UnSouled (8 page)

“Do you know how bad that is, Argent?”

“I know, right?”

“No, you don’t. The authorities. The Juvenile Authority. They’ve got facial tracing bots on the net.”

“Bots, right.”

“They’ll take down this house. I’ll get taken in. You’ll both get five to ten for”—Connor can’t control his laughter—“for aiding and abetting.”

“Ooh, this is bad, Argie,” says Grace from the corner.

“Who asked you?” Argent says. Being wasted doesn’t temper his treatment of his sister.

“We gotta get out of here, Argent,” Connor says. “We’ve gotta go now. We’re both fugitives now.”

“Yeah?” Argent still doesn’t quite grasp it.

“We’ll be on the run—you and me.”

“Right. Screwing with the world.”

“It was fated, just like you said.”

“Fated.”

“Argent and the Akron AWOL.”

“Triple A!”

“But you have to untie me before they come to take us out!”

“Untie you . . .”

“There’s no time. Please, Argent.”

“I can really trust you?”

“Did we or did we not just do tranq together?”

That’s enough to clinch the deal. Argent puts the pipe down, then goes behind Connor to undo his hands. Connor flexes his fingers and rolls his aching shoulders. He doesn’t know whether the numbness in his arms is from being tied up or from the tranq.

“So where do we go?” Argent asks.

Connor’s response is a glass pipe to the head. The pipe catches Argent just above his jaw and shatters, cutting the left side of Argent’s face in at least three places. Argent’s legs slip out from under him, and he hits the ground, groaning—still half-conscious, but unable to get up. His face gushes blood.

Grace stands staring at Connor, dumbfounded. “You broke great-grandpa’s bong.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She doesn’t go to help Argent. Instead she just looks at Connor, unsure whether she’s just been betrayed or liberated.

“Is it true what you said about the police coming after us?” she asks.

Connor finds he doesn’t need to answer. Because he can hear cars screeching to a halt outside and the steady beat of a helicopter overhead.

7 • Grace

Grace Eleanor Skinner fears death as much as anyone else. She fears pain even more. Once, a long time ago, Argie had made her go up to the high-dive platform while they were on vacation. She had squandered her willpower, mustering the guts for waterslides and such, but once she had made the climb to the
ten-meter platform, she found herself weak. The pool below looked small and very far away. Hitting the water would hurt. As she stood on the edge, toes curled on the concrete lip, Argie had heckled her from down below.

“Don’t be a stupid wimp, Gracie,” he yelled for all to hear. “Don’t think about it—just jump.”

Behind her, others were getting impatient.

“Gracie, jump already! You’re making everyone mad!” In the end, Grace had backed away and gone down the ladder in shame.

That’s what this feels like today. Only now the threat is far more real. Argie’s words from that day come back to her.
Don’t think about it—just jump
. She follows the advice this time.

She pushes open the cellar door and bursts forth into the light of day.
This is a game
, she tells herself.
I win games
.

There are sharpshooters in the yard, but they don’t see her at first. Their rifles are trained on the house, and the cellar is at the far back of the yard. They haven’t gone in yet. The force is still positioning.

“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” she yells, running out into the weedy yard, pulling the sharpshooters’ attention. Immediately all the rifles turn to her. She doesn’t think they’re loaded with tranqs.

“Don’t shoot,” she says again. “It’s this way. He’s over here. Don’t shoot!”

“On the ground!” one of the sharpshooters orders. “On the ground now!”

But no. Rule one—never allow capture unless it gives you an advantage.

“This way! Follow me!” She turns around, hands still flailing in the air as she runs back to the cellar. She half expects to be shot, but the other half wins; they don’t fire. She races down the stairs into the cellar and waits. In a moment, the
sharpshooters are there, covering one another, aiming at her and into the dim light of the cellar like soldiers in hostile territory. Although her heart feels like its exploding and she wants to scream, she says calmly, “You don’t need guns. He’s unarmed.”

The marksmen still hold their ground, covering for an officer in a suit who follows them down the stairs.

“I knew it was a bad idea,” Grace tells him. “I told Argie, but he wouldn’t listen.”

The officer sizes Grace up quickly, dismissively, just as everyone does. He guesses she’s low-cortical and pats her shoulder. “You’ve done a good thing, miss.”

