and had to infer from everyone around the homicide victim or missing person what they were really like. More often than not, those stories left more inconsistencies and questions, than answers. But once he found Robyn he'd be able to ask her what was really going on from her perspective.

The pimply-faced uniform officer standing in front of Turner's desk broke his train of thought. "Sir? I think we found him."

"Who?" Turner asked.

"Nick Hughes," he said. "His agent is listed on his website, so I called him, and he gave me Mr. Hughes' number." Officer Asbury pushed down the sticky note.

"His agent? Is he an actor?"

"No." Asbury said. "He's a writer. Novels, I guess."

"Never heard of him," Turner said.

Asbury shrugged. "Me either. But he won some award for a book called _Lies_."

Turner ran his finger over the sticky note. "Let's give him a call."

Nick picked up on the first ring.

"Mr. Hughes? This is Officer Turner of the Hartford, Connecticut police." He didn't say detective on purpose. Everyone in the police department was an officer of the law, but detectives were the most intelligent of the bunch. If Nick had something to do with his wife's disappearance, there was no need to make him guarded.

"Officer Turner... You mean Detective Turner? I know you."

"Oh?"

"Yes, you investigate disappearances?"

"Occasionally, yes." Turner's first big case was a disappearance, and one that remained entirely unsolved. "Sir, there's been an incident with your wife."

"Oh?"

"Yes, have you heard from her in the last two days?"

There was a long pause, longer than Turner would expect for someone answering a yes or no question. "No, I haven't," Nick finally said.

"I see. Were you aware you were supposed to pick her up two days ago from the York Correctional Facility?"

"Who told you that?"

Turner rustled some papers to be bureaucratic and official. "It says so in her release paperwork."

"I never told her I would pick her up."

"I see," Turner said. He scanned down the page for more information from her release. "Is there any reason you didn't tell her that you moved from the house you rented?"

Another long silence, "I told her. I can't help it if she didn't listen to me."

"She is officially missing. I'll need you to come down here and make a statement."

There was another long pause. "I'm afraid I can't do that."

"I must insist."

"I'm not going to fly back to Connecticut for anything to do with my wife."

"Fly back? Where are you now, sir?"

"I'm living in San Francisco."

"California?"

"Yes, I don't think there are any other _San Francisos_."

"I suppose not," Turner said. "And you didn't tell your wife you were taking your son across the country?"

"She's a convicted felon. I don't think I owe her anything."

"I see. I'm not so sure Mrs. Hughes or the state of Connecticut would see it that way."

"Let her press charges. I'm sure I'll win in a custody battle."

"You're probably right," Turner said. "And what about her property? Did you leave that in storage?"

"I didn't leave her anything in storage. I'm pretty sure she isn't going to want to bring up in court anything that she really wants."

_What did that mean?_ Turner thought.

"Is there anything else?" Nick asked.

"We are trying to contact some of her former friends," Turner said. "Does she know anyone in New Haven?"

"I don't know," he said. "Maybe? She met a bunch of people in prison. There were people she met when she worked at the station, I don't know most of them. Before that, college, she met plenty of people there I don't know."

"Do you know where she might go if she was in trouble?"

"She makes friends very easily. She'll go wherever she wants to, especially if she's on the hunt for a story."

"Did she tell you about any stories she might be tracking down?" Turner asked. "Because I'm aware she's had some conversations with the state prosecutor to facilitate her early release. A story about drugs getting into the prison. Did you know anything about that?"

Nick cleared his throat. "Why would I know anything about that?"

"I thought maybe she might have told you something."

"Well she didn't. We haven't talked in months."

Turner shifted papers on his desk, "She called you a week ago."

"I didn't talk to her."

"The call was three minutes."

"Maybe someone else answered my phone?"

"I see."

Turner passed on his contact information, but he was certain Nick wasn't writing any of it down. It wasn't so much what Nick Hughes said that threw red flags, but the way he'd said them. He manipulated the truth like a politician, emphasizing anything that helped his cause and failing to mention, or outright lying about, anything that made him look like the con he most certainly was. What did he mean by something she wouldn't want to bring up in court?

More importantly, why had he mentioned that he knew Turner worked in missing person cases? Did it have anything to do with the disappearance of Professor Behan? How did Nick remember Turner's name? Turner pulled up the file on the disappearance of Brendan Behan, although he didn't need it. Turner had everything in that file memorized. Just the same, he searched for any interview involving Nick or Robyn, but didn't find anything. He searched and found that they had both been at UCONN at the time, he was a professor of English and she was a student in Journalism. The disappearance was big news. Perhaps Nick had an endemic memory and read about the reports in the paper?

Something prickled at Turner about Nick. He shouted across the squad room, "Asbury. Get that agent back on the line. Have him FedEx us copies of all of Mr. Hughes' novels."

"You got it," Asbury called back.

Detective Turner sympathized with Robyn, but only a little. His wife left him years ago to run off with another man. But he hadn't stolen a car to chase after her.

**Chapter 10**

Illinois - 720 ILCS 5/10-1

Kidnapping

BLOOD WAS EVERYWHERE. "You fucking devil!"

I had the gun in my hand, pointed at him. "Get out of the car."

"You fucking devil!" John shouted again. "You shot me!"

We both looked down to the blood pouring out of his leg.

"I said get out of the car, asshole!" My voice was shaking. My heart beat so hard in my chest it was difficult to breathe.

His bloody hand reached for the car door. "What are you going to do to me?"

"GET OUT!" I waved the gun in front of his face to get his attention. Memories flashed in front of me in another car, with another gun. "Get out," I said more evenly.

The calmer voice made him shiver. He opened the car door and a rush of bitter wind and leaves flew in like a vacuum. His pants were still around his ankles, so he struggled getting out of the door. He crawled on his hands and knees. His hairy, blinding white ass had streaks of blood across it. He looked like a bleeding white whale on the beach.

Once he was clear of the car I climbed into the driver's seat. The car started, but it sounded like the fuel injectors were as clogged as the man's arteries. When I put it in reverse rocks kicked up into John's shocked face. I pressed hard on the accelerator. My adrenaline pumped. My mind was anything but sharp.

A few yards down the road a sign pointed the direction to Chicago. Another old sign, shot at, rusted out, warned me about the fine for littering: $100. The trash I left behind might cost me more.

I put the gun under the seat, but my hand came back bloody. I searched the car and found only thin paper napkins to wipe my hands. I had to do something about this car, before I got pulled over again. The cops would find blood everywhere, a handgun and me driving another man's car. They would suspect the worst and be correct.

The crisp air outside the gas station quickened my mind. I dug through the trashy car and found John's wallet in the glove box. I couldn't risk using Wayne's card again. I filled up the tank with my hands shaking.

I concentrated on the steady rhythm of the dashed white lines in asphalt. My breathing slowed to a tolerable pace fifty miles later. My mind wandered off to that night years ago in April. When I woke up out of a haze my clothes were ripped. Brendan was covered in blood. I screamed so loud my ears rang.

I was sobbing uncontrollably when Nick ripped open the door. "Oh my God," he said.

I looked at him. His eyes were moving back and forth between Brendan and I.

"I don't know what happened," I said.

"I should call an ambulance." His eyes stayed on Brendan.

"No," I said. "Please."

"Shit, is he... is he dead? Did you kill him?"

"I don't know if he's dead. I don't even know where I am."

"Is that... is that Professor _Behan_?"

I slowly nodded. I didn't want to look back at the dead body, but his bloody face had already burned an indelible image in my mind. He wore Brendan's hand-repaired glasses.

"Whoa, is that a gun?" Nick pointed to a pearl handled gun wedged between the center console and my seat. "Is that _your_ gun?"

"I don't own a gun," I said.

"Whose is it then?"

"I don't know."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know... I don't know. Just let me think."

Just let me think.

I thought about that night, as I had many times over the years. Why couldn't I remember the sound of the gun going off? The sound of the gun going off in John's car was so loud my ears were still ringing. The smell too was different. I checked my watch; almost two hours later and the smell of the gunpowder still lingered in the air. Why didn't I smell it that night with Brendan? How long had I been in the car before Nick came along like a white knight? What was he doing out there? He never had a good answer for that question. Then that thought I had over and over again repeated in my mind. I needed to get Kyle back, no matter what.

Springfield was only fifteen miles away and I had to do something about this car. Was John injured, or had I left him for dead? He pulled a gun on me. It was self-defense, or an accident. But it didn't matter. After the last forty-eight hours that's not how the courts would see it. They would never believe my side of the story.

I followed the signs for a motel in Springfield. I parked in a way back spot behind the dumpsters. The gun and a shredded map I found in the mess of takeout wrappers were tucked into my parka.

I headed straight for the bathroom past the restaurant bar to wash my hands. The blood took ages to get out of the creases in my fingers and underneath my nails. I reapplied my makeup, trying not to look so much like the homeless felon on the run that I was.

The restaurant was mostly empty, but a middle-aged woman sat at the bar. I pulled out a barstool a few seats away from her. The woman was wasted. It was still pretty early in the late afternoon for such a bender, but alcoholics and drug addicts didn't obey the circadian rhythms of everyone else. They woke up ready for the first fix, then the next, and the next, until they passed out, whenever that was.

The woman's long black cotton dress fell to the floor. Her sagging boobs were barely contained inside her stained tank top. Her flashy gold Roman sandals showed her fungus-encrusted toenails. She looked like she was ready for a summer day, not the blustery Springfield fall evening going on outside the door. "What are you looking at?" Her voice was cut with bile and straight alcohol. Her front teeth were stained yellow and separated by a half inch.

I ignored her, or tried to. The menu was stuffed full of the usual fare of sandwiches, burgers and salads with little twists to make them different, but the same different of every other chain restaurant.

The bartender, hearing the woman's gruff voice, came over. She was a slender black woman with long manicured fingernails. "Don't let Mary bother you." She had a smile that looked tired and weary, but still maintained the air of a hostess. "What do you want to drink?"

"Water," I said. "And how about a 'God Father' hoagie?"

"You look like you could use something stiffer than water," the waitress winked.

The lure of a drink pulled me in like a tune from the pied piper. The bitter taste permeated my mouth though I hadn't had a sip. I shook my head. If I slowed down the cops would catch up.

"Suit yourself. You want soup, salad or fries with that? We've got tomato bisque."

"Soup sounds good."

Mary started hacking. She coughed so hard that I was tempted to walk over and slap her on the back, but she stopped long enough to take a swig from her drink. "Who sits at a bar and drinks water?"

I started to sweat from the parka, so I pulled out the map from my coat pocket, peeled off the parka and sat back down.

Mary coughed again. "Goin' on a world tour?" She choked on every word.

I looked over at her. "Just trying to find an escaped prisoner."

Mary laughed, a full belly laugh that turned into another coughing fit. She recovered with another swallow from her drink. "Better off lost."

The bartender came back with my meal, "Here you go."

"Thanks," I said.

"This woman is on a quest to find a fugitive," Mary said.

"Is that right?" the bartender said. She refilled Mary's drink.

"It's not exactly a quest," I said. I slurped the heavenly soup into my mouth. The difference between prison food and restaurant food was fresh vegetables. I could taste the tomatoes. In prison, the cheap canned tomatoes tasted like someone put ketchup flavoring on watered down cardboard.

The bartender put her manicured fingernails on her chin. Her bobble necklace fell against the bar with a ding like a Christmas bell. "How did he escape? Did he take hostages?" With each question her eyes got wider.

"Yeah, something like that," I said.

"What are you going to do when you find him?" the bartender asked. Her sculpted eyebrows peaked at the top like two mountains.

I stopped eating. Other than taking Kyle back, I wasn't sure what I had planned to do when I found him. I shrugged. "Bring him back in, I guess."

The bartender gave me a sideways glance. Apparently this wasn't the exciting fugitive plot she was looking for.

With the attention off me I noticed two Latina women and a boy walk into the restaurant. They talked a mile a minute, all in Spanish. I didn't know much Spanish, except for the curse words I learned in prison. These women said all of those words, and a whole lot more as they took a seat in one of the booths.

The bartender wandered over to take their order. She too spoke Spanish.

Mary guzzled down her drink. "Well, I gotta go." She pulled her keys out of her purse and slapped them on the bar.

"You can't drive," I said. The moment I uttered those words, I knew it was a bad idea. _Mind your own business, the last thing you need is to get involved with another fiasco. Didn't the last two days or two years in prison teach you anything at all?_

"You need to learn to mind your own fucking business." Every syllable was emphasized with her pointed, gnarly, yellowed finger.

_Mind your own business_ was a line I knew well, from the guards, my fellow inmates, even from my husband. But a reporter's job is to mind everyone else's business. Bad habits die the hardest.

I went back to eating my hoagie.

The bartender came back to punch in the Latina women's orders.

Their voices turned to a fever pitch. Arms pointed at each other, and to random places outside. Their heads nodded and shook alternately, like they both had a passionate stake.

I bit my lip, trying not to ask the bartender what the two women argued over. I always wanted to learn a foreign language, but couldn't quite commit myself to the project fully. Maybe eavesdropping would be the motivation I needed to keep at the task.

Mary took the last swig of the drink and then staggered getting off the barstool. Her skirt got hung up on the metal footrest. "Ah hell," she slurred. She staggered another step, but didn't go anywhere, like Wile E. Coyote held back by a rubber band. With one more step Mary fell forward onto her face.

"Shit," the bartender said.

The Latina women stopped talking and looked down at Mary.

The bartender picked up the phone. "Javier?... Yeah, you need to take Mary to her room... No, she just tripped getting off the barstool... I can't do it. I'm the only one in the restaurant... Well, get down here as soon as you can."

Minutes went by. I finished off my hoagie. The Latina women went back to arguing. Mary started snoring.

I put my napkin on the plate. "Did you say Mary was going up to her room?"

The bartender rolled her eyes. "Yeah. She likes to make a big show of getting her keys out of her purse so someone will nose into her business."

"And I fell for it."

"Don't worry, lots of people do."

The Latina women's shouting turned to a high-pitched scream.

"Damn it. I'm going to have to kick them out. I really don't want to deal with this _and_ Mary."

One of the Latina women stood up. And then the other stood up with her arms flailing. The two women stared at each other. The little boy in the booth stared up at them crayon in hand.

"Shit," the bartender said.

"What if I took her to her room?" I asked.

"What?" She didn't take her eyes off of the Latina women.

"I could take Mary to her room. One less problem for you to deal with."

The Latina women stared each other down. The boy stared at the women. Mary snorted.

The bartender moved her head, but not her body, to look at me. "Yeah, I guess," she whispered. "Her key card is in her purse. Room 202."

I looked at my purse.

"Hoagie's on me." The bartender went back to looking at the women.

When I picked Mary off the floor the Latina women started punching and scratching at each other.

"Damn it," the bartender said. She reached out from under the bar and pulled out a bat.

Mary was as light as an alcoholic that never ate should have been. Her roman sandals dragged making a trail of lines in the grey blue carpet like train tracks.

The bartender's voice and bat got the attention of the two women. There was a lot of huffing and a little less screaming as I dragged Mary out into the lobby.

There was no one at the front desk at first, but a Latino man poked his head out from a back office just as I reached the elevator.

Twenty minutes later I walked out the door with a new set of keys and a new wallet. I clicked on the key's electronic button. A weak "wee-ooo" echoed the car's reply. The cherry red convertible Porsche was stunning, but dingy. I looked back up at Mary's room in amazement. Where on earth does a woman like that get a car like this?

The car didn't want to start. The steering wheel was covered in dust. On the third try the baby purred to life. The odometer read just seventy-three miles. Probably just enough miles to drive for a day before checking into the hotel. Why would someone do that?

My stomach sunk when I realized I left the parka, and more importantly the gun with my fingerprints and John's blood, in the restaurant. I couldn't risk turning the Porsche off, as it might not start up again, so I left it running and rushed inside.

The argument had simmered, but nostrils were still flared. I grabbed my coat, and checked for the gun.

The bartender called after me, "Hey, thanks for taking care of Mary. She's a drunk, but she's our drunk, you know?"

"Yeah."

"Good luck on your quest."

"Thanks, I'll need it."

I walked back out the door to the waiting chariot. My overnight sprint to Western Kansas would at least be in style. The challenge would be keeping the speed down to just seventy-five, but at least these western states knew how to set a speed limit.

I needn't have worried. The traffic outside of Kansas City and confusing threads of overpasses were enough to keep my speed in check. I lay on the horn when one little car tried to wedge himself in front of me.

The horn had a full sound, not like one of those pip-squeak little cars. They thought of everything in these luxury vehicles.

Once I was past the turbulence of exits and stop and go traffic, I thought about Nick burying Brendan. The digging that night took so long that moonlight turned into gray sunlight. I worried about being seen, but we were in central nowhere. How long until vultures started circling?

Brendan had to have drugged me with a date rape drug. I never understood why he did that, but Brendan loved to play outside the typical lines of sexual activity, just like Nick. Nick was the one that came up with the plan, not me—that I remembered. But Nick said my memory was like Swiss cheese. He gave me plenty of reasons to doubt my version of reality.

The traffic moved right along and my mind wasn't done churning through my memories of that night.

"Why can't I remember...?" I whispered to myself.

"What are you talking about lady?" A little voice called from the back seat.

I screamed. I tried to look back, but the car swerved. A horn honked from behind me. I yanked on the wheel a little too hard, over-correcting and swerving into the other lane dangerously close to the semi passing me going at least eighty.

**Chapter 11**

Kansas - Section 8-1602

Fleeing the Scene of an Accident

I PUSHED ON the brakes. "Shit, shit, shit."

The little voice from the back seat echoed, "Shit, shit, shit."

I tried to look back again, this time with the car going only sixty-five. Anyone that saw me swerve out of control was likely giving me an extra wide berth. I found a spot on the road to pull over.

My heart pumped fast. My breath was rapid. Beads of sweat formed on my forehead. Darkness enveloped the car. I groped around in the dark for an overhead light, but remembered that convertibles don't have overhead lights. The car lit up like a disco every time a car drove by, but plunged into darkness just as quickly.

I finally found a light switch on the dash. Through the shadows I saw the boy from the restaurant. "Shit."

"Shit," he repeated.

"How did you get in here?"

He replied with the jingle for Toys "R" Us.

I looked at him, confused. "Do you know any English?"

"Yes."

The car was quiet, until he started singing the words to "Toys 'R' Us" again.

"How did you get in here?" I asked again.

"Door was open," he said with a shrug.

I turned back to the wheel. I couldn't go back, could I? No, definitely not. I left Mary on the bed, stole her car, and took her wallet. But what was I going to do with this kid?

"Where are you from?" I asked.

"Mexico," he said.

"Why were you in Illinois?"

"What's Illinois?"

I groaned. He didn't know where he was. "Was that your mom back there? At the restaurant?"

"No."

"Who were they?"

"My aunts."

I faced the wheel and sat in silence. If something like this happened to a normal person you'd go straight to the police, but I was a felon on the lam, not a normal person. I couldn't just leave him on the side of the road. And I couldn't leave him with the authorities. They would ask questions. Questions I wasn't prepared to answer. Minutes went by. The traffic was relentless.

"Put your seatbelt on."

"Okay lady." The boy said.

"My name is—" I thought for a second. If I did manage to drop him off, I didn't want him to tell the police my real name. "Mary." Perhaps I could get away with using Mary's drivers license, say something about a diet I was on to make me look decades younger.

His seat belt clicked, and I put the car in gear. "What's your name?"

"Antonio Castillo," he said rather quickly.

"Antonio?"

"Mama calls me Tony."

Over the next half hour my head felt like a rock quarry. I wished the time had been spent in silence, I needed time to think up a plan, but Tony, unlike any kid I'd ever met in this day and age, entertained himself, usually by singing jingles from commercials. Most of them I'd never heard before. Like the one for an anti-bullying campaign that ended with: "Know what's up! Speak up!" Or the yogurt commercial: "Lick the lid on a whole new day."

The stations on the radio didn't last longer than a few songs, cutting in and out. And even then, Tony seemed to know each of the commercials by heart and sang them even louder.

With the radio off he cycled back through the old jingles, starting with the Toys "R" Us theme song. I even sang along a few times.

He stopped singing in the middle of a tune about Lunchables. "Mary, I'm hungry."

Of course he was hungry, he left before the food was served in the restaurant hours ago. The next exit advertised an International House of Pancakes, one of my favorites from when I was his age. "How about pancakes?"

He sung the song for Mrs. Butterworth's. I took that as a 'yes.'

The parking lot was empty, but I chose a spot away from the road as a precaution. I still wasn't sure what I would do with this kid. Maybe I could leave him at IHOP? What were his chances of being picked up by predators versus good guys? Given my current track record I figured his chances were better with a stranger from IHOP than to continue on with me.

I got my first real look at the kid when I led him out of the Porsche. He looked like any normal Latino kid, dark hair, dark eyes and a dark complexion. His dark hair hadn't been cut in ages and stuck out in every direction.

He wasn't dressed for the weather. His t-shirt was thin. His big toe wiggled through the hole in the top of his worn out tennis shoes.

"Where's your coat?" I asked.

He shrugged.

The hostess, a teenager with too many piercings, gave me a strange look while seating us. What did she know? Maybe the kid was in the news?

The waitress, Debbie, greeted us a short while later. She blathered on about the specials, while I took note of her oddities. Her skin was leathery; her hair was frizzy and frosted. A burn ran across her neck at an odd angle. The woman was too old to make such a mistake herself with a curling iron so she probably had a daughter, or even a granddaughter, in beauty school.

Debbie didn't leave after going through her pancake testimonial. She stood there, expectantly, and I couldn't think what she may have asked.

"What?" I asked.

"I said is he adopted?" Her tone was sweet, but I knew it was that back-stabbing sweet voice women used on the phone when they gossiped: 'Then she walked right into the restaurant with this little Mexican kid and ordered pancakes. Never seen anything like it in all my life.'

"I don't think that's any of your business." I was a little louder, a little shakier, than I wanted to be.

Debbie stuck her nose in the air and went back to the kitchen.

When I looked around the dining room, everyone stared back at me.

Tony fiddled with the syrups, pouring the strawberry syrup directly into his mouth. I guessed his age was six or seven, but thought to ask, "How old are you Tony?"

He smiled at me. His teeth pointed in random directions, but strangely none were missing. "Nine."

I was shocked. He just didn't look that old. "You're going to need braces."

He nodded. "Papa says when the deal goes through he'll buy me braces. Just like on 1-800-GOT-BRACES."

"What deal?" I asked, but the moment I asked I knew I didn't want to know. _Mind your own fucking business._

"Chiva," he said while fiddling with the silverware. "That's Spanish for goat."

I knew the term from prison. Chiva was low quality Mexican Heroine. The kid's father was a drug dealer. I had to figure out what to do with this kid, very soon. The panic rose in my mind. Across the room was a woman in a teddy bear printed uniform and white shoes and the idea struck me like lightening. I could drop him off at the hospital.

When the waitress came back Tony sang a song about cereal. "He knows all the jingles, huh?" She set down the hot chocolate with a mountain of whipped cream in front of Tony.

"Yes," I said.

Tony looked up at me with a little whipped cream mustache.

He ordered the kid's pancake meal, complete with chocolate chips, more whipped cream, chocolate syrup and banana slices. I ordered the "Healthy Harvest" pancake meal. I figured I'd get a jump on tomorrow's breakfast. If nothing else, I'd have it packed up and eat it on the road.

Tony kicked back into jingle mode and the waitress shook her head. "Kids these days get too much television, if you ask me."

How could I defend my parenting when I wasn't even the kid's parent? What would I be like as a parent? Would Kyle be singing commercial jingles in seven or eight years? Or would he be an outdoor kid? Would he be a bookworm? Would he be addicted to video games? The guilt stuck in my throat.

The waitress had to know from the moment she uttered the crack about him being adopted that she kissed her tip goodbye, so she chose to stir up trouble for fun.

I wanted to kick my plan to drop Tony off at the hospital into action. I worked through the details. I'd drop him off at the nearest hospital's reception desk. Tell them some lie about him being sick. Fill out the paperwork with false information. At that point he'd be in the system. I could leave him in the waiting room. He had a better chance there than leaving him in the IHOP, and definitely better than being with me.

Tony devoured the pancakes like he hadn't eaten in days. Maybe he hadn't. He looked over at my plate when he was done, "You gonna eat that?"

I pushed the plate his way, "Help yourself."

I recognized this behavior from my own youth. You eat when you can, everything you can. After my father disappeared when I was twelve my junky mother would go days without feeding us. We fended for ourselves. Sometimes we ate the bits of stale crumbs that would fall out of the toaster for breakfast. I was so hungry once I ate dandelions. Their bitter taste was okay, but the scratchy leaves made my throat hurt. I later learned that women in Greece survived on dandelion greens and other foraged weeds during times of war. When we did get a meal we devoured everything, even the nasty Brussels sprouts and beet greens our uncle made from his garden. Justice said to imagine they were desserts. We made a contest out of describing the most fantastical desserts. I didn't care for desserts after that.

I paid the bill with Mary's credit card.

The waitress came back a short while later waving the card. "Sorry, it's been declined." Her eyes looked full of pity. I chalked it up to another thing for this waitress to gossip about to her beauty school relative.

"Oh." I pulled out John's wallet, containing the last of my foraged cash. After paying the bill there would only be that hundred-dollar bill left for food and gas.

"Do you need change?" the waitress asked.

I snarled, "Yes." But I didn't wait for the $1.87. I looked at Tony, "Let's go."

"Where are we going?" he asked. It was the first time he seemed interested in talking at all, but then his stomach was full of food, so he had one of the three necessities for life taken care of.

"To the hospital," I said.

The air seemed denser outside. The humidity was higher.

Tony shivered, "I'm cold."

"You should have brought your coat." I took off my coat and wrapped it around his shoulders.

A cop car went by, its lights and sirens wailing. I ducked behind a truck.

"Hot on our tail," Tony said, like a cartoon television narrator.

"Just get in the car," I said. Snow started to fall, but it melted when it hit the sidewalk.

I got back on the highway, waiting for a big blue reflective 'H' sign to guide my way. I'd seen a dozen of them so far. The snow started sticking five minutes later, then the flakes got bigger until they looked like cotton balls falling out of the sky. The sign I'd been waiting for appeared a moment later.

The handling on the Porsche failed in the slick snow. I barely made the turn when the Porsche's tail end waved back and forth in the same rhythm as the windshield wipers.

"Whoa," Tony said from the back seat. He giggled like we were on a roller coaster ride.

We shuffled into the emergency room just after midnight. I felt so fatigued each step was more difficult than the last. I put my arm on the information desk to lean into. "Hello?" My jaw hurt from clenching it tight in the car. The woman at the counter didn't look up.

"What's your complaint?" Her voice was tired with an edge of coffee and nicotine. She filled out paperwork, looking back and forth between the paper and computer screen.

"It's my son. He's been throwing up."

"How much?"

"How much was he throwing up?" I asked.

The woman looked at me with glassy eyes her voice was monotone. "For how long and how many times?"

"Oh, um... maybe three times in the last fifteen minutes." I panicked, maybe I should have said four times in the last hour? Maybe I should have said eight times in the last three hours? What constitutes an emergency?

The woman poked her head up, stared at the child standing in my big coat. Tony smiled at her with his gnarly teeth. "That's your son?"

"Yes," I said squeezing his shoulders. This lie only needed to work for a short while.

The woman's eyebrows narrowed. "He looks okay now."

"Well, he's not. He needs to see a doctor."

She rolled her eyes and handed me a clipboard. "Do you have insurance?"

"No," I said.

"You'll have to meet with our payment specialist before he sees a doctor if he isn't ambulatory."

"Fine."

"Take this number. Have a seat over there." The woman pointed to a seating area with orange plastic chairs.

"Come on Tony."

When we were seated, I started to fill out the form. "Do you know your address?"

