Outcome (8 page)

Chip followed her look. "What if they don't know?"

"I don't know," Ellie said, distracted, forgetting those were the three least-acceptable words in the English language.

"Do we follow another van? Try another hospital?"

"Be quiet."

"Don't tell me to be quiet. We're talking about—"

"I know what we're talking about," Ellie said. "And I would prefer the two of us remain the only ones who know that. So shut up and look pretty."

"About twenty years too late for that," he muttered.

She made her mind go quiet and listened to the ticking of the clock at the back wall. Past the door the receptionist had gone down, two pairs of male shoes echoed closer. Ellie's heart froze.

"Time to go."

Chip's face went slack. "What?"

"Our cover," she said. "It's been blown."

8

Ellie grabbed his coat sleeve and pulled him toward the front doors. He stumbled after her, grabbing her wrist. Behind them, a door clicked open.

"Hey!" a man called.

Chip slowed. She yanked him forward and he broke into a run, matching her.

"Ma'am! Stop!"

The doors slid open. The two out-of-uniform soldiers frowned at Chip as he ran past. He was suddenly quite conscious of the extra pounds he'd stashed around his middle in the years they'd been apart—she looked as lean as ever—but he managed to match her stride for stride. Ellie juked to put a row of cars between them and the two uniformed security officers following them out the door.

"What's going on?" he said.

"They recognized me."

"Shit!"

"That's my tactical assessment of the situation, yes."

She sprinted to the street, crossing despite an oncoming cab. It screeched to a stop, tires smoking. She vaulted the curb to the lot where she'd parked her car. Back across the street, one of the guards pulled his gun.

Chip yelled. Ellie ducked and kept running, fumbling for her keychain, clicking open the car doors. The security turned and rushed back the way they'd come. Chip piled into the car. Ellie roared out of the lot into the street. She opened a three-block head start before the guards pulled out behind her.

"They're chasing us!" he said.

"How observant," Ellie said. "You should have my job."

"What did we do?"

"You didn't do anything. I assaulted one man and shot another." Ahead, the light turned red. She slowed, then barreled through. Tires screeched to her right.

He flinched, covering his head. "Where are you going?"

"Away. You're the one who lives here. Got any more specific suggestions?"

He craned his neck, watching for pursuit. "Will you slow down? What's your plan, lose them by escaping to the afterlife?"

She tore down 2nd Ave, narrowly making another light. A couple blocks back, a patrol car flipped on its siren, stalling traffic in an intersection, and weaved through the stopped cars.

"Doing my best to not crash," she said. "Stop watching the rearview and tell me where to go."

"Chinatown," Chip blurted. "That place is all messed up. I can't find Little Italy no matter how many times I go there."

Ellie yanked hard left, swerving around a puttering old station wagon. "Directions."

"Take a right to Bowery. You can take that all the way to Canal."

She nodded, weaving again. Sunlight bounced from the faces of the downtown diners. An onion-domed Eastern Orthodox church loomed over the walkups. Ellie hung a sudden right, slowed, and made an unprotected left turn that was greeted by the screaming tires of an approaching taxi. It hurtled straight toward Chip, then jerked right, scraping their rear fender.

"Stop it, you us-killing maniac!"

She laughed coldly. "I want you to imagine something: us being taken to jail, where the guards sudden begin to fall sick and die. What happens to us behind the bars?"

"I don't know," he said. "They bring us pizza?"

The engine thrummed. Sirens howled behind them. Ellie powered down Bowery, switching from one lane to the other.

"Get ready to run," she said.

"Do you do this a lot?"

"I took a class once."

Another siren twirled three blocks down the broad avenue. Ellie turned hard right, swaying Chip off center. She passed a northbound one-way, then turned sharply left down a narrow street fronted by a mixture of thrift stores, espresso bars, and restaurants advertised in an Asian language Chip didn't recognize. Ahead, the light went red. Chip braced himself, expecting her to blast straight through the light and the other drivers be damned, but she yanked the car to the curb, killed the engine, and rushed out the door. He grabbed his kit and followed.

