“The shoot-out town,” Boxers said.
“Bingo.”
“And who is Douglas Wilkerson?” Jonathan asked.
“Give me a second.” Venice started typing again. Over the course of three minutes — enough time to load four mags — Venice’s face ran the full gamut from confusion to discovery and back to confusion. “I have no idea who Douglas Wilkerson is,” she announced. “Ask me why.”
Jonathan sensed that he already knew, but he played along. “Why?”
“Because he doesn’t exist.” They said it together.
“Yet there’s an auto registration,” Jonathan said.
“With a real physical address,” Venice said. “When you’re dealing with a motor vehicle bureau, real addresses are important. I did a search of the address and learned that the same fake citizen, Doug Wilkerson, is listed as the resident.”
Jonathan looked to Boxers.
“What the hell?” Big Guy said. “How bad can a place be when it’s named Defiance?”
CHAPTER NINE
Graham peeked out of the curtains again. Where the hell is she?
Jolaine was gone, and she’d taken the car and the guns with her. The note said that she’d gone shopping, but how long could it take to snag a T-shirt and a pair of shoes at Walmart?
Graham had been awake for nearly two hours now. It was going on ten o’clock, and according to the sign on the back of the door, checkout time was eleven. What was he supposed to do if it got to be 11:01 and Jolaine wasn’t back yet? What kind of coward must she be to disappear on him like this? She was supposed to be protecting him, for God’s sake!
He deeply wanted to take Jolaine at her word — take her note at its word — but after a while, when everyone you’ve known or loved is being shot at, faith is hard to come by.
Daylight made everything more real, and he hated that. Thinking back to the events of the past twelve hours made him dizzy. It was hard to differentiate reality from nightmare. If he were to believe the evidence, his father was dead, his mother was grievously wounded, and some undefined, anonymous entity was trying to make him dead, too.
It couldn’t all be true, could it? There had to be some semblance of his life left as it used to be. Otherwise, what had he done to deserve all of this? What had his parents done? The harder he thought about it, the less he could identify the holes in the fabric of his living nightmare.
Graham Mitchell was a nobody among nobodies. His parents went to work every day, doing whatever it was that parents did when they went to work every day. Then they came home and were boring. What could they have done to make the kind of enemies that would bring so much violence? Some of the awfulness had to have been imagined. He had to believe that.
His imagination couldn’t explain away the blood, though. Or the dying man in the foyer of his house, or the stream of men with guns, or the blood that he’d had to wash off his chest and hands and legs last night. He had the towels on the floor of the bathroom to prove the reality of that.
There was the reality of the hole in his mother’s stomach. The reality of the weird, twitchy doctor.
“Oh, my God,” he said aloud, bringing a hand to his mouth to stifle a sob that rose from nowhere. I’m an orphan.
That thought shut down all others.
Tears streamed down his face, but he wasn’t aware of them until one of them tickled his nose. He wiped it away and tried to clear his eyes, but it didn’t work.
Dad is definitely dead. He had to be, and for evidence, he needed only to remember that Dad had never left the house, and that when Graham had asked Mom about him, she had dodged his question.
Jolaine.
The mere fact of her presence in his life was testament to the fact that he’d been living in real danger for three years. Why hadn’t he put that together in his head before? Mom and Dad had told him that Jolaine was merely a security precaution, that he shouldn’t worry about anything. Hell, Jolaine had told him that herself. Had people been hunting them for all this time, and he’d just never known it? Was last night just a realization of the inevitable? Had the last peaceful months actually been the accident, and the shoot-out preordained?
He swiped again at his eyes. He couldn’t let Jolaine see him crying like a little boy. She had little enough respect for him as it was.
He needed to think of something else. Anything else.
The television in this dump of a motel room sucked, both the machine itself and the programming it showed. At this hour, the broadcast networks were all about shows that attracted consumers of erectile dysfunction medicine, and there were no cable programs to speak of — unless you wanted to listen to a bunch of screaming newsreaders, or watch people cook or fix houses.
He pressed the power button and killed the set.
The silence brought demons.
Graham was tired of depending on everybody else for his survival. He was supposed to trust Jolaine, but where the hell was she?
“You made a promise,” he said aloud. Hearing the words made it real.
Follow the protocol.
How many times had Mom said it in the last hour that they were together? She was his mother, for crying out loud. And Jolaine was only a… whatever the hell Jolaine was. A nanny with a gun. If Mom hadn’t thought that that number was important, she wouldn’t have made him memorize it. And if it wasn’t important for him to deliver it, she wouldn’t have made him promise to do just that. No way did Jolaine outrank that.
Graham turned his head to look at the phone on the nightstand. He knew without searching that Jolaine had taken her cell phone with her. Just as well, because cell phones were traceable. He’d seen on television that as long as you didn’t stay on a landline for more than a few minutes, calls made from them couldn’t be traced.
Jolaine’s words rang in his ears. Everything but doing nothing is a risk. Did she know things that he didn’t know? Was she a better judge of what was the right thing to do? Maybe better than him, but not better than Mom.
Follow the protocol.
Until today, he didn’t even know what that word meant — he still didn’t, if he really thought about it. All he knew was it had to do with something his parents had been planning for a long time. Follow the protocol meant follow the plan.
Graham sat back down on the bed and he picked up the phone. He hesitated. Then he dialed.
“Two nine four one,” the voice said through the phone.
Graham opened his mouth to speak, but found that his vocal cords were hesitant. He had no idea what he’d been expecting when he called the number, but it had been more than that.
He heard the tentativeness in his own voice when he said, “Um, hello?”
“Two nine four one.” There had been urgency in the man’s tone before. Now it was joined by annoyance.
The protocol.
Mom had made him practice this part. If ever there was an emergency, he was to find a phone and follow the protocol. She’d made him recite the phrase. Now all Graham had to do was remember what the hell it was. “Um, Billy Bob Seven Nine,” he said. They were the correct words, but he had no idea what they meant, or what weight they might carry.
“I copy Billy Bob Seven Nine,” the voice said. “What is your status?”
Graham hesitated. He didn’t know what to say.