"No."

The real information might have helped the authorities find his parents. I started filling in the form with random information. Zip codes from an apartment in college, a town from a state I lived in when I was ten. I used my father's name, Henry, as the street.

"What's your last name again, Tony?"

"Castillo. C-A-S-T-I-L-L-O."

"Thanks."

There was a junky in the corner, staring at me. His hands shook. His face was shrunken in. His thin face had open sores where he had been picking. The television above the junky caught my eye. There was a picture of John, but his fat face was purple on one side. The other side had a large strip of gauze. The crusty rolls from his neck jiggled when he talked. He lay in a hospital bed. The television was silent, but scrolling across the bottom were the headlines: "Cleveland man says 'the devil' shot him and left him for dead." His jaw was clenched tight when he wasn't talking. I wondered what he was saying, and how he managed to get the bruises and cuts. He reached his hand up to wipe the tears away.

Immediately following that story the headline read: 'Breaking news: Illinois millionaire robbed.' A picture of the bartender with the manicure flashed on the screen.

"Shit." I whispered under my breath.

But it was loud enough for Tony to hear so he repeated, "Shit."

A woman on the other side of Tony looked toward us. I made sure not to catch the woman's eye, but a few seconds later the woman started screaming.

"Oh my God. Oh my God." She screamed over and over. Her voice was louder with each 'Oh my God' until it reached a crescendo of shrill where the syllables were no longer distinguishable.

She pointed at Tony.

Two people in scrubs rushed over to help the screaming woman. A few other people started pointing at Tony. I looked down at him and figured out what they were screaming about. He was holding the gun. The one I shot John with. The gun was caked with his blood.

"Fuck! Tony, give that to me."

"Sure, Mary." He handed me the gun.

I tucked it into my pants. "We gotta get out of here," I said. "Now." I grabbed his hand.

When the guards ran over to help the orderlies with the hysterical women, I took the opportunity to slide out the door. I led Tony out into the snowy Kansas winter. A man called out from behind me, "Hey, lady." My heart was racing. I got into the car, slammed the door shut. I didn't wait for Tony to get his seatbelt on. I put the car in reverse, but the slick snow pushed the car too far. I came within inches of backing into a parked car.

One of the guards was standing in the road with my purse. I was practically hyperventilating. He made a motion for me to roll down my window.

"Hey, you forgot your purse."

"Oh," I said as calmly as I could muster. I held my breath and stuck out my shaking hand to grab the purse. "Thank you."

"Take it easy out on these roads, okay?"

"Sure, thanks." I let out the breath when the window was rolled up. I felt lightheaded and overwhelmed with exhaustion.

When we got out onto the highway I realized I should have left Tony in the hospital. But I couldn't leave him alone there, with that junky, and those people. They didn't know him. They would have put him in jail for brandishing a weapon. He would live his life with a felony conviction tacked to his name, and it would be my fault.

The roads were treacherous. My goal was just to make it out of the snowstorm. Since storms usually travel east, a steady drive west, even at the moderate pace of forty miles an hour, would take me past the storm and into better weather, at least that's what I hoped.

Tony started singing again.

All I could think about was sleep. My eyes stung. Every blink of my eyes felt like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. I really needed to figure out how to get rid of Tony, but maybe we could find a motel just for one night. How long had it been since I slept?

"Lick the lid on a whole new day," he shouted.

"Shut up!"

"Sorry," he said in a little boy whimper.

I turned my head to apologize, but in a moment my world was turned upside down.

**Chapter 12**

Detective Joseph Turner

TURNER LET OUT a long exhale after reading yet another twisted story by Nick Hughes. He was still waiting for the novels to show up as the agent had promised hours before, but not looking forward to it as the short stories were terrifying enough. He knew the difference between fiction and non-fiction, but the details Nick put into his writing felt so real, it made Turner's skin crawl. The story about the boy and his adopted mother falling down the stairs was especially chilling since the boy used a hammer to bash his mother's head in after she was still breathing at the end of her tumultuous journey. The cops in the stories were flat, however. Their dialog didn't ring true. The detective in the story comforted the boy with the line: "Don't worry, we're going to find who did this to your mom." Cops knew better than to promise anything to a victim. Nothing works out the way you plan it. Although it is rarely a solace to the family, it's better to tell them that you are doing everything you can to find their loved one or their loved one's killer than to promise justice.

Officer Delaney, the talking mustache, walked over to Turner with a FedEx envelope in his hand, "You got a package."

Turner ripped open the thin cardboard envelope and pulled out two paperbacks. "Are you up on the Hughes case, Delaney?" Turner asked.

He nodded, "I've read the reports."

Turner skimmed through the blurbs on the back of the books. "This one is about a man murdering his wife and claiming self-defense. This one is about a college kid who kills her professor and buries the body."

Turner looked back up at Delaney, "I'll read one while you read the other? Which one do you want first?"

"Self-defense, I guess," Delaney said with a shrug. Turner handed him the thin novel, _Secrets_ , with a blurry picture of a woman's hand gripped around a pearl handled pistol.

The cover of Turner's novel, _Lies_ , had just a woman's hand gripped around a shovel. Her nails were polished red and shiny perfect, except for one that was broken. Ripped along the bottom was a quote from some New York Times bestselling author Turner had never heard of, "Gripping, fast-paced physiological thriller will keep you up at night!" The last thing Turner needed was to be kept up at night.

A trill of the computer's email program broke Turner's concentration. After skimming through the text he made a quick search of the Kansas State Troopers website and then dialed the number he found.

"Hello?" The voice on the line was stressed, rushed. A radio squealed in the background. There was shouting.

"Hello, is this Officer Knutson?" Detective Turner asked.

"Speaking."

"This is Detective Joe Turner from the Connecticut State Police. I'm calling about a license plate you ran about fifteen minutes ago?"

"I didn't run a Connecticut license... At least I don't think I did." Papers shuffled.

"No, it was an Illinois license plate 'Lima-Beta-Charlie-Lima-Seven-Zero-Two'?"

"Oh, yeah..." Officer Knutson hit a few keys on the computer.

"I'm looking for the woman that stole that car, she skipped parole here in Connecticut."

"Oh? I don't have all the details of the accident. The firemen at the scene just radioed me the license plates. I've got... hold on..." More papers shuffled. "I've got fourteen cars and seven big rigs involved so far. We closed the highway about an hour ago."

"I'm going to send you a picture of the woman we're looking for."

"You're that hot to pick up a woman that skipped parole?"

"I've been tracking her across country. Her name is 'Robyn Hughes' but she's used a few other names."

"Robyn Hughes, like the actor? Levi and Peachy?" Turner braced for the catchphrase he was already tired of. "Dude. Let's create a better world."

"Yeah. She broke into a house here in Connecticut, assaulted a man, stole an Escalade and drove it to Cleveland. Her prints were found in a car in Springfield, the owner was shot and left for dead near Chicago. The car was left outside a hotel where a millionaire lottery winner was robbed."

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I saw that on CNN. Didn't they say her brand new Porsche was missing?"

"We think she stole the Porsche from the millionaire, so we had the license flagged."

"I hope that Porsche isn't the same one we found. If so, it's gonna be totaled." Officer Knutson whistled. "Damn. She's a one-woman Bonnie and Clyde, huh?"

"Yes. We need to find her before she makes it to San Francisco."

"What's in San Francisco?"

"Her husband and son."

"What is she planning to do to them?"

"We don't know, but he's under watch. He wouldn't go into a safe house, but she won't be able to get near him."

"I hate to say it, but I don't think we'll be able to hunt her down for you. Every man in the county, and a few from outside the county, was called in for this accident and we're still severely understaffed. It takes us days to crawl out from under these freeway accidents. We have one death confirmed, but we are still peeling people out of the wreckage."

"All right, if you could just distribute her picture to the guys at the scene?"

"I can do that," Knutson said. "But I can't guarantee anything."

"Thanks..." Turner said. "And Knutson? I would consider her armed, and very dangerous."

"Thanks for the heads up, Detective Turner."

He passed on his contact information and hung up. He stared at the map of the United States he had ripped out of an old atlas. Until that email hit on the license plate, he'd worried the trail had gone cold. It might be days before the Kansas State Police could run fingerprints in the Porsche. Maybe she hadn't even stolen the Porsche? Maybe she just gave the keys to someone else to throw them off the trail?

But then another email came in. The credit card for the millionaire was used in an IHOP just fifty miles away from the accident. Then another ten miles farther down the highway from the IHOP was a report with a woman and a boy in the hospital brandishing a gun. If that was Robyn, who was the boy?

Turner walked into his Lieutenant's office. "I got a hit on that license plate from Illinois. Some place near Oakley, Kansas."

He put his hand to his temple. "Do they have Mrs. Hughes in custody?"

"They haven't seen Mrs. Hughes, but they'll be on the lookout. Officer Knutson said the car is totaled, so we'll have to be on the alert for any vehicles stolen within a twenty-mile vicinity."

The Lieutenant didn't look up or say anything.

"She has to be on her way to San Francisco, right? We'll be ready for her there, if nothing else."

"I'd rather it didn't come to that, Turner."

**Chapter 13**

Kansas - Section 21-3718

Arson

I PLUNDERED THE small house for gauze. The power was out. The house was cold. My fingers were stiff and numb. Tony's feet were freezing, but his bleeding arm was my first concern. Our thirty-minute hike through the wet snow had been almost as bad as finding myself upside down in oncoming traffic on the highway. I had extracted him from the car just seconds before another car smashed into the Porsche. The sound of the glass shattering and metal impacting with metal still reverberated through my ears. I had wanted to help those people, but I hadn't wanted to get run over in the process. At least that's what I told myself.

My arms ached from carrying Tony. By the time I had broken through the back window of this house my back was ready to give out too.

I found a first aid kit in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom that was so small I wondered if it was an afterthought when the house was built. I turned on the faucet, but nothing came out except a gurgling sound. I knew from my summers in Maine that out in the country they use well water. A well required a pump and there was no power for the pump.

I used the freezing cold antiseptic wipes to clean off Tony's wounds.

He was crying, whimpering really, in order to save his energy. Little bits of snot were plastered to his face. He cringed when I wiped his face with the icy antiseptic. Once all the gauze was applied to his arm, albeit sloppily, I started hunting for a way to warm the house. He wouldn't bleed to death, but we might both freeze to death.

I took an inventory of flammable items. There were piles of mail on the kitchen table, well read trashy novels with bold titles on a bookshelf in the den, newspapers in a cardboard box, kindling and stacks of wood in a basket by the wood stove. Once the small pile of wood was burned the books would make a good substitute. From there I would break up the bookshelf itself. I wasn't going to haul wood from the shed. I worked quickly to start the fire in the wood stove, following all the steps my father had taught me. I couldn't remember everything, but I remembered his emphasis on building the kindling teepee.

The side of the matchbox was dull. It took three or four swipes across the beat-up box to get the match going, and even then I broke a few of the matches before they lit. The newspaper burned up too quickly. A fast flame, but it failed to ignite the log, or even the kindling. Soon there was smoke coming out of the stove. I worried about asphyxiation. I balled up more newspaper and flicked the cheap matches against the old strike box four more times until there was a hiss and a flame on the end of the little wooden stick. The newspapers lit up again, and this time the kindling caught on fire. I stood there, hoping the log too would catch.

Tony stopped whimpering when even the smallest flame started in the stove. Every boy has a pyro inside ready to burn his way out. As boys grow into men the only difference is how many mental extinguishers they use to keep their inner pyro at bay.

Once the fire was going I ran around the house looking for clothes to change into. Justin took survival training in the army and I interviewed him for a story in college. Warm, dry clothes were essential. I found a big flannel shirt for Tony and a pair of flannel pajamas for myself. There was an entire drawer full of hand knit wool socks. I grabbed a pair for each of us.

The quilt I held up provided Tony a little privacy while he changed into the flannel shirt and wool socks. His pants clunked to the floor like he was carrying rocks. "What have you got in there?" I asked, breaking the silence of the crackling wood stove.

"Nothing," he said. But I knew about boys his age. They were terrible liars.

The room wasn't warm yet, but Tony fell asleep in the warmth his own body created lying on the sofa under a pile of quilts. Once I heard his light snores I pulled his pants over to inspect from my perch on the love seat. His pockets were full of cell phones. The little thief had even stolen the phone I stole from the snotty woman in Connecticut. Only one had power.

I considered calling someone for help, but who? What would I say? I needed to sleep. Tomorrow I could find a place to drop Tony off. I would be better prepared with the lies required to drop him off at a police station without getting caught myself. I was stumped even trying to figure out a good lie if the homeowners came back. Sleep would sharpen my mind, it always had.

I had to get rid of Tony first thing in the morning. I couldn't keep taking him along, for his own sake, as much as my own.

The flames licked the glass front stove. There was a quiet roar and crackle from the log being consumed. In prison every cough, every snore, every bang echoed. My fitful sleep was often interrupted. For two years I'd craved the white noise just like the fire roaring before me now. I fell asleep on the overstuffed love seat with the comforter I found in the lacy bedroom.

I woke up later when the power came on. There were beeps and whirring noises from electronics waking up. I didn't know how long it had been, but it was still dark outside and the room was warm. I put another log on the fire, just two more and I'd need to start burning books. I didn't see any of Nick's books. I would have liked to start with his, but he wasn't as well known as the authors on this shelf.

The light in the kitchen fluttered a few times before coming to life when I flicked the switch. I found a pitcher and teakettle to fill with water. The sound of the air moving through the pipes was frightening. I worried about waking Tony up, but once the air was gone, water came out of the taps smoothly.

I opened a few cabinets looking for tea, finding instead an endless supply of coffee and ramen noodles.

As I waited for the water to heat up, I found a light switch next to the door in the kitchen. Outside the light just over the kitchen window illuminated the large flakes of snow that piled on top of the foot of snow already accumulated when we walked into the house. My rubber boot tracks from the upside down Porsche to this house would be long gone by now.

I made two bowls of ramen noodles, in case Tony woke up and the power went out again. After the makeshift meal of coffee and ramen noodles I went back to sleep on the love seat.

A knock at the door woke me up. Tony looked at me with sleepy, scared eyes. I sprinted across the room through the dawn light to look through the peephole. Just as I put my eye to see two men in parkas, the man in front pounded again. I stifled a scream. He said something threatening in Spanish I didn't understand.

"Tony," I hissed. "Get over here."

He cried out when his tender feet hit the cold hardwood floor. "It's cold," he said a little too loudly. "I'm scared."

"Me too."

One of the men beat on the door again and threatened something in Spanish.

I whispered, "What are they saying?"

Tony made a face. "He says he knows we're in here. He says open the door. He says they know..."

"They know what?"

His eyes were wide. He smiled and called back to the men in Spanish.

"What did you just say?"

"I told them, it's me! They're looking for me."

"Fuck." I said. "Shit. Shit. Shit." My mind kicked into fifth gear. "Okay, don't let them in yet." I ran to the back of the house to grab my rubber boots, coat and purse. I pulled on a knit hat from a box near the back door.

"Where are you going?" Tony whined.

"You'll be better off with them," I whispered. "Just give me the count of one-hundred before you open the door, okay?"

He nodded his head. "Okay, Mary."

When I turned I knew it would be the last I saw of him. My boots clomped along the hardwood floor on my way to the back door. I looked out to the snow, but didn't see anything. I heard Tony counting, in Spanish. The men pounded on the door. I turned the knob, slow enough to keep from making too much noise, but fast enough I wouldn't run out of the one hundred seconds before I got out the door. But the door was too stubborn to be quiet, so I pulled on it with all the strength I could put to the task. It gave way with a loud crack.

The crisp air hit my lungs first, and then the sun bouncing off pure white everything blinded me. I raced from the house. The rubber boots broke through the crust, but soon clumps of snow slid into my boots turning to an icy slush. The air was visible coming out of my mouth. The trees were thick. I wondered how long I could stumble through the woods without heading toward the road. When the wind picked up the snow felt and sounded like sand. The particles of snow stung on my face and my eyes. I heard a noise echo through the woods. I stopped. My first thought was an animal, but I knew the reality was much worse.

A branch snapped behind me. I turned to see a man. I didn't waste time on screaming. My pace doubled, but the flannel pajamas snagged on a branch. I pulled away, not daring to look back at the man. I could hear his heavy breath with each footstep, not a man used to hiking in the woods. In this I had the clear advantage. There was a clearing just beyond the bramble of bushes. The tops of trees were far off in the distance. But once I got past the brambles I slipped. I started to fall backward, but I overcorrected and fell forward in the snow. When I tried to get up he reached out to grab me. A gloved hand covered my mouth. He pressed his body against mine, and then reached into my coat to take the gun.

We walked through the woods with his hand over my mouth. He whispered in my ear, but I didn't understand, at least nothing but the word 'chiva.' That word was repeated each time with a fury not usually reserved for 'goat' in any language. For the first time I realized that Tony actually created more trouble for me than I had for him. They thought I had the drugs.

When we got back to the house the man threw me to the floor in front of the fire. It was the first time I got a good look at him, and the mole occupying the better part of his face. He held out my gun, or more technically, the one I'd stolen, and handed it to the other man.

The two men stood in the living room. One of them was staring at me in silence, and the other one was shouting in Spanish.

"I don't have your drugs," I said. "No chiva," I repeated again and again shaking my head violently.

Tony was talking to the man staring at me. The man had a barbed wire tattoo on his neck and a scowl on his face. I stopped talking first, and then so did the man shouting, but Tony kept on. He was talking so fast I might not have understood anything even if he had been speaking in English.

When Tony finally stopped they all stared at me in silence. The phone rang.

The man with the barbed wire tattoo said: "You live here?"

I shook my head.

"Who are you?" he asked.

The phone rang again.

I pursed my lips. "My name is Rachel. I'm looking for a man. I'm just trying to get to Seattle. Tony jumped into my car." It wasn't my car, but my name wasn't Rachel either, and I wasn't on my way to Seattle. They all seemed to be translating the English into something that made some kind of sense. Even Tony was confused; in the heat of the moment I'd forgotten he thought my name was Mary.

The phone continued to ring. On the fifth ring the answering machine picked up. A generic message told people there was no one home—witnesses in the living room not withstanding. "Hey Wally...I know you're there I see your smoke stack...Pick up.... Ah shit maybe you're out back grabbing wood..." The room was eerily silent when the man stopped talking, as if he might hear us through the one-way answering machine. "...Anyway, Deloris wants to come over and grab some coffee from your stash. She says she'll bring a hot dish in exchange...Sorry it's just tuna casserole...She'll probably be back over before you notice this message anyway." There was a click and a beep.

I looked into the barbed wire tattoo man's eyes, but he didn't hold my stare for too long. He spoke to the other man. Within seconds they pulled me to my feet and escorted me out the door and into a back seat of a black SUV.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

As if it was his reply, the barbed wire tattoo man held a gun up to my face. The second time this happened in as many days.

Smoke poured from the kitchen window before the other man—his arms had tattoo flames licking his wrists I hadn't noticed until then—jumped into the back seat with me. I hoped Wally had good insurance, or that Deloris would get there in time to call the fire department.

I faced the fact that everything I touched turned to shit.
**Chapter 14**

Detective Joe Turner

DETECTIVE TURNER SET down the novel. He'd skimmed through the first half of the book. Nothing stuck out at him that was relevant, but in the absence of tracking down any more updates on Robyn he'd continued reading. He hoped the long descriptions contained some nugget of information that was relevant to the case. But so far most of it was about the obsession that the protagonist, Jerry, had with the female character, Raven. Jerry was high the first time he laid eyes on her, but the 'lingering remnants of her beauty' never faded from his mind, at least not for about thirty pages. Raven, being of sound mind in Turner's eyes, wouldn't have anything to do with Jerry. She ignored him when he showed up at her work at the coffee shop 'slash' bookstore on campus. She refused to go out with him on a date when he asked. Turner was uncomfortable reading the scene where Jerry watched Raven having sex at her boyfriend's house while the boyfriend's wife was away. A few weeks later, Jerry was still obsessing and Raven didn't notice Jerry when he was standing behind her at the pharmacy. She gave the clerk her phone number to activate her savings card. Jerry then called her every day from random payphones throughout the campus just to hear her voice. He couldn't 'manually stimulate' himself unless he'd talked to her that day. Long paragraphs were dedicated to talking about his 'junk.' Turner fast-read through those pages.

If Jerry was a real person, and if Raven had reported him, the police would tag the guy as a classic stalker. But in the novel, Raven had been blissfully unaware of Jerry. Even though it was fiction, Turner couldn't help wondering if any of this was based on anything real in Nick and Robyn's life.

Why they got married, conceived a child, and then Nick moved across country didn't add up in Turner's mind. In order to dive deeper into the nature of their relationship, Turner had called several of Robyn's friends, including two of them from New Haven. Not one friend had even talked to Robyn from before she was incarcerated. The one time Turner mentioned something about her pregnancy and child, a fellow reporter at WFSB, Sara Mackey, was so shocked he had to clarify whom they were talking about. No one knew who Robyn really was, but Sara was stunned to hear that Robyn was a mother.

One person he put off calling was Wayne Kendall, Robyn's former producer at WFSB. Based on one of the uniform officer's reports Wayne admitted to harboring Robyn Saturday morning, but he didn't know she was a fugitive at the time. Wayne didn't come in for a statement either. Turner wanted to know how Robyn managed to get to Cleveland without using the credit cards she stole from the woman in City Steam, unless she stole gas or a credit card from someone else. But Wayne never reported anything stolen.

There was no time like the present to interview Wayne, since despite the good weather for fall Turner wouldn't be golfing.

Wayne's classic West End home had white round wooden pillars in front with an empty, dusty porch. Houses in the West End were built around the turn of the 20th century in the shadow of Mark Twain's immense brick home. Even with all that history, the West End homes sold for almost half of their similar neighbors just one or two blocks further in the town of West Hartford.

After Turner rang the doorbell, Wayne, mid-thirties with curly black hair, was standing in front of him.

"Wayne Kendall?" Turner asked.

"Yes?" His eyebrows furrowed and released.

"I'm Detective Turner from the Connecticut State Police. I'm wondering if I could ask you about Robyn Hughes?"

Wayne swallowed as if a piece of gum was stuck in his throat. "I don't have time right now." He took a step back. The door started to close.

"It'll only take a few minutes of your time," Turner said. "I think she's in over her head, and the sooner I can track her down the easier it will be for all of us to protect her."

Wayne seemed to think this over. His eyes narrowed, but when Turner didn't say anything more, Wayne said, "Yeah, okay." He let out a deep breath and opened the door to let Turner in.

Turner walked over to the leather couch. "Mind if I sit down?"

"Sure," Wayne said. "Do you want coffee or something?"

"I'm fine. Thank you."

Wayne took a seat on the only other chair in the room, a director's chair with his name on the back. The room was void of most furniture and any personal touches you might see in a married man's house. Light rectangles with little holes near the top showed the scars of missing artwork. Like Mrs. Turner, Mrs. Kendall got everything in the divorce, or almost everything.

Turner leaned back. "Nice couch."

"My wife didn't want it, but she took everything else."

Turner tapped his thumb on his slacks. "Tell me about Robyn."

"What do you want to know?" Wayne ran his fingers through his hair. He looked over at the empty wall.

"Why did you give her your credit card?"

Wayne looked at Turner without turning his head. "I didn't."

"So she stole it?"

Wayne opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

"I think you gave it to her," Turner said. "And you didn't report it stolen so she could use it as a backup when she got into trouble."

After a few seconds Wayne nodded.

"So tell me about the nature of your relationship."

Wayne ran his hand through his hair. He took a deep breath before saying: "We were lovers."

"Were?" Turner picked up on the past tense.

"Are, I guess, but she didn't want anything to do with me while she was here." His shoulders slumped. "She just wanted to find Nick." He practically spat out Nick's name.

"Why did she come here to look for him?"

Wayne took another deep breath and then let out slowly before saying anything. "She thought maybe I could help find him."

"Find him how?"

"How?"

"Yeah," Turner said. "Did you guys drive around the neighborhood? Did you make some phone calls?"

"By... by sending him an email."

"So you sent him an email and he told you he was in San Francisco?"

"Something like that, yes."

"You didn't know why she wanted to find Nick?" Turner asked.

"No, it didn't make any sense to me at all."

"Why is that?"

"She never liked Nick, much less love him. I always asked her why she didn't just get a divorce. I told her I would leave Lisa if she wanted me to, but she said no."

"She didn't like him?"

"No, but she didn't really talk about him much either. When she did it was always something wretched he'd done."

"Wretched how?"

"He never physically abused her, if that's what you mean," Wayne said. "I never saw any scars. But she..." he hesitated, "...let's just say she had plenty of emotional scars. She never got over her father leaving her."

Turner thought about this. Plenty of criminals never recovered from an early emotional loss. But according to her twin brother, Justin Young, a.k.a Justice Young, their father leaving was not so traumatic. He thought about the novel he was reading. "Did she read any of Nick's writing?"

Wayne furrowed his eyebrows. "No. She specifically said she stopped reading his writing when they got into a big fight back when she was in college. She said something that made him mad, and she told me what she'd read was too brutal."

Turner nodded, thinking about the little boy getting away with murdering his foster mother. The innocent neighbor was found guilty of the crime.

There was just that one more detail Turner had left to ask about. "Did you two talk about Kyle while she was here?"

Wayne looked entirely mystified. "Kyle? Who's Kyle?" Robyn had kept that secret very well.

"Did you visit or communicate with her while she was in prison?"

"No." Wayne pursed his lips. His eyebrows knit together. "Who's Kyle?"

Turner took a deep breath. "You know, on second thought," he said. "I think I will take that coffee."

Wayne came clean after Turner told him about Kyle. Wayne cried, or rather blubbered, and then he told Turner everything he wanted to know. First, he told Turner how he found Nick by using a 'phishing' program to lure Nick into clicking on an email link that then reported Nick's IP address and approximate location. Then, he talked about how Robyn hated even talking about Nick, and never talked about their relationship. Wayne could never figure out why she stayed with Nick. That was a common theme amongst all of Robyn's 'friends.' Turner could hardly call any of them friends since none of them knew about Kyle. Wouldn't you share the birth of your child with your closest friends?

Wayne was sure that Kyle was his son, not Nick's.

"What makes you so sure?" Turner asked.

"Because I love her," Wayne said. He pounded his fist into the chair.

Turner had the information he needed. "Thank you, Mr. Kendall." He handed him a card. "If you think of anything else, and if she calls you, please contact me right away."

**Chapter 15**

Kansas - Section 21-3761

Trespass on Railroad Property

THE TALK IN the car was incessant, but I had no idea what was being discussed.

I asked again, "Where are you taking me?"

"We are going to find the chiva, Mary," the barbed wire tattoo man said in rough English.

"You are smart, Mary. Although," he made a noise like he was thinking very hard, "You don't look like this, Mary." He held up the identification card for the millionaire. I didn't have the chance to look at the card before now. I was surprised by the woman's youthful look compared to how she was at the hotel, shriveled and old at the bar. How long had she been living in the hotel? How much smoking and drinking excessively do you have to do to age that quickly?

"You are a thief. Just like Tony. Just like his aunts." The barbed wire tattoo man shot a look over to Tony, and he looked down.

"I'm not a thief. I just..." I tried to think of a way of defending myself, but I was a thief, and a liar.

"You just steal things? That's what a thief does." He smirked through the reflection in the rearview mirror. "That is okay. I need something stolen. And our usual girl is..." his fingers spread apart like something in them popped out and disappeared like magic. "Well, lets just say she won't be found for a while."

I swallowed.

I could see his eyes smiling in the rear view mirror. "We'll find my cousins and you will steal the chiva back for us."

"Your cousins?" I asked, but the reply was only a harsh stare.

