The Spider Thief (23 page)

“Cleo, he’s a con artist. He fleeces people all the time. Believe it or not, he’s fooling you.”

“Ash is a good guy who made some mistakes. Some bad mistakes. But he’s doing everything he can to fix them.”

Graves shook his head. This was ridiculous. “If he wants to make things right, he could turn himself in. Because if he doesn’t, I’m going to find him. And when I arrest him, when I put the cuffs on him good and tight, it’s going to feel wonderful. And do you know why?”

“Illuminate me.”

“Because he’s a criminal. He’s no good. He’s one of
them
, Cleo. The other team. The people we work hard to get off the streets to keep the world safe for decent, law-abiding people who don’t go around making ‘mistakes’ involving Colombian drug lords, automatic weapons, and a million dollars of counterfeit money.”

“Are you done?” Cleo asked, sounding tired.

“No, I am not done. I am not going to walk away, Cleo, and let you go down with the ship. This is going to end badly for Ash. And I’m here to make sure his mess doesn’t blow up all over you.” Something caught his eye in the mirror. About a block behind him, a black Trans Am rocketed around a corner and swerved into the wrong lane, dodging oncoming traffic.

A second later, a white-striped red Ford Torino skidded after it, leaving a trail of smoke from its tires. The Torino dodged around the same cars, their brake lights flashing red, and closed in on the Trans Am’s tail.

Graves blinked. It couldn’t be. Not without a film crew. It was like the seventies were coming to life in his rearview mirror, in all their awful glory.

But the cars were real, as impossible as that was. He watched them weave through traffic. “Cleo. We have a problem.”

“You’re right.” Cleo’s voice was thick with emotion. “Listen, Graves, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now.”

“No, Cleo, look—”

“Just listen to me for one second, because I have to say this. We can’t work together anymore, you and I.”

Graves watched the car chase rocket toward him in the mirror. He stared, unable to really make sense of it.

“Just say something,” Cleo said.

He shook himself. “Look, Cleo. Turn around in your seat and
look.
”

The Trans Am made a hard turn and whipped out of sight. The Torino slid around the corner after it, its wide rear end leaning hard, and vanished.

“Fine.” Cleo rolled down her window and stuck her head outside. Her eyes were red with unshed tears and her lips moved slightly out of sync with the phone. “What am I looking for?”

Graves blinked. The cars were gone. “Cleo? You’re not going to believe this.”

Nowhere

Cars flashed by on Ash’s left. The guardrail was a blur on his right. Up ahead, the Trans Am accelerated, its sleek black shape shrinking in his vision. Ash put his foot down and the Torino picked up speed.

DMT kept looking back over his shoulder, trading glances with Prez. He held the shotgun at an angle, pointed out the window, like he wasn’t sure where to put it. The open window blew in the ripe smell of his sweat.

“Cop cars back there again,” Prez said. “Three, this time. Maybe four.”

Ash glanced up to look in the rearview mirror, but it wasn’t there. There was only a little nub of metal stuck on the windshield. He ignored the nagging feeling in his stomach that told him they were all going to die. “Don’t worry. We’ll get out of this.”

The Torino floated oddly over the bumps and gravel of the freeway’s shoulder, as if it wasn’t in complete contact with the ground. The reflected noise from the cars he accelerated past kept rising until it became a steady roar.

DMT faced front, filling the wide seat. “How fast we going?”

“I don’t know.” Ash didn’t dare take his eyes off the road now. He didn’t blink. He focused on the rear end of the Trans Am ahead and the slate-gray blur of pavement that separated them.

He put his foot all the way to the floor. The engine wound up. The Trans Am grew larger again as he closed the distance.

“When we get a little closer,” Ash said over the noise, “take out a tire.”

“The hell with that,” Prez said. “This speed, we do that, everybody dies.”

Ash gripped the steering wheel so tightly his fingers tingled.

The Trans Am’s brake lights lit up red and it swerved left into a sudden gap in traffic. Ash followed a second behind it, feeling the hair stand up on the back of his neck. He dodged between cars as if they were standing still.

Andres slalomed through the traffic ahead. Ash followed, knowing he was being suckered but unable to do anything about it.

“Heads up!” DMT shouted.

