Hard Return (17 page)

CHAPTER
21

He was up early, three a.m. early. He needed to be outside in the dark; he needed to walk. The house had cameras to the outside from every angle. Landry checked all of them. Nothing stirred. Standing in the dark, he looked out the windows. No strange cars. No cars at all. All of them in this neighborhood were buttoned up in their garages.

He dressed in dark clothing. Jolie was out like a light, beautiful in sleep. She snored slightly. Landry figured she would be over what they’d talked about last night. She was strong and she was smart.

And she’d killed enough to understand what he’d done.

They would be all right. If there
was
a “they.”

He would have to figure that out, and soon. Jolie meant a great deal to him, but he loved his wife and daughter. He loved his family. He wondered if going to look for Jolie, and finding her, and having her take off with him—if those actions had been a way of saying good-bye to his wife and his daughter.

Gary could be right, that he had been gone for three years and they believed he was dead and he would never get them back now.

He had not wanted to face this possibility before, but in the dark, in the morning, after his talk with Jolie about the things he had done, he wondered. Was he delusional? Would Cindi take him back, the way he pictured she would?

He decided it wasn’t the time to think about it, not now.

He went out into the cool dark morning and walked up behind the townhomes into the hills. There was a dirt road beyond, leading up into chaparral and a little place where he could look down on the city.

This was a time not to think, but to
be
. To take in anything and everything that drifted in through his transom. It was important, at times, to be empty. To try and drop thought, so that new ideas—fresh ideas—would have the room to come in.

But his thoughts were all snarled together. He tried to make his mind a blank, but something intruded.

Something had changed
.

It was a tiny alteration on an invisible scale. Negative and positive ions switching places, maybe.

Some people might describe it as the hair rising on their arms. Landry felt it in his jaw. Tightness. Like some people might feel before an incipient heart attack. The feeling would start there and then ping off every part of his body. Like a tuning fork.

He even had a name for it, taken from a childhood book he’d loved, and the Shakespeare line that had inspired the title. “By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes
.”

He went back to the house, crept into the bedroom, and shook Jolie’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

She did.

“Get dressed, now. We’re getting out of here. No sound.”

She didn’t argue. She pulled on her clothes and grabbed her small duffle and stuffed her purse inside. Strapped on her weapon. All fast, all quiet, as Landry did the same.

Over the years, especially in tense military situations, Landry knew when he needed to tighten himself up. When he needed to be ready. He heeded the firing of molecules in his jaw, the ache in his teeth, its connection to the electric grid of his body. The grip he needed to keep on his bowels. Through umpteen combat missions and close to twenty covert operations he had trusted it.
And the only person he could trust completely was himself
.

Jolie filled up bottles of water and grabbed a fistful of energy bars and fruit while he checked the street. All quiet, still dark. Landry didn’t know how much time they had, or who was ranked against them, or how it would come. But he knew it would be soon.

“What’s going on?” Jolie whispered as they rounded the Kia and opened up the Econoline van.

“Something’s changed,” Landry said.

“Changed? What about the Kia?”

“We leave it.”

Jolie looked at him. “This is serious.”

He loaded two motorcycles into the back of the van. One was a Honda. It was a recreational motorcycle. The other was a Harley chopper. Landry had clothing for each of them. He looked completely different depending on which bike he chose to ride—a different person. He had his cotton balls for his mouth and his pin-on ponytail, his leathers, his man-on-the-street casual clothes. All stashed in a good-sized duffle. His eyeglasses and sunglasses and caps and hats and boat shoes and motorcycle boots.

Jolie said, “What is this? Summer stock?”

“You could say that. If we need to get away in a hurry, you okay riding the Honda?”

“I’ve ridden a motorcycle before. Don’t you worry.”

But she sounded only half-believable.

The garage door rumbled open. They backed out, and the door lowered after them.

They encountered no cars, no dog walkers, no one at all as they drove under the orange sodium-arc lights of the neighborhood. Just another anonymous townhome on an anonymous block in an anonymous housing development in an anonymous neighborhood.

They hit the freeway driving south.

“What happened back there?”

“Something changed.”

“What changed?”

“Something.”

Jolie said, “
What? What
changed?”

Landry said, “I told you. Something’s turned against us. I don’t know what it is, but I know we had to get out when we did.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Someone may know about the town house. Hard to figure out how. But someone’s coming for us.”

“And how do you know that?”

“I know.”

“Unbelievable.”

Landry said nothing.

“I should go back to New Mexico. My job is on the line.”

“That’s where we’re headed.”

“To New Mexico?”

“No. To the airport. You’re flying back.”

She said nothing.

“You said that was what you wanted to do.”

She said nothing.

He said nothing, either. Not for a few miles. Then he said, “Take a look at my iPad. Look for up-to-the-minute news.”

She powered up and looked. “I don’t know the channel here.”

“Look it up. Just do it.”

She found CNN. “I don’t know what you’re looking for . . .”

“Just keep looking.”

“It might not be news.”

“Fifty-fifty,” Landry said. “Worth a try.”

