Banished (15 page)

PART THREE: CHICAGO

C
HAPTER
17

I
T WAS TWILIGHT
by the time we reached the outskirts of Chicago, the skyline a sparkling row of towers off in the distance, stretching out impossibly far in both directions. We left the highway on a looping cloverleaf crowded with speeding traffic.

Despite the brief nap in the motel, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I must have drifted off, because when Prairie gently shook my arm to wake me, we were parked behind another motel, this one huge and new and anonymous, backing up to a wide avenue across from a car dealership. I didn’t even ask where we were. I went through the motions of getting Chub, who was fast asleep, as Prairie took care of Rascal. In the room, I collapsed with Chub and didn’t wake up until late the next morning, when the sun was streaming in the windows.

I sat up, disoriented by the unfamiliar surroundings. The room was almost a copy of the one from the day before, but reversed, the television on the opposite wall. Chub sat on the edge of the bed, swinging his legs, watching TV with the sound turned low. He was already dressed, and his hair was sticking straight up.

Prairie stood at the window, clutching the fabric of the drapes in her hand, staring out into the parking lot, Rascal sitting at her side, staring at nothing. When I said her name, she jumped.

“Good morning, Hailey,” she said. “Are you feeling better today?”

To my surprise, I was. I felt rested and strong, and the events of the past few days had faded in my mind, like a movie I’d watched but would someday forget. Not that I would ever lose the images of the wrecked kitchen, of Gram on the floor, but as I washed up and packed, I felt like it was all in the past, like that phase of my life was over.

I felt the faint stirrings of hope.

It was almost one in the afternoon by the time we walked Rascal and put our things in the car. We went to a diner next to the motel for lunch. My appetite was back, and I ordered a burger and fries and a big glass of milk. Even Prairie ate most of her chicken salad, and the worry lines around her eyes had smoothed.

“So,” I said as I finished the last of my fries, “I guess it worked, huh? The … thing you did. So he wouldn’t be able to find us.”

I didn’t say his name, could barely stand to think it.
Rattler
. The image of him plunging the knife into the man in the gray jacket flashed through my mind and was gone, leaving only a shadowy outline of the terror of that night.

Prairie nodded thoughtfully and sipped at her coffee. “If he was going to be able to track us …”

She didn’t finish the thought, but I knew what she was thinking. He would have found us by now, if his visions were able to lead him to us. I wondered if Prairie had slept, or if she’d stayed by the window worrying all night, waiting for his old truck to roll up in front of the motel, waiting for him to come crashing through the door the way Bryce’s men had the day before.

I felt guilty because I’d collapsed and slept like a rock, leaving all the guarding and worrying to her. I almost apologized, but I couldn’t quite find the words.

“So he probably stayed in Gypsum,” I said hopefully.

Prairie nodded. “Mmm. With any luck I can finish … what I need to do tonight, and we can move on.”

She was looking not at me, but out the window. I had so many questions. She said
we
, but did she mean all three of us? And I had no idea what she meant by “move on,” or where we would go next, how we would live.

“What do you have to do tonight?” I asked.

She looked at me directly and chose her words carefully. “I need to destroy Bryce’s research.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I have some ideas. First thing is to get into the lab. And for that I’ll need my key. It’s too dangerous to go back to my house, but I keep spare keys at my neighbor’s.”

“Don’t you have a key with you?”

Prairie pushed her salad around on her plate without looking at me. “This is a special key, Hailey. It’s a prox card for an electronic lock, and I’m pretty sure that by now Bryce has changed the code so I can’t get in. But I have a master key at my friend’s place.”

“Does she know you’re coming?”

“No …” Prairie hesitated and bit her lip. I could tell she was trying to figure out how much to tell me. “I thought it was best that I didn’t call or do anything that might tip someone off. I do have a key to her house, so I can let myself in. The quicker I get in and out, the better.”

I …
She said
I
. Not
we
. Panic stirred in my gut—panic at being left alone, left to defend Chub against any threat that came along.

“I’m going with you,” I said quickly, my tone harsher than I intended. “We’re going together.”