Out of the corner of his eye, Ash saw a Jeep roar down an entrance ramp at an insane speed, streaking between two trucks to end up between him and the Trans Am.

He swung around and passed it, fighting to keep ahead of the Jeep as it tried to cut him off. He glanced over as he passed by, catching a glimpse of the dark-haired driver.

It was Cleo. She yelled to him, but he couldn’t make out the words.

Up ahead, Andres was trapped in the left lane behind a leather-clad guy on a Harley, with a bus on his right and a wide grass median on his left.

This was it, Ash thought. He accelerated, closing in fast. He realized a moment too late that Andres was setting a trap.

As Ash closed in, the Trans Am lunged ahead, side-swiping the motorcycle. The Harley went down in a spray of sparks, tossing the rider across the asphalt and down onto the median. The Trans Am shot away down the highway.

The wreckage of the motorcycle spun into the path of the bus, blowing out its front tire. As the bus lurched sideways, the crumpled motorcycle tumbled end over end toward Ash.

He braked hard and the Torino’s wheels locked up, sending them skidding. The shriek of tortured rubber filled the air. Panic blasted through Ash, paralyzing him. The twisted wreck of the motorcycle seemed to freeze in the air just in front of him, defying gravity.

He fought the steering wheel. Felt the big car shift around him, too slowly. Watched the bus shudder across the freeway in front of him, blotting out the sun. Then the Torino’s tires bit into the road and hurled them off into the grass. The horizon streaked past the windshield, dizzying. Prez let out a hair-curling whoop.

The uneven ground beneath the Torino banged and bucked, and their speed dropped. They passed the bus as it lumbered to a stop, and Ash wrestled the car back onto the road again.

For a brief instant, he started to relax. They were back on the road again, safe.

Then Cleo’s Jeep skidded out of control, hurtling straight toward him.

The bone-jarring impact jolted through the Torino, yanking Ash against the seat belt, sending the car skidding sideways. Cleo’s Jeep spun away, its front end mashed in, its windshield shattered. It glanced off the concrete center divider where the grass median ended and slid back into the center of the freeway. It came to rest ahead of the Torino, facing the wrong way, salting the asphalt with broken glass.

Ash pumped the brakes and stopped the Torino dead in the middle of the freeway. The Trans Am was long gone, taking Mauricio with it.

A smear of red inside the Jeep’s broken windshield glowed in the sunlight.

“Cleo,” he breathed. He fought to unbuckle the seat belt, his hands shaking. “Cleo!”

*

Shattering pain radiated through Cleo’s body, but it lasted only a second. Then everything overloaded and snapped to black. She floated, numb, every part of her slack and weightless.

She drifted.

A dim red light filtered through the gloom, darker red than any sunset. It didn’t frighten her, but it left her uneasy. Something waited for her, out there, though she couldn’t see anything.

Voices muttered around her. Snatches of conversations she couldn’t quite remember. Some recent, some long ago. A jumble of office small talk, raucous party laughter, late-night secrets whispered into the phone.

She smelled fresh-baked cinnamon rolls, new-mown grass, the smoke of her parents’ wood stove. She felt the bracing shock of a snowball fight, the jittery glee of prom night, the unceremonious pride of buying her first condo.

Her life cascaded down around her in sensations and sounds, but she couldn’t open her eyes to see anything. She was powerless to visualize her life, make any kind of sense out of it. She had the urgent desire to organize things, put them in place and tidy up.

Her life was a riddle that she had to sort out, needed to understand. She reached toward the sounds, but nothing was there. Just that endless red mist.

The harder she strained to remember things, the more elusive they got. The voices faded to a dim murmur. The smells and sensations softened to cottony nothing.

Thin silver lines radiated out around her, glittering like stars. She stared at their cold beauty, hungering to understand what she was seeing. And then she knew.

It was a spider web. Vast, limitless, encircling her like a night sky.

She couldn’t see the spider, but she knew it was out there. Impossibly huge. Waiting for her in the red darkness.

The spider had her life trapped in its web, wrapped up so that she couldn’t see it. The spider stretched over everything, through everything, stealing it away from her so that she could never have it back. Never live her life, as long as its web ensnared her. The spider had won.