Even though my panic meter was already pegged, my heart stuttered when I saw the signs for the airport. My hands were clammy. Sweat pooled under my arms. I started to hyperventilate, but then my cycle of panic was interrupted with a dash of reality. They wouldn't be able to put me on a plane. They wouldn't be able to get me past security. I didn't care about the police anymore; I'd go back to prison before getting on a plane. At least they didn't throw me off a bridge, yet, or leave me to die in the burning house. In prison I would live. Nothing I'd done would put me on death row. The fat man lived, the millionaire was recovering—maybe even in rehab—and the kid was likely on his way to his parents. Why else would he be so happy to see these goons? I would call for help as soon as we arrived at the airport. I might even be able to convince the state that Nick was a bad father before they put me away. I could see Kyle again.

My breathing slowed when they didn't pull over at the sign for the terminal. They didn't even stop at the airport, they continued on. The barbed wire tattoo man said something sternly, but almost in a whisper.

Tony cried out, "No!"

The man with the mole looked into my eyes, then closed his eyes, made the sign of the cross, whispered a prayer to himself, and pulled back his arm. Tony's scream echoed through the pain and darkness and into my dreams.

We were stopped somewhere when I woke up. My head was throbbing. My throat was dry. My eyes blurred open. The sun screamed through the windshield, boring into my retina. Through the pain and the brightness I saw that I was alone in the car. I peeked out the window. We were at a gas station. I saw Tony's head bobbing up one of the aisles. The barbed wire tattoo man stood at the counter to pay, but I didn't see the other goon, the arsonist.

I pulled open the car door just wide enough for my body to slither to the ground. I left the door open so I didn't make any noise to attract attention. I crouched down behind the window and then scrambled over to the side of the building. I peeped around the side of the building, but I heard a man shout out behind me. When I turned around the arsonist was less than twenty feet away, walking in my direction while adjusting his pants. I took off running.

My boots slipped on the icy asphalt, but I held steady to my path. I heard, and then saw a train approaching the intersection behind the gas station. I ran as fast as my rubber boots would carry me. I was determined, this time, not to let the arsonist catch me. As I got closer, the reality of the train's speed dug into my mind. The noise was deafening. People died in all manner of hideous ways—falling off the train, falling under the train—but I wanted to get away from these goons and live to see Kyle. The rocks slipped under my boots. I struggled just to stay upright. I looked for something to grab, but everything flew by so quickly. I looked behind me and the arsonist was gaining on me, but also slipping on the smooth rocks. I reached my hands out to grab anything. My fingers slipped over the rough metal. My right arm hit against a hard, flat piece and then my left hand took hold. I was jerked forward so rapidly that my arm felt like it was pulled out of the socket. My head hit against something hard. I tried to run with the train, but as my boots scraped along the rocks they fell off.

I held on tight with my left hand, pulling my right hand to meet it on the metal bar running vertical for three feet or so. My exposed feet dragged. Each rock felt like a hammer hitting against the delicate bones in my feet. My clunky purse whipped up to slap me in the back and I nearly let go. When I looked back the arsonist was still trailing along, but he was so far behind me now that I knew he wasn't going to catch up.

With excruciating pain and effort I worked my way up a bar inch by inch until my feet took hold of a flat section of the train car. The chill from the metal ran through my body.

With two more agonizing pulls and a good push with my tender feet I was sitting on a perch in the back of a train car. I watched the arsonist get smaller and smaller until I lost track of him around a shallow bend.

Tony was gone. He was probably off to his parents. I wished him the best. At least he was no longer my responsibility, but maybe he never was. If I'd left him in hospital I would still be on the road to San Francisco. If he hadn't stolen away in the Porsche I would still be driving it. Or maybe the cops would have pulled me over, since they found the millionaire so quickly. Perhaps my luck was a matter of perspective. If I weren't in the accident I wouldn't have been kidnapped by the goons and might have been arrested and sent back to prison by now.

The train car held two orange trailers stacked on top of each other. The trailers, like the ones hauled across country by semi trucks, were shorter than the train car, so there was five feet of room between the back of the trailer and the back of the train car. Flat cross beams were the only thing separating me from the workings of the train car.

I worked my way down to the precarious opening behind the trailers. I could see down to the rocks below. Just three feet away from a gruesome death Nick might find interesting. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction, however. I gathered up the pajamas in a sudden fear that the loose fabric might take hold of the moving metal and pull me to my imagined death.

The rhythm of the train's drowning noise quickened. The rocks below the train car became a steady blur. Once I was in position, every bit of my body braced against the icy metal. I pulled up the hood of my parka to cradle my head. I ripped off the pockets and the better part of the outer layer to tie around my feet for protection.

I had no idea what direction we were headed, but I would figure out a plan once we stopped. I wasn't going to risk jumping off a moving train.

I sat there, wedged in that spot watching the sun drag across the sky. My mind held steady thoughts for long uninterrupted stretches. I'd buy a bus ticket for as far as I could get to San Francisco with that one hundred dollar bill. I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of it sooner. At random intervals the train's whistle and the train crossing alarms interrupted my thoughts like a skip of a record.

When I peeked my head out occasionally I could see towns blurring by. A burger joint reminded me of my need for food and water. I thought about the last time I'd eaten anything—ramen noodles—and later about the last time I had a real meal. The night before I turned myself over to Connecticut for incarceration Wayne ordered a gourmet spread from an Italian restaurant in his neighborhood. We shared a cheap bottle of Chianti and fed each other bits of garlic bread.

Sometimes I switched to thinking about snuggling with Kyle. I didn't know anything about babies other than those few hours I spent with him in the hospital and the books I'd checked out from the library. He was sixteen months old. Would he be talking? I wanted to know what his voice sounded like. How big was he? How thick was his hair? Was it curly or straight? Would he remember me? I knew he wouldn't, but I wanted him to anyway. Animals remembered their mothers by the smell. Perhaps Kyle had a lingering olfactory perception of me.

The memories of Kyle and the sun had been my only comfort, until sometime later when the air turned warm. A high-pressure zone as the WFSB weatherman would surely have said.

I didn't know what time it was, but the sunlight dwindled and the sky turned a shade of pink reminiscent of a baby's flush cheeks.

The road crossings became less and less frequent. I dozed off in the dark and steady drone of the engines.

Sometime later screeching wheels woke me up. I poked my head up above the ledge of the train car. The train was slower. The ghost silhouette of cactus taller than a man loomed in the distance. The screeching turned to a high-pitched pierce.

After the sounds of metal crunching on metal and a long lunge forward, we were stopped. I made my way down from the train car the way I'd come up. But my arms and legs were stiff from the long ride and the torture they'd endured over the last days.

Rocks crunched beneath the makeshift shoes wrapped around my feet. I walked for a while along a small dirt path until I heard a rush of water. I made my way down a short embankment. I fell to my knees and then plunged my face into the cold water. I gulped up the liquid until I could hold no more. I crawled to a tree a few yards away, curled up and fell asleep. Train whistles, the drone of the diesel engines and the piercing sounds of the metal wheels suffused my dreams.

The smell of bacon, and coffee, woke me up. My stomach hurt worse than my head, sore bones and muscles. I walked like a zombie along a dirt road following the overpowering smell until I reached a mobile home. I would have thought the home was abandoned except for the smell and wet laundry hanging from the line.

Black shirts, short black skirts, faded t-shirts and two pairs of jeans fluttered in the wind attached at one end to the green metal mobile home. A pair of old, tan leather work boots lay in the dusty yard almost camouflaged. I stripped off the bits of cloth I'd used to cover my feet. I was sitting on the ground with my foot just about to go into the boot when a woman's voice called out from behind me.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you."

I froze. I turned my head slowly around. "I..."

"You're welcome to use the boots, but you have to check to see if the spiders have taken residence first." I stared at her bronzed face behind the screen door. She was slender, blonde and wore an old t-shirt and cotton shorts. "Flip them upside down and whack them against the dirt," she said.

I did as I was told and the hairiest spider I'd ever seen popped out. I jumped back about two feet to give it a wide berth. I'd done a fluff piece on keeping tarantulas as pets and I'd looked forward to never seeing one again.

"You would have been in a world of hurt for a while sticking your foot in there."

"Would it... have killed me?"

She smiled while opening the screen door and stepping onto the rickety wooden stairs. "Nope, never been a reported death by tarantula they say. They just make you wish you'd died."

I looked back down at the spider. It was headed back for the boot. I picked it up and smacked it a few more times against the ground. A cloud of dust kicked up.

"Careful there, you're going to get my work clothes all dirty."

"Sorry," I said.

As if she read my mind she said: "You look hungry."

I nodded.

"Come on in here. I have plenty of food for the both of us," she said pushing the screen door open. "What's your name?"

"Cynthia," I said.

She held out her hand, "Sherry. Come on in. I can't ever drink a whole pot of coffee anyway."

**Chapter 16**

Detective Joe Turner

THREE DAYS HAD gone by with no sign of Robyn Hughes. Turner wondered if she'd died that night in Kansas as Officer Knutson had thought.

Since the press had gotten ahold of the story, reported sightings of Robyn were an hourly waste of Turner's time. No real reports of her had been verified since before the accident in Kansas. However, plenty of fake sightings were entertaining. So far she'd been seen at several grocery stores, a movie theatre, a wedding, and on a flight to Mexico. He knew the report on the flight to Mexico was bogus, but followed up on it anyway. One woman claimed a friend of her friend was Robyn Hughes, but that turned out to be a prank.

Turner needed to get out of the squad room. Based on nothing but the sick descriptions of the death of Professor Morgan in Nick's novel _Lies_ , he was out driving the back roads of Western Connecticut. Five years was a long time to think Turner was going to miraculously come across the shallow grave of Brendan Behan, but the cafe the novel's characters had stopped at after burying the body sparked a memory in Turner, right down to the red painted cement pig that Raven initially mistook for a real one.

Of course, Nick could have pulled the details of burying the body through a lot of research and exploration, but there was one detail about Professor Behan that was held back from being published in the press. One little fact that Nick happened to have weaved into the novel. Not one single person, except Brendan Behan's wife and the emergency room doctor who saw him, knew that he had a cut on his thumb the morning he disappeared. The cut was about two inches long fixed with six stiches. He'd been prepping breakfast that morning and the knife slipped. Professor Morgan from the novel also had a 'stitched' hand he held up when Raven forced him into the car with her pearl-handled pistol.

Even if Robyn was dead as Knutson suspected, Turner knew the key to finding her was to examine Robyn's relationship with Nick. The key to her cross-country trail of felonies lay in her past.

The state prosecutor, Welch, had threatened to go to the FBI to find Robyn. The trial against Carla Brooks was set to start in ten days. If Robyn wasn't available for questioning by the defense soon, the case would be dropped and Robyn would no longer be valuable to Welch.

Turner stopped the car and then put it in reverse when he spotted a green shed out of the corner of his eye. How many times had Nick driven out here to get the details so accurate? Turner took out his cell phone and then took a few pictures. He marked the location using the GPS in the car.

The novel wasn't going to be enough evidence to get a warrant to search the property, but that wasn't the only way to go about getting the job done.

**Chapter 17**

New Mexico - Section 35-10-1

Unlawful Entry

AFTER TWO DAYS of loafing on Sherry's couch I was making myself useful in the kitchen by making a late lunch before she had to go to work at the restaurant. When she went to the market I asked her to pick up fettuccini noodles as well. Her pantry had all the other makings of the best faux Alfredo I knew how to make.

The phone rang. A few minutes later Sherry called out to me from the living room, "Cynthia?"

I popped my head out through the Formica opening between the kitchen and the living room, "Yes?"

"Lunch will have to wait. That was my boss. I gotta go to a catering gig." Sherry started scrambling through the house.

Since I wasn't too far into making lunch I turned off the stove and went to the living room to get out of her way. The past two days she'd been like a tornado ripping through the house before leaving for work, and that's when she knew when her shift started. With an unexpected shift in her work schedule I knew better than to be an obstacle. The last two days she'd taken more than half an hour to get ready, even in rushed mode. But she rushed slower than I'd seen other people take their time.

She walked out into the living room mostly naked—just a pair of panties and one sock. She'd already grown accustomed to my presence, apparently. "Have you seen my eyeliner?"

I moved a heavy nursing textbook, clothes, and a dirty dinner plate aside and then handed her the eyeliner. She had a tendency to leave things wherever they were used last, like those boots in the yard.

"Thank you." Her perky breasts were hard not to notice, but I tried not to stare. Her eyes got wider showing off her bright green contact lenses. "You know what? You should come to the museum tonight. You could make some quick money and get on the train to Seattle like you wanted to. I know you wouldn't be able to find that guy, but—"

I interrupted her, "I don't think—"

She interrupted me back with a wave of her arm, "Three girls called in sick. It'll just be me and Josie, and someone needs to tend the cash bar."

"I've never tended bar." I knew this was a lame excuse the moment I muttered it.

"There's nothing to it," she said while marching back down the hallway. "We don't serve anything fancy," she shouted from her room. "Just wine and beer and stuff mixed with a few standard boozes. Two minutes of training and you'll be on your way to at least a couple hundred."

A couple hundred dollars would probably get me all the way to San Francisco. "I don't have anything to wear," I said.

"You can wear something of mine," she said before switching on the hair dryer.

The thought of being in public unnerved me, but I couldn't tell Sherry that. What if I'd been in the news and people recognized me? But didn't Wayne say that was ridiculous? The manhunt for Robyn Hughes wasn't to the point of shutting down the airports. I didn't think my story was all that interesting. It would hardly be interesting beyond Connecticut, and certainly not out in New Mexico.

Sherry came out with a pile of clothes.

I stared at her. I could use the money, and what kind of ungrateful person would I be if I didn't help her out after sleeping on her couch for two days? At least I no longer felt like I'd been run over by a steamroller.

I changed into the thin, white cotton dress she gave me. My breasts were way too big for the bra she let me borrow, but I stuffed them in just the same. The sandals were a bit snug, but no more than a half size. Beggars and thieves couldn't be choosers. I put my makeup on as best as I could without making her even more late and then jumped into her truck. The whole process took me less than fifteen minutes.

"You sure look a lot better than you did a couple days ago," Sherry said.

"I just needed to rest."

She smiled. "Well after chasing down Mike..."

I'd told her a version of the bounty hunter story where I had chased a suspect in a murder trial—his name was Mike Healy—onto the train, but lost him. By the time I realized he was gone the train was moving too fast to jump off. I had to ride it until it stopped. I had a rather exciting imaginary life. I sounded like a regular Indiana Jones. She was riveted to my story that night, at least until she had to run off to work. Thank goodness she didn't ask why I was chasing a criminal barefoot in my pajamas.

I told her the next day that my credit cards were maxed out looking for Mike. Catching him was my last chance to get solvent before I lost my house. She told me to hang out for as long as I liked. I was her only diversion from studying. She didn't have any electronic forms of entertainment. Since they switched the signals to digital her television wouldn't pick up any stations and she lived in a dead zone for cellphones. That was why rent for her place was so cheap, just two hundred dollars a month plus utilities. She was saving up for nursing school by keeping her costs down and working at the restaurant with side jobs catering. Just three more years of living like this and studying what she could, and she'd be two years away from her dream job. Well, not exactly dream job. She wanted to someday be a doctor.

Tumbleweed rolled by the car. There were sand dunes and cacti. My mother hated being dry and hot. I spent my life in the northern states. I'd never stepped foot in the desert before. I had hoped I would have the chance, someday, for a nice walk in the desert. Just once.

The dirt roads turned to concrete. The concrete turned to asphalt, cacti turned to gas station signs, and tumbleweed turned to taco huts and ice cream joints. Just as we hit the outskirts of town I could see in the distance a sign that read, Meza Gardenia, Population 45,854. The sign was weather worn. The population must have changed since the sign was erected, but they couldn't keep up with the weekly occurrence of births and deaths.

When I got to the museum it was nothing like how Sherry had explained it. She said 'white,' but the building was a dull cream color. Adobe, I remembered from school. The Pueblo Indians built their houses out of mud. Something I couldn't remember made them cooler so they could survive in the blistering heat of the desert at high noon.

The training was short, even less than the two minutes Sherry had allotted. Most of that time was spent going over the cash register. It took me four or five early customers to remember to press the big red button twice to get the cash drawer to open.

The dress, and my breasts spilling out of it, attracted the right attention from the customers. After the first hour Sherry came over to wink an approving look at my brandy snifter tip jar. Josie, a Hispanic girl of no more than twenty, was equally pleased by the tip jar and even happier not to be running the cash bar.

"I hate dealing with all these cheap, drunk, rich bastards," Josie said. She too took a glance at my tip jar, "Although you seem to be doing a good job of it."

The deal, explained to me in the truck on the way, was to split the tip jar three ways between Josie, Sherry, and me. Since almost every cheap, drunk, rich bastard put a dollar or five into the tip jar, I figured Sherry's estimate of two hundred dollars was probably pretty accurate.

As I picked up from the conversations going around my bar, the museum gala was in celebration of the new Borello collection. He'd collected hundreds of priceless pieces, from Native American rare pottery treasures to bold modern art by Southwest painters.

The real fun however, was yet to be displayed. Mrs. Borello, it seemed, had painted hundreds of paintings to try and please her husband with her unique artistic talents. Every one of them was similar to some million-dollar painting by an artist he adored. The trick, one man told another, was to spot the million-dollar painting amongst all of the imitations. So far, the man said, everyone who'd tried had failed.

"One million dollar painting sitting in a sea of imitations," the man in the purple tie said. He laughed, "I bet you can't find it."

A man walked up to the bar with his tie tacked down by a jewel-incrusted lizard. "How much?"

"Fifty dollars."

"Fifty? I'm not here to gamble small potatoes," the lizard tie tack man laughed as though he'd fleeced a few poker players in his day. "No, I was thinking of making it interesting."

"How much were you thinking?" The purple tie man rubbed his chin.

"Say, a thousand?"

They stared at each other, and then the lizard tie tack man noticed me watching. His eyes narrowed. His stare bore into me like a dentist's drill.

I looked away. I handed someone else a beer. I poured a glass of White Zinfandel. I turned around and rang in the purchase, but stumbled over hitting that big red button twice. It was the first time I'd messed it up since the first purchases.

When I looked back the man with the lizard tie tack leaned over the bar just a foot from my face. "Do I know you?" he asked.

"Nope," I said. "Do you need another drink?" I asked, pointing at his almost full glass of twelve-dollar vodka and soda.

"No," he said. "Are you sure I don't know you?"

"Well, I don't know you." I looked away from him toward a woman coming my way with an empty wine glass. I wiped my forehead with a bar towel. "Another Shiraz, ma'am?"

"Yes," she said.

The man in the lizard tie tack walked away with the purple tie man. I'd missed my chance at knowing if the purple tie man took the bet or not, but I wasn't comfortable with his line of questions. Anyway, the bet itself seemed like a suckers bet. The lizard tie tack man probably already knew which painting was real, if not, he had a pretty good idea.

Just about the time I hit my stride at bar tending, the cops showed up. There were only two of them, but they were enough menace to have me on edge. I watched them out of the corner of my eye. They worked the room like sharks picking out the weakest fish on which to feed. My paranoia and common sense duked it out in my head. My common sense and paranoia only agreed on one thing, I should bolt. But a third contender, a dark horse in the race, won out; I needed that tip money. Anyway, if they were here for me they would have come directly my way, but they showed everyone a picture. If that picture was of me, someone would have pointed my way, nearly everyone had been to the bar at least once. But no one did. Skinny women in cocktail dresses shook their heads. Men in fine suits shrugged their shoulders. They had to have seen me, or not. Who notices the help?

My heart was pumping so hard it was difficult to hear anything but the whooshing of blood through my body. I was deaf with dread by the time one of the cops walked over to me. I watched him the whole time, without looking at him directly.

"Ma'am?" he said to get my attention.

I took a quick look at him and then turned around like I was busy fishing a very specific beer out of the ice bucket. My breath was way too hard, but it was merely trying to keep up with my heart's vigor. Ice started sticking to my hand. I took a few shallow breaths to try and get myself under control before turning back around.

I handed a tall man the beer I'd been looking for. "Hey," he said. "I asked for the Coors Light."

I ignored him and I tried to help another woman, but the cop wedged himself in front of her.

"Ma'am, I just need a quick moment of your time."

I turned my body his direction, but busied myself with bar duties while I ducked my head down. I didn't want him to get too good of a look at me. "What can I help you with?" I said. I tried to keep my tone even, but the word help came out with a broken squeak.

"I'm looking for this man." He held up the picture. The man in the picture looked exactly like the guy with the lizard tie tack.

"I haven't seen him," I said with a quick headshake. I wasn't interested in getting involved.

"Are you sure?"

I looked him in the eye, but only briefly. "Yes," I said.

His lips parted, his eyes contracted.

I looked away. He wandered off, but not after making me incredibly nervous.

I went back to tending bar with fervor. I wasn't going to be happy until every single person in the joint had at least two drinks in their hands. Working hard was a good excuse for breathing so hard. I'd stroke out soon if I didn't slow down.

Sherry came over to check on me a short while later. "You look frazzled."

"I'm doing okay," I lied.

"I saw that cop come over," she said. "Does he know who you are?"

"No," I said. Part of my made-up fantasy was that I couldn't go to the cops because there might be a warrant out for the shady things I'd done to try and bring Mike in.

"Was it Mike, that guy they were passing around? You know, in the picture?" she whispered conspiratorially. "I saw him, but I told the cop I didn't. Just in case."

I didn't know how to respond to this. She had very little in the form of distraction and entertainment.

"It wasn't him," I said.

She looked disappointed, but it would have been more than a casual coincidence if an imaginary man I'd lost track of in Kansas suddenly showed up at a party we worked in New Mexico.

I reached down for the chilled White Zinfandel to fill another woman's glass. As I filled her glass I saw the lizard tie tack man sneak behind a closed door. Although there was no 'Exit' sign, it was probably a way out. He'd slipped out of the gala, but not without leaving behind the cops. I wondered right then what he was up to, and how his felonies might get me into trouble.

I needed another case of the White Zinfandel. Even at nine dollars a glass, all the women, and a few men, guzzled the stuff like grape soda. I'd had a sip; it even tasted a bit like soda. The only crime going on at this party was how much we charged for shitty booze.

On my way back to the bar with a case of wine I looked at the sign on the door he'd crept into. All it said was "Authorized Personnel."

If he was "Authorized Personnel" I doubted the cops would be searching for him. The cop I'd talked to earlier looked at me from across the room. I turned my head away from him, but out the window I noticed three new cop cars had arrived.

My panic meter, while not pegged, had inched up toward the three-quarter mark. I waved Sherry over.

"What's up?" she said. She smelled like vinaigrette and smelly cheese from the hors d'oeuvre she'd served.

"I need to take a break," I said. Two more cops walked into the museum. I couldn't keep my body from shivering.

"Sure," she said. Her brows wrinkled. "Are you okay?"

I didn't answer.

"Wait here, just let me tell Josie." She hustled off toward the kitchen.

I thought about taking the money from the tip jar right then, but I knew I couldn't count the money fast enough before Sherry got back, and I didn't want to shaft her and Josie. I'm not sure where this little bit of conscience came from, but I was willing to go with it. I had to remind myself that the cops were not after me, but the lizard tie tack man. What had he done, I wondered. It was probably nothing as bad as I had done.

When Sherry got back, I did a beeline straight for the bathroom. I wanted to lie low for a bit. There had to be some way to get control over my paranoia with rational thought. But not listening to my paranoia had gotten me into plenty of messes already.

After washing my hands I splashed cold water on my face. My makeup was thus ruined. The bruise the goon gifted me was a purple mess. I needed to dry my hands before reapplying my makeup.

I tried to get a paper towel, but the holder was one of those no-touch magic eye things. I was standing there playing charades with the paper towel holder. "Give up the goods," I said just as two women walked into the bathroom engrossed in their own conversation.

"I'm telling you, I know which one it is."

"What are you going to do, steal it or something?" the other woman said. Each woman walked into a stall. I waved my hands in the air to make them dry and try and calm my nerves at the same time.

They went on about the details of the million-dollar piece in contrast to the fakes.

I tried again to extract a towel. Ordinarily it wouldn't bother me to wipe my hands on my dress, but this dress was a little too white. Water might make it transparent.

"Well, I wouldn't steal it," one of the women said. "But I bet that guy the cops were looking for wants to," they both laughed at this little quip. Their laugher echoed off the tile.

"Oh, excuse me," the first woman said to me getting out of the stall. She checked her makeup in the mirror.

Just as I was about to give up on the paper towel holder the light turned red and six inches of rough, brown paper was awarded to me for my patience. The woman leaned over and ripped off the towel, "You don't mind, do you?"

I wasn't in the mood to argue with her, and I remembered I was 'just the help.' Actually I was the help of the help, and with the cops roaming around all I needed was an altercation, so I didn't say anything. But I planned to spit in her next glass of White Zinfandel.

When I finally wrestled another six stingy inches of paper towel from the holder I reapplied my makeup and then walked out of the bathroom. I passed by the 'Closed' sign for the special exhibit in the Borello Collection. This was the gallery everyone had been talking about. My curiosity got the better of me. I wondered if I could spot the real one too.

I walked into the room. There were thousands of tiny paintings. No bigger than an eight by ten photograph. With all the information I'd heard at the party I thought maybe I could find the right one, just for fun. They all looked exactly the same, how would I know for sure if I got the right one?

I agonized over every detail I remembered from the lizard tie man's lecture and the women in the stall. The flower had red petals. I wanted to ask if it was a rose, but how many other flowers had red petals?

There were roses and flowers with bright red petals, there were ones with brown petals. Some of the flowers were more abstract than others, as if the artist made copies of paintings from a previous painting. Each one became more abstract. Like when someone made copies of copies at the news station. At some point you couldn't read the print anymore.

My concentration turned to frames. Gold, the woman from the bathroom stall said. That eliminated half of the paintings, as more than half of the remaining half had wooden frames, and the rest were silver frames.

"Scroll work in the frame," one of the women said. There were a dozen that seemed to match.

The final clue was in the thorn of the flower. There was just one thorn. Two paintings, one on each side of the room matched the description. I heard a noise, something like shouting, from outside the dark gallery I'd snuck into.

My hand reached up to touch the painting, thinking perhaps the truth would be behind the small painting, but there was a piercing sound so loud I put my hands up to my ears. This was the painting. Because of this painting I would be hauled back to Connecticut in shackles.

I ran for the door, but when I opened it there were cops coming my way. I shut the door in their face and twisted the bolt lock. I propped a chair against the handle to help buy me more time. The piercing sound didn't cease. My fingers were in my ears, but they barely blocked the sound. The room had no windows, so my usual mode of egress was out. I looked for closets. There was nowhere to hide within the collection's stark museum layout. I looked up at the drop ceiling.

The guards smashed their bodies against the door. I climbed on top of a table in the middle of the room. A glass vase tipped over and rolled across the table when I bumped it. I tried to catch the vase, but in an instant wet glass skittered across the floor. I concentrated back on the ceiling. The tile moved, but I saw there was no way for the mechanism to hold my weight. Why were there always people escaping this way in movies? Off in the corner though, was an air vent. I pushed the table over to the corner of the room. A piece of wet glass sliced through the side of my sandals and through the tender flesh of my foot. The door jiggled more. I threw the purse up into the vent first, then my hand held on to the vent. With all my strength I struggled to pull myself up and into it.

My head was through the vent, and so were my shoulders. For a moment I thought I was going to get caught with my ass hanging out of the hole and into the room, but I wriggled my way down the metal tube.

This was not part of the plan to lie low and make some money. My luck, again, spoiled everything.

**Chapter 18**

New Mexico - Section 30-31-20

Trafficking in Controlled Substances

THE BANGING FROM the metal ventilation system rang through my already achy head. Surely everyone could hear me making my way through the walls. Shouts from the room, and the incessant alarms echoed.