She turned down Grand on foot, streaking by a street festooned with red, white, and green pennants—they'd managed to find Little Italy after all. Sirens whooped down the block. Ellie took the next left, sprinting past sidewalks littered optimistically with outdoor seating, the few patrons bundled against the winter chill. The smell of garlic and pan-fried pork drifted from the doors and vents.

A cop car blared behind them, speeding west, out of range. Ellie hit Canal and swung right, taking them toward the dense crowds browsing the strange shoulder-to-shoulder mixture of diamond brokers, cafes, vegetable stands, seafood markets, and sidewalk stalls of wallets and sunglasses. Hundreds of faces bobbed down the sidewalks, Asian and white and Latino and black, children holding hands with parents, elderly men in shapeless caps sitting on stools waiting to make a sale. Chip grinned, pleased with himself. If there was one place to get lost in the city, this was it.

A woman coughed, wiped her hands on her jeans. A young man spit a heavy wad into the gutter. Chip ran by a seafood market, its buckets of crabs and mussels, whole fish stretched out on ice with their beady little eyes staring at the world. He smelled the sharp tang of brine and ocean-flesh, some of it too old, gone foul. Conditioned by clean, gleaming supermarkets with pretty pink slabs of salmon, he often found these stalls disgusting—that old-guts smell, whole creatures just tossed on the ice, tiny tentacles curled, puckered with suckers—but he knew some of this stuff had been caught that day, too, yanked out of the ocean at dawn and sitting on the Canal Street sidewalks before noon, fresh in a way you'd never tasted. He had always meant to come down here and buy the day's catch, whatever it was, bring it home and cook it that same day, but he'd never got around to it. Just one of those things. He'd never been to the Statue of Liberty, either. His grin withered. If Ellie was right, these staring fish were the last fresh ones he'd ever see here.

A man shouted behind them. Back on the corner, a cop in a hat elbowed through the crowd. Ellie grabbed Chip's sleeve and pulled him into a dense shop filled floor to ceiling with racks of coats and shirts and jeans. Wonderful. A dead end. Shouts rang from outside. Ellie vanished between two puffy blue coats. Chip brushed after her, smelling dust and fabric. He pushed a coat from his face. Ellie sank down a staircase, feet pounding the steps. He followed her into the basement, an overfilled mess of piled t-shirts, unlabeled jeans, and unpacked boxes. An old man sat on a stool, eyeing them without expression.

"We were never here," Ellie said. She produced three twenty dollar bills. The man accepted them, folding them away without looking, his face unchanged from its pensive stare. He pointed over his shoulder to a curtain. Ellie smiled. "Thank you."

She parted the curtain to a back room with a stove and a kettle and a cot. Another set of stairs rose to iron delivery doors set into the ceiling.

"What, you know that guy?" Chip said.

"Sure," Ellie said, climbing the stairs and unlatching the doors. "We go way back to three seconds ago."

"Kind of him to direct you to the back door, then."

"A lot of these guys don't like cops." She opened the door with a metallic squeal, splashing them both with late morning sunlight. "Especially the older guys."

Chip snorted. "
You're
a cop."

"Not really. And not anymore."

Ellie glanced both ways, then emerged to street level. They stood on a side street next to another clothing shop and across from a Chase lettered in both English and Chinese. Ellie led the way north at a fast walk. Chip glanced back several times, scanning the thinned pedestrians for uniforms. Chinatown ceased within blocks, replaced by the pleasantly shabby shops and apartments of Greenwich Village. Ellie entered the first hotel she saw and booked them for three days. It wasn't quite check-in time, but Ellie smiled for once and talked the balding clerk into letting them up anyway. Their room was small and dim and smelled like laundry left too long in the washer. Ellie stood at the window, eyes glossy with exhaustion, gnawing absently at her cuticle—she used to bite them until they bled.

"So what does that mean, that they didn't have Dee at the hospital?" Chip said. "Do we go check another?"

"They've got an alert for me." She paused to nip another piece of the skin around her thumb. "We can't go to another hospital unless we're sure it's the right one."

"I thought you had like fifty IDs in that bag."

"That was my last one."

"Well, then how do we find her?" he said. "Should I go find a phone? Start calling around?"

