Chapter 7
Alice
Present day
Alice caught a shout from Carter that could have been “hold on” as he leaned the bike to one side of the van, the motor thrumming underneath them.
The passenger door swung open and the bearded guy jumped out, yelling at them to stop.
Carter leaned the bike even further, but the guy lunged and got a hold of Alice’s arm.
Cold panic seized her chest. Without thinking, she kicked out.
Her boot clipped his waist, and he flinched—only slightly, but it was enough.
Carter accelerated and the guy’s hand slipped away.
Wobbling, she dove for Carter’s waist. He spun the bike right around, tipping her in the opposite direction.
She screeched and scrambled back up the seat, catching him in a bear hug, flailing for the foot pegs.
What was he doing? They were now facing the nearly closed garage door—shouldn’t they be heading onto the road?
Again the guy closed in. “Carter!” she yelled.
For half a second they just sat there, and then the bike took off, knocking her backward.
She recalled that she wasn’t supposed to be clinging to him like this, but she sure as hell didn’t want to let go.
He aimed toward a driveway at the side of the building, gaining speed.
He shifted gears and she lurched forward, clunking her helmet into his.
He was going into the compound? Why would he do that?
She turned her head to one side but couldn’t see anything beyond the side of the building.
Presumably their pursuers were climbing into the van—or just sitting there waiting for her and Carter to emerge.
Carter rounded the building and rode between two huge bundles of plastic garbage, bound with string.
Warily, she eased her hands back to the sides of his waist. Not a fingernail would fit between his jacket and hers, but now that she’d crossed that boundary, she wasn’t going back.
In one of the bike’s mirrors, she caught the reflection of the van.
“They’re coming!” she yelled. Didn’t they have guns?
If this were her novel, they’d be shooting by now.
Carter wove between stacks of recycling and scrap metal, the van sliding in and out of the mirror.
It was definitely easier to predict his movements and shift her balance to suit when she was flat up against him.
The handlebar scraped the corner of a concrete wall, and she squeaked.
They rounded the wall and came face-to-face with a chain-link fence at the far end of the compound.
Behind them, the van was coming up fast. They were cornered.
The driver blasted his horn, the sound muffled in her helmet.
Instead of slowing, Carter accelerated, straight at the fence.
She shrieked again—she couldn’t help it—and turned her head.
He kept on going. Was he planning to bust through it?
Omigod, jump it? She braced for impact—and then a tangle of jagged, wiry metal flashed past. There was a hole in the fence, and they were passing right through.
They zipped over a grass shoulder and onto a street.
Back in the recycling yard, the van had pulled up just short of the fence.
It was way too big for the hole. It started turning—heading back to the gate, no doubt.
Carter took a series of side streets through the Montrose industrial area and pulled into a deserted driveway between two concrete buildings.
As he drew to a stop, she lurched forward and her helmet cracked into his.
“Sorry,” she said. He dropped the kickstand and killed the engine.
From inside a nearby building came a squeal of metal being cut—or maybe that was in her head.
“You wanna get off?” he said.
She was clinging like a limpet. With shaky legs, she clambered off even less elegantly than she’d gotten on and went to undo the helmet clasp. Her gloved hands shook. Her whole head felt clammy with cold sweat.
“Here, let me.” He stepped closer, pulling off his gloves.
As he lifted the helmet off, the metallic buzz rose to a screech, and she watched her reflection in his visor turn from an identical helmet to a flushed face framed by crazy hair.
She was definitely not one of those women who would look sexy taking off a helmet and shaking out her shiny, untangled hair.
“You okay?” he said, removing his helmet.
She bent double, resting her gloved hands on her thighs. “That was fucking terrifying!”
“Couldn’t have done that in an Aston Martin.”
“Did you know there was another way out of the yard?”
“Never go into a situation unless you know two ways out. Nice work with the boot—quick thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking at all. It was sheer fucking panic.”
“Can’t help noticing your language has deteriorated, Ms. Thornton.”
“No fucking kidding!”
He smiled—not the wry quirk, but broadly and openly, and it was just like in the book: you felt like you’d unlocked a reward. “Catch your breath a minute. I gotta do something.”
He drew something else out of a saddlebag—another license plate and a screwdriver—and quickly switched plates.
“Now turn your jacket inside out,” he said, unzipping his.
Puzzled, she watched as his jacket turned from black to brown—it was reversible! She followed suit with hers.
“Excellent,” he said. “Now we look like a tragic touring couple.”
“Won’t the plate be picked up as fake?”
“It’s not fake. It’s registered, just not to this bike. I have a few of them.”
“As you do.”
“I do freelance surveillance for a few PIs in D.C. I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”
D.C.? All this time, her book boyfriend was living, like, a couple of hours away? Freelance surveillance made sense for a former spy, though it sounded like a waste of his other skills. And there she went again, assuming she knew him.