Dust covered the vents in thick sticky sheets. When I sneezed, there was a brief quiet followed by shouting echoing through the vents. The further I went from the room I left behind, the darker it got. Thankfully, the piercing alarm got quieter as well. I could barely see at a fork in the vent. I had to make a choice between an even darker path and one with a bright light at the end. The bright light, I figured, would lead outside, so I took the fork in the vent toward the light.

The metal from the vent continued to buckle and bang no matter what I did to brace myself and keep the noise to a minimum. But the piercing alarm was still going at full force, and getting louder.

At the end of the route the daylight I was crawling toward was really the loading dock. To my horror I looked down from the ceiling and saw the lizard tie tack man. I watched him pulling vases from crates and loading them with another man into a van.

When a guard rushed into the loading dock I held my breath. I wanted to scoot my body away from the vent, but I knew it would create too much clamor.

"There's someone in the vent," the guard said, a bit out of breath.

"Who?" The lizard tie tack man said.

"The thief," the guard said. "Did you see her? Did she come out?"

There was no response. I heard the door shut then shuffled my body backward through the vent. I would take the darker path.

"You idiot," he said.

I held my breath, not knowing if he was talking to me or the other man. I stuck my neck out as far as it could reach. I couldn't see the lizard tie tack man, though, until he popped his face in the vent from below. I screamed.

"Shut up!"

I pursed my lips. The piercing noise from the alarm switched off.

"I knew I recognized you," he said.

I wondered what he meant. It was I who had recognized him in the picture the cops showed me.

"If you don't get out of here, you'll get us both caught. Separate we can take our goods and get out of here. Or maybe one of us will get caught." He winked like we were part of some conspiracy.

I nodded my head.

"Very good. Now get out of here."

I slithered my body backward. The fear and adrenaline began to subside and my rational thought started to take over. What did he mean take our separate goods? What was he doing at the museum? What was in those vases?

I didn't want to get caught. I had no idea what was going on but I needed to take control of the situation. I wriggled my way down another path. I got smarter at making my way more quietly. If I ever needed to do this again I was resolved to practice first. So many things I'd done since I was released from prison would have gone better if only I'd had the chance to practice first.

Just as I got more comfortable with the movement through the vent I heard a snap. The sudden lurch a second later was my last warning sign. I was in free fall and stopped abruptly with a jerk. My face hit something hard. My hands held on to the remnants of the metal pipe with all my strength. I looked down to see I was in a supply room, just three feet in the air. I fell into a pile on the concrete. I stood up, dusted myself off and stepped over the twisted remnants of the metal tubing. A bit of exposed tubing scraped my shin. I stifled a scream of agony.

I needed a place to hide. In the corner of the room there were boxes. I hurried over, hoping for some sort of cover behind the cardboard. But they would know I was here, there was a huge pile of broken air duct in the middle of the floor and a trail of blood right to where I was standing.

Then I saw, or rather first smelled, the garbage chute. When I opened the door to the garbage chute the rotten smell of food knocked me back. I hitched up my dress and climbed into the chute. I slipped and banged my head on the door.

I coughed, choked and gagged from the fetid smell. The flowing white skirt was covered in brown goo. I could see through the grease stains to my panties like a window. Lettuce was stuck to my face. I writhed around, but the trash wasn't sturdy enough to support my weight. The spongy trash compacted down rather than supporting my efforts to get up. When I got my feet down to the bottom of the garbage bin I managed to get my hands up to the lid. I pulled myself up by my forearms and poked my head out into the world beyond. The sun was low in the sky and cast an orange glow into the horizon. There were no cop cars, no cops and no guards, just the desert.

I swung my legs around to get leverage out of the trash bin. Just as my body weight shifted to the outside of the bin the momentum carried me all the way to the hard ground. A puff of dust kicked up around me, coating my smelly parts in dirt.

Everything about my body hurt when I stood up. I tried to wipe off some of the dirt before continuing, but my hand came back covered in sticky brown goo smelling distinctly of rot with a hint of vinegar, maybe cheesy vinaigrette.

I picked a direction and walked out into the desert. I didn't know where I was exactly, and I didn't care. I just wanted to get away from everyone. I looked back a few times, but never saw any headlights or flashlights coming my way.

A half hour later the sun was fully set. The moon was half full, so it provided me with a fair amount of light. I saw blinking red lights, presumably on towers, off in the distance. I put one foot in front of another and headed toward the red lights.

The air cooled very quickly. My mouth was parched. Each dry breath through my nose felt like I was breathing sandpaper. The quiet stillness was interrupted by a dog's howl. And then, I thought, maybe not a dog but a coyote or wolf. I wondered about the cut on my foot and shin. Were wild canines like sharks? Could they smell blood?

My gooey summer dress was no match for the chill. Tumbleweed brushed my legs, startling me a few times. I tripped over a rock and fell face first into the sand. I looked up to see a snake staring back and me and let out a shrill scream. It slithered away to the left and then I moved five or so feet to the right to keep my distance from it.

The buzzing sounds of a highway made white noise in the distance. Occasionally bright lights flew across the horizon, but I never got closer. I resisted walking toward the highway. I needed to be away from the source of my trouble: people.

Running in the sandals was impractical, but provided me with much-needed warmth. I could only sustain running for short distances. My breath was haggard and heavy. My legs ached from exhaustion. When I finished running a short distance, the warmth would radiate from my core to my extremities, but the sweat I generated would chill me even faster. When the chill became a shiver and my breath was slow enough, I would start running again.

The stars came out in the sky like a showing of my very own planetarium. I'd been a few times, but I hadn't seen stars this brilliant out in the real sky in years. Not since I was a kid living in the country with my father pointing out constellations in the sky. I found out later the constellations he named were all made-up. Although even then I should have known there was no "Two Twins Dolly Parton" constellation.

As I got older I didn't really follow astrology horoscopes like most of my high school friends, but I was interested in the constellations and paid attention in astronomy class in college. The stories in astronomy concerning how the constellations got their names fascinated me. Cassiopeia for instance, that big W in the sky was her throne. She was a mortal, vain queen bragging about her beauty. The gods threw her up in the sky to sit on her throne upside down with her dress over her face for eternity. At least that's how I remembered the myth.

The red lights didn't seem to get any closer until I was practically standing at the base of the tower surrounded by barbed wire. The headlights from the highway were brighter. The noise was louder. I could tell the difference between semis and cars. Behind the tower, off in the distance, was a set of train tracks. I walked toward the tracks. They would lead somewhere, at least.

Our house in Vermont, when Justice and I were six, butt up against the train so close that the house would shake so hard it knocked things to the floor in the middle of the night. My mother swore every time a precious vase would shatter. My father said they weren't worth anything anyway. These were the early days, before my father left and before we moved so often in the middle of the night leaving everything behind. It was the time before things meant nothing at all to her. In those days my mother cherished the few beautiful things she had.

My father taught me about the force of the train. About how long trains took to stop. He loved to talk about what trains carried across the country, how long it took, how vital they were to the livelihood of the country. He gave Justice a little model set. But Justice wasn't interested in trains, either the real ones or the model kind.

He ran them a few times, but left the set out for our mother to trip on. "We don't have enough trains running out back, I have to trip on them too?" she asked no one in particular.

I rushed to pick the set up and bring them to my room. That was back when I had a room of my own. When I had a bed, even. I ran the trains for hours across the floor. I loved the sound even better when it echoed outside behind the house.

When the train derailed in February my father brought me, and not Justice, to marvel at the miles long destruction through town. "Thankfully no one was hurt," he said lots of times. "It'll take ages for them to clean all this up."

The teachers at school fussed over their long commutes caused by the road being cut off. But the train was cleared up in just a few days. Cranes and crews worked through the night to clean up the mess.

I walked along the tracks in the desert. I remembered the scar in the embankment left by the derailment. Every day walking to school I saw the scar. When spring came the scar was slowly taken over by weeds. In June, it was like the derailment never happened. Weeds would never cover up a derailment here. A derailment in the desert would keep its scar for years.

Tiny white lights illuminated the train trestle in the desert. It wasn't very long, but the depth of darkness below, and the far off gurgle and hush of water gave me a pretty good clue the trestle was high. I squinted down to see light shimmer off a winding rope of water. I started across the trestle. There was plenty of room for me to walk, even duck into the shelter of the bridge beams if a train did happen by.

When I was a quarter way across a voice in the distance startled me, "Stop right there!" A man's voice. Maybe a train guard? But that made no sense.

I froze. I waited for a few minutes, but there were no more instructions. The sounds of my breath and the gurgling brook below were all I could hear. I took another careful step, wondering if I was hearing things. My fear vocalized in my head, perhaps.

A few steps later the voice called out, "Don't come any closer!" I could hear the fear, the shaking in his voice. This wasn't a guard, but who else would be out on a train trestle?

"Who are you?" I half whispered.

"Nobody," he replied. "Go away."

"I just want to cross," I said.

"I don't care," he said. "Go away or I'll jump. I swear I'll do it."

My first thought: _This is not happening._ My mind was trapped. I didn't know this guy, or his problems. I didn't want to get involved. I didn't want my luck to fuck up his life too.

"Just ignore me," I said. There was silence. I took a few quiet steps.

"Don't tell anyone I'm here," he said. "I'll be done when I'm ready. I don't want anyone to come."

"I won't tell anyone anything," I said. I took a few more steps.

"God, what's that smell?" The last few words came out with a nasal tinge, like he was holding his nose.

I was used to the smell after the last few hours of swimming in it. This was how people learned to live in garbage, dealt with dead bodies or worked with chemicals. They no longer smelled the smell. "I fell into a garbage can."

"How do you fall into a garbage can?" His voice was doubtful, accusing.

"Why would someone walk out on a train trestle to jump off it?" I snapped back before thinking.

"I fucked things up," he whimpered.

I let out a little laugh in the darkness of the bridge. "Join the club."

"My family..." his voice trailed off into the distance.

I listened to his breathing just a few notches louder than the sound of the rushing water below. "Look," I said. "Everyone fucks things up." I laughed again. "If I told you all the horrible things I did in the last few days, you wouldn't believe it."

"Did you fall asleep, light your house on fire, and kill your family?"

I sucked in my breath. "No." There was a pain in my heart I didn't recognize. Was it guilt? What could I possibly have to be guilty about with a man I didn't know?

"Well, I did," he sobbed. "God. Even the dog died."

"Damn," I said. "I don't know what to say." I was rarely at a loss for words, so this moment was extraordinary.

"No one does. Not me. Not anyone." Each sentence sounded like a short sob. "I just can't deal with this shit anymore."

"Why not?" I asked.

"You're just going to try and talk me out of it."

"Yeah, well, only half-assed. I really just want to walk down the trestle to the other side."

"Why don't you?"

"You told me not to come any closer."

"Oh." I debated walking on when he started talking again. "Why are you out here in the middle of nowhere?"

"Not that you would care, but I'm on my way to Colorado." Or I had been, until that accident in Kansas.

"That's a long walk."

"I wouldn't know. I don't even know where I am." And I didn't. I didn't even know if the last two hours of walking was really in the right direction. Or even the same direction. My brother got lost in the woods once. He walked in a circle for three hours. After that I always teased him for having one leg shorter than the other.

"Pinchon, Arizona."

"Huh. I've never been to Arizona."

"It's a great place, actually. My kids," he choked up, "they loved it."

"How many kids did you have?"

I heard him wipe the tears from his eyes. "Two. Two girls."

"What's your name?" I asked.

"William, but everyone calls me Bill. Or they used to..." he choked up again. "But now no one talks to me. I'm a walking ghost. All they see are the ghosts of my wife and children."

Even telling me his name was painful. This was a guy ready to do the unmentionable deed. "Well, I'm here talking to you, Bill. My name is, um... Christy."

"You don't know where you are, and you don't know your name?"

"It's complicated."

He laughed. "Certainly sounds like it."

"Christy isn't the name I was given." Nor were any of the other dozen names I used so far since I left prison.

"Hippy?"

"Not exactly, just..." I've tried to describe the relationship I had with my mother to so many people over the course of my life and nothing had ever seemed to work. "My mom's just different. One of those people that doesn't care what you think about what she does or doesn't do."

"Sounds liberating."

"Can be," I said. "But when the rule makers want you to be a certain way and you don't fit in their mold it can be rough living."

Bill's breathing became heavy.

"Hey Bill, I'm a little exhausted. Do you mind if I work my way over to the edge of the bridge and sit? I'd like to stick my legs over the side for a bit."

Bill sucked in a deep breath, letting it go in one long huff. "Yeah. I guess. But just don't look at me."

"I can't even see you."

"I'll hide behind the beam. You won't have to look at me."

"Fine," I said. "But I don't care what you look like."

"You would."

I didn't want to argue the point. I maneuvered my way to the edge of the bridge. When I knelt down to dangle my legs over the side I realized my feet ached more than they ever had. I felt each pulse of my heart through the pain in my feet. Sandals were not appropriate for walking or running for hours in the dessert.

"Please tell me why you smell that bad." His voice was low and uncomfortably close.

"I told you, I fell into a garbage can. I can't even really smell it anymore."

"I can," he said. "How did you fall into a garbage can?"

"I was fleeing from some drug dealers. That's how I escaped, through the trash chute out of a museum." After hours of random thoughts in the desert, the only thing that made any sense was that the lizard tie tack man was a drug dealer and the museum was his way of smuggling drugs. That was the kind of story I would have pursued with the intensity of a bloodhound back in my investigative journalism days. It would have been my third drug ring bust, too. I had a knack for this sort of story.

"Ugh. Nasty." The water below made a shushing noise. "You could take my clothes. Before I jump I could take off my clothes and you could have them."

"I don't know. I think I'd rather just have smelly cloths than a dead man's clothes."

I could tell by the silence that he was really mulling over what I'd said. In the scenario I'd described he was a dead man. I'd spelled it out; the idea was no longer abstract.

"Why were you fleeing from drug dealers?" he asked.

My response was automatic; I hardly had to think before lies started spewing out of my mouth. "I was collecting evidence and they saw me."

"Why don't you just go to the cops?"

"It's complicated," I said. "I lost the evidence, and they might think I was somehow involved."

"Aren't you?"

"In a way, yes," I said. "But now I don't want to be. I want to go home. I want to see my son." I started sobbing. The truth came bubbling to the surface. "I want everything to be over. Through all of this I just wanted to be with my son, but what I've done...I'm probably never going to see him again."

"You probably have thin luck."

I wiped my eyes with my dress, and smelled the rotted food. "What are you talking about?"

"Thin luck," he said. "My mom was a professional gambler. She came up with a theory and called it 'thin luck.' "

"Which is?"

"When you lose everything, except your life. You feel lucky to be alive, but then there's nothing to live for. I escaped the fire—a fire I started—I was lucky to be alive, but everything I loved was gone. That's thin luck."

"How about when I was released from prison and my husband had moved out and rented our house, so I broke into it without knowing and then I beat a man that had kidnapped me?" I let the whole truth escape out, but what did it matter? With his current plans he wasn't going to be able to tell anyone anything.

"Seriously?" He laughed again.

I couldn't help it. I saw his face for a short second in the dim moonlight. But it wasn't a face. It was melted flesh. I turned back around. "I'm sorry."

"Whatever. No one wants to look at me." There was a catch in his voice, like he too was swallowing back tears. "I'll have these scars to remind me forever. Or maybe just today."

"I'd rather that forever be longer." I felt guilty for looking. "I'm sorry your family died, your daughters. I'm sorry your dog died."

"I hated the fucking dog," he said.

We sat in silence for a long time. I felt tired. I felt safer on the bridge than I'd felt in ages. No one was going to die or be in serious peril right now, at least not because I did something wrong. But it wasn't my fault everything was going wrong. I just had 'thin luck.'

I put my head on my lumpy purse. My feet curled up under the flowing white dress. I was cold again. "Okay, tell me more about your mom, she sounds smart. I'll just lay here."

His breathing was labored. He walked over to sit next to me. "She was smart. She was a professional poker player."

I made a noise like an exhausted version of "Please continue."

"Her luck was incredible, but even better she could read people. She always knew when they were bluffing. She knew when they had a wicked hand. Before she became a pro she would beat the ten guys she played with so often that they tried to do things to distract her." He stopped.

"Like what?" I asked in a whisper.

He chuckled. "One of the guys brought in a deck of cards with naked women on them. He asked if she minded. Without skipping a beat she said, 'Are you kidding, I'm on the ten of spades.' They shuffled through the cards, looking for the ten of spades, looking at her. 'I was much younger then,' she said. She won a thousand bucks that day. We paid the rent. She bought my sister and me fancy sugar cereal."

"How old were you?"

"Twelve."

"Which cereal?"

"Lucky Charms. It's magically delicious."

I smiled at him, and he smiled back. I saw the hurt and joy in his eyes at the same time, but his melted face made him look like a horror film villain.

He pulled off his flannel jacket and wrapped it around me. "It's getting cold."

In the warmth of the jacket I fell asleep.

**Chapter 19**

Detective Joseph Turner

JOE WALKED OVER to the empty coffee pot. No one ever had the decency to make more when the pot was empty. He was exhausted and still covered in dirt. His sleep had been restless and he'd only gotten home shortly after 2:00 a.m. when the last officer assisting him had to go home before his wife called the police. The phone reception in that far corner of Connecticut was dreadful.

The four hours of sleep Turner got were restless. The dog took up most of the bed. He couldn't stop thinking that he was so close, far too close to give up. If he found the body there would be evidence, no one ever buried a man without leaving a trace.

Before he had a chance to take a shower that morning the Lieutenant called him in. There was a verified sighting of Robyn Hughes in New Mexico. He'd need to follow up immediately before Welch blew a gasket.

The report from New Mexico turned out to be preliminary only. There were three short lines: _Suspect 'Robyn Hughes' seen at gala at local museum. Fingerprints confirmed. Drug dealers captured in raid._

The report was thin at best. Turner supposed more information would be coming as the details were fleshed out. The part of the report about 'capture' was his favorite. Perhaps they had detailed Robyn Hughes, since they confirmed her fingerprints?

He hadn't heard from her, or her wake of wreckage, for almost four days, not since the snowstorm in Kansas. He was sure she'd found some shelter there, somewhere, but the men on the ground didn't have the manpower to go door to door. His calls with Officer Knutson almost had him convinced that Robyn was probably dead somewhere in the woods. They might not find her until spring.

But Turner had a nagging feeling. Robyn was too wily for giving up and dying in the woods. She'd already managed to wrestle a gun from a man and shoot him with it. The detective in Ohio made the story sound fantastical, like somehow she had actually become the devil the crazy victim said she was.

Turner stared at the coffee pot brewing. He knew exactly how long it would take. He knew he could go to the computer, and check on any one of his other three cases. When he came back the coffee would be ready. But he also knew about the vultures in the station. If he left the pot alone for too long it would mysteriously disappear, just like Robyn, so he waited.

"Phone for you, Turner," Officer Garrison called out from her desk. Joe looked over. Isabella Garrison was prettier today, every day, since the day she walked into the station seventeen weeks ago. He was counting. She had another six weeks or so of training, and then she might, just might, catch a call that he would need to investigate. Heat rose in his cheeks and the back of his neck every time he saw her. She was married, of course, but what did that matter? After a few years, her husband would get jealous of the job or she'd leave and have a baby. At least that's the track record he'd witnessed in his twelve years at the station.

He shouted back to her, "Take a message, will you?"

"You're going to want to take this one, Turner," she said. "It's about that woman."

Wasn't it always about a woman? Even when it was about a man, whoever that man was, whatever crazy thing he did, and the crazier the thing he did the more likely it was true: for that man, it was about a woman. He reluctantly abandoned the coffee machine. "All right, transfer it over."

The phone rang at his desk before he got there. "Detective Turner."

"Hey, this is Detective Soto in Meza Gardenia, New Mexico." Hispanic, Turner figured from his accent. He sounded even more tired than Joe.

"What can I do for you, Detective Soto?"

"It's what I can do for you, Detective Turner. IAFIS here says you flagged the fingerprints for a Mrs. Robyn Hughes, a.k.a. Robyn Young, a.k.a. Stacey Young a.k.a. Destiny Young."

Joe pulled over his notebook, and then checked to make sure his pen was working. "Where in New Mexico did you say?"

"Meza Gardenia; about an hour to the west of Albuquerque. We have a rather unusual case here."

The phrase 'unusual case' and Robyn had now become commonplace since a few days earlier with the call from Ohio and the fat man left bleeding in the woods. 'Unusual case' and Robyn Hughes could now be used as synonyms.

Soto continued, "Our crime scene techs have been working all night. They had to climb through the heating ducts," he laughed, "but wait, I'm getting ahead of myself."

"I'm confused, do you have Robyn in custody?"

"No. It appears that she escaped out of the garbage chute."

"Garbage chute? Huh." _At least she didn't get away smelling like a rose this time._ "So you have fingerprints at the scene in New Mexico for Robyn Hughes?"

"Right."

Turner heard him sip from a cup of coffee. He looked at his watch, he wasn't entirely sure about the time zone, "Is it 3:00 a.m. there?"

"No, we are in the Mountain time zone, so it's six. I've been up all night."

"Tell me about your unusual case."

"A woman matching Mrs. Hughes' description walked into the Museum of Santa Seema at approximately 3:00 p.m. yesterday. We have copies of the museum's closed circuit monitors. She worked a cash bar for about two hours. Part way into an event the Museum was holding our department sent over two uniformed police officers."

"Had someone spotted Mrs. Hughes?" Turner asked.

"No, that's the weird part. Someone called in an anonymous tip that a drug dealer we've been hunting, Juan Flores, was at the museum's party."

"What was the party for?"

"Acquisition of a new collection, the Borello Collection."

"What's in the collection?"

"Mostly Native American and Southwest painters. However, there are these little paintings of abstract flowers that aren't on display yet." He paused for a moment. "Stay with me, this will all make sense soon; sort of sense. Anyway, the museum says these little paintings aren't worth much, at least most of them aren't. The man's wife painted most of them; he was the collector, Mr. Borello. The woman wasn't an artist, but the museum likes to tell the story about the artistic collector and his sad wife, always trying to please her husband with art. About a month ago they came up with this game they would play during tours. So one of the paintings is not by the collector's wife, but painted by a famous artist, a woman named," Turner heard Detective Soto press keys on his computer. "Ah...Jan Clark. I guess the painting is similar. The game of course is to spot the famous painting amongst the junk. So, anyways, last night Robyn Hughes walked into the closed exhibit. She stared at the paintings, just like a few other people that afternoon. But then, out of the hundreds of paintings on the wall she touched the one that was alarmed—the one valuable painting. What are the odds, right? None of the other paintings were touched, as far as we can tell. When the alarm went off the guards came rushing into the room, but she escaped through the heating vent. There was a man hunt, a little chaos and all of the guards left their posts."

"Then she escaped through the garbage chute?" Turner asked.

"Not so fast," he said. "First she stopped in the loading dock."

It was a pregnant pause, for sure. Turner was ready with the question, "What was in the loading dock?"

"Inca pottery being loaded onto a truck by two men, one of them was Juan Flores. While Mrs. Hughes was being pursued in other parts of the museum she was having a conversation with Juan Flores at the loading dock through the heating vent. What we suspect is that Mrs. Hughes was working with a Mexican drug cartel—"

Turner interrupted, "What do a bunch of vases have to do with Mexican drug cartels?"

"We suspected not everything was as it seemed when the man was talking into the heating vent. Drugs are the first thing to suspect down this way, and we have a K-9 unit with a drug-sniffing dog on most of our major calls. Rex identified heroine at the scene. We've been questioning Mr. Flores, but he claims no knowledge of Mrs. Hughes.

"So, I ask you, what does Mrs. Hughes have to do with the Mexican drug trade? And does she have a history of art theft?"

Turner laughed in spite of himself. "As far as I know she doesn't have any known connections down there. The last I heard of her she was in a snowstorm-related accident on the interstate in Kansas. I have no idea what she's doing in New Mexico."

"Kansas? But she's from Connecticut, right? Does she have any connections here?"

"Her family traveled around a lot when she was growing up, but there is no documentation they ever lived in those parts. Mostly around Michigan, Upstate New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and she worked as a reporter here in Connecticut of course. She met her husband at the University of Connecticut."

"What's his story?"

"He is currently in San Francisco. He grew up in Sacramento, California. He teaches English Literature and writes novels I've never heard of. I don't see any connection with him and the drug trade, but I haven't looked into his background extensively."

"Does she have experience with theft?"

"She's gotten pretty good at it since she skipped parole a few days ago; purses, phones and cars mostly. She stole a brand new Porsche Boxster from a big time lottery winner in Illinois and flipped it in a snowstorm in Kansas. I've seen pictures. It's totaled. The state troopers couldn't believe that she walked away from it. They thought maybe she walked into the woods and died and they just hadn't found her yet. To be honest I almost believed them until your report came through an hour ago."

"Damn," he said. "So, she totals a car like that in Kansas and somehow gets down here to steal a painting in New Mexico? I'm suspicious she picked out that painting. Something like this takes planning."

"Yes, that has me stumped as well. She was in prison a week ago. By all accounts she was a model prisoner. They let her out early for good behavior and snitching on her cellmate. She's a reporter, or was, and sniffed out a good story on how illegal cellphones and drugs made their way into the prison system."

"Drugs, huh?" Detective Soto took another sip of his coffee.

"She always passed the drug tests," Turner said his shoulders shrugged although he knew Detective Soto couldn't see him. "They tested her in the D.A.'s office to ensure her credibility." There was another long pause. "Well anyway, thanks for calling. Keep an eye out for her. If she's mixed up in the Mexican drug trade she might try to slip over the border, but I still think she's on her way to confront her husband in San Francisco."

"I wonder if the coyotes or snakes out in the desert will get to her first."

"The last guy thought she died out in the Kansas woods."

"Okay. Thanks. I'll call you if we find anything else."

"Thanks, Detective Soto. Good luck."

"You too."

Joe hung up the phone. He took a pushpin out of a little clear plastic box and then stuck it to the map for Meza Gardenia, New Mexico. The woman was a mystery, his mystery. He looked forward to debriefing her. Did she have any justification for what she was doing? What made her turn so far south?

When he leaned back in his chair the metal spring groaned and squeaked in protest. He thought about checking on one of his other cases, but remembered the coffee pot. When he got there the pot was empty, of course. He considered chewing the officers out, but looked across to see Isabella sipping at a cup of coffee. Probably one from the pot he made; probably the last cup. Even if he did chew out the station, he'd lose his nerve when Isabella started looking at him.

The dead grounds went into the trash. A new filter was placed in the basket. He smelled the fresh grounds when he opened the little plastic shiny bag.

He was resolved to look further into Robyn, and her husband, Nick's backgrounds for connections to Mexican drug dealers, but not until he'd had another cup of coffee. After his shift he'd resume the scanning and digging.

**Chapter 20**

California - Section 192

Assault

THE WHISTLE FROM the train woke me up even before the violent shaking of the bridge. The smell of my body was pungent. My theory about getting used to the smell fell apart in the baking hot sun. The whistle blew again. I looked down the bridge to see the solid bright light, like a man-made sun rising in the wrong direction. The train was upon me before I had a chance to wake up. The bridge shook from the moment the train entered. I held on to the beams with what energy I had left. Bits of dirt and rocks kicked up, stinging my flesh. I turned away from the train and shut my eyes tight.

The train seemed to last forever. When it was over I coughed in the dust left in the train's wake. My cough turned to hiccups in the dry air. I stood there trying to gather my wits with a cough and hiccup fit.

My mouth was parched. My lips were cracked. My skin felt like leather. I looked out upon the desert horizon. Miles of cactus and painted rock spread out before me like the painted backdrop in a mural.