More officers come into the cellar, making it crowded.

The figure tied to the pole is limp and semiconscious. The lead officer grabs his hair to lift his head and looks into his face.

“Who the hell is this?”

“My brother, Argent,” Grace says. “I told him not to steal all this stuff from the supermarket. I told him he’d be in big trouble. I knocked him out and tied him up. I had to hurt him, see, so he wouldn’t get shot. He’s not resisting, right? So you’ll go easy on him, won’t you? Won’t you? Tell me you’ll go easy on him!”

The officer is no longer kind to Grace. Instead he glares at her. “Where’s Lassiter?”

“Who?”

“Connor Lassiter!” Then he pulls out the picture of Argent with the Akron AWOL that he must have downloaded off the net.

“Oh, that? Argie made that up on the computer. It was a gag for his friends. Looks real, don’t it?”

The other officers look to one another. The lead man is not pleased in the least. “I’m supposed to believe that?”

Grace shakes her brother’s shoulder. “Argie, tell them.”

Grace waits. Argie might have a lot of faults, but he’s pretty good at self-preservation. Like Conner said, “aiding and debating”—or whatever it’s called—is a serious crime. But only if you get caught.

Argent glares at Grace through his blood-clouded eyes. He radiates a sibling hatred that could kill if it were set free. “It’s the truth,” he growls. “Gag photo. For my friends.”

It’s not what the officer wants to hear. The other men chuckle behind his back.

“All right,” he says, trying to seize what’s left of his authority. “Untie him and get him to a hospital—and go through the house anyway. Find the original file. I want that picture analyzed.”

Then they cut Argie’s ropes and haul him out. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t resist, and he doesn’t look at Grace.

After the others leave, one of the local deputies lingers, looking around at the stockpile of food. “He stole all this huh?”

“You still gonna arrest him?”

The deputy actually laughs. “Not today, Gracie.”

Now she recognizes him as a man she went to school with. She recalls he used to tease her, but he seems to have mellowed—or at least redirected his bad into good.

“Thank you, Joey,” she says, remembering his name, or at least hoping she remembered it right.

Grace thinks he’s going to leave, but he takes a second look around at the stockpiles of emergency supplies. “That’s an awful lot of potatoes.”

Gracie hesitates and shrugs. “So? Potatoes is potatoes.”

“Sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re not.” Then he pulls out his pistol, keeping his eyes trained on the large pile of potato sacks. “Out of the way, Gracie.”

8 • Connor

The deputy only suspects Connor’s presence, but doesn’t really believe it. Clearly he doesn’t give Grace credit enough to be harboring a fugitive. He thinks she’s too dim-witted to pull it off. Once he finds Connor, he’s just as likely to shoot him on the spot as not, because killing the Akron AWOL is just as good as capturing him. All Connor has in his favor now is the element of surprise, but that will be gone once he’s discovered—so the instant the deputy begins poking around the potato sacks, Connor makes his move, lunging out of the sack he’s hiding in, grabbing him by the ankles, and pulling his feet out from under him.

The man goes down, shouting in surprise, and his weapon, which he was not holding on to the way a deputy should, flies free. Grace goes for the weapon as the man lands in a stack of water bottles, sending them bouncing and rolling all over the ground.

Connor’s arms are still wrapped around the guy’s ankles, and he finds there’s only one thing he can say under the circumstances.

“Nice socks.”

Grace stands above them, aiming the gun at the deputy’s chest. “Don’t move and don’t call to the others or I swear I’ll shoot.”

“Hold on there, Gracie,” he says, trying to charm himself out this. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You shut up, Joey! I know what I do and don’t want to do, and right now I want to see you in your underwear.”

“What?”

Connor laughs, immediately getting what Grace has in mind. “You heard the lady. Strip down!” Connor wriggles the rest of the way out of the burlap sack and begins stripping down too, exchanging his clothes for the deputy’s. While Connor had thought he’d be in charge of his own escape, he lets Grace take the lead. He’s awed by what she’s managed to accomplish up till now, and as the Admiral once told him, “a true leader never puts his ego ahead of his assets.” And Grace Skinner is an asset of the highest order.

