The Gift of the Dragon (9 page)

She noticed a door in the back of the bathroom. It looked like just a closet. Alice tried the door and found it opened to a hallway with five more doors.
 

She went into the first room; it contained a queen-size bed, a closet, and a desk. It seemed very plain, with little sign of personalization. She checked the closet and saw men’s pants, shirts, and jackets. Most looked like nice dress clothes, expensive. One shirt stood apart on its hanger, faded, soft denim, with leather patches on the elbows. She checked the pockets of the clothes, and in the pocket of the denim shirt, she found a worn card. Embossed blue words printed on thick white stock read, “Dr. Peter Moore, Chief Science Officer, Apple Creek Corporation,” along with a phone number and e-mail address. She put the card in her pocket.
 

She went to the next bedroom and found it very similar to the first, except this man wore a larger size and owned more blue shirts and ties, where Moore’s clothes tended to be black. The closets in the other two rooms also stood mostly empty, containing only a few expensive women's clothes. She found no other cards in these rooms. The clothes in the two women's closets were different sizes, and each room's clothing had a predominant shade.
 

The room next to Moore's room she thought of as the Blue Room for all the blue clothing. The woman’s room across from this one contained mostly yellow clothes.
 

In the Yellow Room, there sat a picture on the desk, of two couples, laughing, their arms around each other. One of the women was Sara. The scene on the edge of the Columbia flashed in her mind again, and she remembered something.
Sara wore a yellow shirt!

The older man must be Peter Moore. She went back to Moore's room and searched it again, looking this time under the sweaters stacked on the shelf and inside the socks and underwear in the drawers built into the closet. She tapped on the walls for hollow spots but found none.
 

Under Moore’s multicolored boxers, she found a small gun.
Smith & Wesson Centennial
, her inner voice whispered. She opened the cylinder and checked.
No bullets!
Thinking she might find ammunition for it stored elsewhere, she put the gun into the waistband of her jeans. She then went to the bed, flipped off the mattress, and checked under the box frame. Nothing. She repeated this process in the other rooms. No more guns, and she found nothing more helpful nor suspicious in the other rooms. She went back into the Yellow Room and contemplated the picture.
 

Jenny had said Sara had been a young girl when Alice had brought her to Oregon. In the picture, Sara stood next to her father, an unknown man, and a woman.
She must have come back here when she left me.

Looking at the picture, she remembered more, in flashes. Sara laughing, Sara sitting next to her. Sara's head exploding with gore. Alice falling into the Columbia. She wondered whether these were real memories or just her imagination putting together things Jenny had told her.

I wonder if it matters.

Leaving the photograph for now, Alice went to the back wall of the hallway of the office of Moore and Moore. There hung a painting of two chairs looking out at a calm, blue lagoon. Acting on a hunch, she tapped the wall under the painting with her fist. It sounded hollow. She felt carefully and found a circle of wood under the painting that moved inward when she pushed.

A large piece of the wall moved inward with a soft clicking sound.
 

A hidden door!

On the other side of the door, she found another room also with automatic lighting that came on when she entered. In the room stood two paper-covered reclining exam beds. Dark red splatters covered the paper sheet on one of the beds. Next to it, she saw a machine with tubes and vials attached. Her inner voice said
apheresis machine.
Next to it stood devices she recognized somehow as centrifuges, a plasmapheresis machine, vented infusion set, even a PGM, a personal genome machine.
 

Expensive stuff,
she thought. She heard Jenny’s voice say, “You remember things from your past but not people. Every brain injury is different.”
 

I must have known what these things did, once
.
Why?
To one side waited a full kitchen with a fridge, stove, and dishwasher. She noticed another door at the far end of the room. She looked at the exam bed with the bloody paper. She would come back to look at that more closely, she thought, but first she wanted to see where the door went. This door had a small window in it. She looked through and into the waiting room she had first entered. Another hidden door;
what is going on with this place
? She turned and headed back to examine the bloody bed. Just as she reached it, she heard a metallic crash
. My Red Bull can?
 

