Blacklist

CHAPTER 28

When you hear a.45, you never think it was a backfire or a firecracker. Yosano and I froze, and then he ran through the swinging door to the front of the house.

As soon as the door swung shut, I opened the oven.

“Come with me. Don’t ask questions, and don’t speak,” I told Benjamin. He was giving off the sweet sickly sweat of fear, and he couldn’t stand, he’d been lying doubled up so long. I slung him over my shoulder, firemanstyle, and humped to the bathroom double time. He was clutching his book still, and it dug into my sore shoulder. He was fifteen or sixteen, but such a skinny kid it wasn’t as hard a ride as I’d feared.

Inside the bathroom, I set him down and worked on his legs. He was still shying away from my touch, but fear and cold had made him numb; he didn’t resist. As soon as he could stand, I turned off my headlamp, opened the window and looked out. We could hear the excited yelling from the front of the house, but we were clear here in the back.

“I’m going to give you a boost up to this window” I spoke in the flat, tongueless speech you learn in prison because it doesn’t carry far. “You slide through, you drop to the ground. You lie flat on your stomach and wait for me. Got it?”

I felt rather than saw him nod. I gave him a boost up to the sill and helped him wriggle his legs through. As he twisted, he dropped his book. He cried out.

I stuck up my hand and covered his mouth. “I’ll hand it to you. Get through and get down.”

When he seemed unwilling to leave without it, I pushed him. He clung briefly to the sill, and then fell. He didn’t cry out again, so I assumed he’d landed without breaking anything. I climbed up on the toilet seat, dropped his book through the opening and hoisted myself onto the sill. The stab of pain between my shoulders was so intense I had to hold back my own cry.

I sat for a few seconds, gathering my breath, then began the hard job of wriggling through the window-a grown woman’s hips are wider than a skinny adolescent’s. When a second shot reechoed, it startled me so that I landed in a heap almost on top of Benjamin. The fall knocked the wind out of me and I lay gagging for air, trying not to make any noise.

We were at the southeast corner of the mansion. We could hear excited shouts as the puppies and Schorr tried to figure out where their prey had fallen. They had shot at… a raccoon or a deer. They had not shot-notan ardent teenage girl running through the fields to protect her protege.

I wanted to dash to the back, what are you morons doing, you machodrunk fools, shooting at shadows and children? I grabbed the grass in front of me, tying myself to the ground here. If I joined the hunt, I’d leave the boy here where he would be found, arrested, if not shot. And Schorr was jumpy enough to arrest me or even shoot me if I showed my face.

“What they doing?” Benjamin cried in an undervoice.

“They shot at something. Probably a raccoon, an animal. As soon as they figure that out, they’ll be looking for me, so let’s move.”

“Animal? You think not-” he thought better of finishing the sentence. “Come on,” I said roughly. “We’re going. We are going to go straight across the lawn here. The house will keep the people in back from seeing us. When we get to that tall grass, we are going to go through it. You will stay right behind me, got it?”

He stumbled to his feet. We couldn’t go fast. He could barely walk, and certainly not run. Cold, hunger, confusion, far from home in a country

that wanted to put him in prison for being-what? If he was a terrorist, I’d deal with that down the road, but if he was just a kid in the wrong place at a time when fear was holding the horse’s reins in America, I needed to deal with that, too.

We were halfway across the lawn when two more squad cars squealed up the drive, lights flashing. I turned to Benjamin and pulled him smartly to the ground, lying flat next to him until the cars were at the house. Lifting my head, I watched the side of the house we were facing. They hadn’t found the open bathroom window yet: all the action was in the fields and gardens at the back.

“Let’s go. Hands and knees. You go forward, I’ll keep an eye out.”

The work gloves shielded my hands from the stickers growing in the untended lawn, but Benjamin didn’t have any protection. When I saw him unable to put his hands down, I stripped the gloves off and forced them onto his hands. “Move. It’s our only chance, while they’re doing what they’re doing.”

We crawled through the unmown grass to the untended field beyond. I was lightheaded with fatigue and hunger, my shoulders ached, I was scared. Only the snuffling from the boy in front of me, tears manfully suppressed, air sucked painfully in, kept me going.

The deputies had rigged up the searchlights while we were stumbling through shrubs. The sudden light arcing through the night sky behind us startled me. I tripped on a fallen branch and landed in rotting leaves. At least if they sent dogs after us they wouldn’t find us by our smell.

When we reached the ditch by the side of Coverdale Lane, I cautiously poked my head through the shrubbery to survey the road. A squad car blocked the intersection of Coverdale with Dirksen, where I had left my Mustang. I couldn’t see clearly at this distance, but they had probably found the car, might be waiting next to it for me.

I sank back down into the ditch, close to screaming with fatigue and frustration. We were trapped. I fought back panic. Benji whispered, “How we are going to do?”

The only possibility was to cross Coverdale and fight our way through the hedge to Anodyne Park on the far side, taking a chance that they

wouldn’t see us in the road. If I had the wings of a dove or the shovel snout of a mole. A mole. If that culvert I’d stumbled on yesterday came this far… Under cover of sirens and of a helicopter that had arrived on the scene, I explained to Benji as best I could what I was looking for. I would explore east, toward my car, he would crawl along the ditch to the west.

“Let it open up here, on this side of the road,” I begged the whimsical ruler of the universe. “Let me find it, before they find me.”

I crawled along slowly, patting the embankment, praying for it to give way. About fifty feet from where the squad car stood, Benji tapped my shoulder with a soft, timid hand. He had found the entrance.

I crawled back after him. The opening was a black hole on the road side of the ditch, not high enough for me to stand upright but just wide enough for us to move side by side. It smelled of mold and animal droppings, and it was as dark as the entrance to death. We couldn’t afford to show a light. I grabbed Benji’s left hand with my right. He didn’t try to withdraw; indeed, he clung to me, trembling, as we squelched along the muddy floor.

It should have been a quarter mile, getting to the hedge, going under Powell Road, coming up in Anodyne Park, but the tunnel seemed to stretch endlessly in front of us. What if we weren’t under Powell Road at all, but were shuffling into the Deep Tunnel? We could wander for hours until we collapsed and died of hunger and thirst. No one would find our bones for years, if they ever came on them at all. Morrell, Lotty, everyone I loved who cared about me, they would forget me. Already they were so far away that they didn’t exist.

My breath rasped dry against my tonsils. My back ached from walking in a stoop, red darts flashed across my eyes. And then we were suddenly breathing fresh air, smelling the juniper berries, scrambling uphill, standing upright on asphalt.

I shuddered in relief. We stood trembling for a few minutes, stretching sore muscles, listening for pursuit. All was blissfully quiet. Anodyne, the healing of pain. All we needed was a car, and we’d be home free.

I led Benji up the winding path toward the town houses, where cars were parked for the night in the drives that lay behind them. In this wealthy

enclave I didn’t expect to find an old car, the kind where I could break the steering column and pull out the ignition rod. But the fifth house we came to, luck favored us: someone had left their keys in a Jaguar XK-12. I’d always wanted to drive one of these. I opened the door for Benji.

“You are stealing this car?”

“Borrowing,” I grinned. “The owner will get it back tomorrow”