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Chapter 35

Mike forced himself not to sprint back to Cayanne. He had maybe four minutes before Graham cleared the lobby and navigated his way upstairs and back to them. Mike kept an even pace, nodding reassuringly at Kat as he passed her.

Cayanne said, ‘Everything okay with your wife?’

‘She took a turn. It looks bad.’ Mike assumed he appeared shaken enough to be believable. What kind of plan could he generate in the next thirty seconds that would get him alone with Kat? ‘Do you have a bathroom? I need a minute before I tell my daughter.’

‘Of course. Around the corner there, second on the left.’

Mike rushed back, frantically scouting a way out. Offices let into offices, halls onto halls, a host of internal windows giving the entire floor a spotty transparency. In the bathroom he searched under the sink, behind the door – nothing. He threw toilet paper out of the rotting wooden cabinet, finally locating a first-aid kit in the back. He dumped it out and shoved aside the gauze rolls and medicine packets, plucking up a catheter-tipped syringe for wound irrigation. His shoes slipping over the supplies, he dashed across to the sink and filled the syringe with water. Dubious-looking, but if it came down to it, it would have to do.

Rushing back, he fought the plunger into place and shoved the syringe into his waistband. He slowed before the turn, tried to catch his breath. Cayanne was on his feet by his door, looking concerned.

Mike drew close, bowed his head. ‘Can I have a moment alone with Kat? To tell her?’

‘Sure, we’ll leave you my office.’

That had been Mike’s fear. He needed to get Kat out of the bullpen area entirely to make a move for the exit. Graham was probably on the third floor by now, winding his way back to them.

Plan B: out with the prop.

Mike walked over and crouched in front of Kat, slipping the syringe into her front pocket – they’d frisked him, but not her. She looked down, brow furrowed, perplexed.

He said loudly, ‘My God, honey. Your color. Didn’t I give you your insulin shot this morning?’

‘What-’

‘Honey, I know you hate needles, but this isn’t the time.’ He squeezed her shoulders: Please go along with me.

A familiar glint broke through her glassy eyes. She nodded.

He made a big show of checking her forehead, then turned, fearful that Graham was already barging around the corner, but there was just Cayanne and a few officers drawing near, concerned.

Mike channeled the Couch Mother. ‘Cold and clammy, you need some candy. Dry and hot, you need a shot.’ He patted her pockets. ‘Where’s your insulin? Do you have your insulin?’

Kat withdrew the syringe, and he made a quick grab for it, enfolding it in his hand, doing his best to hide the wide plastic tip. She went a little weak-kneed, overdoing it, but Mike grabbed her arm and stiffened her up. Listening for Graham’s approach, he didn’t find it hard to act concerned. ‘I have to administer this in her thigh. Mind if I take her to the bathroom for a little privacy?’

‘Sure,’ Maxwell said. ‘My mother-in-law’s diabetic. I know how that goes.’

Nodding his thanks, Mike shepherded Kat through the cops and around the turn, her hand clenching the polar bear. ‘Dad, what was tha-’

They were flying up the hall now, past the bathroom. ‘I need you to follow my lead so I can get us out of here.’ He dumped the leaky syringe into a trash bin just inside a doorway. ‘And I’ll answer all your questions later. Deal?’

Through the open door and an interior office window, Graham flashed into view, charging up the parallel hall on the opposite side of the floor.

‘Dea-’

Mike clamped a hand over Kat’s mouth and jerked back, flattening against the wall. Cops buzzed in the surrounding offices; at some point someone was going to step through a doorway and see them hiding here.

He could hear Graham’s elevated voice. ‘-known terrorist in your custody. Perhaps you can explain to me why a hospital clerk was able to get me his location before you thought-’

And the aggressively calm reply. ‘He’s back this way, sir.’

As Graham’s voice drifted toward Cayanne’s office, Mike propelled Kat down the hall the other way. It seemed their movement was linked to Graham’s, two points on a pulley cable sliding in opposite directions.

They reached the terminus and stepped into a pass-through office, sliding behind two desk detectives hunkered into burritos. Neither raised his head. With Kat keeping pace at his side, Mike scurried through doorways and down corridors, waiting for red lights to flash, alarms to erupt, security barriers to lower.

At last a stairwell. They jostled down and spilled out into an open garage, a host of police cars pulled in for service or washing. To their right a wide ramp angled up to the side lot that Graham had been standing in moments before.

A faint ding-ding-dinging sounded from that direction, too subdued to be an alarm.

The overweight cop whom Graham had argued aside was trudging right at them, lugging his bulletproof vest and shotgun.

