‘Address.’
He hesitated. She knew the streets in Fish Camp; he didn’t. He could hardly invent an address. Through the haze of pain he knew his only hope was that, Fish Camp being remote, whoever she sent to eliminate Celeste and Nathan would take hours to reach Yosemite, and he would be dead or free by then. ‘I don’t know… street address. There were a cluster of rental properties… behind a grocery. They’re staying at one.’
She flipped open her phone, spoke softly into it, repeating what Miles had said. Giving him a property name to call. She closed the phone.
‘You better not be lying. I’ve got someone calling the rental office to check.’
Mistake. He hadn’t thought past the pain; their presence could be disproved with a couple of phone calls.
He might have only a couple of minutes before she got a call back telling her he’d lied. No margin for error. ‘I’m not. They slowed me down.’ He loosened the bandage on his leg.
‘Leave that alone, you’ll bleed. I want you conscious.’
‘It hurts.’ He stripped the whole bandage loose and grimaced at the bullet hole in his leg as though it were a picture in a book, not a wound in his own flesh. Blood oozed out. He held the strip of cloth between his hands.
‘I said leave it alone.’
‘You shouldn’t have killed Groote.’ He had to play her along, get her to come close to him, get her thinking there was another threat to her that only he could help defuse. He collapsed on the floor, as though standing drained him of all energy.
‘I did the world a favor. Now. Who did Groote tell about Frost?’
‘FBI… old buddies of his,’ Miles lied. ‘Helped us find your buddy Singhal. Tracked him here.’
Fear briefly shaded her face. ‘I need names.’
He let his eyes go half closed, mumbled. Come close, he thought. Closer. I only get one chance.
She took two steps. And stopped. She might not believe him. But he’d put an itch under her skin. ‘Miles? The names.’
Just three steps closer. He tensed to jump at her.
Then he heard a boom, rumbling, as if a tank had crashed hard into the front of the building. The madhouse shuddered.
She turned and he leaped, grabbing at her gun. It fired, powering the bullet past his head, pinging off the stone wall. She kicked him hard on his wound, whirled and fled the room. Miles stumbled after her, agony screaming in his leg. She stopped at the top of the stairs; Miles saw they were on the top floor, no more stairs rising beyond this floor.
She ran down the stairs.
‘Allison! Allison!’ he yelled.
And then he heard an answer, over the clatter of her feet on the stairs: ‘Miles?’
Nathan.
‘Nathan, get the hell out, call the police, Allison’s got a gun-’
And then the awful, final crack of two bullets. Miles limped down the stairs, half falling, half running, the pain in his leg terrible, but frantic for Nathan.
In the foyer the smashed front of a sedan lay among the remains of the front door, debris and dust crowning the h o o d and the starred windshield. The driver’s door was open; the car empty.
Nathan was gone.
Miles heard footsteps and spun. Allison ran back into the foyer, clutching the laptop from the office he and Groote had passed, the gun aimed at him.
‘Allison.’
She stopped, steadied her aim, took a step back.
‘You can’t run. You can’t just keep… running. Doesn’t work.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Running is nothing.’ He could taste his own blood in his mouth. ‘You’ll never get out. Never escape. Never. Ever. If not me, Nathan will find you. Celeste. Any of our friends. Any of Dodd’s followers. It won’t end for you. Ever. You’ve thrown your life away. You’re the crazy one.’
Rage and fear contorted her face. She fired at him and he dived through the open door of the wrecked car.
She emptied his small gun as she charged at the car. He counted every shot. She rushed the door, aimed at him, and he kicked through the open window with his good leg, catching her in the chest as her finger clicked on an empty clip. She staggered back, lost her balance, cracked her head on crumbling masonry on the floor, and went limp as she hit the tiles.
He heard his name yelled. ‘Miles! Miles!’
Nathan.
‘Here!’ Miles stumbled to Allison, pulled the gun from her unconscious fingers.
Nathan’s face appeared in the hole that had been the front door.