He pulled her phone from his jacket pocket—formerly the inside pocket, now the outside. “Do you have anything stored on here to do with the book? Files? Recordings? Downloads? Anything at all?”
“Absolutely not. Nika would have flipped. She was crazy careful. She wouldn’t even let me use Windows.
Said ‘they’—whoever ‘they’ were—could get access to your every keystroke.
She disabled Wi-Fi on my laptop and made me use some software she said would lessen the chances of anything being tracked.
I tried to at least talk her into storing backups on the cloud—everything was on that laptop, all her notes, and mine, research, every draft, the master copy—but she was adamant.
She even went through in a frenzy before she died and permanently deleted all her notes and every draft.
I tried to get them recovered after she died, so I could check some stuff, but the tech guy said it was impossible. ”
“That didn’t clue you into the fact that this wasn’t fiction?”
“I thought she was just paranoid about plagiarism, and the cancer was affecting her brain. That can happen. I just really wanted to write a book, but before this I never felt like I had anything to write about. Believe it or not, not every day in Montrose is the stuff of page-turning fiction.”
Carter held the phone up. “Are your photos backed up?”
“Um, yeah?” She reached for it. “I should call the principal. She’ll be wondering what’s going on. Call in sick, maybe.” And how would she explain being escorted from the property by the trash collector?
He turned away, swiftly removed the SIM card and snapped it, then threw the phone to the ground, and stomped on it with a series of sickening crunches.
“What the hell?”
He kicked the remains to a grate over a drainage hole and slid them between the bars. “It was a shit phone anyway. I’ll buy you a better one.”
“You think someone’s tracking me?”
“They’d be stupid not to.”
“How about your phone?”
“It’s clean. You ready?” he said, swinging his leg over the bike.
“Couldn’t we have just left the phone here?
” she said, pushing her helmet back on and managing to do it up all by herself.
It wasn’t all that different from wearing a virtual reality headset.
In fact, the whole experience felt like some super-vivid virtual reality game, though she’d only tried that once, and only for a few minutes before she’d gotten nauseous. “I could have picked it up later.”
“I’d rather keep them guessing.”
“There you go with the ‘them’ thing again,” she said, managing a less clumsy mount this time.
“One thing I forgot to mention—don’t hold your head too close to mine.”
“Noted.” She realized she’d slid right up behind him without thinking twice. She eased off so they weren’t quite touching.
It was like an alternative reality, driving in disguise down streets she’d known all her life.
Few people looked their way, but to those who did, she was invisible behind the helmet and visor.
The hipster who worked Friday nights at the pizza shop—a former student—waited to cross the road, looking straight through them as they passed.
Her Zumba teacher sat at a table outside the juice bar on Main Street, on her phone.
Who knew a motorcycle was the perfect spy vehicle?
An Aston Martin driven by Mr. Muscles here would likely make the local newspaper.
They turned onto her street. As they approached her house, Carter didn’t slow. She tapped his hip once. He still didn’t slow. She tapped three times.
Then she saw what he was seeing. Big black SUVs were parked on the road outside her house.
A police car blocked the driveway, its front doors open.
People in suits carried beige cardboard boxes down her front path.
Two men were hoisting her filing cabinet into the back of a black van.
Beside them, a guy was constructing another box from a flat pack.
On her neighbor’s porch, a cop and a woman in a suit stood talking to the single dad who’d just moved in.
They all stared at her house like Alice had buried ten bodies in the yard.
Alice tapped Holt’s hip again, three times. This was nuts. She needed to come clean, explain, before things got even crazier. He still didn’t slow. His head didn’t even turn. She tapped his other hip. He drove right on past.
As they approached the T-junction at the other end of her street, out of sight of the SUVs, a dark blue sedan parked across the road suddenly U-turned, forcing Carter to accelerate to avoid a collision.
Carter’s helmet tilted slightly—watching the car in his side mirror?
Alice ducked and twisted to get a sightline in the mirror.
The car was following. A loud, echoing crack blasted in her ears, and Carter swerved.
Shit, that couldn’t be a—? Another crack.
Someone was shooting at them? At the junction, Carter made a sharp left turn, throwing them into a lean.
He hunched slightly and she copied, digging her gloves into his hips and flattening herself into his back.
Personal space be damned. As he wove through traffic, accelerating and slowing, earning the occasional horn blast, she had to concentrate hard to stay glued to him.
The town passed by in flashes: the library, where she had a book on hold; the Swedish bakery, smelling of cinnamon buns as if this were any old day; old Mr. Flannery turning to scowl at the reckless motorcyclists as he walked into his art gallery.
As they left the last block of houses behind and hit the town’s green belt, she felt Carter’s spine lose some of its tension.
She could no longer see their pursuers—any of them.
Had she just become a fugitive from justice? And window cleaners? And random people taking potshots from a car? This was not what she’d expected from her afternoon.