Darn, now it stinks to have all these lights on!
 

She rushed back to the window to see what had made the noise but then, hearing a click, she dropped to the floor just as a stream of bullets cut through the wall above her, whatever shot them making only slight puffing sounds.
 

The silence of the gun amazed Alice. Betting that the gunman would not shoot the same place twice, she slowly raised her head until she could peek through one of the bullet holes about two feet from the floor. She saw the broad, black-covered back of the man, his hands fiddling with the door to the hallway.
Thank goodness I locked it behind me!
 

Move now,
said that voice again
.
She shook her head.
Did I hear all these damn voices before I got shot?
She found the latch on the hidden door. It had a curved lever type of handle; she pulled it down, yanked the door open, and did a forward roll into the waiting room, coming up with Moore's Centennial in a double-handed grip, just as the gunman whirled about. He wielded a short, carbine-style gun.
That is a De Lisle carbine, quietest gun ever made.
 

“Drop it!”

He wore a thick flak vest over a black combat suit, with a hood over his head revealing only his eyes. He glared at the Centennial, then at her.
Shoot, he’s going to—

He hurled the carbine at her and rolled to his left, coming back up. “Dang,” she spat, ducking under the spinning carbine and dropping the useless Centennial, cursing Moore for not keeping it loaded or having any bullets in his underwear drawer. The gunman came out of his roll, his foot flashing through the space where her gun hand would have been if she had tried to keep it pointed at his twisting form.
 

If she were slower.
 

She came in with a kick to his stomach, doubling him over enough for her left elbow to strike him in his jaw. She could feel him rolling with it though.
He is good!
She grabbed his head and jammed her knee into his face, but he turned and only took a glancing blow. He went down then, and as her momentum took her in toward him, he caught her with a foot to the stomach, dropping her to her knees. He followed up with his other foot to her head, a solid blow she only partly ducked. She saw stars and tasted blood as she rolled back out of his range.
 

They faced each other for a second, and then he charged with a roundhouse right she blocked easily. She struck out with her own right. He caught that and spun into a kick she slid off her left shoulder. Still turning, he aimed a back kick at her, and she moved out of the way barely in time, taking a hard blow on her shoulder.
He is using kung fu
,
so he will block and counter next
. She aimed a kick at his stomach again and pulled back just as he committed to the block. He spun to combine his block with a strike where her head should be. She stepped inside his spin, doubled her fists, and as he rolled around her fist met his face just at the peak of his turn. The impact rolled up her arms as she held her strike, and she felt his nose crack. Out loud this time, she said, “That one you didn't dodge.”

He glared at her and then licked his lips and grinned.
 

“Haven't had a real fight in a while, babe.” His voice sounded deep, gravelly, with a hint of surfer.
 

“Well, here you go,
babe
!” She had learned his pattern now and spun into a set of feints, kicks, and elbows that gave her four more good strikes to his head and kidneys. He came up from the last one with his De Lisle pointed at her.
 

“Enough, bitch! If you want to survive this—”
 

“Screw survival. I want satisfaction!” Alice sang under her breath as she re-directed the barrel of the carbine, dancing in with her elbow to the gunman's jaw. She grabbed the stock of the weapon out of his hands and stepped back with the barrel in her left hand and the stock in her right. As the gunman shook his head to clear it, she aimed the weapon at him, dropping back enough so he couldn't pull the same trick on her.

Charging, he tried anyway. The subsonic bullets punched him backward, two striking his vest and knocking him down, but the last one punched through his throat and out the top of his head.

Shoot!
She had meant to keep him alive. The De Lisle’s trigger took less force to pull than she expected, firing three shots when she meant for only two.
Wow, this
is
a quiet gun
.
 