I stood up to walk down the railroad trestle, and my ankle caught and twisted slightly. In the corner of my eye I saw the depths of the nearly dry creek below. It was at least twice the distance in the light than I imagined in the dark. I couldn't see anything of the man. I wondered if he walked on, or jumped.

"No," I said. I wanted to cry, but my body was so void of hydration nothing came out but sobs. The guilt shook through my body like boiling hot water.

Maybe if I'd stayed awake he would have...but no. You can't watch people all the time. Justice scolded me once after our father left, "I can't watch you all the time. You make mistakes without thinking. You say things that hurt people." Nick had said something similar too.

Had I said something to hurt Bill? He was already hurting so much. I just wanted to talk to someone—someone that wasn't threatening my life or needing anything from me. But he needed something from me. He needed for me to listen.

But now all I wanted was to be with Kyle. I wanted to say nice things to him. I wanted to tell him how much I loved him. I wanted to give him kisses. I wanted to listen to his little voice.

I looked down again, and then at the jacket. I took it off. If he was dead, I didn't want a dead man's jacket, not in the blazing sun anyway.

I needed water.

The walk down the trestle was quiet. At the end of the bridge there was a sign:

Need to talk to someone? There is hope. Please use this phone.

Did he see the phone? He should have talked to someone—someone besides me. I stared at the curves of the phone, contemplating picking it up myself. An insanity plea might hold up given all the evidence from my last few days, but I turned away from the phone, just like Bill might have.

I heard the highway again as I crested the hill away from the train tracks.

My ankle was swollen and my skin was lobster red when I reached the highway at least two hours later. I stuck my thumb out, spinning the wheel of my 'thin luck.'

One car, covered in 'Jesus saves' bumper stickers, pulled over but then quickly pulled back onto the road. I could see the occupants arguing before the man pulled back onto the highway.

An older car, no bumper stickers, with Florida license plates pulled off the highway in front of me. I fast walked to the car as quickly as my hobbling feet would go. When I opened the door he was throwing empty water bottles in the back seat. I hoped there were full bottles somewhere in the car.

"Hop in," he said.

I sat down in the warm black vinyl seat.

"Whoa. No offense, but you smell really bad." He had a perfect-teeth smile and a face for accepting confessions. His tousled blonde hair was wavy on top, with a short tight cut around his ears. Not in the sloppy way Nick had kept his hair when we first met, but in a way that said, 'Look out, World.'

"Sorry. I..." His charisma leaked out all over the car. He was stunning, like looking into sunshine. "...Fell into a garbage can yesterday."

"That sounds like an excellent story," but he didn't press me for the details. He put the car in gear and off we went. "So, where are you headed?"

"Seattle."

"Long ways." His head nodded. His smile was unwavering. "Been driving a long ways myself. Radio's out." He pointed down to the corroded spot where the radio would be, but only a rusty hole and loose wires remained. There was a screwdriver hanging out of the steering wheel. Perhaps, I thought, he hot-wired the car. But he was too innocent-looking. Why steal such a cheap car anyway?

"It's my Aunt Lucy's car. She's retired," he said. "In Florida."

I nodded.

"She had it sitting around and told me to take it. I'm headed back to Oregon to visit an old friend of mine."

I nodded again.

"You know. I'm not sure how long we are going to last with you smelling like that and being so silent."

"Sorry," I said. I glanced at the speedometer pushing eighty. The car rattled and I gripped the sides of the leatherette seat. "You're going a little fast."

He smiled over at me like I'd said something amusing. "Let's take care of the smell first."

I looked at him, confused. "And how do you propose we do that?"

"Sassy," he said. "I like that." He smiled over at me while passing a semi. The little up turn on the side of his mouth gave his two-day beard an audacious look. "I've got plenty of spare clothes in the back."

I looked into the back seat. A green duffle bag, like the kind you see at army surplus stores, and a bright green suitcase sat on the bench seat. Even better, a case of water bottles sat on the floor. "Can I have one of those waters? I don't have a way of paying you back, yet. But I'll figure out a way once I get to Seattle."

"Sure, mi casa, su casa."

I was done with Spanish, but I knew what that meant. I tore into the water bottle like I hadn't had a drop to drink in a day.

"Hold up, be careful. You might drown. Buddy of mine said he's seen it happen."

Drips of warm water flowed down my chin and onto my chest. The white, stinking fabric stuck to my skin.

"About that dress," he said. "In the bright green bag there's some t-shirts and some shorts. I promise there won't be any funny stuff from me, just grab whatever and get that smelly thing out of here."

I unbuckled my seatbelt, and then gave him a quick look. He kept his eyes on the road and the effervescent smile on his face. I crawled between the seats to reach the bright green bag. The zipper was reluctant, but I managed to unzip it enough to reach my hand in.

"It's all clean in there. The dirty stuff is in the back," he said.

I pulled out a pair of his boxer shorts first, and then stuffed them back in. I pulled out a well-used white t-shirt with an ad for oatmeal stout made in Bend, Oregon. The shorts I pulled out would be far too large. They were red and Hawaiian printed, but at least I wouldn't be sitting in my underwear. I turned back around and then took another sip from the water bottle. I was tempted to guzzle the rest of it down, but settled for rationing it. I didn't know how long it would be until I was out on the street again fighting for my life.

I pulled my dress off and flung it out the window. Embarrassment was for people who never spent time in television dressing rooms or prison cells. But he didn't peek. His eyes held steady on the road with his pastoral smile.

The strong smell of flowery laundry detergent was a welcome scent, and far better than the smell of the museum's trash I had carried over miles through the desert. I clicked the seatbelt back on.

"That's better, now isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes, thank you," I said. I shed the bra under the t-shirt and threw it out the window as well. "Mind if I wash my face and brush my teeth?"

"Be my guest," he said. "There's a bar of soap and a clean wash cloth I swiped from the last hotel room. It's in a little plastic bin behind my seat." He started humming a show tune I knew from _Oklahoma!_ Under normal circumstances this would have driven me crazy, but it only seemed to make him more charming.

"Thanks." I reached back behind his seat. I watched his eyes fall down to my breasts.

The smile on his face turned from pastoral to lecherous and back to pastoral. Under every goody two-shoes lay a man with sexual desire, no matter how goody two-shoes he appeared to be. His sexual desire didn't bother me, on the contrary it gave me a feeling of security I needed at that moment. He would provide me with transportation. He would protect me.

With the rationed water and the washcloth I cleaned off the heavily applied makeup from the day before. The bruise from the side of my face had little bumps in it, echoes of the fist that put the bruise there.

I fished through my purse for my makeup, but he saw the bruise before I could apply anything. He asked: "Boyfriend?"

"Nope, we'd just met," I said. "I have that kind of effect on people."

He laughed, "You are definitely a sassy one. Enigmatic too." His laughing stopped abruptly when he looked into the rear view mirror, "Uh oh."

I turned around to see the flashing lights of a cop car. "I told you that you were going too fast."

"Look, just don't look at the cop unless you have to, keep your head turned away. If he sees that bruise..." He didn't finish the sentence, but I knew exactly what he meant. The last thing I wanted to do was get him into trouble. I was carrying two ID cards, both of them with tainted pasts: Mary the once-missing millionaire and Robyn, the woman at the center of many catastrophes.

We pulled over to the side. The dry air and dust blew into the car in waves as the traffic passed. A bit of tumbleweed actually tumbled in front of the car. I busied myself with my makeup.

"Where are you headed?" The officer's voice was a baritone you might expect.

"Going to Oregon, visit some friends."

"License and registration, please."

"No problem, officer." He handed over the paperwork and the cop left. He went back to humming his show tune.

I kept applying my makeup, hoping to finish before the officer came back. The cop would either give this guy a ticket, or let him go on his merry way. Of course, there was another option. The cop might arrest him. Perhaps this guy—this show tunes singing, pastoral smiling guy—had a warrant out for his arrest. Perhaps the fact that I didn't look at the cop would make him suspicious, maybe he would see me and put my face together with an FBI wanted poster. But I hadn't done any federal crimes; the FBI didn't seek out parole jumpers, did they? And as far as I knew from childhood, when the FBI wanted you they generally found you.

"He's coming back."

I kept my head down. I applied the last bits of blush.

"I'm just going to give you a warning this time, but keep it under eighty, buddy, okay?" The officer handed back paperwork. "We get a lot of accidents in these parts. Mostly due to speeding."

"Sure thing, officer," the smiling idiot said.

"Ma'am?"

I kept an icy stare into the makeup case, "Yes, officer?"

"Keep an eye on him."

"Yes, officer," I said.

The cop hovered for a moment. The sweat formed spontaneously in pools under my arms. When I could see the cop walking away in the side mirror getting into his cruiser I let out a long breath.

He put the car in drive and drove off. The car shimmied and shook as we cruised down the next hill going at least eighty-five. His latest show tune hit a crescendo and I sung along to the last few lines.

"Are you a fan?" he asked.

"Not really," I said. "But I know that play. My favorite teacher in high school was the lead. I don't even really remember it other than that song, tell you the truth." And it was the truth. Not a version of the truth, but the actual truth.

He looked over at me, "I was in the play in high school. Total fiasco. The girl that played Laurey tripped on one of the hay bales and fell into the orchestra pit."

I laughed.

His face took on a false seriousness. "She was my girlfriend."

I blushed. "Sorry."

He smiled and then busted out laughing. "No, it was hilarious."

He laughed until there was just the sound of the hot air rushing by. He started the song over. His voice was beautiful. I sat back in the chair and listened. He started on another song after that, and then another. I didn't really know them.

He took a break from singing at the crest of a hill. The car groaned and shuttered all the way up. "Hungry?" he asked.

"Honestly, I'm starved."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"I didn't want to push my luck," I replied. "I've done that a few too many times in the past few days. I thought I'd try just going with the flow for a little while."

"Aren't you mysterious."

"You have no idea," I said. My answers weren't even really answers, but he never pressed me for more.

"Okay, so food. We have two options. Now that you don't smell like a pile of manure...we could grab something at that cafe I've seen advertised for the last twenty miles, or we could share the PB&J I made back in Texas from the continental breakfast bar."

"I—" I started to say something, but he cut me off.

"Now, I don't want to sway your vote either way, but the cafe advertised having the best strawberry pie in California."

"Are we in California already?" I asked.

"Yes, and to celebrate I suggest we indulge in a little strawberry pie."

I didn't even remember my last meal. "I don't have any money." No money other than the hundred-dollar bill that had been useless so far.

"Yeah, I figured that when you said you couldn't pay for the water."

"I could send you some money when I get to Seattle, but I don't know your name."

"And I don't know yours." His sunshine smile returned. "We could make a game of it."

"What kind of game?" I wasn't in the mood for a game, but I needed food, and if playing a game with him would facilitate food I'd participate.

"If I guess your name first..." he seemed to want to think it over. My mind wandered into dark corners. "You have to tell me about all these mysterious things you've been doing in the past few days."

I thought about this. Would he win if he guessed the name I was born with, or the one I adopted, legally, in college? What were his chances for guessing my name?

I asked: "What do I win if I guess your name first?"

"I'll drive you all the way to where you need to go." From his quick response he'd already thought it over.

I smiled. "Deal."

He took his hand off the wheel for me to shake. The moment my hand touched his there was something that made my stomach flutter besides hunger. My body felt weak. My heart raced, not from fear, but from some unknown, foreign feeling.

"Tom," I said almost out of breath. I was still holding his hand.

He turned his head to look at me. "Do I really look like a Tom to you?" he asked, and then I let go of him. "Susan?"

I tried the name on for size. I'd never been a Susan, but that was my brother's wife's name. It wouldn't do at all.

We'd both been through a dozen names when we walked into the cafe. The heat was oppressive and I elected to sit in the air conditioning. I didn't say so, but I didn't want the freshly applied makeup to melt off my face and show my bruise to strangers. It was funny how I didn't think of this guy, the guy with no name, as a stranger.

The smell in the cafe, mainly of fresh bread and coffee, made me even hungrier in anticipation.

I wanted every single thing on the menu, but settled for the BLT.

"So you aren't Jewish," he said. "Or Muslim."

I held out my golden locks. "Do I look like I could be?"

"No, not a lot of blondes in those cultures," he said. "But it was possible."

"Still is. I know some people who are, but don't follow the 'no pig meat' rules."

"East coaster," he said.

I shrugged without any conviction. "Doesn't mean you have any idea what my name is. What are you having?"

"I'll have to think about that. Make sure that none of my options give away my name in any way." He made a show of shaking out the menu until the little paper snapped and then put it up to his face. "Let's see...there's a seafood salad. Don't like to be too far from the coast for seafood salad."

"So you aren't from the Midwest," I said, my eyebrow rising.

"Or maybe I just don't like seafood too far from the coast," he said. "Did you see the sign on the door for the specials? Carrot soup," he shook his head.

"What's wrong with carrot soup?"

"I don't want to get into that just yet, the waitress is on her way. I think the BLT is really the best thing on the menu. Do you like real mayonnaise or that miracle disgusting spread?"

"Not a big fan of the spread, huh?"

"I asked first."

"It's not a game of twenty questions," I said. "But no. I don't like the 'miracle disgusting spread.'"

"Interesting."

"Not really. In my experience most people don't like it," I said. "And therefore it doesn't really give you any insight into my name."

He nodded. "Logical. You went to college."

"Didn't you?"

"Yes."

When the waitress came to take our orders, he made sure to emphasize we wanted real mayonnaise. Then he said, "And we'd both like to judge for ourselves about that 'best strawberry pie in America' business."

"Huh?" the waitress asked.

"What he means to say is, we'd both like an order of the strawberry pie."

The waitress nodded her head and left the table with her eyebrows furrowed as if to say 'weirdos.'

"Stewart?" I asked.

"Julie?"

When I shook my head I said: "Okay, tell me about the carrot soup."

He rolled his eyes, "My mother is crazy about fad diets. I mean crazy. She did the Grapefruit diet, Slim Fast, Zone, Pritikin, Somersizing, Atkins, South Beach...I could go on. When I was in high school—"

I interrupted, "Last year?"

"No, my fifth reunion is _next_ year."

I clucked my tongue. "So young. That eliminates old names like Ernie."

"Is that a guess?" he said.

"No."

"Anyway. When I was in high school my mother did this crazy baby food diet. You had to eat only pureed food, and only certain foods, mostly root vegetables."

"So?"

"So she tried a few different recipes for the diet, but got hooked on pureed carrots. For two weeks that's all she ate, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Do you know what happens when you eat nothing but carrots?"

"No."

"You turn orange."

"Really?" I thought about how interesting it would be to do a story on someone who'd turned orange. Good video, I imagined.

"Yeah, she was bright orange and no one said anything. She went to parties."

"No."

"Yes. There are pictures of her, bright orange. I was so sick of carrots I was eating extra lunches at school and skipping dinner."

"Did someone finally say something?"

"That girlfriend I mentioned? The one that fell into the orchestra pit?"

"Yeah?"

"She came over for dinner; carrot soup, of course. Mom at least cooked it when company came over. My girlfriend asked for some crackers or something and said, 'Mrs—oh you almost had me there." His finger waved back and forth. "No way. I'm not giving you my last name."

I laughed. "What did she say? Really."

"She told my mother that she looked as orange as the soup." He laughed so hard other diners turned to stare. I laughed with him.

"George?"

He shook his head. "Carrie?" he asked when the BLT's were put in front of us.

I shook my head. "That was my babysitter's name in third grade. She only knew how to make three meals: raisin bran for breakfast, BLT's for lunch and lasagna for dinner. We drank Tang with every meal too. Every single day."

"Weird, lasagna? What a difficult meal to learn to make without knowing anything else."

"She was young, just seventeen, with two kids; a toddler and a baby. It's a wonder I still like BLT's at all, but bacon is the miracle food you can eat everyday without complaining."

"And turkey bacon should be outlawed." He talked with food in his mouth, something that would normally have me irritable, but I found it charming.

I finished chewing the bite in my mouth, but didn't rush it. I hadn't eaten since God-only-knows-when and I didn't want to upset my stomach anymore than I had to. "I don't know, works pretty well when you need to cut down on the fat intake."

"I can hardly believe you ever had a problem with weight."

I shrugged. "There was a time in my life I was comfortable, too comfortable."

"You have a way with words, like a professional liar." He smiled.

My eyes darted around the room.

"Don't tell me you are some kind of secret agent. Because that would just explain so much," he said. "Especially you smelling like a sewer when I picked you up on the side of the road."

I rolled my eyes, "I'm not a secret agent."

"Too bad. I'd love it if you had to kill me." The last sentence hung in the air. I looked at him confused, and he looked at me confused about my confusion. "You know, because if you were a secret agent and you revealed something about your mission you'd have to kill me?"

I briefly laughed it off and stuffed a handful of chips in my mouth.

"Mary?" he asked, but before I had a chance to answer he said: "No. No. Far too pedestrian for my secret agent. A name like that would only be cover identity."

The conversation was making me more uncomfortable by the minute. I needed to win this and get it over with. "Jack?" I asked.

"I have a friend named Jack, good guy. Drinks too much though. Every time I'm with him I get wrapped up in his drinking habit like it's my own drinking habit."

"Maybe that's just the person you are when you're around him."

"You _are_ a secret agent. That's totally something they would do, be one person around this friend and another around someone else. Don't you find it difficult when more than one person is in the room? Or do you just take on the dominant personality?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"It's not, I'm just joking...Natalie?" His eyebrows raised high, sure of himself.

I shook my head, "Ray?"

The waitress came over with their strawberry pies. On the very first bite I thought they came by their slogan not only honestly, but I wanted to challenge anyone to defy their rightful place as the leader in strawberry pie making.

"I have to admit," he said. "This is fucking good."

We were quiet for a while, both of us absorbed in the bliss of the pie. He finished before I did. My stomach was starting to ache from alternately starving and then binging over the last few days.

I stared down at the last few bites of pie on my plate as if they might run away if I didn't concentrate on their existence, but I pushed the plate away. "I can't eat anymore, but I really want to."

"Why don't we get one for the road?"

"Aren't we going through the desert?" I asked. "With no air conditioning?"

"Yeah."

"I didn't see a cooler in the back of your car."

"Good point," he said. He let out a belch. "Excuse me," he punched his chest with his fist. "Burping in front of a lady and I don't even know her name."

"I forgot," I said. "Whose turn is it?"

"If you forgot then it's my turn," he said. He looked into my eyes. A smile creeped across his face, slowly. His eyes narrowed. His nose curled up. He sniffed the air like he might be able to smell my name like someone could identify a perfume. His eyes smiled. "Robyn." It wasn't even a question, but a statement of fact.

My jaw dropped. I couldn't believe that he had guessed my name. Not like 'Robyn' was a popular woman's name, at least not in the United States. I thought about lying, sticking with the name I was born with, but that would just be worse when he did find out. Plus I was obviously stalling for some reason, and not one I wanted to explain.

"Hold that thought," he said. "I'm going to go pay the bill and you can tell the sordid story of the last few days while we go through Death Valley." He bounded across the cafe with his wallet.

I looked for a way out. But there weren't any giggling drunk women with purses to steal from. A few old guys at the counter formed a line with their plumber's cracks and fat wallets. Fat wallets that they'd notice the moment I touched them.

He was back standing before me in no time. I had no choice but to follow him out the door and into the car. My legs felt like they had concrete encasements. My feet dragged through the dust. I was distracted when I put my hand on the door; I let out a shriek. The burn made me pull it back fast. I shook my hand in the air as though that might cast off the burn.

"Careful," he said. He smiled, but not in a way that he found my burn humorous, but that he was actually concerned for my safety. I used a bit of the loose shorts to pull open the door.

"Let me see your hand," he said while reaching over to take my hand. My breath quickened, I looked at his face, but he was looking at my hand. I pleaded silently for him to look at me, and when he did my heart stuttered. My skin felt like I was in an acupuncture session. His eyes were a pool of clear blue water. I yearned for him to lean in and kiss me, but instead he leaned back. He reached behind my seat and came back with a first aide kit.

"I got it before I left Florida," he said. "You can never be too careful."

He pulled out a cleansing wipe. "You should use this for that cut on your leg and foot."

I was confused, and he recognized it, "I saw the cuts when we were in the restaurant." I did as I was told. He sprayed my red hand with the stuff for burns. At once it felt cool.

"How close was I?" I asked.

"To my name?" he asked. He'd picked up on the conversation without missing a beat; he was my kind of man.

"Yeah."

"You didn't even guess with the right first letter. My first name is Wilson, but everyone calls me Woody. As in the president Woodrow Wilson," he said. He stuffed the kit back behind my seat.

"But stop stalling. I want to hear about the guy that punched you, about the last few days you've been mysteriously alluding to like a secret agent."

I briefly considered lying. How would he know the difference? But something about his charisma and that smile that would fit perfectly on a man of the cloth made me want to tell him the story. The real story.

He was named after a president, however. Woodrow Wilson was a career politician. Maybe his smile was more about the politics than the religion. Didn't every politician have to carry around charisma that made people do things they wouldn't otherwise want to do, like pay taxes to pay for big stadiums that would ultimately line the politician's pockets either with money or favors from the construction companies hired to do the work. At least, that was my experience with politicians.

The gravel kicked up as he entered the highway. "Well?" he asked.

I took a deep breath. "I woke up six days ago in the York Correctional Facility, a Connecticut Women's prison hoping to see my son..." I rolled through the story, leaving out almost no details, over the course of the next five hours. The heat of the desert relentlessly streamed into the car. The dried out trees and cactus blurred by. I parched my thirst and my hoarse throat with an endless stream of warm water bottles.

Woody asked almost no questions during the telling, except when I got to the part about driving in the snowstorm in Kansas. "I don't get it. Why are you going through all of this cross country trip, why not just fly directly to San Francisco?"

I tensed up and shivered even in the intense heat.

"So you're afraid to fly? That explains why you didn't just fly to San Francisco from Connecticut, but I can't imagine you'd be afraid of anything after what you've been through."

I felt defensive. "Well, I am. I have fears just like everyone else."

We came to another long, steep hill and Woody had to drop the car down another gear.

I cracked open another bottle of water without asking. The story continued on through the freight train trip, the museum and the man ready to commit suicide on the train trestle. I told him about his theory of 'thin luck.' I ended with him picking me up from the side of the road.

"Wow," he said as we sped our way across the dry landscape. "Just wow."

"I know."

"I have a million questions." His voice was breathless, like he started the sentence just after a long exhale.

"No." My head shook. "I said I'd tell the story, but I never said I'd answer a bunch of questions."

"Oh you're good," he said. His finger pointed and waved.

I looked out the window to the late afternoon sun. The hot, dry air was cooling as quickly as it had the previous night. Hearing the story in one long line made me think I was a little bit crazy. It all started out so innocently by walking through the empty house. How was I to know he'd stopped renting the house? I didn't remember assaulting the guy. I didn't have a weapon. How did everything spiral out of control so quickly?

Woody interrupted my train of thought. "What if we work out some sort of payment?"

Again my mind reached into dark corners. Why would I agree to have sex with him to somehow assist in his curiosity? Men say that women are an Enigma, but men, while predictable, are just as puzzling to women. Why did everything have to be about sex?

He looked over to me, saw the look on my face and said: "No. No. Geez, what kind of person do you think I am?" He laughed, but not in a way you might think something was funny, but awkward, uncomfortable.

"What kind of payment, then?" I asked.

Woody went back to his real smile, the smile that could melt a woman's heart, specifically my heart. "Look. You want to get to San Francisco. I'm headed to Oregon to crash with a friend for a few months. The skiing is good in Bend, and my buddy says they're looking for people to work on the mountain. Anyway, San Francisco is maybe...lets say...five hours out of my way?"

I shrugged. I had no idea how long a drive it was to San Francisco or what route he was taking to Bend, Oregon, wherever that was.

"Okay, so for every question you answer I'll grant you fifteen minutes out of my way."

I thought about this. My mouth opened, but I didn't speak.

"Keep in mind that I'd still have to turn around and go back to the interstate, so it's really a half hour effort on my part. Ten hours if you make the whole distance." Then he added: "With no radio."

I laughed. "You are enough radio for anyone."

He started singing a soul song I recognized from the sixties, "Hold On, I'm Coming." I didn't remember the artist.

"Aren't you a little too young to know that song?"

"My dad is into soul and R&B from the sixties. He's got a huge collection of vinyl. For fun he sometimes sorts them in random ways. It can take him weeks. I used to steal some of them."

I thought about my dad and his taste, if you could call it that, in honky-tonk music. He never owned a record. He had a few tapes, and I made a point to weaken them with a little snip from my dull kindergarten scissors before long trips so they would snap after a few minutes. Inevitably whatever was on the radio was far better than what he had on tape. He even let me fiddle with the radio sometimes.

I felt a chill, so I started to roll up my window but the handle fell off in my hand. "Damn, sorry."

Woody stopped singing and laughed. "I'll fix it when we stop for gas. So what do you think of my deal?"

"All right, sure. Ask your questions, but I'm going to ask you questions, too."

"I'm an open book to you, Robyn," he said.

"First of all, tell me how you figured out my name."

"My father is clairvoyant." His answer felt a little too rushed to be the truth. As if it needed a few more facts to back it up he continued, "He's even participated in hunting down a few murderers. I've always thought I had a touch of his skill."

_Bullshit,_ I thought. I'd been around enough 'clairvoyants' to know that they fooled themselves as much as they fooled their marks. I'd just spent hours telling him this long true story and now he was going to bullshit me?

"First question," he said. "What did you do to get put in jail?"

"Prison," I said. "State prison. It's not the same as jail."

"Fine. Prison."

"Drug possession," I said.

He looked over at me, "No way."

"What do you mean?" I backed my own lie with more facts, "I was caught with a bag of heroine."

He shook his head. "I'm not going to drive you to San Francisco if you plan to lie."

I couldn't believe it. He knew my tell, just like Nick. Only Nick never told me how he knew when I was lying, how would Woody? "How do you know?"

"Your eyes. I knew when you said you were going to Seattle you were lying."

"What about my eyes?" I said.

"I can't explain it. They just...lie."

I steamed from the heat and the embarrassment both. I never liked to get caught in a lie, and Woody had been so kind to me. Maybe his father really was clairvoyant?

"I ran over a teenage girl," I said.

Woody's face scrunched up, like he was physically hurt. "Was she killed?"

"Does that count as a second question?" I asked with distain.

"Sure," he said. "Just make sure you aren't purposefully illusive."

"She wasn't killed, but she didn't walk again for a year. There were vigils at the hospital. Laws, strict as they were at the time, were considered too lenient for me. She jaywalked, but it didn't matter, they had videos of me looking at my phone a few yards before I hit her. The witnesses all took her side," I said. "Just remember you have to act like video cameras are everywhere, watching your every move."

He thought about this for a moment, or at least sat with his eyes pointed at the road. "Tell me about Nick."

"That isn't, strictly speaking, a question."

"Okay," his mouth flashed that smile, the one that I was mesmerized with hours earlier. "I'll form it into a question." He stopped to think. "Tell me why, when you figured out what was going on—namely that he left you—that you wanted to see him so badly."

"Still not a question." I sputtered, "Kyle—"

"Okay, I can understand why you want to see your son, even though you've hardly mentioned him. But, what I don't get is why you are so driven to get to San Francisco. You could have found his phone number. You could have even let the courts figure things out. You could have settled for whatever punishment for _accidentally_ assaulting a man, whatever that means. But you didn't. You stole a car and started driving across country to get to San Francisco. Something is nagging at you about Nick. I want to know what that is. You want a question: 'What do you want from Nick, so badly, you are hunting him down all the way across the country?' "

I couldn't understand why Kyle wasn't enough of a reason, but he was right. I would never be truly free unless Nick was out of the picture. He would always find a way of obsessing over me, and over his darling son. Nick knew too much about what I'd done. He knew about things I'd done, even though I didn't know myself. I'd already proven that I was capable of violence when I was not conscious. 'Mike' knew that very well by now. I couldn't go to the Connecticut courts for custody over Kyle, Nick would tell them what I'd done. What Nick had done was minor compared to what I'd done. I'd killed a man, my own lover, and I didn't remember anything. I wasn't about to admit any of this to Woody.

