Raising Stony Mayhall (25 page)

Was the system overloaded? Was there some security scheme in place that stopped anyone from calling three times in a night?

He dialed the Thursday number that he’d used first. The phone rang once, and then a woman said, “Hello?”

It wasn’t a recording, or a machine voice. He started to hang up. He held the receiver for a long moment, then put it back to his ear.

“Hello?” the woman said again. “Who is this?”

“Who is
this
?” It wasn’t Delia, or Rose, or anyone he recognized.

“Are you in trouble?” she said. “Do you need help?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She hung up on him.

He looked around at the dark, but no cars were approaching. He’d gotten a live person—or a dead one. He dialed the number again.

The woman answered on the first ring. “Yes?”

“I need to find out what’s going on,” he said. “What parish are you?”

After a pause, she said, “Ohio. And you? Are you in trouble?”

He thought of the only delegate from the state that he knew. “What kind of radio do you like?” he asked. “AM or FM?”

“Tell us where you are,” the woman said, “and we’ll send a car to pick you up.”

“Okay, I’m … let me get back to you on that.” He slammed down the phone and stepped back.

The Diggers had taken control of the communication system.

* * *

He resisted the impulse to burst into Crystal’s bedroom and shake her awake. He opened the door slowly and let the light fall across her face. Crystal lay on her side, Ruby tucked under her arm.

He touched Crystal’s shoulder, and she jerked awake. “The baby?”

“She’s right here.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and gently rested a hand on Ruby’s legs. “I’ve got to go, Crystal.”

She sat up and pushed the hair from her eyes. Even this tired, she was beautiful. “What? What happened?”

“A lot of things. I think the Diggers are rolling us up. The phone system’s been tapped.”

“Does that mean—can they trace you?”

“I don’t know. I tried to get off the phone as soon as I could.” He didn’t know how tracing worked. In the movies, they were always trying to get criminals to stay on the line. He said, “Mr. Blunt needs me. He’s in Salt Lake, and I have to drive there.”

“Now?”

“I can’t wait till morning. The Diggers may be rounding us up.”

“Okay, okay.” She looked around at the darkened room. “I’ll feed Ruby, you—”

“No, you’re not coming with me. You need to get as far away from here as possible. Zip is—he might be starting the Big Bite. You need to get on a bus that doesn’t go through Salt Lake. I was thinking you should go to Denver, and fly out from there. Go see Alice.” He lifted the Commander Calhoun backpack onto the bed. Inside was a ludicrous amount of cash. “When you get to Chicago, you can buy yourself a new car. Something safe, like a Volvo.”

“You’re taking my car?”

“I can’t take a bus. Besides, it’s a crappy car.”

“You can’t drive by yourself,” Crystal said.

“It’s the middle of the night. Nobody’s going to see me.”

Crystal climbed out of bed. “Makeup. I’ll do your face.” At the bedroom door she stopped, turned. “You’re going to need a hell of a lot of base.”

Ruby emitted a squeak, but her eyes stayed closed. Stony carefully slid one hand behind her neck, the other under her bottom, and lifted. Her arms jerked in a startle reflex, but he brought her close to his chest and she immediately settled.

It was a mistake to come here. Yet again he’d put his family in danger. This time it had only taken him a week to force Ruby and Crystal out of their home and put them on the run—a new record. That could never happen again. Whether or not the world ended tomorrow, he couldn’t come back to them. He couldn’t see anyone in his family again.

He knew he was wrong about Zip, too. Only a few days ago he thought he could not kill the man, even if it meant saving the world. But now Ruby was in the world.

He leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Take care of your mom, kiddo.”

he Mormons were the most disciplined of urban planners. Like all their cities, Salt Lake was laid out in a grid, each street numbered from its distance from the temple at the center of the city. The address Blunt had given him, 750 East 400 South, put him seven blocks east of the temple, and on the fourth block south of it. He didn’t need to read any of the building numbers to guess which one was Zip’s safe house. Or rather, which one used to be his. Four squad cars, three ambulances, and two fire trucks had formed a semicircle of strobing lights around a smoking shell of a house. The fire seemed to be out, but firefighters were still spraying down portions of the structure.

He was too late, then.

Stony made a three-point turn—easy to do in the wide street—and parked a block away. When he shut off the engine, he realized that over the hours he’d become deaf to the whine of the differential.

It was seven in the morning and still dark. He’d made it to Salt Lake in a little over four and a half hours, driving fast through Green River and Price, slowing down only when he
joined the interstate at Spanish Fork, where Crystal told him the cops liked to set radar traps. It was the farthest he’d ever driven a vehicle in his life, and it quadrupled the amount of time he’d spent behind the wheel. When he’d asked to borrow his sister’s car he wasn’t even sure whether he’d be able to drive all that way without causing an accident or getting pulled over. That he’d been able to do it felt like an achievement. That he’d enjoyed the speed and the freedom felt like a betrayal of Junie.

He pulled on the toboggan hat Crystal had loaned him and checked himself in the mirror. Commander Calhoun had said he was handsome, which was LD code for “almost normal.” Crystal had tried to take him the rest of the way to passing by coating his face in Clinique Honeymilk “City Base,” turning him into an extremely tanned dead man. He told her he looked like George Hamilton in
Love at First Bite
. She told him he looked fine. It would have to do.

He stepped out of the car and walked uphill toward the burned house, his hands jammed into the pockets of a denim jacket that used to belong to Crystal’s ex. It was a tree-lined residential neighborhood, a mix of wooden houses and brick apartment buildings. The only people on the street were down by the fire, a dozen bystanders standing outside the yellow tape line. He walked across the street to a spot perhaps fifty yards from the house, where he could look out over the hoods of the parked cars to watch the crews work. He leaned against a tree to project casualness.