Then, her legs shaking, she collapsed in a heap to the floor as the adrenaline rush gave way to the sudden realization that she'd killed a man—with skills she barely knew she had. Shaking badly, she stayed seated on the floor. She could not stand. Jenny said the seizures that occasionally froze various parts of her body might come less frequently as her brain healed. At least her brain had waited until after the fight to have its internal electrical storm.

When she got her legs working again, she stood up and searched the man. Inside his flak jacket, she found a wallet. A little money, credit cards, license. Jake Hannover. California, Los Angeles. Federal ID.
FBI badge.
She'd killed a federal agent! Not a good way to end the day.
Wait, these guys don't work alone, do they?
She thought she better get moving.
 

Alice went back into Sara's room and took the photo out of the frame. That could be useful. On the back of the photo she saw a handwritten note:

"One Particular Harbor,” and a one-word signature, “Sam.”
 

She had no idea what the words might mean, and she needed to get moving, so she rolled the picture up and stuck it in her shirt.

Dead Jake carried three extra magazines for the De Lisle on his belt, but it would not be easy to carry the long weapon around without people noticing. She remembered a canvas shopping bag crumpled in one of the closets. She got that, partially broke the carbine down, and put it in.
 

In Jake’s pocket she found a fine-looking, slim smartphone. She made a few tries at guessing the pass code, looking at combinations of his address, birthday, and city from his ID. Most people used those. Jake apparently did not. She thought about putting the phone in her bag to deal with later. Then, she heard
leave it,
in her head.
It can be tracked
. Alice dropped the phone.
 

She took Jake's money and his wallet to make it a little harder for whoever found him to discover his identity. She realized she had left too many prints in here to clean them all up.
Burn the place down?
A fire would just attract attention. Other than the mess she and Jake made, the building looked as though no one had been inside for some time.
The bills must be on auto-pay.
It could be a while before anyone found Jake here. No one had ever cleaned up the blood in the medical room, after all.

She shouldered her bag and went to the door to look out. The rest of the office park appeared deserted. She carefully opened the door and walked out into the night.

After the fight at Moore’s office, Alice felt exhausted. She asked Ami to find her a cheap, anonymous hotel, and Ami led her to one on Thirty-Fourth Street in St. Petersburg. Seeing the room, Alice talked with Ami about what the star ratings on Google search might mean. “Next time tell me whether the review says ‘reminds me of a total crack den’—that is not a good review. We don’t want to stay at motels people say are like crack dens, Ami!” Ami thanked Alice, saying she needed feedback to improve her recommendations.
And they call this a smartphone!
 

The next day, still tired and shaken, somewhat more from the battle with Jake than from the dirty, noisy motel, on the bridge that heads south from St. Petersburg and over Tampa Bay, Alice found a rest area where she pulled off into a space right next to the sparkling waves. She parked there, staring back at the bridge’s span in awe. After all the traumatic events of the last twenty-four hours, she needed to sit quietly, stare out over the azure water, and breathe.

The Sunshine Skyway stretches over four miles across Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg to Terra Ceia. Two triangular sheets of steel like the sails of a huge ship hold aloft its span. With the noontime Florida sun on them, they appeared to Alice to be shining white ships crossing a wine-dark sea, like the boats of the Elves in a book called
The Silmarillion
. Jenny had given it to her to read while she recovered, and the thick book had left its own deep gash in her mind. Some of the Elves in the book returned to try to fix the world they left behind. That noble effort did not turn out well for them.
Maybe I should take Jenny’s advice and go back to the slopes of Mount Hood while I still can!
 

After a time, she needed to pee, and she left her car and went into the public bathrooms at the parking area. When she returned, sweating from the noonday heat and with a cold Pepsi from the machine, she decided to figure out her next move. She picked up her phone and pulled the folded photograph from her pocket. The four people in the photo stared back at Alice. Two were dead, Sara and Peter. The other two were the only clues she had. She thought about how she had gotten Moore’s address from his phone number.
If only there was a way to get that kind of information from a photograph!