But I'd flirt with a version of the truth. "I couldn't go to the police. After I woke up in the park and found out I'd assaulted that man, they would put me back in prison."

The car was quiet. There was only the sound of the rough road out of the desert valley. He looked straight ahead at the road. I was unnerved by Woody's patience. How could anyone be like that?

I cleared my dry throat, "Because when I married Nick he knew more about me than I knew." It wasn't a lie, technically. I wondered if my tell would show behind an omission of truth.

He didn't say anything, like he was waiting for more.

So I spun a web of truthful lies. "When I was young, after my father left, I wanted to be just like my brother. He never let the crazy things Mom did, the crazy things Mom said, get to him.

"Nick saw something in me, some sort of project. So he..." I tried to think of the word for 'obsessed' without that word. "He took an extra job to help me pay my way through college." I took a deep breath. There was a pain, like an exposed raw nerve.

"Then what?"

"I finished college and got a job as a reporter. I was comfortable. I had a life. I had a good job. I didn't really have any real friends, but I never did figure out how to make friends, just acquaintances. There were people I wanted things from, and people who wanted things from me. Nick was one of them. He wanted to get married."

"You didn't want to?"

"No," I tried to think of something believable, but couldn't come up with anything.

"Why did you marry him?"

"I can't explain it." Because he knew I'd killed Brendan and blackmailed a relationship out of me. How do you explain something like that? Maybe even for a while in my grief over Brendan, Nick was a comfort. He was my white knight in my time of need. He rescued me from myself when I made the biggest mistake of my life. I sobbed for months after I'd killed Brendan, and Nick nursed me back to health. He promised to take care of me. He promised that I'd never need to face those facts again. Only now, years later I was facing the very real fact that I'd murdered a man, and maybe I would murder again to get my son back.

"What about Kyle?" Woody asked.

"What about him?"

"If you can't explain why you married Nick, can you explain why you got pregnant?"

"I don't know how I got pregnant," I said. I really didn't. I'd been on birth control since sixteen and it worked perfectly until then. "I never intended to get pregnant. Things were so fucked up in my family. I didn't know how to be a mom. I didn't have any lessons on being a mom. Nick was adopted and his adopted family had died when he was young. After that he went to live with a series of foster families. A child and a wife was what _he_ wanted. He talked about it a lot. I got pregnant just before I went into prison. I didn't even know I was pregnant until I was already in prison. I thought I'd starve myself, or hurt myself. I didn't have any other option once I was in prison."

"Option? Like an abortion?" Woody asked.

"Yes," I said. I was the very image of a reluctant mother. How could I give birth to a child behind bars? "Nick said it would be fine. He said he'd take care of the kid. He promised me I wouldn't even need to see the baby if I didn't want to. At the time that's what I wanted. I was scared.

"Meanwhile, Nick read books and consulted psychologists. He's a writer and loves to do research. He said it was like he was researching for one of his characters. The short story he wrote based on all that research won an award." However, like the rest of his writing, I never read the story.

I continued on, "I tried not to get attached to Kyle, but those few hours I spent with him in the hospital when he was born, it was all I could think about for the next sixteen months. I asked Nick about the baby every time we talked, but he doled out the details sparingly. He was stingy with Kyle. I only got to see him four more times. Each time I was shocked how much he'd changed.

"I think Nick planned all along to run off and take Kyle away from me."

Woody stared into the dwindling light. He didn't say anything. He didn't look at me to see if I was lying either. A long stretch of silence gripped the car.

Woody said, "That's an interesting story, and I believe you are planning to get your son back, but tell me what you want from Nick."

"Fine. What do I want from Nick? I want to confront him. I want to ask him why he stuck by me through the trial, through the pregnancy, through the prison sentence, only to run off to San Francisco when I got out. I need closure."

"Closure," he repeated. "That makes a lot of sense."

But it wasn't closure exactly that I wanted. What I wanted to know was if he would haunt me with the mistakes of my past for the rest of my life.

He pulled the car off the road onto an exit.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"We're going to get rid of your 'thin luck.' "

"How do you propose doing that?"

"Buddy of mine had bad luck when we were in the Gulf. We went to a witch doctor."

"And there's a witch doctor out here?"

"No. But all he did was light a fire. He burnt some sage."

"And it worked?"

He hesitated. "Yes, sort of."

"What do you mean by 'sort of?' "

"Well, no more people died on his watch."

When we walked into the grocery store the stark overhead lights beat down on his face casting hard shadows. He led the way to the produce section.

"This is stupid," I said.

"It's worth a try though, right?"

"No. I don't believe it is," I said.

He looked at me, discouraged. "How can you believe you have 'thin luck,' but not believe in anything to cure it?" His voice was a little too loud.

I shrugged.

An old man with white hair in a green apron and cheap tie looked at us from the corner of his eye.

"Don't you want to try it?" he demanded. His voice grew louder. "You don't even want to try something to make your situation better?"

The old man sidled over to us. "Is there something wrong here?" He stepped between Woody and I, with his back to me.

Woody's voice got lower, "No. I'm just trying to find the right herb for my turkey." His voice was calm and charming. Suddenly he was the confessional Woody I'd met hours ago.

"If you don't keep things down here, I'll have to ask you to leave."

"We got it," Woody said.

The old man smirked. "Then figure out the herb for your bird and move on."

"Fine."

The old man turned to face me. He smiled at me. "Hope you're all right?" His smile turned to confusion. The man put his hand on my shoulder. "Do I know you?" he asked.

I turned away from him and shrugged his hand away, "No."

"But—"

"The woman said she doesn't know you," Woody said putting his hand on the man's shoulder. He spun the man back around. "Now leave her alone."

"You two are flakes," the old man said. "Pay for your herbs and beat feet." His thumb pointed toward the door.

I turned and left for the car, followed a few minutes later by Woody. "See, nothing went wrong in there. Maybe your luck is changing?" His worldview was twisted, everything had gone wrong. Why did the man think he recognized me? Was I just paranoid? Was this what it would be like to be on the lam forever?

Woody drove us out to a deserted place down a dirt road off the highway. I could still see the headlights off in the distance.

"All we have to do is burn this," Woody said. "But it won't really burn, just smolder."

He lit the herb. I waited for tumbleweed or tufts of grass to catch fire accidentally. I thought a cop would come and arrest us for burning illegally. The cop would think it was his lucky day when he found the notorious Robyn Hughes, or maybe through some series of events they would get a fine and move on.

My mind was wound up spinning intricate fantasies, but true to his word there was a lot of smoke, but no flame. He waved the smoke in my face, and all around my body.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I'm dosing you in sage smoke. That's what the witch doctor did."

My eyes stung. I coughed. He held my hand and I felt that same spark.

We were back on the highway twenty minutes later.

We sat in silence when he said: "We need gas. Sorry, I wasn't watching the gas gauge."

"How bad is it?" I asked.

"Fumes."

We drove up a two-lane bridge, one lane in each direction. All I could think about were the consequences if we ran out of gas on the way up. We would be blocking traffic. The cops would come. I'd be hauled away before I'd even seen San Francisco. As we reached the apex of the bridge my panic subsided. I knew we could always coast down the downhill slope of the bridge.

We drove a few more miles. I was desperate for any signs of a gas station.

His blinker went on. He took an exit on an empty highway. A sign said two miles to a gas station. I held my breath, in that way that you did when you ran out of gas, as if it might help. But holding my breath was no use. The car sputtered and kicked.

Woody eased onto the shoulder. "Shit." He hit the steering wheel.

I sucked in a huge breath and let it out like a balloon with a slow leak. The sun was long gone and I stared off into the distance.

"Grab a sweatshirt for me and one for you out of the suitcase. It's gonna get cold," he said. He opened the trunk. A short while later he came around the side of the car with a portable red gas tank. "Look. I'll hitch a ride. I'm a guy, it'll be easier."

I wanted to beg to differ. People were far more eager to pick up women than men—they wanted to be heroic—but I didn't say anything.

He leaned into the window. His face was inches from my face. We stared at each other, and then he leaned in for a short, but lasting kiss.

I was too stunned to say anything.

"It might take a while, but I'll be back."

I nodded. The continued smell of burned sage filled my nose. Maybe it would keep me safe as well. Maybe the fact that the grocery store and sage burning wasn't a disaster was a sign, a good sign.

He walked ahead of the car. A few cars drove by, and to my surprise one stopped and picked him up. I thought about taking a nap, I was terribly exhausted, after all. But my mind raced. All I could think about was that kiss. Was he attracted to me, or the danger I represented?

In my distraction I failed to notice a vehicle pull up until I heard a tinny rattle on the window of the car. It was pitch black straight ahead, but I saw the outline of a man's face from the headlights behind me. Someone, I thought, to _rescue_ me. Another white knight here to ruin my life.

"Ever' thing all right?" His muffled voice asked.

"Yeah," I said.

"Why you out here, then?"

"Ran out of gas," I said. Everyone always wants to know why. It was none of his business why. Maybe I wanted to get some sleep on the side of the highway, ever think of that?

"I got gas," he said. His rotten tooth grin was barely visible through the shadows. "I could give you some."

I contemplated this. I had no idea, and really no way of knowing how long Woody would be gone. But then, maybe I could just run off with his car. No more questioning my motives. "Sure," I said.

I heard his footsteps come around my side of the car. The window was still open. His eyes stared back at me. It was so dark I couldn't see his pupils, just one big dark circle centered in the slivers of white.

"What is a pretty young thing like you doin' out here. Boyfriend left ya?" His eyebrows raised, "Maybe girlfriend?"

This was the lecher I'd been looking for in Woody. His eyes scanned me. He was close enough I could smell the pungent odor of stale alcohol and cigarettes.

This guy had no idea what he was getting into, but maybe he would go get the gas and everything would go easy.

His wide eyes focused in on my face, "I know who you are. You're Bonnie."

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "How much gas are you willing to give me?"

"I'm not going to give _you_ any gas, I'm going to turn you in for _gas money_ , Bonnie."

My voice gave away my sudden panic, "I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but you better get your ass back in your car and get the fuck out of my face before I call the cops."

He laughed so hard his feet slipped down the embankment a little. "You aren't going to call the cops," he said. "You're Bonnie, you can't call the cops."

"My name isn't _Bonnie_."

"No, it's _Robyn_."

How did he know my name? His crooked finger swiped through the air. "Robyn Hughes." I braced for that dreaded moment when he put his hands to his heart. "Yeah, like that dumbass actor." He clutched his chest and gazed out onto space, "Dude. Let's create a better world."

My first thought—the one I always had when anyone said 'like that actor' or 'Dude. Let's create a better world'—was that I never should have taken Nick's last name and ended up with a name so similar to that space cowboy.

When I opened the car door it hit him. The man was startled. He stepped back, but his feet couldn't create equilibrium on the uneven ground. He slid down the embankment onto his face. As he steadied himself back on his feet, he pulled little bits of gravel out of his face and then stared at the blood on his hand.

"Look what you did to me."

"I didn't do anything, you drunk bastard. You slipped down on the rocks."

"You pushed me with the car door."

"Why did you call me Bonnie? How do you know my name?"

"Don't you know? 'Bonnie without any Clyde.' You carjacked and shot a man in Ohio, stole a car from that lottery winner—tied her up in her hotel room even—totaled her brand new Porsche and then you tried to steal a painting in New Mexico."

"I didn't try to steal it." Why was I explaining this to him?

"Oh yeah, so why'd you touch it?"

I had no response. 'I had to' didn't even make sense to me, so why would it make any sense to this drunken asshole?

"How'd you get to California, anyways? That's a long way to go without yer usual trail of destruction."

I didn't want to elaborate on how I got to California. "Where are you getting all of this from?"

"The news. You're all over the news," his eyes were barely lit, but I could see the change. It was a look that said, 'I'm going to be rich.'

He lunged at me headfirst. I was expecting this and stepped sideways to let him smash his head into the side of the car.

Far from knocking himself out he shook off the pain. "You bitch," he said. As if it was my fault he decided to ram the car.

A car pulled up from the other side of the road. _Shit, another witness, maybe someone else who watched the news,_ I thought.

"Robyn," Woody called out.

I turned to see him sprint across the lanes of empty road. The car sped away. At the same time the man lunged at me from behind. His arms wrapped around me like a python. He held me in a chokehold.

"Let go of her!" Woody yelled.

"Don't you know who she is?" the man asked. "She'd kill us both, given half-a-chance." His breath was hot and vial. "Armed and dangerous, they says."

I started to feel faint. Blood pooled in my head.

"No," Woody said. His steps were slower, but each one moved closer to me.

The man's stubble rubbed up against my face like an emery board. "I see," he said. "You want the reward money for yourself. Well, okay we'll split it—say sixty/forty?"

Woody didn't say anything, still inching forward. My head ached. The man took a little step backward, pulling me with him. Everything was in slow motion. Woody reared his arm back. His fist hit the front of the man's face in a blur. His head whipped back, but his arm didn't lose its grip. We fell down like bowling pins.

The man's arms went slack. I wrestled free.

When I stood up I saw the horror before me. Blood rushed from the man's head onto the pavement. "Do something!" I screamed.

"Get in the car," Woody's voice was calm, authoritative.

"We can't just leave him here," I said.

"We can. And we will," he said. "Get in the car."

I stood there, staring at the man on the pavement. I didn't know if he was dead. I didn't see any of his breaths, but I could see my own hot breath in the chilly air.

"Get in the car," he said, a little louder.

I walked over to the passenger's side of the car. There was a clank and gurgle as he put gas in the tank. I heard a faint sound, like a moan.

Woody got in the car, put his seatbelt on, and then turned the key. But there was no response.

I heard the moan again. "He's still alive, I think."

"Do you want me to finish him off?" He looked at me with fierce eyes. There wasn't a hint of the preacher's smile.

"No," my voice trembled. "Why would you say that?"

He looked back at the car, turned the key, but there was nothing. He turned the key another time and there was a slight sputter. On the next try the car roared to life.

"I guess that sage didn't work then," I said.

We drove to the gas station in silence.

**Chapter 21**

California - Section 211

Armed Robbery

HE PUMPED THE gas to fill the tank. I watched the needle go from E to F like the second hand on a clock.

Would the man have killed me? Was I at the point of kill or be killed? What, exactly, was on the news?

When he went inside to pay I contemplated running, but there was nowhere to run, just endless miles of dead grass fields. Years ago I'd reported on grass fires in California, it all made a lot of sense now. All that dead grass was there to feed the fuel of the wildfires.

He tossed a plastic grocery bag onto the back seat.

We drove in silence, but my nagging thoughts kept me from letting it go. "Is that how you knew my name? You saw me on the news?"

He sniffed. "Yes."

"What was your plan? Were you going to turn me in?"

"Maybe," he shrugged.

"Fucking great."

"But then, you were interesting. I can't believe you told me everything, the truth." His eyes got wider. "I thought maybe if you lied about your name I'd take you to the next police station, I would turn you in. I thought maybe if you lied about the past few days I'd turn you in. But you didn't lie, except to yourself."

"What are you talking about?"

"Whatever it is driving you to see Nick, it isn't just to get your son back, or to get closure."

I couldn't process everything he was saying. This goody two-shoes with a face for confessions was going to turn me in, but he had made a game of analyzing me first. "Who are you?"

"I am Wilson Hatchet. Everyone calls me Woody. I've been honorably discharged from the United States Navy. I wanted to take off a year before going back to school to get my Masters in Education. I've already been accepted to a program for teaching math in Washington, but first I'm going to spend the winter skiing with a buddy of mine, in Bend, Oregon. I'm not any different from what you knew before."

"You punched a man in the face and left him for dead." My voice was raised.

He spoke more quietly, "You shot a man with his own gun, pushed him out of his car and left him for dead."

I shook my head and crossed my arms. "He didn't die."

He reached his hand over to touch my leg. Why did this simple act seem to simmer all of my anger at once? His eyes met with mine, "I can go back, if you want."

Miles ticked by. The smile on Woody's face was long gone, so were the show tunes he hummed. How could I trust that he wasn't going to drive straight to the police and turn me in? My only leverage was the guy on the pavement, but if he died it would be my word against Woody's, and my word wasn't worth two squares of toilet paper in prison. Never had been.

He pulled over an hour later into a motel with a vacancy sign. "Look, I'm tired. I need some sleep, and you have a few things to do and a decision to make."

My thoughts broke away from the cycle, "What kind of decision?"

He didn't answer my question, but jumped out of the car and into the motel's front office. When he came back he handed me the plastic key card. "We got the last one, #102," he pointed to the door.

Running away was my first thought. Perhaps that was the decision I had to make. I could hitch a ride, be back on the road. But I was so tired. If he wanted to kill me or turn me in, wouldn't he have done that already? I took the key.

He maneuvered the car into a spot far away from our room, behind a large truck.

The room was dingy. It smelled of must and mold with an overtone of an unnatural floral chemical. The floral chemical didn't remind me of a specific flower, but the color purple. The carpet had a stain as big as a man. Like someone had died and they were too cheap to change the carpet.

The bedspread was straight out of a seventies decorator book, complete with avocado green trees and burnt orange leaves.

He walked into the room carrying the bright green suitcase, the bag from the gas station, and the Florida license plate.

He handed me the plastic bag. "Here. There's some hair dye and scissors."

The look of horror on my face must have been apparent; because when he looked at me he sat down on the nightstand. "Look. I'll take you to San Francisco, but we aren't going to get there with you looking like..." he hesitated, "you. We'll get caught."

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.

Woody looked up at the ceiling. He took a deep breath. "I don't want to get into the specifics yet. I just...I don't know, I'm rooting for you, I guess."

I looked into his eyes. The spark of his charisma was back. The lamp cast a catch light in his eyes, like the photographers always tried to do with my eyes at the news station. I'd never report the news again, not after everything I'd done to create the news.

He swallowed hard. "I want you to figure out that you don't really want Nick at all."

I furrowed my brows. "What do you mean?"

"I don't know. You should either cut and dye your hair, get some sleep and we can continue on to San Francisco in the morning; or you should turn yourself in before anything else happens."

I looked at the package of dye. Brown. I loved being blonde. I loved the ridiculous things people said to me when I was blonde, and the ridiculous things they did. Back at the station I dyed my hair even more blonde. As my hair got lighter, the interviews with criminals became easier. My blonde hair seemed to pacify them. This never happened to the brunette reporter.

I walked toward the bathroom.

"Put your hair in the bag," he said.

This comment made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. He was directing my every move, just like Nick. I was letting him take control, but what choice did I have?

Nick told me what to say and do. Nick told me what jobs to take. He picked out my clothes for important meetings. All of his direction was taken under the guise of how to be a normal wife, because that's what he wanted from me, or maybe that's just what I thought he wanted.

We were married in a small ceremony just six months after I killed and we buried Brendan. In my grief, I was an automaton. School was starting in just a few weeks for the fall semester. He explained that, as his wife, I could get my tuition reimbursed. He was my shelter. I panicked a few times watching the news, but he kept me from watching the coverage of Brendan's disappearance. He sheltered me at every turn from the fear that the body would be found. I thought every day I would be caught. Some days I couldn't get out of bed. On those days I thought I might kill myself, or confess to Brendan's wife, or turn myself in, but Nick always found a way to convince me to go back to being his normal wife. He made my life easier, until it wasn't.

I cut my hair, straight across, or as straight across as I could get at about shoulder length. After I was done cutting I remembered the hairdressers always dyed first, then cut.

I sat on the bed with the dye in my hair. Woody watched an action movie staring Jason Statham, taking sips of gin between punches. I couldn't make out the plot in the scene I watched, just that some people wanted to kill him and he didn't want to be killed. Wasn't that the plot for all of his movies? I wondered how he seemed to get out of situations unscathed.

I put my hands on the bottle of gin, but I didn't take a swig. What would alcohol do at this moment to help me? But then I thought it really couldn't do that much to hurt my situation either and took a big swig.

"I want to see what they are saying on the news," I said. Heat rose from my chest to my mouth. I'd be feeling good soon.

"I figured you might," he said. "I'm warning you, you're not going to like it."

"Why?"

"You'll have to see it for yourself." He pointed the remote at the screen, but pounding on the buttons didn't give him the reaction I expected. The television was old, and the remote control's buttons were worn out.

After swearing at the box, the channel changed a few times quickly. He flip-flopped back and forth through the channels until it finally settled on CNN. They reported on tornados in the Midwest. The destruction was devastating and always was, always had been, always would be. Reporters were required to blame the devastation on climate change, or to ask leading questions to this effect. But I believed the increasing destruction had as much to do with the expansion of human growth as it did weather changes. The destruction was due to people living in places they shouldn't, with increasingly fragile homes, in addition to the fierceness of the storms. An expert in earthquakes told me that in an interview. The earthquakes weren't any stronger, but people were living in denser areas and the human toll for earthquakes was much greater. I extrapolated this idea to cover these devastating storms as well since there were more people living in the Midwest than ever before.

After the tornado coverage the host, a blonde, said: "Later, we talk to Detective Turner of the Hartford, Connecticut Police Department. He'll bring us up to speed on the 'Bonnie' case."

"She's talking about me," I said. "That's what that guy..." the image of the man lying on the pavement with the blood running out of his head flashed through my mind. I shook my head to clear away the image. "That's what that guy said. He called me 'Bonnie without a Clyde.' That has to be what the police named me."

"I said you wouldn't want to know." His voice was flat, as though he himself didn't want to know.

The television broke to a commercial.

"But they were bank robbers. I didn't rob a bank."

"You worked in the media, Robyn. Did anyone at the station care about semantics like that?"

I thought for a moment, but I didn't have to. No one ever cared about the criminals. No one cared about their motivations or needs. All they ever said on the news was that the criminal had a history of mental illness. Didn't everyone? Whatever the reporters could do to make the story flashier, more memorable, was done. Including calling a woman on the lam 'Bonnie.' I hung my head and said: "No."

The blonde came back on. "So we've all heard the story about Bonnie. She's on the loose in a cross-country trek, leaving behind a trail of destruction." The blonde went off script, "Much like the tornadoes we've just been discussing." She looked like a woman expecting a laugh from a tough audience. "Yes, well. We have an exclusive interview with the detective on the case, Detective Turner. He'll be telling us about some new developments. Welcome to the show, Detective Turner."

The camera switched to a young detective, maybe early thirties. His suit was wrinkled, but his hair and makeup were perfectly styled by the television crew. "Thank you, Holly. I'm happy to be here." This wasn't true. I could see it in his false smile. He was being forced to come on the show, by whom I didn't know.

The camera switched back to the blonde. "The woman we now know as 'Robyn Hughes' has been seen in Connecticut, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas and New Mexico. Fingerprints have placed her at carjackings, shootings and thefts."

Holly leaned in, "Detective Turner, for people who are not close to the story, can you elaborate on the crimes you know she committed?"

Detective Turner kept his body language to a minimum. Even at his young age, he was at least moderately experienced with the rules of television interview engagement. "We have reason to suspect that she stole a late model Escalade here in Connecticut and drove it to Ohio. When the highway patrol there pulled her over for a standard traffic violation, she fled to a restaurant and got rid of the car."

"How did she ditch the car?" Holly asked.

"She left the keys in the ignition and the door open. A young man, Darius Smith, stole the vehicle about fifteen minutes later, according to the Ohio Highway Patrol's timeline."

Holly scrunched her eyebrows together, "And that car then was involved in a high speed chase?"

"Correct."

"And what happened to Darius?"

A picture of the crash scene with the Escalade sitting prominently in the middle of the screen and a red car crushed in the background splashed on the screen. My head pounded.

"He was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead the next morning of hemorrhaging in the brain."

I swallowed what little moisture was left in my mouth.

"How old was Darius, Detective Turner?"

"He was seventeen."

"And he didn't have a license?"

I held my fingers up to my face in disbelief.

Turner shook his head. "No," he said. "He was living with his grandmother and did not have access to a vehicle."

"Also in Ohio, Mrs. Hughes was involved in a carjack?" Holly was relentless.

I prayed for a television break.

"There is no indication that she carjacked the car in Ohio. We believe she hitchhiked. There are witnesses to that effect."

Holly looked into the camera, "When we come back, more details on 'Bonnie,' the cross country mother who will not be stopped."

Tears ran down my face, sucking away what little moisture I had left in my body. Woody stood up, walked over to the sink and filled a glass of water. The water smelled like rotten eggs, but I drank it down in two or three large gulps. I chased it with another two large swigs of gin.

My head was starting to burn, but before I could rinse off the dye the intro for Holly's show, called "CNN: Crime," ripped across the screen with swoops of blue against graphics of a black man in handcuffs and another man, his hair wild, behind bars.

"We're back with Detective Joseph Turner, the head detective for Connecticut's State Police in charge of bringing back the notorious 'Bonnie.' "

"I'm only one Detective on the team, Holly."

Holly ignored this comment. "And how long after hitchhiking, or as some have said, carjacking, did she shoot the victim, John Springer?"

"Based on the information passed on to me, Mr. Springer was found approximately four hours later in a secluded park in Indiana. He had a GSW, sorry, a gunshot wound, in the right leg." He was likely warned against using TLA's or 'Three Letter Acronyms,' as they confuse the general public. But GSW would never confuse anyone that followed crime reports.

"Were there any other injuries?" Holly never asked a question she didn't know the answer to.

"Yes, he had many lacerations and contusions to the face and body."

"He was also taken to the hospital?"

"Yes, he is still in the hospital."

"And he doesn't admit that Robyn Hughes was involved in his injuries?"

"No." Turner didn't elaborate.

"Who does he blame for his injuries, Detective Turner?"

"He said the devil, disguised as a woman, caused his injuries." His voice was monotone.

"Just goes to show you what can happen when you pick up hitchhikers."

Turner smiled with his eyes raised, but it was brief. "In most places it is illegal."

"She also ditched the car she stole from Mr. Springer?"

"Yes, in Illinois."

"And she picked up a new car?"

"She stole the keys to a Porsche Boxster from a woman in Springfield."

"We have tape from the woman, Mary McGowan." Holly looked to the left and a picture of Mary filled the screen.

"She took me to my room. Put me in a closet. She wedged one of those plastic things under the door so I had to bang for hours to get help when I woke up." Mary huffed. "She says she was looking for a fugitive," Mary said. "But she was the fugitive."

The interview went on, but I felt sick and my head was burning. The commercial would be on soon. I coughed a few times into the bathtub while the water rushed over my head. I left it there until I felt the nausea subside.

When I came back I stole another swig of gin. The bottle was half gone.

Holly continued on, "Have the police been able to identify how she got to New Mexico?"

Detective Turner looked pained to answer the question. "No. That's still an open question. We are looking for information on that. I believe after our interview there will be a number you can call if you have any information. There is a reward if the information leads to an arrest."

I recognized Holly's smile. Everything about it said _I know the crazy answer to the next question I'm going to ask._ "Do you have any reason to think she didn't just fly to New Mexico?"

"Yes. According to her husband she has had a fear of flying since she survived a small airplane crash in high school."

Holly's head turned slightly, her chin tucked down. It was a subtle, but practiced, interviewer movement. "Can you elaborate on that incident?"

"Yes. She and a handful of other students in her high school took a small plane for their senior trip in upstate New York. One girl died in that instance."

"Do you have any reason to suspect that Robyn, or whatever her name was at the time, was involved in the crash?"

I stood up and screamed at the television, "What? What is she saying? I crashed the plane? That's insane!"

Woody's soft eyes and warm touch calmed me almost instantly. I took swig.

