Chapter 8
Sera
I had no idea where we were going, how Travis had managed to figure out I would be in this much danger, or how I was going to survive the asthma attack I could feel building.
But I kept running.
Travis had my hand, and he was pulling me through an alley I’d never noticed in three years of living three blocks from here. Past a loading dock. Past a delivery van with its back doors hanging open.
Right turn, then straight, then another right, and every turn was a decision he made without slowing down, and I followed because there was nothing else to do.
My bag was gone. I’d dropped it in the hallway when he’d grabbed me, or maybe I’d dropped it in the service corridor, or maybe somewhere between the two.
I couldn’t remember. My phone was in it.
My inhaler was in it. My thumb drive with two years of Kindt data was in it.
All of it was back in my apartment building with the men who were there to kill me.
Travis pulled me around a corner and my shoe caught on something and I stumbled. He caught me without breaking stride, his hand tightening around mine, and we kept moving. The alley opened onto a cross street and he went right, pulling me with him.
My lungs had started complaining two alleys ago. A tightness across my chest that I recognized the way you recognize an old enemy. Damn it. Not yet. Not now. I breathed through my nose and out through my mouth and told my bronchial tubes that this was not the time for their bullshit.
They disagreed.
Travis turned us down another side street. Narrower. Less foot traffic. He slowed from a run to a fast walk and checked behind us. I checked too. Nobody. Just an empty sidewalk and a row of parked cars and a woman walking a dog on the opposite side.
“Are we—” My sentence dissolved into a cough. A bad one, deep and wet, the kind that pulled my shoulders forward and made my diaphragm spasm. I pressed my free hand against my sternum and tried to breathe through it.
Travis stopped. He looked at me. Really looked, not the quick operational glances he’d been throwing over his shoulder since the hallway but a full, focused assessment that started at my face and moved to my hand on my chest and then back to my face.
“Where’s your inhaler?”
“My bag.” I managed it between breaths. “Dropped it.”
Something passed across his expression. Brief, controlled, immediately replaced by something harder. He looked up the street, then down it. His eyes landed on a small drugstore on the corner half a block ahead.
“We’ll get you an over-the-counter inhaler there. We can’t go back to the apartment.”
I nodded because I didn’t have enough air to say yes.
He put his arm around me and we walked. Not running anymore.
Walking, which was good, because I wasn’t sure my lungs would have allowed anything faster.
Each breath was a little shallower than the last. I could feel the familiar tightening, the airways narrowing, the air having to push harder to get in and out.
I’d managed my asthma my entire life. I knew the stages. I knew how long I had before shallow became difficult and difficult became dangerous. Right now, I was at shallow and heading south.
Travis held the drugstore door open and walked me inside. Fluorescent lights and aisle after aisle of organized products. The normalcy of it was disorienting.
Two minutes ago someone had been chasing us through alleys with a hand inside his jacket, and now I was standing next to a display of seasonal allergy products under lights that hummed the same flat frequency as my cubicle at the FBI.
“Sit down.” Travis guided me to the bench by the pharmacy counter in the back. “Don’t move.”
He disappeared down an aisle. I sat on the bench and focused on breathing. In through my nose, slow as I could manage. Out through pursed lips. The wheeze was audible now, a thin whistle on each exhale that I hated because it made the invisible thing visible. Made people stare. Made people worry.
Nobody in the drugstore was staring. A woman in the next aisle was comparing shampoo bottles. The pharmacist was typing something behind the counter. The world was going about its business four blocks from where men with guns were waiting in my apartment and actively searching for us.
Travis came back with an over-the-counter inhaler box and had it open before he reached me. He pulled the inhaler out of the packaging and handed it to me. “I already paid for it.”
I took two puffs. Held each one as long as I could. The epinephrine was rougher than my albuterol, with a jittery chemical edge that my prescription didn’t have, but the airways responded. I could feel them loosening. Not all the way, but enough.
I took a third puff. Sat there on the pharmacy bench with my hands on my knees and waited for my chest to unlock.
Travis stood beside me. He wasn’t watching me. He was watching the front of the store, the entrance, the windows. His body was angled so that he was between me and the door.
“Better?” he asked without turning around.
“Getting there.” My voice was thin but functional. “Thank you.”
“We need to keep moving. They’ll widen their search radius.”
He looked down at me then. There were new lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there at breakfast. He looked exhausted. He looked about how I felt.
This morning he’d told me to report through channels and let someone else handle it. He’d sat across from me at his kitchen table and made it clear that whatever I’d come to Montana for, he wasn’t offering it.
And then he’d driven to Spokane. Why? Because I was in danger? How in the world had he known that? Lucky guess?
