CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
Jake awakened to the sound of distant
sirens.
Disoriented at first, he stretched his
back and scanned the darkened room. “Shit,” he moaned. “I fell
asleep.” He checked his watch. For three
hours.
He’d fallen into the sagging,
overstuffed lounge chair just for a minute, he thought. To give his
back and shoulders a rest. He didn’t even remember closing his
eyes.
The sirens reminded him that he’d
forgotten to do something. Then, like a curtain being parted, the
events of the day raced back into his consciousness.
Somebody had tried to kill him! The
bullet came within an inch, for Chrissakes! As his mind replayed
the impact of that bullet, the sheer force of it, even as it missed
him, a lump formed in his stomach, and his hands began to tremble.
Trapped in the netherworld between sleep and reality, he felt the
blast of heat all over again, blistering hot against his shoulders
and his back, despite the protection of his suit. And he saw the
bodies of his friends, scattered like logs across the old roadbed.
Even in his memory, they didn’t look real; they didn’t look dead.
He could only presume that the man on the hill had shot them, just
as he had tried to shoot Carolyn and him, but the horror of it all
was somehow muted by the absence of blood and the facelessness of
the bodies.
“Got to call,” he whispered.
Got to find out what
happened. Taking care not to make any noise, he
pulled hard against the arms of the chair and sat up straight.
Raking a hand through his hair, he twisted first to his left and
then to his right, releasing a ripple of pops from his spine. Only
twenty-four years old, and tonight he felt every bit of
seventy.
In the darkness of the room, the
sparse furnishings were visible only as shades of black against a
charcoal-gray background. Fumbling blindly along the nightstand,
Jake placed his hand on the telephone but paused as his attention
turned once again to the sound of the sirens. They seemed to be
growing louder. He stood and hobbled over to the front window,
where he used two fingers to part the heavy, rubber-lined blackout
curtains.
A gentle but steady rain fell in the
empty parking lot, giving everything a glassy, reflective look,
which in the darkness of the night took years off the age of
everything. The wail of the first siren reached a crescendo, then
stopped abruptly as a police car sped into view and slid to a stop
in front of the motel office.
“What the hell is this?”
Carolyn stirred at the sound of his
voice. “What’s going on?” she groaned sleepily.
“I don’t know yet.” He watched with a
growing sense of dread as the trooper climbed out of his car with
his hand on his pistol and moved cautiously to the door of the
office. The cop pulled hard against the lock, then pounded heavily
with his fist on the glass panel. “I think our friend Terrell might
be in a bit of trouble.” In the distance, more sirens
approached.
Her curiosity piqued, Carolyn joined
her husband at the window and watched as a light came on in the
office, casting a greenish hue through the tinted glass. Soon
Terrell’s lanky form appeared through the glass. He opened the door
wearily, then seemed suddenly animated as he listened to whatever
the trooper was telling him. He nodded a couple of times, then
shook his head a couple more.
Finally, Terrell pointed directly at
Jake and Carolyn. They both jumped. “Holy shit,” Jake
gasped.
“What?”
“This doesn’t look good.” The trooper
moved quickly as he said something into the microphone clipped to
his shoulder, then climbed back into his cruiser. He never took his
eyes off their motel room.
“What?”
Jake could hear the edge of panic in
Carolyn’s voice—the same emotion he felt building in the pit of his
own stomach. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What are you talking about?” She was crying now, gripped
with fear.
He turned two quick circles in the
dark, trying to figure a way out of the room without being
seen.
“Jake!” she nearly
shouted.
“Shh!” he commanded. “The bathroom
window! Come on!” He dragged her by the hand toward the back of the
room, even as the police car’s high beams pierced the thin seam in
the curtain and cast a laser-width spear of light against the far
wall.
“What are we doing? I’m not going
anywhere,” she insisted, following along as she spoke.
“Look,” he snapped. “People tried to
kill us today, and now that cop looks mad as hell. Looks to me like
staying here could get us shot.”