"No," Detective Turner continued. "We interviewed two other women from that crash. We don't have any reason to suspect that Mrs. Hughes, or as she was known then, Cecelia Young, had anything to do with the plane crash."

Woody's eyebrows raised, "Cecelia? You don't seem like a Cecelia to me..."

I looked back at the television.

Holly's smile was back, the one that said she knew the answer to the next question. "Are there any new reports on her whereabouts?"

"Yes. We have a report of her in Southern California."

The air blew out of my lungs like a punctured tire. I couldn't breathe. When I tried to pull in air from my nose the smell of purple was overwhelming. I coughed until I developed a hiccup fit.

"And we have a video of that." Holly looked over to her left, most likely to her producer. The screen filled with a grainy, black and white picture showing Woody and I walking into the grocery store.

"Shit. Shit. Shit," I said.

Woody rolled his eyes. "There's no way they know who I am from that picture."

Holly started talking, "It appears someone is with her there, Detective Turner."

The screen went to split view. It's the best way to allow for the host to interrupt the guest during an interview without actually coming off as _rudely_ interrupting. The television audience could pick up on subtle non-verbal clues that they wouldn't be able to see if the screen only had Detective Turner on it. This would be the lightning round section of the interview. "Yes, we are now looking for a new person of interest in the case—"

Holly interrupted, "So you think Bonnie found her Clyde?"

Detective Turner took his eyes off the camera, presumably looking at the producer in his own location. I could almost see the producer pointing his finger back at the camera. Detective Turner then looked back at the camera, "Based on the eyewitness reports he is about five feet eleven inches tall, brown hair." And he is bleach blonde so we know how well to rely on eyewitnesses. "We are working to see if we can find any specific identifying information." He didn't answer her question, and never said anything about the 'Bonnie and Clyde' business. He looked as disgusted with the nickname as I was.

"I understand they purchased some unusual items?" Holly asked.

"The manager said they were buying herbs for a chicken."

"Why would they be buying herbs?"

"We have no idea."

Holly asked: "What kind of things are you doing to identify this guy?"

The detective took a breath. "We are tracking down all the credit card holders an hour prior and an hour after this video was taken. We are working in cooperation with the California State Police to track down all the holders of those credit cards to talk to them about what they may have seen. Any witness that may have seen the car they were driving, what they purchased or were wearing would be of use to us."

"Can't you just find out who was buying herbs?"

"Shit. Shit. Shit," I said again. "What are we going to do?"

Woody hushed me again. We missed the detective's reply.

Holly shuffled a few papers. "Tell us more about Robyn Hughes. What have you learned about her so far?"

"To be honest we don't know a lot about her. She has a twin brother, Justin. Her father left when she was twelve. The family moved around a lot. She ran away from her mother after graduating high school, but before she was of legal age. She met her husband in college. She was an accomplished television reporter here in Hartford, Connecticut, until she made a big mistake."

"What kind of mistake?"

"She struck an underage pedestrian with a news van."

The screen split again. Even though the story was likely well known, Holly's face looked not only surprised, but also pained. "The incident wasn't fatal though?"

"No." The detective took a deep breath. "But a lot of legislation on distracted driving was being considered at the time. The case made headlines because of the age of the victim and the fact that it was a news van. There was also a photograph sent around the press of her looking at her phone."

"And she went to jail?"

"After a year long trial process she was sentenced to York Correctional, our state women's prison, for a term of five years."

Her practiced maneuver of the head tilt and chin tuck showed up again. "But it's only been two years since she was put in prison."

"Yes, well a state prosecutor struck a deal. She was released on probation based on testimony against her cell mate."

I winced, that was supposed to be a secret, but now every secret I ever held was on display for the entire world to see, and judge. That is, except the secrets I kept to myself.

Holly shook her head. "And then she went on a crime spree?"

"Yes. Although it appears none of the crimes were pre-meditated."

"You do believe there is one crime she has long been considering?" Holly's teeth showed, pearly white and perfectly straight.

"We believe she is going to try and confront her husband and kidnap her son. She's been on a trajectory in that direction, with one small deviation down to New Mexico, as you mentioned earlier, since her release."

"What do you suppose is driving her to find him?"

"I really couldn't say."

"You don't have a theory?"

"It seems Mr. Hughes was supposed to pick Mrs. Hughes up from prison, but attempted to disappear with her son instead."

Holly's eyebrows reached up to the stage lights, a forced surprise on her face. She looked down at her notes, but I knew it was just a matter of pacing. Holly looked back up at the camera. "Mr. Hughes was quoted in the paper yesterday saying, 'After everything she's done do you think she deserves to have her son back?' Do you have any response for that, Detective Turner?"

"Custody is a matter for the Connecticut judicial system."

"But do you think she should get her son back?"

"I think both her and her husband need to return to Connecticut and work out their issues within the Connecticut legal system." Detective Turner knew his way around cameras and reporters, he didn't even acknowledge the premise of the question.

"What measures do you have in place to protect Mr. Hughes and her son?" The words 'her son' were emphasized so strongly they could not be missed.

"I don't want to go into the specifics, Holly, but we are working carefully with Detective Swan of the San Francisco Police and Detective Sergeant Newly of the California State Troopers to protect Mr. Hughes should Mrs. Hughes show up."

"Thank you, Detective Turner."

The camera switched to a full screen of Turner. This was the moment he was supposed to thank Holly for having him on the show, only he said: "One more thing I wanted to add, Holly."

The camera went back to Holly, and instead of the mock surprise she'd been displaying earlier, her mouth fell open for a moment in genuine surprise. "We only have a few more moments."

"I understand," Turner said off camera. None of this was anticipated, but most producers know that makes for better tension. "It has recently come to my attention that Nick Hughes, Mrs. Hughes' husband, may have been involved in a cold case I've been investigating for five years."

"Mr. Hughes?" Holly said. "Are you saying—?"

"I'm saying there is significant evidence, not fully examined, that implicates Mr. Hughes in an older crime here in Connecticut. Once this evidence has been thoroughly—"

"Sounds intriguing, but we are really short of time, Detective Turner."

The segment closing graphic came on the screen just as Turner said: "Thank you for having me, Holly."

The camera switched to a tight angle of Holly leaning in. "After the break we'll talk with FBI profiler Noah Cooper about Robyn Hughes. You may be surprised to hear about the long list of women tracking down their husbands and what they've done to get justice."

Woody pounded on the remote to turn off the television, but the television didn't respond. The commercial played for the yogurt that Tony had sung in the car. The commercial had just reached the end when the television finally shut off.

"Be a kid, lick the lid." I said in a flat tone to finish off the end of the commercial. I walked back to the bathroom. From the burn in my scalp, I knew the hair dye had been in way too long. I worked the packaged conditioner into my hair. What had Detective Turner meant by a cold case five years ago? If it was evidence of Brendan's murder, why had he said Nick was involved?

When I walked back into the room Woody was pacing a ten-foot path between the bed and the dresser holding the television.

"They're going to find you, Woody," I said.

"Sh!"

"I'm sick of you shushing me!" I burst out. "Look. The cut and dye was a good idea. But you have to leave me here. I don't want you to get involved. I just need to get to San Francisco."

"Don't you see?" he asked. "You don't need to go to San Francisco. You shouldn't go to San Francisco. They're waiting for you there. And this detective...he says he has evidence on Nick. What is that about?"

"How should I know?"

"I saw it on your face. You know something."

I thought about it. I had probably looked as shocked as Holly. My mind wandered. Evidence against Nick; what would it be? Nick said he got rid of all of the evidence of me killing Brendan. But he refused to tell me where we buried him, even after I begged. He said I was too weak. I would tell his wife, or worse, the police. His view was that it was better that I live my life than dwell on what I couldn't remember in my past.

"I have to go," I said, but the conviction in my voice wasn't there.

"No. You don't," he said. "Just run away with me. We'll both go to Bend. You can learn to ski." His fingers ran through my wet hair. His smile was back, the one set for confessions.

Our eyes locked. My breathing was heavy. He leaned in to kiss me. I didn't push him away, at least not at first.

My heart beat faster. Warmth radiated from my heart to envelope my core. His lips were smooth.

I pushed him away, "I'm not looking for a relationship."

He leaned back in, "Who said anything about a relationship?"

His lips parted from mine. His hand moved up my torso to shed his shirt from my body. His eyes wandered down to my breasts. "You are so beautiful."

Before he could kiss me again I said, "Look. You have to promise me."

His head tilted, "Promise you what?"

I looked up into his eyes. I bit my lip just before speaking. "Promise me when it's over you'll let me go."

He started to say something, but I put my fingers on his lips.

I said: "Either I go now, walk out that door and you never find me again. Or when we wake up we go our separate ways."

"What if I say no?" he asked. He pulled me closer. Our lips locked together, but he pulled his head back, "Just let me stay." He pulled down my panties, and then moved his hands up my thighs.

His own pants slipped off when he stood up. He repeated, "Just let me stay with you."

I didn't say anything until he was nose to nose with me again. "No." I wrapped my leg around his body. The conversation was over.

When I woke up a few hours later Woody was snoring like a chainsaw. I slipped out of the bed. My feet ached slipping them into the sandals. I dug through his pants and found the set of keys.

He stopped snoring for a second when the keys jiggled. But then he coughed and picked up the snoring again. I was worried for a moment that he'd caught me. I slipped into some fresh clothes. I grabbed my purse and walked out into the parking lot.

The echo from the creak of the door weakened my resolve by half, but I was determined to keep Woody out of my troubles. I realized I cared about him, but he was better off without me.

I'd been using sex to get what I wanted for years, maybe even a decade. Men did what I asked of them in the midst of their climaxes, but doing what I asked after sex was much harder to accomplish. He never would have let me go when he woke up. I needed to get to Kyle. I was so close, and Woody was standing in my way.

I shut the door, put the key in the ignition and prepared myself for the road. But when I turned the key nothing happened. No weak turn over, or clicking noise, just nothing.

I searched around in the dark cabin for the knob to pop the hood. He was already prepared for my deception, even if I hadn't been. I thought he might have pulled a fuse, or took one of the wires off the battery. Either way I could fix that even with my limited knowledge of cars. When I flicked the dome light nothing happened. He had to have disconnected the battery. I felt around in the dark for the knob. I found the knob and proceeded to repeat the loud creaking noise that made my heart beat faster. I looked around, but couldn't see much in the dim light.

Gravel crunched behind me, but when I looked around I couldn't see anything. I got the hood up. Even in the dim light my problem was apparent. The whole battery was gone.

"Looking for this?" Woody said from behind me.

I stifled a scream and whipped around.

His hands held up the car's battery.

My heart sank. I wasn't going to get away from him easily.

"Just let me go." I pleaded.

"We had a deal."

"I can't hold up my end of the bargain."

He shut the car's hood. "Let's go inside."

I hung my head low. "I don't want to be any more trouble for you."

He didn't say anything as we shuffled back to the room.

"I think it's too late for that," he said finally. "I have a new idea. You just have to trust me."

He'd have to sleep again sometime, and I'd be long gone before he woke up. "Okay," I said.

"Let's get some sleep," he said pointing toward the bed. It took a while, but he fell asleep again, while I lay perfectly still with my back to him. His arms draped over me, but I managed to wriggle out of them.

Bonnie was without Clyde again. I didn't know what love was, and I was equally sure he didn't either.

I stared at my new, strange self in the bathroom mirror. A haircut and dye probably wasn't going to fool anyone, but it was fooling me. I turned my head, half expecting for the reflection to stay steady. As if the woman in the mirror wasn't me at all.

I walked out of the motel room and into the low, harsh sunlight. Long shadows were cast from the handful of cars in the parking lot. The truck Woody parked next to was gone. Cars sped by on the highway.

The air was crisp as I jaunted across the street in cut off jeans I'd hacked apart in the bathroom. Before my hand was fully stretched out to hitch a ride, a beat up truck screeched to a halt and pulled over. The door stuck, but I managed to open it. The woman inside was slightly overweight and wore a plaid flannel shirt under khaki overalls. Her smile was stern.

I reached my hand out to shake, "I'm Cece." I didn't want to get into a guessing game like the last ride.

The woman reached over to shake. Her hand was covered in rough calluses, "Susan." She put the car in gear. The car did as she requested, but not willingly. "Where are you headed?"

"San Francisco."

"Headed to Sacramento."

I winced at the fragmented sentence. I didn't know exactly where Sacramento was, but I was confident it was in the right direction. At least it would be away from Woody.

"Gonna get cold in that outfit, those shoes," Susan said.

"I'll manage." I waited for the questions, the conversation, but there was nothing. The radio droned on with music, but nothing that stuck in my brain. The dry grass turned to tall trees, then even taller trees. The road went from straight to winding. My ears popped as we climbed elevation.

Susan pulled over for an awkward, almost completely conversation-less exchange of driver duties. She didn't leave the truck, but as I opened the door she climbed over the console and into the passenger's seat. I went around the front of the truck into the driver's seat.

At first I had a rough time with the gear shifter; the last car I drove was a Porsche. First gear on the old truck was a granny gear and second gear didn't want to take. I got the hang of it through Susan's harsh stares.

I reveled in the silence of Susan. However, my stomach was empty, ready for its next gorging session. Susan didn't eat, or drink. She never had to stop and pee. The truck didn't need gas. The sign for Sacramento said fifty miles. Below that was a sign for San Francisco, just another eighty-seven miles farther.

Before long there was a sign welcoming us to Sacramento.

The edges of Sacramento looked like every other run down western town I'd been through in the last few days.

Susan cleared her throat at a red light. "Look, I've got some things to do."

Susan's arms shook. "Sure," I said.

"I gotta go to the bank. Make a withdrawal. If you could just stay in the driver's seat?"

I wasn't sure what this was all about, but then Susan sweetened the deal. "I've got some money in this bank. When I'm done in there we can go eat."

I didn't know what to say, so I stared at Susan.

"It's all on the up and up. I swear," Susan said. "And you've been a good travel partner." Her voice wavered.

This rolled through my mind. How was I a good travel partner, exactly? At least I didn't have to tell her my life story, like I did with Woody. I didn't have to make sure a child was fed or warm, like with Tony. "Okay."

"Good. Pull into this bank," she said, pointing. "When I come out, you just be ready to drive north. I'll be carrying some stuff, so I don't want nobody bugging me."

This didn't feel right. North was not the direction to San Francisco, but the pain in my stomach ruled my mind.

I had a rough time of backing up into the parking spot like she asked. I just missed the ten-foot white sign.

Susan said she'd be quick, to keep the truck running. She reached into the bed of the truck to pull out a large leather briefcase; the kind lawyers pull around on wheels full of their briefs.

"Can I help you with that?" I asked.

"Nah," Susan said. "I'll manage." Susan walked across the parking lot into the bank.

I jumped out of the truck to stretch my legs and back. I turned to admire the view. The overcast sky cast a dull sheen on a pond in a park in the distance. I wrapped my arms around myself against the rising wind. My toes already felt like ice.

Susan sprinted across the parking lot. "Get in the car!" She screamed. She hurled the case into the back of the truck while I put my seat belt on.

"Just go!" Susan screamed.

I struggled to put the car in gear. A few people came out of the bank. One ran over to the parking lot exit.

"Go around him!" Susan screamed so loud my ears rang.

"Where?"

"Hop the curb!"

I did as instructed. There were sirens in the distance.

"Turn right!"

Susan screamed directions for the next four intersections, but then took a deep breath. She turned her head in a dozen directions out the windows. "Okay. I think we lost them."

"What just happened?"

"I made a withdrawal," she said. "Just slow down now."

"What kind of withdrawal has people chasing after you in the parking lot?"

"My ex ran off. The bank took my money, and then foreclosed on my house anyway. I only took how much they owed me. Four thousand seventy five dollars and sixty six cents." Susan held out her hand with two quarters, a dime and a nickel and a penny.

"Wait," Robyn said. "You robbed that bank?"

"It was my money!" Susan screamed.

My hands shook. "Why didn't you tell me you were going to rob the bank?"

"Didn't want to get you involved." Susan crossed her arms together.

"Well I am involved. I just drove your get-away vehicle." I looked out the rear-view mirror, checking for anyone following us, but saw something entirely different. "Fuck!"

**Chapter 22**

California - Section 12500

Operating a Motorcycle without a Motorcycle Endorsement

"WHAT?" SUSAN TURNED to look out the back window. Twenty-dollar bills were flying out of the back of the truck bed. "Pull over!"

I steered the car to the side of the road.

Susan hopped out to shut the briefcase.

For a brief moment I saw a gun, just before Susan stuffed it into her jacket.

Susan crawled around in the truck bed looking for loose twenties. She jumped out of the truck and started walking in the opposite direction to pick up the bills.

I leaned my head out the window. "Get back in the fucking truck, Susan." Of all the bank robbers in America, I had to get stuck with the stupidest, battiest one.

Susan was pouting when she got back in the truck. I drove off, but after a long silence Susan whined: "Don't swear at me."

I remembered the gun tucked into Susan's jacket. "Sorry, I'm just hungry. I haven't eaten in a while." Twenty-dollar bills hung out of Susan's overall pockets.

"We should head up to Yuba City," Susan said, her mood miraculously improved. "I know this crab place."

The thought of Yuba City, not San Francisco, made me wince, but I said: "Fine. Just point me the way."

I enjoyed the silence again for the next hour of the drive. But the money in the back and the gun in the crazy woman's jacket weighed heavily my mind. I could see it was weighing on Susan as well.

Once in Yuba City, Susan pointed the way to 'The Crab Shack.'

Susan wrestled the leather case from the truck and sat it on the floor under the table. I put my purse right next to it.

I ordered the cheapest, heartiest thing on the menu, a stuffed crab pasta dish. I felt ill after eating half of it, but forced myself to finish every morsel. I nodded at the waiter every time he asked if we wanted more bread and water. I stuffed five rolls in my purse, wrapped in one of the cloth napkins.

Susan saw me doing this and said: "My great aunt used to do that. She used the napkin as underwear too. At least when the rolls were eaten."

Using a napkin as underwear? I didn't say anything, preferring to keep my food down. At least Susan hadn't noticed I was also stealing twenties from her leather case. I excused myself to the bathroom after finishing most of my pasta dish.

On the way back from the bathroom I spotted a California state trooper entering the restaurant. I ducked behind a wall just in time to hear the hostess say, "She's over there. There's another woman with her too, but I don't know where she went."

I looked for a way to get out of the restaurant without going by the troopers, but the only way out was through the kitchen.

There was an apron hanging from the hostess station. As the hostess left to lead the state troopers through the restaurant, I grabbed the apron. With the apron on, I walked through the kitchen. One of the cooks looked up, wiped his face with his forearm, and then went back to chopping onions.

I walked out the back door. I was halfway across the grass to the next restaurant when a man called from behind me, "Hey!"

I looked back. A fat man in a 'Crab Shack' apron called after me, "You know you can't take the apron home."

I slipped it off, "Oh sorry."

He ran up to take it from me. "And make sure the next time you come in you have the right shoes, or Jimmy will write you—" Gunshots rang out from the restaurant. He turned away. "What the fuck?"

People started screaming.

"I'll keep that in mind." I ran.

The strip mall a few blocks down had a coin-operated laundry mat. I slipped inside to warm up; figuring all the dryers running would heat the place up like a set of roaring fireplaces. The heat and humidity filled my lungs. I sat on the hard plastic chairs.

A woman and her young daughter waited on the chairs. The girl played paper dolls on an electronic tablet. The mother talked on the phone like she was alone in her bathroom. "Yeah, well he don't know...No. You aren't listening...No. I said he don't know I know...I know...Well as long as he don't know I know, then I can catch him...But if he finds out I'll kill him..."

I winced, looking at the little girl happily pulling a new dress on the doll.

The woman continued. "I know...Why not?...Oh, Sheri, don't go telling Cathy...Because she'll tell Luke and he'll tell Dale...Because she can't help herself..." The woman started laughing. "But I only told you because I know you won't tell Dale..."

The conversation went on like this while I stared at the laundry, wanting to be warm and dry, possibly even tossed around.

The little girl put lipstick on the electronic doll, and then wiped it off. She looked up at me, and we both smiled. "Do you like my doll?"

"Sure."

"I like your toenail polish," the girl said.

I looked down to my chipped pink toenails. Carla got a kick out of painting my toenails, but then I'd have to paint hers to match. Warmth was returning to my feet. I wiggled my toes. "Wish I had nice shoes like your doll."

The girl's mother said: "Wait a minute, Sheri." She looked at me. "Who are you?"

I understood the tone of her voice to mean _don't talk to my kid_. "No one."

The woman stared into my eyes for a moment, and then went back to her phone.

In the corner of my eye I saw a television. I walked across the room to see my mother, in a hospital bed, split screen with a reporter. Rolling across the bottom of the screen the text read: "Mother of 'Bonnie' makes plea from her death bed: 'Come home, Destiny.' " There was no sound, except my groan. What did she know? What evidence had surfaced since the night before that Detective Turner had alluded to in the last few seconds of the interview?

"Shit. Shit. Shit," I said. I rushed over to the desk in the back. I rang the bell to call the attendant. No one came. I rang the bell again. No one came. I rang the bell continuously.

Somewhere deep in the laundry mat's bowels howled a voice. "Hold your damn horses. What have you got some God damn laundry fucking emergency?"

I held my hand back from ringing the bell again.

The skinniest man I'd ever seen walked into the dark room behind the desk. An unlit butt of a cigarette hung from his mouth. "What the fuck is wrong with you ringing the damn bell like that? Can't a guy get a cigarette smoked?"

I didn't bother with apologies, or correcting his grammar. "Can you turn on the sound on the television?"

"Are you fucking serious?" The skinny man's face scrunched, stretching his skin in odd places. "This isn't a fucking bar. You don't get to make requests on the TV." He mumbled the next bit: "Can't even make fucking requests to change the fucking channel to the 49er's there either."

"Is there a pay phone?"

"What do I look like, fucking Google Maps?"

"Can I use your phone?"

"Hell no." The wisps of his hair flew side to side while he shook his head. "Get the fuck out of here, crazy bitch."

"Look," my hand smashed against the desk. "I've been through a lot in the past few days, that's my mother on the television. I just want to know what the fuck going on."

He looked at the television, looked back at me, then back to the television.

I knew I'd made a huge mistake, but maybe he wouldn't catch on. "Never mind. I gotta go." I turned around. _Shit. Shit. Shit._ I was going to have to get a lot better at being on the lam than telling people I was the person behind the nationwide manhunt.

"But that means..."

I turned back around to face him. "Tell anyone and I'll come back and kill you." My voice came out calm, like I meant it, although deep down I knew I wouldn't bother.

His hair nodded with him. "Yeah. Whatever. Just get the fuck out," he said with less conviction.

I walked quickly toward the convenience store a few blocks down the street. "I need quarters. Do you have a pay phone?" I asked, handing the dreary convenience store attendant a twenty.

"You gotta buy something."

I plopped a bottle of water on the counter. "Pay phone?"

He pointed toward the back. "Over there."

He handed me a huge pile of quarters and a few rolled across the floor. I ignored them and headed straight for the phone.

Ring. I was lucky the phone worked, most of them didn't. Ring. I hadn't made a call from a pay phone in years and had forgotten about the annoying sound that emanated from the metal wrapped phone cord attached to the handset. Ring. It sounded like Styrofoam on my teeth. Ring.

"Hello?"

"Justin?"

"Who is this?" He yelled, like he'd been getting a lot of strange calls.

"It's Robyn."

"I know I told _you_ not to call."

"Mom's on the news."

"What's that got to do with me?"

"I couldn't hear the voice."

"Why are you calling _me_?"

"What did she say, Justin?"

"She said you should come home. She called you by your real name, too. Press got all excited to hear about her reasons for calling you _Destiny_ , but they still call you 'Bonnie.' Not sure why though, since you didn't rob any banks."

I didn't say anything. But then we both started at once "I..."

"Or have you?"

I could hear his breathing over the pay phone noise.

"Ah, shit, Robyn, seriously?" He paused, but then continued before I could form an answer. "Never mind, don't answer that." He forced out air between his lips. "I've got more bad news."

"What?"

"Doc says she's only got a few more days." He exhaled. "If you want to see her you need to come now."

"I'd never make it," I said. "But what's the good news?"

"This isn't a good news / bad news thing, Robyn. It's just bad news. You should turn yourself in. The police could transport you back here."

"No. I wouldn't make it."

"Where are you?" Justin asked, but then said: "No. Don't tell me."

I fidgeted; the infuriating sound from the pay phone was the only sound from the phone.

Justin said, "Look. This doesn't make any sense. You can't just go to Nick's house. He's not going to take you back."

Why did he think I wanted Nick to take me back?

He continued, "It's not like with Dad—"

I cut him off, "Don't talk to me about Dad."

"Just because Nick left you doesn't mean you have to—"

I hung up the phone. I'd never see my mother again, except in replays on television. I opened my purse and counted the twenties. A cop car whizzed by. I turned away from the window.

Four hundred dollars could get me a proper change of clothing for this weather including shoes and a hotel room where I could manipulate the television. I could watch my mother, find out what she was saying and if there was any development in Detective Turner's evidence.

***

"I can't pay with a credit card, they've all been canceled." I was practically shouting at the old man behind the desk. "My wallet was stolen."

"How come you have your ID then?" he shouted back. He held up Mary's ID. He hadn't even questioned me about not looking like her.

"It wasn't in my wallet."

He studied the ID as though it held important secrets. "Come a long way from Illinois," he shouted.

I didn't reply.

"I guess," he said a little quieter. "I'm going to disable the phone, though. And the Pay-Per-View and Internet on the television."

"Fine," I said.

"What?"

I shouted, "I said fine."

"Oh."

I set the heater in the room as high as it would go. It whined and buzzed in protest, but shot out desert hot air anyway. My feet were warmer with the thick socks and boots from the army supply store. I turned on the television, but my mother wasn't on the news. My head hit the pillow. The heater filled the room with a buzzing white noise.

I woke up later to the sound of knocking. The peephole revealed nothing. There was a thud when I opened the door a crack and the chain resisted anymore. A California state trooper stood two doors down. He didn't look my way. I shut the door very easy.

"Shit. Shit. Shit," I said. I put the leather coat on, put everything back in my purse, unlocked the chain on the door and then walked out. I didn't turn to look at the trooper, and hoped he hadn't seen me either.

I was half way down the street when a man on a motorcycle stopped in front of me. He stepped off the bike, but he didn't pull the key out. I kept walking toward him, watching him pat himself down, looking for something.

I walked between him and the motorcycle, and then got on. I'd had a lesson, as a fluff story piece on motorcycle safety. Wayne thought it would be fun to show my vulnerable side with motorcycle lessons. Everyone in television news had to pay his or her fluff piece dues sometime.

I started up the engine, and the man turned, "Hey."

I put the gear in first. And the next part, I remembered, was the art to learning to ride a motorcycle. I let the clutch out, careful not to give it any gas. My first lesson, video taped of course, I gave the bike too much gas before the clutch was out. The massage therapist the next day said my job was too dangerous.

The bike moved forward, just out of reach of the man. "What the fuck?" the man snarled.

I gave the motorcycle more gas, revving the engine up. It popped out of gear. I pushed on the foot petal and it lurched forward a few feet. I clicked again, let out the clutch and the motorcycle jerked forward slightly smoother.

The man ran behind me. I could hear his hard breathing. I felt his hand scrape my back, but he couldn't grab ahold of anything but the back of the bike. The weight of his body almost made me lose control, but I righted myself. I twisted the throttle. The man let go, shouting at me. I twisted more on the throttle and pushed down on another gear, working the clutch a little smoother.

I ran through a red light with my eyes almost closed. Horns honked. People yelled. As the yards ticked by I started to get the hang of the motorcycle. A sign for the highway said San Francisco and I followed it.