What had happened here? Did Zip set fire to the house to cover his escape? Had Blunt tried to burn them out? Where was everyone now?

After ten minutes he had a partial answer: Some people had never left the house. Two firefighters carried out a body bag to a gurney, and that was loaded into one of the ambulances.
There was no way to tell whether the body was Blunt’s, or Zip’s—or belonged to an LD at all.

Over the next half hour four more bodies were brought out, loaded into the ambulances, and driven away. The sky lightened, and in the distance the Wasatch Mountains coalesced out of the dark. Only one ambulance remained.

Zip and his people weren’t the Jonestown type—their entire goal was to go down biting as many breathers as they could—so, it had been a fight. Sometime after Blunt had called the answering system and left his message for Stony, he’d gone into the house after them.

Was Blunt really some kind of hit man for the LDA? He and Stony were friends—at least, Stony thought they were friends—but he’d only seen the man every few weeks when he brought the mail. It wouldn’t have been hard for Blunt to keep him in the dark.

And if Blunt wasn’t an assassin, someone like him would be necessary. It was the only explanation for why the Big Bite hadn’t happened yet. The Diggers were good, and they could swarm a safe house once they’d been tipped off, but they didn’t have much of a chance to prevent a bite—that required inside information. The LDA had to police itself. Jesus, Delia had to be part of it, too. She said that they didn’t kill their own people, but of course she’d lie to him if she thought that was best for the army. The less he knew—the less any of the LDs knew—the less they could tell the government if they were caught.

He watched as they loaded a body bag into the last ambulance. A voice behind him said, “What’s going on?” He started to turn, and stopped himself.

“Just a fire,” he said.

The woman’s dog, a white poodlesque creature, sniffed his shoe, then ran away from him, straining at the leash.

“Proxy! No. I heard gunshots,” the woman said. “Early this morning.” He didn’t look into her face, sure she’d see through his disguise. She said, “Do you think they’re drug dealers?”

He shrugged, kept his eyes on the house. Finally the woman let the dog pull her away, and he watched her go. Ten yards down, she forced the dog to come away from some bits of garbage on the sidewalk. After she passed, the passenger window of the parked car at that spot rolled down, and cigarette smoke drifted out. A hand tossed out a lit butt. The smoke, when it reached him a few seconds later, smelled of menthol.

Stony looked at the house, then back at the car, a boxy green Chevy Caprice. He walked toward it, trying to see through the rear window while making it seem like his attention was on the burned house. Two men sat in the front seat. When he drew closer he caught a glimpse in the car’s side-view mirror of a pale face under a dark hat, but in another step the angle was wrong. He stopped, looked at the stretch of sidewalk outside the passenger window. Twenty, thirty cigarette butts lay on the cement.

Hours of cigarette butts. Hours of watching the house burn.

The ambulance rolled past, lights flashing, but with no siren. The taillights of the Caprice lit up, and then the engine started. Stony froze. The car backed up a few feet, turning to angle out of the parking spot, and suddenly the passenger window was beside him. The passenger’s face was gray, but his hair was coal black and cut in a bowl—like Moe Howard. It was Zip’s man from the congress, who’d crawled under the RV to look for a bomb. The man suddenly realized someone was standing outside his window, and threw up a pale hand to shield his face. The car pulled away.

Had he recognized Stony? It was impossible to tell.

Twenty feet away, the Caprice stopped abruptly, then began to back up at an angle. Stony spun in the other direction and began to walk quickly away. Then he calmed himself. The car
had
to turn around, because the way was blocked by the fire crews. It didn’t mean they’d recognized him.

The Caprice slowly came up alongside him, this time with the driver’s window facing him. Stony ducked his head and kept walking.

A moment later the car accelerated. He looked up to see it stop at the next intersection behind the ambulance. The ambulance turned right, and the Caprice went straight, toward downtown. Stony ran for his car. He was thankful the car was already pointing in the right direction.

The streets were starting to fill with morning traffic, but the slope of the hill let him see the Caprice two blocks ahead and below him. At the stoplight at State Street he was able to slide up behind the car with only an El Camino between them, and after that he was able to follow the Caprice north to where it pulled into a parking garage.

He slowed as he approached the dark entrance. What the hell were they doing? Going to the mall? The sign said ZCMI, which seemed to be some kind of department store or shopping center. He sat on the ramp, unwilling to follow too closely, until a car pulled up behind them. He took his ticket and began to follow the arrows first down, below street level, then around and up. The garage was mostly empty. On the third story he caught a glimpse of the green Caprice, heading up a ramp to the next level, and he followed, keeping his speed low. This level was a bit more crowded, and there was a double-door entrance to the store here. He rolled slowly past the rows of cars, craning his neck to see whether the Caprice was climbing the next ramp—and suddenly
passed the car. It had just backed into a parking spot next to a white panel truck, which had also backed in. With a start he realized that on the side door of the truck was a Commander Calhoun logo.

Keep calm, he told himself. He drove past the car without looking at it, turned the corner, and went up the ramp to the next level, which turned out to be the last. He parked next to a stairwell. He felt like Jack Gore, or one of the Hardy Boys. True, they’d only traveled four blocks. It was the shortest “tail job” he’d ever read about, outside of an Encyclopedia Brown story. That kid only had a bicycle.

He stared out the windshield, trying to decide what to do. If Zip had been burned out of the safe house, then he should have hit the road to a new safe house, or rejoined his people who’d already left. Blunt had said in his message that his breather driver, one of the men they’d used at the congress, was following a group who’d slipped out yesterday.