Mike froze, hand clamping the back of Kat’s neck.

‘Lost?’ the cop asked.

Mike let a breath leak through his teeth. ‘No. I’m doing some work.’

‘Yeah?’ The smile seemed friendly. ‘What kind of work?’

The dinging continued relentlessly, a bird pecking on Mike’s spine. The pause felt as though it dragged out several minutes.

‘That flickering light in the lobby,’ Kat said.

Mike scratched his forehead with a thumb, grabbing the life-line his daughter had thrown him. ‘Right. Probably just a loose connection, but you always worry about arcing, you know? So we’re off to check the breakers.’ He pointed vaguely up the ramp.

The man flicked his chin at Kat. ‘She your assistant?’

Mike shot a glance back at the stairwell door. ‘It’s Bring Your Kid to Work Day.’

‘I thought that was in April.’

He’d heard of it?

‘They changed the date,’ Mike said. ‘Conflicted with Talk Like a Pirate Day.’

The man studied him, head cocked, and then his serious expression broke and he gave a big laugh. Stepping aside, he swept a hand at the ramp.

Mike unlocked his muscles and headed for daylight. The dinging grew louder as he hustled Kat up the ramp. They stepped into the sudden bright, the sun winking harshly off the domino row of windshields. All those matching patrol cars, neatly aligned, as if for sale. Slanted in the middle of the aisle, door still flung open, issuing the nerve-grating dings, was Graham’s Mercury Grand Marquis. A barbed-wire-topped fence hemmed everything in. On the ground before the exit at the lot’s end lay a thick black sensor cable, requiring the weight of an automobile to open the imposing electronic gate.

An angry banging overhead.

Mike looked up. Hammering the window three floors above, his face tight and angry, Graham bellowed down at them. He stood where Mike had been minutes earlier; in fact, they’d reversed positions exactly. Graham’s mouth wavered, spit flecking the glass, but his outrage, from below, was soundless. Standing beside him, looking not entirely displeased, was Cayanne.

Mike glanced from Graham to the electronic gate to the black Mercury. The door alarm meant the key was in the ignition. ‘Come on.’

Before Kat could get the passenger door closed behind her, Mike was accelerating toward the gate. As it rattled arthritically open, he dug the truck keys from his pocket. His fist guiding the wheel, he squeaked through the gap early, the gate’s edge grinding the side of the car and throwing up sparks. He screeched across the street and into the main parking lot, raking the tires the wrong way across the security spikes. The rubber shredded, Graham’s car skidding sideways, throwing sparks and grinding to a halt. Mike and Kat leaped out and into the pickup, and then they were motoring away, his eyes clicking from rearview to side mirror. The rucksack full of cash and the few plastic bags of their stuff rolled at Kat’s feet. Dusk was coming on, cutting visibility, making him feel incrementally safer. He accelerated through a red, cut up an alley, hit the freeway entrance on a slide, and ran the blacktop the length of two exits. Kat’s eyes were bright, and Mike realized that this was, in a manner, exciting for her.

Back on darkening residential streets, he prowled like the teenager he used to be. He passed over the German makes. He’d heard they had fancy security systems these days, the antilock brakes kicking in and the steering shutting down before you pulled away from the curb. And even if you cracked a glove box and lucked into a valet key, there was still LoJack, GPS. He needed something from his era, something he could work like a Rubik’s Cube.

A brown Honda Civic with a late-eighties body was nestled to the curb beside a high hedge, the nearest house quiet behind a substantial setback. Mike parked behind the car and hopped out. It occurred to him that each successive vehicle he’d taken was a stepping-stone to a prior time.

‘Grab our stuff.’

But Kat was too fascinated to obey. As he dug in the wheel-well toolbox, she watched from the curb, swiveling one leg and chewing her cheek. He didn’t find a crowbar, but there was a length of stiff electrical wire that he doubled, forming a hook with one end. His hands seemed to shape the wire by themselves, on muscle-memory autopilot. Clenching the wire between his teeth, he shoved a hammer into his back pocket and carried two flathead screwdrivers to the Honda. At the driver’s side, he jammed both screwdrivers between the top of the window and the rubber guard, about two inches apart, opening up a small gap.

‘Dad?’

The wire slid through, the hook grabbed the notched lock, and he was in.

‘Dad?’

Three smacks of the hammer knocked off the plastic ignition keyhole, and the wider screwdriver fit the hole. A turn of his wrist and the engine purred to life.

‘Dad?’

Finally he registered Kat’s voice and looked up. She was standing a few feet off the driver’s window, arms crossed, mouth slightly ajar with wonder.

‘Where’d you learn that?’