Fear

ELEVEN

‘Allison?’ Nathan turned toward the door.

‘It’s not her,’ Miles said. Jesus, he’d unloaded the gun, that was stupid. He knocked over the lamp, fumbled for the clip in his pocket. ‘Get in the back bedroom. Lock the back door.’

Nathan Ruiz muttered, ‘The guards can’t find me, they can’t know she helped me-’ He spun on his heels, ran out onto the balcony, jumped over the railing. Miles grabbed at him and missed. Ruiz tumbled fifteen feet, landed in dirt and gravel, slid into the pinon trees, scrambled down the hillside that led to Cerro Gordo. Making a panicky, noisy escape.

The front door opened. Miles saw a tall figure in the spilled light from the toppled lamp, male, thickly built. Miles, retreating against the railing, saw a gun tracking his path.

Miles vaulted off the balcony. He heard the awful vroot of the silencer; the heat of the warped bullet passed above his shoulders, jetted near his scalp. He screamed.

He landed, twisted into the gravel, tumbled down against a pinon trunk, wrenched himself free. He sat on his butt and skidded down the rest of the way, down from the private driveway and the house onto the unpaved stretch of Cerro Gordo.

He heard the sound of a second muffled shot in the blackness above his head. To his left, feet pounded gravel; Nathan, panting as he ran. Follow him, and maybe they catch you both. So Miles bolted to the right, running hard and clean, zigzagging on the darkened road.

He heard a pursuer following him off the balcony, sliding down the pebbled slope. To his left lay a patchwork of houses, yards, undeveloped land. He jumped over an adobe wall, fell down into a side yard, ran past a kitchen window where light gleamed and children pleaded for chocolate ice cream for dessert. Over another fence, down a strip of driveway, the sound of his pursuer drawing closer.

Miles vaulted over a few more fences, then he ran into an open stretch of darkness. Armijo Park, he’d noticed it on the hike up Cerro Gordo. Flat, plenty of room for dogs to frolic, kids to run and play tag and football. He ran across the parking lot, caught his leg on a chain that fenced the park, sprawled on the grass. He could hear the pursuer and now a searchlight sparked from an approaching car, sweeping across the park.

He got up and ran, hard, not in a straight line, trying to dodge the circle of light that hunted him past the fence, past the playground, past the swings and slides. The clouds covered the sky and the gurgle of the Santa Fe River rose in the breeze. Usually the river ran dry or with the barest trickle, but now it surged with the recent heavy rains and snowmelt.

Get across the river, hide in the neighborhood, hunker down… Then his shoes hit the smooth glass of polished stone and he remembered the river still had to be across the street and below him, at least fifty feet, and he skidded into empty air.

Dead. Dead in a straight drop to rocks and then he crashed through a web of tree limbs. He grabbed at a cottonwood branch that smacked hard into his back, missed, fell, hit another one, rolled along its edge, arms flailing, fell again, thinking in a crazy jag, This’ll smash out my brains and I’ll be fixed.

But the next branch caught his weight, held, then cracked with a slow groan, and he let his weight slide down the creaking bough. Listened. No sound of a man still giving chase. The spotlight danced above him, a car driving into the park itself, searching. Hunting him.

He scissored his legs out over empty air. The branch snapped again. He let go.

The land rose in a sharp shift and Miles hit the ground after a ten-foot drop that jarred his ankles, sent him sliding. His legs caught a cactus, the spines needling through his thin khakis, and he howled. But he stumbled to his feet, navigated through a maze of trees, and saw a car driving by, its headlights painting the night.

East Alameda. He ran out onto the road, eased himself down the shallow bank, forged the thread of river in a few steps, the cold water soothing against his tree-and-rock-scored hands. He clambered up the side of the bank, glancing over his shoulder. No gunman. No police car. Nobody.

Across the street, the river, up the hill, the spotlight winked out, like a giant’s eye closing.

He wandered into the riverside neighborhood and ran through the spiderweb of streets. A dim orange glowed against the cloud bottoms to his right – Allison’s office, or the building next to it, still burning.

‘You still got the gun?’ Andy asked him, walking beside him, unruffled.

He groped along his belt. No. The Beretta was gone, lost in the tumbles he’d taken. But jammed deep in his jacket pocket, he touched the crumpled confession he’d written for Allison.

‘Losing the gun’s for the best,’ Andy said. ‘It would make my killing you a lot easier. What now?’

Miles didn’t answer. He walked, steering clear of Palace and the fire engines. He could smell the smoke on the wind. He stumbled across the empty Plaza – Santa Fe rolled up early most nights – and along the side streets until he reached his rooms. He washed his hands and face clean of dirt, sprayed antibacterial lotion on his palms and on his cheek. The bleeding from his head had stopped, clotted in his hair. He dumped his wet clothes in a pile, extracted a trio of cactus spines from his leg. He sat on the edge of the bed, wondered what Sangriaville meant, who was Nathan Ruiz, who was the man who had tried to kill him, why Sorenson had come to Allison’s house, and tried not to imagine Allison vanishing in a ball of flame.

The red cell phone on the table. Hers, he’d seen her use it before. She’d left it at her house. He tried her cell phone again. Two rings. The phone clicked on. But silence.

‘Hello?’ Miles whispered. Then against all hope: ‘Allison?’

‘You and I both know she’s not here.’ A man’s voice. Low, gravelly.

‘Where is Allison?’