“What’s the game, Grace?” Connor asks, as he puts on the deputy’s pants.

“The kind we win,” she says simply. Then to the deputy, “Go on—the shirt too.”

“Grace . . .”

“No backtalk or I’ll fill ya full a’ lead!”

Connor chuckles at the silver-screen gangland cliché. “Technically bullets aren’t made of lead anymore—and let’s not even mention the ceramic ones they use on clappers.”

“Yeah, yeah—no backtalk from you, either.”

Joey the deputy, Connor notes, wears plain gray boxers that have seen better days, sitting limply under a pale belly that has probably gone from six-pack to kegger since his high school days. If Grace really did have an interest in seeing him in his skivvies, she must be disappointed.

“Where d’ya think you’re gonna run, Gracie? You’ve never been out of Heartsdale. This guy’ll dump you at the first rest stop, and then what?”

“Why should you care?”

“Put your back against the pole, please,” Connor says. Connor ties him as tightly as he can, but then Grace grabs a jagged piece of the broken bong from the floor and puts it into the deputy’s bound hands so that he can eventually cut himself free.

“They’ll all be after you the second I get loose. You know that, don’t you?”

Grace shakes her head. “Nope. The second you get loose, you’re gonna scoot yourself upstairs and hide in the bushes.”

“What?”

“That’s right—you’ll hide there till everyone else is gone. Then you’re gonna stroll on over to the Publix parking lot and collect your car, because that’s where we’re gonna leave it, keys and all. Then you’re gonna go about the rest of your day like nothin’ ever happened, and when people ask where you were, you were out gettin’ lunch.”

“You’re crazy! Why would I do that?”

“Because,” says Grace, “if you don’t keep this a secret, everyone in Heartsdale is gonna know you were outsmarted by dumb old Grace Skinner, and you’ll be a laughingstock till the cows come home, and they ain’t comin’ home anytime soon!”

Connor just smiles, watching the deputy’s face get beet-red and his lips purse into angry slits. “
You low-cortical bitch!
” he growls.

“I should shoot you in the kneecap for that,” Grace says, “but I won’t because I’m not that kinda girl.”

Connor puts on the deputy’s hat. “Sorry, Joey,” he says. “It looks like you’ve been double-gammoned.”

9 • Lev

It’s only a hunch. And if he’s wrong, his actions will make things worse—but he foolishly acts on his gut, because he
needs
it to be true. Because if it’s not true, then Connor is done for.

There is a whole series of observations that are feeding into this hunch:

—The fact that the deputy comes from behind the house rather than walking out through the front door.

—The fact that he seems to intentionally avoid the other officers.

—The fact that his hat is pulled low on his forehead, shielding his face like a sombrero.

—The easy way he grips the arm of the woman he’s taking into custody—the same one who came to give Lev the message. The deputy escorts her to a police car by the curb, and Lev can tell that her behavior is off too. It’s as if she’s anxious to get to the car, rather than resistant.

And then there’s the way that officer walks—with one arm stiff and pressed to his side, as if he’s in pain. Maybe from a wound on his chest.

The two get in the police car and drive off—and although Lev can’t get a clear enough look at the deputy’s face, the hunch is pinging Lev’s brain on all frequencies. Only after the squad car has driven away does Lev convince himself that this is Connor in disguise, effecting a clever escape right beneath the noses of law enforcement.

Lev knows that when the car reaches the end of the street, it will have to turn right on Main, and now he’s thankful that he had spent most of the day searching the town, because he knows things he might not otherwise know. Such as the fact that Main is in the midst of heavy construction, and all traffic will be diverted down Cypress Street, two blocks away. If Lev can cut through a series of front and back yards, he can get there first. He takes off, knowing if he makes it there, it will only be by seconds.

The first yards have no fences. Nothing dividing one property from another except for the state of the grass—well tended in one yard, neglected in the next. In a moment, he’s tearing across an adjacent street to the second set of yards. There’s a
picket fence in the front yard of the next house, but it’s a low one, and he’s quickly able to get over it, onto artificial turf of a weird aquamarine shade.

“Hey, whad’ya think you’re doing?” a man shouts from the porch, his toupee as artificial as his lawn. “This here’s private property!”