They zipped along the freeway from pool to pool of orange sodium-arc lights, the night still dark but a blush showing above the mountains to the east. A woman anchor was speaking—reading the news.

“Turn it up,” Landry said.

Barbara Carey wasn’t paying attention to the little television set in the tack room. She was too busy trying to keep the two-year-old from biting her. His official name was Mia’s Fotobomb but she called him Dummy, because he was the dumbest horse she’d ever known in her life. He was obsessed with the flowers on her T-shirt. Even cross-tied, he gave her fits. Resentment in every bone of his body, stamping his feet, trying to rear up, pulling this way and that, pinning his ears back and snapping at her. You did not turn your back on Dummy because he would take a chunk out of you.

So when she decided to leave him there for a while to think about it, and she stepped into the tack room for a gulp of Coca-Cola and a handful of tortilla chips (her breakfast), she had only half an ear tuned to the TV. She kept it on CNN all the time, because of the school shooting.

Although at this point she had begun to second-guess herself about Joe Till’s involvement. There could have been a number of reasons he took off. If she were truthful with herself, she’d cop to the fact that she’d been
expecting
him to take off. She knew the type. He was a rolling stone. She’d seen enough of them to know. It was like they all thought they were in the old-time westerns on Turner Classic Movies, the ones where they kissed the girl, got on the horse, and rode off into the sunset. She’d come to the conclusion that a lot of men had somehow or other been brought up on westerns like that, no matter how young they were, and reveled in the idea that they were independent and free. Always yammering about “wanting their space.” That’s what her boyfriends would say when she was in h
igh school and even her two years of college. “I need my space.” And Joe Till was single, as far as she knew, so he was probably used to pulling that kind of crap.

She’d regretted talking to Justin about him. Justin thought she should send in the photo, but she didn’t.

So when she saw his photo—her snap of him with the horse—on television, she aspirated the Coke she was drinking. Coughing and spluttering, she stared at the screen.

She barely heard the newscaster. Something about a “person of interest” who might have been at the scene of the school shooting.

How did this
happen
?

(You know how it happened.)

And why wasn’t she surprised?

Her heart chugged, hard. She stepped out into the breezeway, rested a hand on the colt’s neck. He stepped on the toe of her boot, barely missing her actual toes, and she jerked his nose chain. “Quit!”

Added, “I’m trying to think here.”

The colt must have understood, because he raised his muzzle up to her ear and blew in and out of his nostrils. She pushed his head away and tightened her grip on the chain.

Driving through the predawn light on the way to the airport, Landry and Jolie lapsed into silence. The sound emerged from the iPad. A woman anchor’s voice, babbling on about a second suspect in the shooting at Gordon C. Tuttle High School.

Landry glanced over and saw the photo of himself and the horse. “Barbara Carey,” he said.

“Who?”

“The woman who had the farm where I worked. That’s where this was taken.”

“You didn’t know?”

“Not at the time, but I recognize it. She must have sent it in.”

“But why would you stick out? People must have been sending in thousands of pictures.”

“I don’t know.”

“How’d they plow through so many photos and find
yours
?”

“I don’t know.”

“What now?”

“The airport’s going to be problematic. They have to assume I saw myself on television and they’ll have cops there.”

“Feds, too.”

“You want me to drop you anywhere? They’re looking for me, not you.”

Jolie was silent.

“I want to ask you something,” Landry said.

“Go ahead and ask.”

“Do you think I am capable of shooting up that school?”

“No.”

“It’s not at the back of your mind? Even a little bit?”

She said nothing for a moment. He thought she was second-guessing her answer. Then she said, “Because of the way you were on the island—how you saved my cousin’s daughter. You wouldn’t shoot your own child. You wouldn’t shoot in the
direction
of your own child—you wouldn’t take the chance.”

“You’re sure of that?”

She paused. Finally said, “I am not sure of a lot of things. You’re a hired killer—”

“Jolie—”

“Hear me out. I know there’s a lot you would do, but you wouldn’t take a chance of killing Kristal. You wouldn’t kill kids. Warriors don’t kill kids.”

First things first, Landry sent Jolie in to pick up his mail. To pick up his sniper rifle, Betsy, and whatever else was in the box.

After that, they cruised a parking lot outside a movie theater and switched license plates with a car out in the hinterlands. From there, they went looking for a down-at-the-heels car dealership—one in a bad side of town where plenty of drug dealers plied their trade. She bought a van, quick and dirty, for $4,000 cash. She’d altered her appearance to biker chick, thanks to some of the stuff he had in the back of the van—including cotton balls in her mouth. She’d spent twenty minutes in a gas station bathroom chopping off her hair and dyeing it black.

There had been no trade-in. She’d gone in on the Honda and loaded it up into the van and driven it off the lot.

Landry had attached the ponytail and rolled up cloths and stuffed them in his pants so that he had a pretty good pair of love handles. Mirrored shades. Leather vest. Biker leathers and a bandana tied around his head, Apache style. Grizzled goatee.

Everyone would see bikers. Everyone would see a whole subset of humanity in shorthand.