‘Nathan, holy God…’
‘I’m not a screw-up,’ Nathan said. He steadied Miles against the car. ‘I – I followed you and Groote here from the hotel… I didn’t know what to do… so I waited… until I had enough nerve. When you didn’t come out… I couldn’t just drive away. So I rammed the rental car through the door, then I ran to get help.’ He gestured at the mess. ‘What the hell was I thinking…’
‘No, you did awesome, Nathan.’ He grabbed Nathan’s shoulder, embraced him, pounded his back.
‘I didn’t do it for you, Miles,’ Nathan said. His tone was cool. ‘You I’m still pissed at. I did it for my friends.’
‘I know. I’m just glad you did what you did. Thank you.’ He didn’t know what to say and the words came, drawn by his memory of Nathan’s nightmare: ‘You fixed it, man.’
‘I did.’ Nathan gave him a thin smile. The side mirror hung broken from its control cables and he carefully turned it to face the battered car. ‘Is Frost here?’
‘If it isn’t,’ Miles said, ‘she’ll tell us where it is. We won, Nathan.’
‘I ran when she shot at me… to a house down the street… they’re calling the police. The guy’s a vet. Like me.’
‘We need to call Victor and Celeste as soon as possible. Stay here. Don’t let Allison run.’
Nathan sat on Allison’s back. She didn’t respond.
Miles climbed the stairs, calling Amanda’s name. He heard a weak reply on the second floor.
The door was bolted shut. He opened it, saw a girl cowering in a corner, dressed in hospital scrubs, pale.
‘Amanda?’
‘Who are you?’ She trembled at his bloodied face, the exposed wound in his leg.
‘A friend of your dad’s.’
‘I want to go home. The sounds. The voices. This place is full of ghosts.’
‘No,’ Miles said. ‘The ghosts are gone. It’s okay now. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’
SIXTY-ONE
‘Does it work?’ Miles asked.
‘Yes,’ Amanda said. She sat on the hospital’s porch, letting the wind kiss her face. ‘It does. The magic’s all in the super beta-blockers. They kick bad-memory ass. And the therapy.’
‘You think I should take the pill?’
‘Yes. But I don’t like the therapy part,’ she said. ‘Talking so much. Quiet’s nicer. In the quiet I hear my mom’s and my dad’s voices.’
‘They loved you very much,’ Miles said.
‘I know that.’ She scratched at a star-shaped scar at the corner of her mouth and he wondered how she had gotten it. ‘Are you going to take the medicine, Miles?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Sometimes pain makes us stronger. Sometimes it makes us weaker. I’m not sure which kind my pain is.’
‘You should take the medicine,’ she said. ‘Hurting so much it ruins your life really sucks.’ She stood. ‘I’m helping Nathan.’
‘What with?’
She announced her project with teenager wryness. ‘It’s so lame. I’m painting a mirror for him.’
‘Don’t get attached to it.’
‘No. It’s a mirror for when he’s ready to look in one. I’m painting all the NFL team logos on the sides. He knows if he breaks it I’ll kill him. I think he might be ready soon, so I better get it finished.’ She went to work on her project.
Miles watched a new arrival from the porch. A young man with the bearing of a soldier, but with haunted eyes, got out of a van accompanied by one of Victor’s newly hired counselors. Sangre de Cristo had been seized by the government, as part of its investigation of both Quantrill and Dodd. Victor and his army of lawyers had negotiated a contract, after much arm twisting and gentle persuasion, to run a program to test Frost in participation with a respected pharmaceutical. Victor and Celeste began, quietly, to contact people who were active on his PTSD Web site. Ex-soldiers from around the world. Survivors of abuse, of rape, of terrorism, of natural disasters, who could not shake the trauma of their devastating memories. And two or three times a day, a new person would arrive, stepping out of a taxi or a rental car, or brought by his or her family, blinking up at the rise of Sangre de Cristo as if its walls held a final hope. Victor would bring them in for coffee and talk, explain the theory and potential and risks of Frost, and they almost inevitably agreed to be part of the testing. The government, eager to bury Dodd’s and Quantrill’s work and promote a legitimate drug, planned to seek a fast-track approval. Allison sat in a federal prison cell, awaiting trial.