‘All burned up. I think you know that, mister, because I think you and Ruiz were part of her plan.’

‘I don’t know what the hell you mean.’

‘I heard your voice,’ the voice said, ‘on the other side of Allison’s door. So don’t pretend you weren’t the asshole with Ruiz that ran away from me.’

Miles sat on the bed. ‘Okay, I won’t pretend. Who are you?’

‘I don’t like names.’

‘Did you kill her? Do you work with Sorenson?’

‘I don’t know who the hell that is.’

‘You’re lying,’ Miles said, but the voice talked over him: ‘Allison took property of mine and I doubt it coincidentally got blown up with her. I’ll pay you for the research. We can reach a deal. But you’re going to give it back, or you’re dead.’

Miles counted to ten, thinking, trying to figure out how to play the shooter. ‘I can’t give you what she took if I don’t know what exactly it is…’

A long silence. ‘Listen, you stupid bastard. I don’t believe you were an innocent bystander at Allison’s house tonight. You and Ruiz, you’re in on it with her, and you’re going to return Frost, or I’m going to kill you. Simple.’

Frost. The same word on Ruiz’s bracelet.

‘The man in her tub… Sorenson. I think he hid a bomb in her office today. I don’t know anything else.’

A pause and Miles could hear the man’s heavy footsteps on tile. ‘What man in what tub?’

‘There’s a guy in her tub… knocked out.’

A pause. ‘There’s a bunch of sheets wadded up on the floor, and that’s all.’

Sorenson must have escaped between the time the shooting started and when the shooter returned to Allison’s house – presumably to search for whatever this Frost was.

‘She’s dead, you can’t sell the research, I told you I’ll pay you. Last chance,’ the shooter said.

You want answers, tell this guy you’ve got what he wants. Draw him out, catch him. You couldn’t save Allison but you can find out what the hell happened to her. Except if he did that, he was drawing a giant bull’s-eye on his back, and an attack could come from any direction.

Miles closed his eyes. ‘I don’t have… Frost… but I might know where you can get it.’

‘Where?’

‘Not now. I’ll – have to be in touch with you later.’

‘There is no later. You got right now. You tell me what you know, I’m going to let you live.’

‘You don’t even know who I am.’

‘I know what you are. Greedy. Stupid. In over your head. Listen, jackass, I hunt for a living. I’ll find you, I promise.’

Miles kept his voice steady. ‘You give me a number to reach you at, and I’ll call with Frost when I have it.’

‘Unacceptable. I made you a one-time offer. You’re declining. Suffer the consequences, asshole.’

A cold rage gripped Miles’s chest, stomach, throat. ‘I’ll make you suffer instead.’

When the shooter spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. ‘When I’m done with you, you’re going to think having your face ripped off is a walk in the goddamned park.’ And the shooter hung up.

Miles closed his eyes, saw the house burning, him late for the most important appointment of his life, Allison dead and gone.

She asked you for help and you failed her. He had failed her, failed her as he had failed Andy. I was supposed to save you. He’d wasted his time with her, parrying her therapy, playing smart guy, never letting her within distance of the truth, when all she’d wanted to do was help. He felt her absence in the world like a hole punched into his chest.

But he didn’t have to curl up in a ball. He could make the people who had killed her pay. He got up from the bed, weighed his options.

Ruiz. Had the shooter and his people with the searchlights caught Ruiz? Nathan Ruiz knew his name was Michael Raymond now. Or worse, maybe his cell-phone number had appeared on Allison’s cell. It gave the shooter roads to finding him. The apartment was rented to Michael Raymond, and the shooter could trace the billing address of the number to this apartment. He couldn’t stay here.

But he couldn’t run again, he couldn’t fail Allison again. The man thought Miles had something Allison had stolen. Why? What was Frost? This involved Sorenson, clearly – he’d shown up at Allison’s house after the blast – presumably hunting for Frost as well. But all that mattered right now was getting the hell out of here and hiding before the shooter came calling.

Miles grabbed a bag of clothes, called DeShawn’s number, got no answer. He tried to calm his thoughts, decide what he was going to say. He had to hide from the shooter, but at the same time, he couldn’t let WITSEC move him from Santa Fe. If that happened, he could never nail the shooter, nail Sorenson, nail Ruiz, whoever had killed Allison.

‘Is that the idea?’ Andy said, sitting on his bed. ‘Avenge her – a charming concept – and you’re well adjusted again and I vanish. You’re kidding yourself, Miles. You and I are a team. Forever.’

Miles took his bag and walked alone in the dark to a modest motel off Cerillos that catered to starving artists and hikers. The clerk didn’t ask for ID when he put an extra twenty on top of the night’s rent.

The room was plain but clean. He lay down on the bed and switched on the TV. The local news was all about the terrible explosion in Santa Fe. The fire was out. Firefighters had found badly burned remains in the rubble. The deceased had not yet been identified, but investigators believed it was the body of the woman who rented the office space, a psychiatrist. The reporter, standing before the fire trucks and the ruined shell of the building, said investigators were not ready to comment on the cause of the explosion.

The deceased. Allison was dead and gone, and in the smoke-kissed night beyond the grimy window was the lying Sorenson, and a shooter determined to kill, and a screwed-up kid named Nathan Ruiz, and they held the answers he needed.

Now all he had to do was find them without getting killed.

‘It’s going to be fun, seeing you lose it all again,’ Andy said.