"They won't tell you if she's there." Ellie reached out to touch the brittle curtain. It was sun-worn, dry flakes cracking from its yellowed liner. "I want you to think seriously about the idea of leaving."

"We've been through this."

"Yesterday. When there was a chance."

At once, he was angry, resentment sloshing up from his guts like an overtaxed storm drain. "This is ridiculous. Why are you here? You don't care about her. You never did."

"That's not true."

"That's why you left! You weren't about to have kids. Not when it would compromise your career."

She laughed coldly. "And you couldn't have waited a few years?"

"It's not like you even had to carry a kid around, to change diapers," he said. "Dee was practically taking care of herself already."

"So why did
you
have to take her? Someone else would have been just as glad to adopt her."

"You don't know that!" He stalked toward the window, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her around, forcing her to look him in the eye. "So what, you weren't ready then, but you are now? That's why you're here? You're about six years too late, Ellie."

Her eyes flashed. "I'm not here to start a family. I'm here to save your life."

"Without her, I don't want it."

She closed her eyes, breath escaping her nostrils in a long hiss. "Would she want her father to die for no reason?"

"No reason?" It was his turn to laugh, bitter jags that hurt his throat. "You
don't
care. You didn't then and you don't now."

"I'm here, aren't I?"

"And all you want is to get out. Just like always."

"We tried," she said. "I could have left yesterday. I didn't have to come here. I didn't have to shoot a man. I care—but I'm not delusional. I know when to cut my losses."

He laughed again. "You sure do."

"That's not fair."

Chip shook his head and sank to the bed. "And what if we do go? And it all falls apart? How do we not fall with it?"

A siren droned in the distance. Ellie turned back to the window. "I have a cabin."

"A cabin?"

"Upstate. Adirondacks. It's supplied. It's on the lakes—water, fish, irrigation."

He scuffed his foot against the well-worn carpet. "Sounds like paradise."

She glanced over her shoulder. "Compared to the hell on its way? It is."

"Great. I hope you enjoy it."

They were both silent a while. She started to say something, then went to the table between the twin beds and got out the hotel pad and pen. "This is the address. If something happens to me, and you find Dee, you take her there."

She passed him the paper. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, refusing. "We'll find her."

She sat on the bed and stared at the floor. "I know."

* * *

He went downstairs and bought bread, peanut butter and jelly, some bottled coffee drinks, frozen chicken nuggets, cup noodles, little bags of chips they could carry around with them. They were bodega prices, steeper even than the city grocery stores, and he didn't want to think of his checking account, but he had worse worries at the moment. He got five dollars in quarters and went back to their room. Ellie was asleep in her clothes. He put the food in the minifridge and went back into an afternoon that wasn't quite warm. He found a payphone with a phonebook and called one hospital after another. None had any record of Deanna Billips.

At sunset, he went back to the hotel and made himself a sandwich. He drank one of the coffees, meaning to get back out and hit the streets, but he fell asleep in the chair. He didn't wake up until late that night. The TV was on, sound turned so low he could barely hear it above the sirens, its blue glow turning the room ethereal, ghastly. Ellie watched the news like a zombie, glued to death tolls that jumped from hundreds to thousands by the end of the report. New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Cleveland.

"Is that for real?" he said at last.

She startled, then looked back to the TV. "No. They're behind. Just like everything."

"I called a bunch of hospitals," he said. "No luck."

She nodded at the anchorman. "Keep trying, I guess."

The defeat in her voice made him want to shiver. It was the voice of a person who expected to join the numbers on the TV.

"I will," he said. "We'll find her."

The next day he bought a disposable cell phone and tried every hospital in the book. He had no luck. He bought copies of the
Times
and the
Post
and saw a short article about a federal agent found dead in a parking lot on the north end of the island. He finished the piece with a hollow ringing in his stomach. A part of him hadn't believed Ellie until now.

She disappeared with her laptop for hours on end. Sirens wailed up and down the streets. He no longer waited in dread for them to pull up to the hotel. These weren't cops, they were ambulances. Seeking out the dying and the dead. Behind the safety of the curtains, he could tell there weren't enough. He should be out there helping, seeing the infirm got the treatment their bodies couldn't provide for themselves. But when he left the room, it was to stock up on more food, to make more calls.