**Chapter 23**

Detective Joseph Turner

"DETECTIVE TURNER? PHONE for you." The shapely officer's sweet voice filled the station. "It's about 'Bonnie,' " she said with excitement, the kind used for salacious news about celebrities.

Detective Turner's face went flush. He didn't want to hear that name again for the rest of his life, but he wasn't about to chew out a woman in a visiting department. "Transfer it over," he said.

His hand was on the receiver when the phone rang, "Detective Turner."

"Good evening, Detective Turner. Your Lieutenant in Connecticut said you arrived in San Francisco last night. I tried your cell..."

"It isn't working inside this building..."

"I see," he said. "This is Sergeant Rivers of the California Bureau of Investigations in Sacramento. I'm afraid I have some bad news for you."

"What's that, Sergeant Rivers?"

"This woman, on the news, they call 'Bonnie?'" Sergeant Rivers had a squeaky voice, not unlike a stubborn faucet.

"We don't use that name, only the media."

"Oh yeah," he laughed. "Saw you on CNN."

"Her legal name is Robyn Hughes. You said you had bad news?"

"Yes. California Highway Patrol got a call at about 6:00 p.m. The manager for The Flamingo in Yuba City reported a suspicious person, a woman, paying cash with a weird story. He called it in, since she was from Illinois. We get a lot of drugs up in these parts."

"Drugs are everywhere," Turner said, dryly.

"Yeah, well meth is a real problem here. We have a deal with hotels to report suspicious persons, paying cash for their rooms. We've caught a half dozen cooking in their hotel rooms this way. Anyway, the officer called in the ID for the woman. ID came back as one of the aliases for Bon—I mean, Robyn Hughes. The manager, an old guy with hearing problems from his former life on oilrigs—rig pigs I think they're called. Anyway, he got the room number wrong."

"You just missed her, huh?" Turner put his forehead in his hand. Most of his upper body weight leaned against the desk.

"Yeah and the officer said he saw someone leave the room they later found was her real room, but he didn't get a good look at her. We got a report about half hour later of a woman stealing a motorcycle about two blocks away."

"Any word on the location of the motorcycle?" Detective Turner asked, but the hope was all gone in his voice.

"Yeah, more bad news I'm afraid." Sergeant Rivers coughed. "I'm sorry to say we found the motorcycle in the woods outside Boring."

"Boring?"

"Yeah, that's the name of the town. Boring," he said. "Sorry, Detective. It seems we didn't have our act together on this one."

"Thanks Sergeant."

"One more thing, Detective," Sergeant Rivers said. "One of my colleagues is doing an investigation here in Sacramento. Bank robbery. I saw the video, it was a woman, but doesn't look anything like your woman. We found the assailant also in Yuba City at a 'Crab Shack' restaurant. When we arrested her she said she was with another woman."

"Did you ask her about Mrs. Hughes?"

"We showed her a picture," he said. "But here's the part you might really be interested in. The woman says it _sorta_ looked like Mrs. Hughes. Only her hair was really different. She said the woman also looked younger."

"Did she say how the hair was different?"

"Shorter, and darker."

"Thank you, Sergeant. Keep in touch if you hear anything else."

"Will do, Detective. The press here wants to hear all about it."

When Detective Turner hung up the phone he pulled three more push pins from his drawer. The red one went into Sacramento, a blue one into Yuba City. The map didn't have Boring on it, so he had to look it up on the Internet. He pushed the green pin into a spot about half way between Yuba City and San Francisco. She was only an hour away.

The next few hours he'd be spending in his shift at the stakeout. First though, he picked up the phone to talk to his Lieutenant.

**Chapter 24**

California - Penal Code 207

Abduction

THE MAN SITTING next to me on the bus was snoring the full resounding snores of my father. Drunken snores. He tried to make some conversation as we left Vallejo, but I did my best to ignore him. I noticed the diabetic kit, almost accidentally, while digging through his bag. It was at the bottom, under the tightie whitie underwear. I hoped they were clean underwear at least, but from the faint brown streaks I didn't want to wonder too much. I put the insulin and set of needles in my purse.

The window was cool against my temples. I took deep cleansing breaths off the window.

I woke up to the bus' breaks screeching. It was foggy in San Francisco, with bumper-to-bumper traffic. They say it is almost always foggy in San Francisco. There was always traffic in big cities. The combination must be suicidal. I'd hoped to see the famous Golden Gate Bridge, but the haze of the evening fog and sheets of drizzle doused my hopes.

Not too far from the bus station I walked into a bar. I pointed at a tap when the bar tender asked what I wanted. Bars had televisions, and I'd hoped to see Nick's house on the television. Some clue in the background might help me find him.

Through two beers I watched the basketball game. Sweaty men ran back and forth shoving an orange ball through a hoop. No one cheered or got remotely exited when the ball went through the hoop. I didn't see the entertainment, but I watched intensely for teasers of the local news. People really started to pay attention to the game in its final minutes. There was cheering mostly when the little orange ball didn't make it through the hoop, or when one tattooed, sweaty man skittered across the floor and another tattooed, sweaty man stood over him in triumph. Most of the bar hung their heads when the game ended. Two people in the corner leapt up like they, personally, were responsible for the win.

When the news came on the bartender turned off the sound, but kept the news on one of the televisions. The other televisions changed to a bloody cage match full of other tattooed, sweaty men. I tried to concentrate on the local news, but the cage match hung heavy in my peripheral vision. I wondered if they mined the fighters from prison. I'd seen plenty of fights there, without the cage.

The weatherman was first in the late news line up. He was energetic, with a wild polka dot tie. With the weather in San Francisco he needed to maintain a positive attitude. His persona was bubbling over with happiness, he predicted a sun-filled day tomorrow.

The next story was about me, or as the media called me, 'Bonnie.' I wanted to beg the bartender for sound, but I didn't want to call any attention to myself. I watched in silence. The camera switched to a live local report on the scene in front of Nick's house. I stared into the television, but couldn't make out the house number. I looked for street signs in the background, maybe something in the skyline to help me find the house, but nearly missed the scroll at the bottom: "Seward Park neighborhood on high alert after 'Bonnie' reported in Yuba City."

Now I not only knew what neighborhood Nick was in, but that the neighbors, reporters, and cops would be looking for me.

I walked the streets of San Francisco in the rain until my feet hurt. I knew the way to Seward Park from the helpful real estate guide I picked up from a plastic bin. Each step I took toward Seward Park steeled my resolve even further.

The rain turned to an icy sleet as I walked up the steep incline. When I turned my head away from a car driving by me my foot slipped. I fell onto the concrete knee first. "Fuck."

"Who's that?" A man's voice called out from the dark.

"Nobody." I called back.

"It's 3:00 a.m. what are you doing out there? You want me to call the cops?"

I pulled up a hazy plan from the back of my brain. "Walking home, asshole," I slurred my 'S's. "Bars closed," I added with finger waving in the air.

"Shit. In this?" he asked. "Don't you know there's some crazy woman out to kill her husband?"

"I'll be fine," I said. Surely _that_ woman wouldn't hurt _me_.

"Look," he said. "Give me a minute and I'll give you a ride." His voice was getting closer. "You shouldn't be out here in the rain."

Another car drove by. The headlights rolled across the man's face. His beard was full; his eyes were hidden behind foggy, wet glasses.

"I said I'm fucking fine." I turned my back before he got any closer. I walked a little faster.

"Your fucking funeral," he called. "Some people you just can't help."

The steep incline leveled off. The tall trees had lost their leaves, and provided the sidewalk only spotty protection from the ice build up. Just enough, it turned out, for me to catch myself right before slipping to the ground either face first or on my ass.

I concentrated harder on staying upright than on what was going on around me when arms grabbed me from behind. A hand went over my mouth.

"Sh!" the man's voice said. It was a voice I recognized. It was Woody's hush.

I fought hard against his grasp, but he held me tight.

"I knew you'd be here," he said. "Get in the car."

I fought even harder.

"Don't make me hurt you, Robyn. You know I can."

I settled down. He opened the door with his free hand, and I got in.

I watched the houses flow by through the slick windshield. They all looked the same with porches and wooden beams above the front door, the same bushes in the front yard, and the same narrow concrete walkway to the front door. Only the colors of the houses were different. Nick's was lighter colored, maybe cream or light blue, but from the dim light in the newscast I couldn't tell exactly which.

He made a sharp turn down another steep hill and we started to drive away from Seward Park. The car slipped sideways. I gripped the sides of the car.

When we reached the bottom of the hill I let out a long breath.

"What do you want, Woody?" I asked finally.

"You can't bust your way into his house," he said.

"Watch me."

"I can't, Robyn. I can't watch you destroy yourself like this. Just hear me out."

"You can't change my mind," I said. "No smoldering sage is going to fix this. I'm going to get Kyle back and find out if Nick..."

"Find out what, Robyn? That he never loved you?"

What he said stung me as if he reached across and slapped me. I would have preferred the slap. I knew Nick didn't love me now, but he had before, he must have. And that wasn't want I wanted to know anyway. I wanted to know if _he_ was the one that killed Brendan. It all made so much sense now.

"You don't really love me, Woody. You just want a project. Someone you can fix. You don't want me, for me," I said. "You want to fix me to be someone else. Someone better."

His voice lowered, "Just like Nick, you mean."

"You don't know—" I stopped when I spotted a news van down a side street.

"I might not know him," he said. "But what are you going to do if you manage to make it past the cops? What are you going to ask him? What is your plan for _after_ you talk to him?"

I sat there in silence. I didn't have a plan for after.

"What is your plan, _Robyn_?"

"I don't have one," I said.

He looked at me with those easy eyes, and that gentle smile. "You told me to let you go. I'm asking you now to stay with me tonight. I'll get you out of here. We'll run away together."

"I'm not leaving without Kyle," I said.

I didn't say anything more, and he took my silence as submission, the same mistake that Nick had made.

We pulled up to a motel. I calculated my routes for escape, but knew Woody would be able to track me down with his car. He led me by the arm to a small room. The carpet, comforter and drapes had the smell of a thousand rainy days. The television was switched on to the same report I'd heard a few hours earlier, only with sound.

"The hunt continues for Bonnie," the reporter said just as Woody reached past me to turn off the television.

"Nick doesn't deserve as much attention as you and everyone else in the world is giving him right now."

I looked down at my soaking wet body and then back up at Woody. I put my finger up to his lips, "Then let's stop talking about him right now."

Woody swallowed hard. "Okay."

"Let's stop talking about everything for tonight."

His eyes stayed steady with mine as I walked toward the bathroom. "I'm going to take of these wet clothes and take a hot bath. You get comfortable on the bed, okay?"

"Okay," he said.

I shut the door to the bathroom and locked the door. The rushing sound of hot water echoed in the tiny harshly lit bathroom. Nicotine stains dotted the edge of the cultured marble sink. I stood on top of the sink and worked the window as quietly as I could. It was a long stretch from the sink to the window, so I got back down and climbed on the tub.

My boots slipped on the tub and made a noise. I was sure Woody heard it, but after a moment of listening and him not knocking on the door I proceeded to get my head and shoulders out the window, but I was wedged out sideways. As I wiggled through the tiny window a bum walked by the hotel.

"Hey lady, you need some help?"

"No," I said.

There was a knock on the door. "Robyn?" Woody called out in a loud whisper.

"Taking a bath," I said.

The bum tilted his deadlocked head, "You don't look like you're taking a bath."

"Everything alright?" Woody said.

"I'm fine," I said. "Just leave me alone."

"Okay," both men on either end said almost simultaneously.

**Chapter 25**

Detective Joseph Turner

DETECTIVE TURNER'S CELL phone rang. He lifted his head from his desk and pressed the 'talk' button. "What?"

"It's Swan. We got a hit on one of the people we haven't been able to get ahold of from the grocery store receipts. 'Wilson Hatchet' checked into a motel in San Francisco, just outside Seward Park."

Detective Turner bolted upright, banging his knee on the glove compartment. "Shit."

"What? We are moving in right now, as we speak. We're ahead of the curve this time, Turner."

"No," he said. "I banged... oh never mind."

A radio squelched in the background of Swan's phone. "That's them," he said. "Should be any minute now."

More squelching radio sounds echoed through the phone.

Detective Turner wished he were there to bring her down himself. His foot shook under the glove compartment. He focused his ears in to listen to the radio through the phone, but the sounds were indistinguishable.

The squelching continued. He had nothing to do but wait, and think. He stared into the empty coffee cup in front of him. Bits of the grounds were glued to the bottom.

After loud squelching sounds, there was a heavy a pause. Swan breathed into the phone liked he'd been holding his breath for three minutes. "Okay. That was the team. They found Mr. Hatchet."

"What about Mrs. Hughes?" Detective Turner asked.

Swan called into the radio, "What about Mrs. Hughes?"

The squelching radio echoed back. Swan groaned. "Mr. Hatchet is cooperating and, Detective Turner," he said, "she's not there. He said she took his car. I'll put out an APB."

Detective Turner stared at the dashboard. They were too late. Another chance to stop her annihilation, and they missed her again. "You better make sure Mr. Hughes is all right," he said to the cop in the driver's seat.

The cop opened the door just as Turner heard an unmistakable crack of a gunshot. He yelled into the cellphone, "Shot fired at Mr. Hughes's house! Call an ambulance."

**Chapter 26**

California - Section 664

Attempted Murder

Two hours earlier

NICK STOOD BY the window. The cops were still there, but hardly paying attention. They talked, smoked, and checked their phones. He checked all of the doors to make sure they were locked, again. He made sure the back window, away from the street, was unlocked. He opened the drawer in the hallway, again. The gun was still there—still loaded. He stood in Kyle's room for a long time, watching him breathe.

Robyn was getting closer. She'd find a way in. She was crazy like that when she was on a mission. Nothing would stop her. In the past her missions had been stories. She would be wild with excitement when she was on the hunt for a story.

He should have known not to leave her like he did, but he had to get Kyle away from her. At least when she came here he'd have the upper hand.

***

I walked up to the back door, but the doorknob was locked. I tried to use my credit card to jimmy the mechanism, but then I noticed the deadbolt. I looked around for another plastic rock, tried all the door jams and looked under the mat, but there was no spare key.

I noticed the window on the left had its mechanism to the right and the one on the right had its mechanism to the left. The perfect mirror image meant that one of the windows was unlocked. I tried the one on the left first, since it was above the concrete porch, and not the rose bush, but it wouldn't budge.

I stomped on top of the rose bush. Little bits of thorn sliced through my leg. The window slowly opened. Nick didn't do anything by accident. He'd left this window open on purpose. He wanted me to break into the house.

At each creak I thought the porch light would turn on or blue lights would flash, but none came. Once the opening was big enough to reach my hand in I used my finger to pull the curtain aside.

The room was dark. Coats hung along the far wall. It was just a small mudroom. On the floor lay two very small high top tennis shoes with Nike swoops. There was a pain in my chest. I almost started to cry, but I took a deep breath to clear my mind.

I pushed up the window even farther. I heard footsteps inside the house. I stood perfectly still outside the window on top of the thorny rose bush until the footsteps sounded much further away.

I wondered if there was a cop inside the house, but I decided not to care. I started with my upper body, then a leg and the other leg. I was standing in the mudroom, trying to control my breath. I heard only the whooshing sounds of my heart pumping harder than it should have for something I'd done more times in one week than most people may do in their entire lives.

I took a few more shallow breaths while removing my boots. I tiptoed to the door. I couldn't hear anything over the sounds of my own panic when I put my ear up to the door.

But then someone pushed up against the door. "Who is it?" It was Nick's voice. He had an unmistakable booming baritone.

I whispered, loud enough for him to hear, but hopefully quiet enough not to catch the cop's attention, "Me."

Nick opened the door. I pointed the syringe at him. "What's in that?" he asked and took a few steps back. His hands were in the air. I slipped inside pointing the syringe at his chest.

"God, you really are stupid, aren't you?" Nick asked.

I shut the door behind me. "Shut up," I said. I pushed him away with my syringe. I wanted to get him away from the windows. The wood floors creaked under our footsteps in the darkness.

He backed his way past a set of stairs. "Why did you come all this way?"

"I want to see Kyle... and I just want to know."

"You want to know what?" he asked.

"I want to know why you left me like that. Why did you take Kyle?"

Nick laughed, "You're kidding, right?"

"I'm pointing a syringe at you, Nick," I said. "Do you really think I'm kidding?"

"And I don't even know what's in it. Anyway, I didn't do a very good job, did I?" he asked. "You managed to track me down."

"But why?" she asked. "Why not just break it off while I was in prison?"

He stared at me without answering. An electronic radio crackled. "Keep your voice low or you'll wake him," Nick said, pointing toward the ceiling.

A little baby cry echoed from the baby monitor.

I looked up. He rushed toward me. I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. Nick grabbed the syringe away from me and shoved a knife in my stomach in one movement.

I crumbled to the floor. "Why?" I asked.

"Isn't it obvious?" He knelt down to whisper. "You came after me, broke into my house. I had to defend myself."

"No," I said. "Why did you kill Brendan?" My voice started to gargle. I slurred through some of the consonants.

I heard Kyle cry a little louder through the radio. I coughed and spit out blood.

"Stay right there," Nick said. "I'll be right back."

He stepped over me and up the stairs.

"Hello Kyle. It's okay. Sh."

"Dada," I heard him cry through the baby monitor.

"That's right, dada here. You want a bottle? Here you go. Yes, that's a good boy. Sh. Don't worry, that's not your mother down there. That's someone else, a crazy person. She had an accident. I called an ambulance. They're coming to get here."

"Fucking liar," I said as I spit out more blood.

I worked my way toward the stairs, but the sharp pain from the knife was too much for me to bear.

Nick walked around upstairs. "Kyle, this nightmare will all be over shortly. When you get up in the morning it'll be like nothing ever happened. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny."

I sobbed. Blood spilled out of my mouth. I would be dead soon enough. Nick's wish fulfilled.

"Nighty, night, Kyle," Nick said through the radio. "Sweet dreams."

Nick walked around me on his way down the stairs. I used up what strength I had left to reach for his leg, but he dodged my grasp. He leaned over to whisper to me. "You want to know why I killed Brendan?"

I tried to speak, but only blood came out of my mouth, no sound.

"Because he had what I wanted and I wanted you. You used to be so fascinating. I watched you, analyzed you. I wanted to tame that excitement, but then you started sleeping around."

I shook my head.

"Don't be ridiculous, Robyn. _Destiny_. You slept with everyone at work, everyone in the police station, even some of the crooks. Didn't you think that was humiliating for me?"

My eyes started to come unfocused.

"Stay with me," he said. "This will all be over soon."

I managed to sputter out, "Why?"

"Because I'm not done yet." He laughed. "I just wanted you to know, I knew you'd come for me. I was waiting for you."

I tried to breathe, but there was so much pain. Blood pooled around my body. I wish I could say that a white light opened up, but it was all darkness.

***

Nick walked over to the kitchen. He sipped on his cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette while Robyn's breaths slowed and became more jagged.

He watched her pull in a long breath with no exhale.

He put out the cigarette in the sink, rinsing off the tip. He sprayed a deodorizer into the air.

He walked to Robyn and stood over her, taking note of her dilated eyes and the bit of blood running from her mouth. He wrote the scene in his head, full of flourishing adverbs that his editor would cut. He pulled a gun from a drawer, and then put it in her hand. With the gun pointed toward the wall he pulled the trigger.

A few moments later, either minutes or seconds he couldn't tell which, there was a knock on the door. He got up and walked over to the door. "Officer, where have you been?"

"Sir, open the door."

"She tried to kill me," he said. His voice was shaking.

"Sir, just open the door."

"I stabbed her with the kitchen knife."

"Open the door, Mr. Hughes."

Nick turned the lock.

Detective Turner stood before him. Nick furled his brow, "What are you doing here? You don't have jurisdiction."

"Where is she?" Turner asked.

"Over there," Nick pointed toward the stairs. "She had a gun."

"Bullshit," he said under his breath. Turner rushed over; saw the bloody horror on the floor. "Oh shit."

"This is the gun." Nick held out the handgun.

Turner pulled out his own gun. "Put the gun down!"

**Chapter 27**

California - Section 23123

Distracted Driving

ABBY PRICE CHECKED her teeth in a little hand mirror. She took her finger and rubbed off the bits of lipstick. She did one last check of her hair. The sun was shining today, and she wanted to look her best on one of the few days she wasn't going to be holding an umbrella or standing outside with a raincoat over her head in front of the camera.

She stuffed the mirror back in her bag, placed the purse on the floor of the van. "Okay, Greg, let's go."

Greg lifted the camera to his face. She cleared her throat.

"Three... Two... I'm standing outside of the house of Nick Hughes, husband of the notorious Robyn Hughes otherwise known to the public as 'Bonnie.' Just a few days ago the nation was on high alert looking for Mrs. Hughes as she raced across the country stealing cars, wallets and shooting a man. A family in Texas claims she kidnapped their son.

"Yesterday, Mrs. Hughes was spotted as close as Sacramento, where she was reportedly involved in an armed bank robbery.

"This morning, at approximately 2:00 a.m. Mrs. Hughes broke into this house," Abby moved aside to allow Greg to pan across the yard. Crime scene tape was draped across two trees. A few cops stood at the portico holding a plastic evidence bag. Abby could not have done better with her timing, so only hoped that the echo of other investigative crime reporters off to her left could not be heard through her microphone.

She walked back to her mark and continued, "Police reported that shots were fired at approximately 2:00 a.m. The police say that Mr. Hughes claims that his wife broke into his home in Steward Park, but investigators here in San Francisco, lead by Detective Swan, and assisted by Detective Turner of the Connecticut State Police, say Mr. Hughes's statement and that of the police officer first on the scene do not add up. Investigators have collected evidence that leads them to believe that Mrs. Hughes was stabbed and left to bleed out on the floor at least thirty minutes before a shot was heard.

"Robyn Hughes was found on the floor of the house. She was taken to Mercy Hospital and is currently reported in critical condition. In what can only be said is a surprising twist in a case of many surprising twists in the manhunt for Robyn Hughes, her husband, Nick Hughes, was himself lead away in handcuffs just minutes ago. The charge, according to a source close to the investigation here in San Francisco, is murder. Fingerprint evidence, the source says, puts Nick Hughes at the scene of a murder of an English Professor, Brendan Behan, in Connecticut. DNA evidence is still being processed, the source has informed me."

Greg widened the camera angle at the proscribed moment.

"Live from Steward Park, this is Abby Price reporting."

Greg put the camera down.

"Do you want to try it at a different angle, Greg?" she asked. "Maybe over there?" But Abby stepped out in front of traffic a little too quickly. A car swerved to miss her, tires screeching. She jumped back onto the sidewalk with her heart pounding. She tripped on the camera's umbilical cord. Her head hit the pavement. She stared up at the puffy white clouds in the sky.

The man in the car that nearly hit her dialed 9-1-1, as his hand was already holding the cell phone. He was texting his wife that he passed by the crime scene.

Greg was paralyzed watching the blood ooze over the concrete.

***

"Live from Steward Park, this is Abby Price reporting." Detective Turner switched off the television in the hospital room. He bounced the toddler on his knee. The toddler squeaked with a sound one could only compare to tires peeling out on the asphalt. "That's a good boy."

Robyn's eyes fluttered. Her breathing was labored. Tubes ran from her body to machines. Bags of liquids were pumped into her body and other bags were there to extract the liquids coming out.

Her hands moved. Her eyes flashed back and forth across her closed eyelids. The toddler squealed again and a smile formed across her face. Her eyes opened one at a time. Her pupils were dilated. A moment later they came into focus on her baby. He giggled and squirmed.

"Whatsthat," he said all in one word.

"Mommy," Turner replied. Kyle was a talker. So far he'd said at least a hundred words, quite a lot for a child so small in Turner's experience.

***

I looked at Turner, "Is that?"

"Kyle Henry Hughes," Turner nodded. "That was sweet of you to give your son your father's name."

I nodded, searching the floor for my son. He picked up an orange ball and flung it at the door. His cheeks were red. He smiled and waved his chubby little arms. I could smell his little baby scent even over the strong disinfectant smell. I inhaled it like an elixir.

"He'll make a good basketball player someday," Turner said.

My voice croaked, "What happened?"

Turner looked down at the floor and then back at me. "Your husband tried to kill you."

I blinked a long, slow blink. I couldn't feel anything. I looked down at my body. How could there be no pain?

"I need to ask you a few questions," Turner said. "Let's start with that night with Mr. Behan."

I started to tell him what I remembered. He pulled out a recorder, "Do you mind if I tape this?"

I shook my head.

He placed the recorder on the nightstand and we walked through that night. As I told him what I knew, or gathered over the course of the last few days, he filled in the holes. It had been Nick that drugged me. Turner found another woman he'd drugged, but not raped. He merely wanted to know what she remembered and how long it took her to wake up. He told her it was research for his book, and dosed her with various doses until he was happy.

I told him about the pearl-handled pistol, and he told me about the gun they found with Brendan's body.

I cried. They'd found him. He'd have peace, finally. I broke out in a sob, and Kyle cried too.

"If you want I can have one of the officer's take him," Turner said.

I lifted my hand to touch his arm. "No," I said. "Please let him stay."

Turner picked him up off the floor. He stopped crying when I smiled at him. He smiled back and showed his cute little baby teeth. "Hungry," he said.

"Let me give him to the officers for a bit, they'll feed him and bring him right back."

I reached my hand out to touch him.

"Say hello to mommy," Turner said.

"Ma," Kyle said.

I smiled, choking back tears. His little hand touched with my hand. We stared at each other until Kyle said, "Hungry," again.

"Okay, you go eat, Kyle," Turner opened the hospital room's door and handed Kyle to a woman outside the door.

When he came back he leaned against the nightstand. "Did Nick tell you he killed Mr. Behan?"

"Not until last night."

Turner nodded his head. "But he wrote it in his novel. It was all written out, even before Mr. Behan was killed. His agent has a copy that predates the murder."

An electrical shock coursed through my body. It was the first feeling I'd had since waking up in the hospital. "The whole thing?"

"Yes," Turner said.

All this time I'd felt guilty about what I'd done to Brendan, but I hadn't done anything. Nick had it all planned.

***

Over the course of the next few months I spent my recovery in a private secure hospital in Connecticut. I flew for the first time in ten years, but I was given heavy sedatives.

I testified first at Carla's trial, then at Nick's. After sentencing Carla was transferred to another prison. Texas, I'd heard, but that was just a rumor.

The evidence against Nick was mostly circumstantial, but the notes they found in his San Francisco home and the changes he made during editing to add the cut in Brendan's (or "Professor Morgan's") hand was enough to convince the jury.

John Smith refused to press charges, as did Mary the millionaire. She'd spent two months in rehab and was busy driving a brand new red Porsche Boxster.

Turner managed to find Tony as a present for me. He's back in Mexico with his parents and a brand new set of braces.

I violated the terms of my parole, so my cross-country trail of felonies was not without consequences. I was transferred back to York Correctional six months after I'd left to serve out the rest of my three years.

My brother, Justin, took custody of Kyle until my release. Wayne tried to take custody, but backed down after I begged him to leave us alone.

I spent most of the next sixteen months in the vulnerable persons ward with piles of paper and a pen until paperwork came through for my release.

Peterson showed up at one o'clock sharp, "I hope this is the last time I'll be seeing you, Robyn."

Woody waited for me holding Kyle's little hand.

THE END

I hope you enjoyed the book. Please take a moment to provide feedback.

**Acknowledgements**

This book would have been impossible without: my friends Jeremy Smith and Kimberly Rider, my critique partners J.P. Choquette, Mary Sutton and my personal writing super hero, Julie Jones. I want to thank most of all, my loving husband Millard, who waded through many of the wonky drafts, and championed this book to publication.

**About the Author**

Cori Lynn Arnold grew up in a small cabin in North Pole, Alaska. She now lives in Connecticut with her son and husband.