The window in the bathroom was of
standard height and size, but made of smoky white glass. Yet
another siren peaked in volume and fell silent. Shit, Jake thought. There’s two of them now. And still more in
the distance. The window lock turned easily, but he had to pound
upward with the heels of both hands to get it to slide
open.
“Jake, this is stupid!”
He made a stirrup with his hands.
“Here. You go first.”
“Go where?”
“Out!” he hissed. “I don’t know where.
Just out.”
Carolyn opened her mouth to argue but
then complied. No sooner had she placed her bare foot in his hands
than he nearly launched her through the opening. She came out too
fast, tumbling headfirst into the wide alley behind the motel. She
got her hands out in time, though, preventing damage to everything
but her pride.
Jake arrived feet-first, just as the
blue and red lights of a police car began to sweep the trees at the
far end of the complex to their right. “Shit! They’re coming around
to the back, too!”
They needed cover; something to hide
behind. With the cop car approaching, they’d never make it to the
tree line without being seen. The Dumpster! Jake grabbed Carolyn’s
hand again and pulled her behind him as he dashed twenty yards or
so and ducked behind the maroon trash receptacle. The warm rain had
reinvigorated the stench of old garbage and rotting food, and he
found himself instinctively breathing through his
mouth.
“Why are we hiding from the police?”
Carolyn shouted at a whisper. “We’ve done nothing
wrong!”
“I don’t know. I have a bad feeling.”
It was as honest an answer as he knew to give.
The second cop car approached more
cautiously, killing his lights as he closed in on the back of their
room. Once in place and stopped, the cop opened his door carefully
and rolled quickly out of the car, taking his twelve-gauge with
him. He scampered over to the passenger-side door, where he could
use the vehicle as cover.
The Donovans exchanged panicked
glances in the dark.
“Are they trying to arrest us?” Carolyn whispered.
Jake answered with a shrug that was
invisible in the darkness. “Look at him. He’s scared
shitless.”
They both jumped as the cop’s radio
squelched and an electronic voice pierced the muted thrumming of
the rain. “All units be advised, we have positive ID from the
manager. These are definitely our shooters.”
The cop muttered something
unintelligible into his microphone, then racked a round into the
chamber of his shotgun and leveled it at the window they’d just
climbed through.
“Oh, my God,” Carolyn
breathed.
“He can’t wait to pull that trigger,”
Jake said, not believing what he was seeing. This trooper wanted
them bad, and he didn’t much care whether they were breathing or
not. Jake pulled Carolyn away from the Dumpster and headed for the
tree line. “We gotta get outa here. They’re liable to have dogs and
all kinds of bullshit out here soon.”
This time she needed no pulling or
prodding to get her to run. A second car pulled up to the rear of
the building just as they reached the first line of cover. The
police were shouting now, apparently no longer worried about a
stealthy approach, and that was the Donovans’ cue to run like hell,
while noise didn’t matter.
“We going back to the boat?” Carolyn
asked.
“I sure as hell hope so.”
They’d floated in the dark nearly all
night before Carolyn got the idea to contact her uncle in Chicago.
A men’s clothing retailer turned real estate mogul, Harry Sinclair
had more money than God, and if there was anyone in the world with
the connections to lift them out of this mess, it would be him.
They still didn’t know why they’d gone from near victims to Public
Enemies #1 and #2 in the space of just a few hours, but it was
clear as crystal that they needed some answers before they showed
their faces again. And, assuming that the Visa card had alerted the
cops back at the motel, they could forget about credit cards taking
them where they wanted to go. They needed to develop alternative
resources fast. Which meant Harry Sinclair.
It took them nearly two hours to give
Travis that much of the story. There were parts he didn’t
understand, and still more that he didn’t want to. But as it
dragged on, and his parents shared the details about who they
really were, and who they really weren’t, he found himself
burrowing further and further under his Army blanket, finally
wishing that they’d just stayed quiet and let him believe that
things remained as they’d always been.