At all costs

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Jake awakened to the sound of distant sirens.

Disoriented at first, he stretched his back and scanned the darkened room. “Shit,” he moaned. “I fell asleep.” He checked his watch. For three hours.

He’d fallen into the sagging, overstuffed lounge chair just for a minute, he thought. To give his back and shoulders a rest. He didn’t even remember closing his eyes.

The sirens reminded him that he’d forgotten to do something. Then, like a curtain being parted, the events of the day raced back into his consciousness.

Somebody had tried to kill him! The bullet came within an inch, for Chrissakes! As his mind replayed the impact of that bullet, the sheer force of it, even as it missed him, a lump formed in his stomach, and his hands began to tremble. Trapped in the netherworld between sleep and reality, he felt the blast of heat all over again, blistering hot against his shoulders and his back, despite the protection of his suit. And he saw the bodies of his friends, scattered like logs across the old roadbed. Even in his memory, they didn’t look real; they didn’t look dead. He could only presume that the man on the hill had shot them, just as he had tried to shoot Carolyn and him, but the horror of it all was somehow muted by the absence of blood and the facelessness of the bodies.

“Got to call,” he whispered. Got to find out what happened. Taking care not to make any noise, he pulled hard against the arms of the chair and sat up straight. Raking a hand through his hair, he twisted first to his left and then to his right, releasing a ripple of pops from his spine. Only twenty-four years old, and tonight he felt every bit of seventy.

In the darkness of the room, the sparse furnishings were visible only as shades of black against a charcoal-gray background. Fumbling blindly along the nightstand, Jake placed his hand on the telephone but paused as his attention turned once again to the sound of the sirens. They seemed to be growing louder. He stood and hobbled over to the front window, where he used two fingers to part the heavy, rubber-lined blackout curtains.

A gentle but steady rain fell in the empty parking lot, giving everything a glassy, reflective look, which in the darkness of the night took years off the age of everything. The wail of the first siren reached a crescendo, then stopped abruptly as a police car sped into view and slid to a stop in front of the motel office.

“What the hell is this?”

Carolyn stirred at the sound of his voice. “What’s going on?” she groaned sleepily.

“I don’t know yet.” He watched with a growing sense of dread as the trooper climbed out of his car with his hand on his pistol and moved cautiously to the door of the office. The cop pulled hard against the lock, then pounded heavily with his fist on the glass panel. “I think our friend Terrell might be in a bit of trouble.” In the distance, more sirens approached.

Her curiosity piqued, Carolyn joined her husband at the window and watched as a light came on in the office, casting a greenish hue through the tinted glass. Soon Terrell’s lanky form appeared through the glass. He opened the door wearily, then seemed suddenly animated as he listened to whatever the trooper was telling him. He nodded a couple of times, then shook his head a couple more.

Finally, Terrell pointed directly at Jake and Carolyn. They both jumped. “Holy shit,” Jake gasped.

“What?”

“This doesn’t look good.” The trooper moved quickly as he said something into the microphone clipped to his shoulder, then climbed back into his cruiser. He never took his eyes off their motel room.

“What?”

Jake could hear the edge of panic in Carolyn’s voice-the same emotion he felt building in the pit of his own stomach. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“What are you talking about?” She was crying now, gripped with fear.

He turned two quick circles in the dark, trying to figure a way out of the room without being seen.

“Jake!” she nearly shouted.

“Shh!” he commanded. “The bathroom window! Come on!” He dragged her by the hand toward the back of the room, even as the police car’s high beams pierced the thin seam in the curtain and cast a laser-width spear of light against the far wall.

“What are we doing? I’m not going anywhere,” she insisted, following along as she spoke.

“Look,” he snapped. “People tried to kill us today, and now that cop looks mad as hell. Looks to me like staying here could get us shot.”

The window in the bathroom was of standard height and size, but made of smoky white glass. Yet another siren peaked in volume and fell silent. Shit, Jake thought. There’s two of them now. And still more in the distance. The window lock turned easily, but he had to pound upward with the heels of both hands to get it to slide open.

“Jake, this is stupid!”

He made a stirrup with his hands. “Here. You go first.”

“Go where?”

“Out!” he hissed. “I don’t know where. Just out.”

Carolyn opened her mouth to argue but then complied. No sooner had she placed her bare foot in his hands than he nearly launched her through the opening. She came out too fast, tumbling headfirst into the wide alley behind the motel. She got her hands out in time, though, preventing damage to everything but her pride.

Jake arrived feet-first, just as the blue and red lights of a police car began to sweep the trees at the far end of the complex to their right. “Shit! They’re coming around to the back, too!”

They needed cover; something to hide behind. With the cop car approaching, they’d never make it to the tree line without being seen. The Dumpster! Jake grabbed Carolyn’s hand again and pulled her behind him as he dashed twenty yards or so and ducked behind the maroon trash receptacle. The warm rain had reinvigorated the stench of old garbage and rotting food, and he found himself instinctively breathing through his mouth.

“Why are we hiding from the police?” Carolyn shouted at a whisper. “We’ve done nothing wrong!”

“I don’t know. I have a bad feeling.” It was as honest an answer as he knew to give.

The second cop car approached more cautiously, killing his lights as he closed in on the back of their room. Once in place and stopped, the cop opened his door carefully and rolled quickly out of the car, taking his twelve-gauge with him. He scampered over to the passenger-side door, where he could use the vehicle as cover.

The Donovans exchanged panicked glances in the dark.

“Are they trying to arrest us?” Carolyn whispered.

Jake answered with a shrug that was invisible in the darkness. “Look at him. He’s scared shitless.”

They both jumped as the cop’s radio squelched and an electronic voice pierced the muted thrumming of the rain. “All units be advised, we have positive ID from the manager. These are definitely our shooters.”

The cop muttered something unintelligible into his microphone, then racked a round into the chamber of his shotgun and leveled it at the window they’d just climbed through.

“Oh, my God,” Carolyn breathed.

“He can’t wait to pull that trigger,” Jake said, not believing what he was seeing. This trooper wanted them bad, and he didn’t much care whether they were breathing or not. Jake pulled Carolyn away from the Dumpster and headed for the tree line. “We gotta get outa here. They’re liable to have dogs and all kinds of bullshit out here soon.”

This time she needed no pulling or prodding to get her to run. A second car pulled up to the rear of the building just as they reached the first line of cover. The police were shouting now, apparently no longer worried about a stealthy approach, and that was the Donovans’ cue to run like hell, while noise didn’t matter.

“We going back to the boat?” Carolyn asked.

“I sure as hell hope so.”

They’d floated in the dark nearly all night before Carolyn got the idea to contact her uncle in Chicago. A men’s clothing retailer turned real estate mogul, Harry Sinclair had more money than God, and if there was anyone in the world with the connections to lift them out of this mess, it would be him. They still didn’t know why they’d gone from near victims to Public Enemies #1 and #2 in the space of just a few hours, but it was clear as crystal that they needed some answers before they showed their faces again. And, assuming that the Visa card had alerted the cops back at the motel, they could forget about credit cards taking them where they wanted to go. They needed to develop alternative resources fast. Which meant Harry Sinclair.

It took them nearly two hours to give Travis that much of the story. There were parts he didn’t understand, and still more that he didn’t want to. But as it dragged on, and his parents shared the details about who they really were, and who they really weren’t, he found himself burrowing further and further under his Army blanket, finally wishing that they’d just stayed quiet and let him believe that things remained as they’d always been.