He should buy a damned lottery ticket.
“Can you walk?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Come on.”
He put his arm around me and we walked. Two blocks east, past a dry cleaner and a nail salon, to a coffee shop on a corner.
He checked the interior through the window before we went in, a quick scan that took maybe two seconds and covered every corner of the room.
Then he checked the street behind us. Then the cross street.
“Here’s ten dollars. Order something. Sit where you can see the door. Don’t use your phone.”
“I don’t have my phone. It’s in my bag.”
“Right.” He paused. “I’m going back for my car. It’s still parked near your building. They were watching your entrance, not the street behind the building. I’ll be in and out. Fifteen minutes at the most.”
“You’re going back there?” I wanted to say that going back toward multiple armed men was insane, that we should call the police, that we should rent a car or take a bus or a submarine or anything but him going back toward the danger.
“I’ll be okay. It shouldn’t take longer than fifteen minutes.
If I’m not back in twenty, walk to the Spokane police department on Mallon Avenue.
Tell them everything. Ask for a federal liaison.
Tell them everything you know about Kindt.
Call reporters and tell them. Hell, call everybody you know so as many people as possible have the information. ”
He was trying to save my life if he didn’t make it back. “Travis—”
“I’ll be okay. Go.” He waited until I was inside. Watched me through the window until I sat down. Then he was gone.
I ordered a coffee because that’s what he’d told me to do and because my hands needed something to hold. I sat at a table near the back with a clear sight line to the entrance and wrapped both hands around the mug and tried to make sense of the last hour.
I couldn’t.
I’d driven back this morning with the windows down and the radio off. Five hours of highway to think about fact that I’d driven to Montana, broken into a man’s house, laid out two years of work across his kitchen table, and been told to go report it to the people who’d already ignored me.
Five hours to be furious at him for dismissing me and furious at myself for going in the first place. So when I’d seen his name pop up on my phone, I’d ignored it. Then turned it off.
I hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone. Not Pratt. Not my mother. Nobody. I wanted silence and the road.
And then a hand over my mouth in my own hallway made the world turn inside out.
Travis in Spokane. The man who hadn’t left his house in three years had driven three hundred miles into a city for me.
He’d known things he shouldn’t have known. He’d known about the men before we’d seen them. He’d known my building’s layout well enough to find the service entrance.
He’d moved through that chase with a certainty that had nothing to do with panic and everything to do with training.
I sat in the coffee shop and stared at the door and the minutes passed. Two. Five. Eight. The coffee sat untouched on the table. Outside, Spokane moved at its normal pace. Cars, pedestrians, a bus pulling away from the curb. All of it ordinary.
Twelve minutes.
The door opened. A teenager with headphones. Then a woman with a stroller. Then nobody for what felt like a very long time.
Fourteen minutes.
The door opened again, and it was Travis. He stood in the entrance and found me immediately, like he’d known exactly where I’d be sitting, and something in his shoulders released by a fraction of an inch. I immediately got up and went to him.
“Let’s go.”
The car was at the curb. I got in. He got in. The doors closed and the sounds of the city muffled to almost nothing, and we were enclosed in a space that felt, absurdly, safer than anywhere I’d been all day.
He pulled away from the curb and drove east. Through downtown, past the strip malls, onto the highway. Spokane shrank in the side mirror. The buildings thinned. The sky opened up.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. The road stretched ahead of us, east toward Idaho and then Montana. Five hours of highway, the same route in reverse.
This morning I’d driven this highway in the other direction, angry and done and certain I’d never see him again.
Now I was in his passenger seat, heading back with an over-the-counter inhaler in my pocket and no bag and no phone and no home to return to.
Everything I’d built in Spokane was behind me.
I couldn’t go back to my apartment. My data was gone.
My life, the careful organized structure of it, had been dismantled in the span of an hour.
The only thing I had was the man sitting next to me. The man who was gripping the steering wheel with both hands and staring straight ahead and hadn’t said a single word since we’d gotten in the car.
I looked at him. At the tension in his jaw, the rigid set of his shoulders. At the hands that had been shaking in the drugstore.
His hands were still shaking.
The man who had zigzagged through the streets like it was choreography, whose voice hadn’t wavered once in the hallway or the alley or the drugstore, was gripping the steering wheel like a lifeline.
I looked away. Out the window. At the highway and the trees and the distance growing between us and everything that had just happened.
I didn’t ask about the shaking. I didn’t ask about the bruises or how he’d known about the men in my building. I didn’t ask any of the questions that were lining up in my head, each one sharper than the last.
There would be time for that.
Right now, Travis was driving me somewhere safe, and his hands were shaking, and I owed him at least the grace of pretending I hadn’t noticed.