She raged against it. Screamed out her wordless anger.

She wanted her life back. She wouldn’t let the spider take it.

Not now. Not ever.

*

Ash left the Torino running and sprinted across the pavement. Bits of broken glass crunched under his feet. Behind him, horns blared as traffic came to a dead stop.

His heart felt like it had been wrenched from his chest. He wanted to deny what he was seeing with his own eyes, but he couldn’t.

Steam hissed out from the edges of her Jeep’s crushed hood. The windshield was a white spider web of cracks, centered over the steering wheel. Cleo lay slumped over the airbag, sinking deeper into it as it went flat.

Ash stood frozen, staring at Cleo’s limp body. He couldn’t breathe. Sirens grew in the distance.

Hands shaking, Ash opened the car door. She didn’t move. He brushed the dark hair back from her face. “Cleo?”

A darkening bruise stretched across her forehead, already swelling. But she was breathing.

A dam broke inside Ash. He sagged against the doorframe, his breath raw. He was afraid to move her, afraid to injure her further.

How could he have done this? To her?

He measured his whole life, on some unspoken level, by how she would feel about him. Only now that he could lose her did he realize how deeply she had always been a part of him. Without her, there would be an aching hole inside that could never be filled.

He needed her. She saved him from the worst of himself, inspired him to become something better. Without her, he would be lost.

The Torino edged up behind him, engine rumbling. DMT had slid across into the driver’s seat. He and Prez stared out the window with a mixture of worry and cold remove.

“Time to go,” Prez said. “Men in blue goin’ to be here, seconds flat.”

Ash shook his head.

“Forget her, man. She’s a Fed.”

DMT gave Prez a look, but said nothing.

Ash just shook his head no.

Prez nodded once. “D. Get us out of here.”

“But, Boss—”

Prez reached up and slapped DMT on the back of the head. “Fool. Drive!”

DMT hunched in the seat. The Torino accelerated down the freeway, leaving Ash alone with Cleo.

He couldn’t look away from her delicate form, even as sirens wailed nearby and stopped. Voices shouted. Radios crackled.

This was all his fault. Chasing after Andres. Getting her involved. Finding the spider in the first place. He’d done all of this. It should have been him in there, broken. He would give anything to take her place.

She gasped, and Ash’s heart leapt.

“Cleo?” he whispered.

She drew in a ragged breath and blinked her eyes open. Her gaze focused on Ash. “The spider,” she gasped, looking scared.

“Don’t try to move.”

“I saw it,” she insisted. “I was wrong, Ash.”

“Shh. It’s okay.”

“The curse,” she said. “It’s real.”

Goosebumps ran up Ash’s arms.

“It’s real,” she repeated.

“I know.”

She glanced around and winced in pain. “Oh, God, Ash, did you trash my Jeep, too?”

“I know, I am so sorry. I’ll make it up to you.” He cradled her face in his hands, smiling like a madman through sudden tears. “You’re going to be okay. I love you.”

She drew in a breath to answer, but he never heard it. Rough hands seized him from behind. Dragged him away from Cleo.

He tried to fight them off, but there were too many, and they were too strong. They forced him face-down onto the glass-salted road.

Patent-leather shoes and crisply ironed slacks walked up and stopped. A bald black man lifted up his creases and squatted down in front of him. “I’m Special Agent Graves, FBI,” he said, looking immensely satisfied. “And
you
are under arrest.”

Alive

Ash tried to get comfortable in the hard plastic chair, but it wasn’t designed for that. The bleak white walls closed in around him, leaving barely enough space for the table and the empty chair opposite him. There were no windows, unless you counted the one-way mirror built into the door.

Across from him, FBI Special Agent Graves stood with perfect posture. He wore a spotless blue suit, immaculately tailored. The dark brown skin of his shaved head shone in the harsh light.

“All right,” Graves said, scanning his folder full of notes. “We’re going to go over this one last time.”

“No.”

Graves’s gaze shot up over the top of the file folder and drilled into Ash. “Excuse me?”

“Let me talk to Cleo first. I need to know she’s okay.”

“That’s out of the question.”

“Guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” Ash tried to stretch his aching arms, but the handcuffs anchoring him to the table effectively killed that idea.