“I don’t think that—”

“Please. We can wait in the car, it’ll be better this way, we can watch for … for …”

I didn’t finish my sentence, but I figured Prairie knew what I meant. I could watch for the men Bryce had sent or for Rattler or for any of the other threats I’d never thought to worry about, threats that until a few days ago hadn’t existed for me, but that had changed the course of my life.

I’d argue with Prairie if I needed to. I wasn’t going to let this drop. She had saved me from Bryce and Gram and Rattler, and I was grateful. But she couldn’t leave us now. I wouldn’t let her.

I didn’t have any other choice.

“All right,” she finally said, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “You can come with me to Penny’s. But after that, when we get to the lab, I go in alone.”

I wasn’t going to argue that—yet. One step at a time.

She wanted to wait until dark to make the trip to her neighbor’s house, so we spent the afternoon in a park. Chub played on the swings and the slides and dug holes and tunnels in a sandbox with a plastic shovel someone had left behind. I tried to interest Rascal in chasing a stick, but he just walked beside me and sat whenever I stood still. Late in the afternoon Prairie drove us north of the city to Evanston, the suburb where her apartment and the lab were. She parked near the lake and we walked out on a strip of land from which we could see Chicago to the south, the setting sun glancing off the windows of all the high-rise buildings, making it look like a city made from gold and mirrors. Chub was more interested in throwing rocks off the pier than at looking at the city, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the skyline and the sun sinking toward the inky blue of the lake.

At last it was nearly dark. Prairie drove around for a while before choosing a parking spot on a quiet side street, near an alley. Cars were jammed in tight on both sides of the street, but a red Acura pulled out just as we were cruising past. It took several minutes of careful maneuvering to get the Ellises’ big car into the spot, but when Prairie finally shut off the ignition, she seemed satisfied.

“I wish we had a leash for Rascal,” Prairie said.

“He’ll stay close. He won’t run off.”

“Yes, but there are leash laws here. Well, we’ll just make do. When we get to Penny’s house he can come inside. She loves dogs.”

We started walking and entered a residential area. Prairie set a quick pace, cutting across a wide street and into an alley that ran behind a row of houses. We made our way down a few blocks, hurrying across when we came to an intersection. I tripped over a hose that had been left coiled behind a garage. We had to hush Chub several times; he was tired from skipping his nap and stumbled along half awake, rubbing his eyes and mumbling.

Prairie put her hand on my arm and pointed at a small, shingled coach house set back from a bigger house that fronted the street. I squeezed Chub’s hand and he leaned against me, his face pressed into my legs. He was so exhausted that he started to cry silently, small sobs muffled by my jeans. We had stopped under the low-hanging branches of an elm that was leafing out for spring, and I hoped we were hidden from anyone who happened to look out their bedroom window.

“Is this Penny’s place?” I whispered.

“Yes. I don’t want to knock because she’ll turn on the porch light, but she won’t mind me letting myself in. We have an arrangement. We water each other’s plants when we travel, that kind of thing.”

Prairie didn’t look as confident as she sounded. She dug for the keys she’d pocketed in the Wendy’s bathroom.

I picked Chub up as she turned the key in the lock. He stiffened in my arms and I hushed him, holding his body tighter. I realized only after I heard the gentle click of the door opening that I had been holding my breath, waiting for—what? A gunshot?

Back in Gypsum, I was always on edge—I never knew what I’d come home to, who I’d find slumped at the kitchen table. But this was different. The things I worried about in Gypsum all seemed kind of stupid now—kids making fun of me, or Gram being in a bad mood, or Dun Acey trying to grab my butt when I walked past him.

“I guess she went to bed early,” Prairie said as she stepped aside to let me into the dark foyer of the coach house, Rascal following.

She slid her hand along the wall. I could barely make out its outline in the moonlight coming through the door. There was another soft click as Prairie’s fingertips found the light switch, and the room was illuminated by the soft light of a lamp on a low table.

A few feet in front of us, an elderly woman in a pink quilted housecoat sat in an overstuffed chair, her feet out in front of her at an odd angle, one of her satin slippers upside down on the wood floor.

For a second I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then I noticed a dark stain that ran down her neck and into the folds of her housecoat, and when I took half a step closer, the reason became clear.

Her skull had been bashed in.

C
HAPTER
18

P
RAIRIE MADE A SOUND
next to me, a cut-off little cry. I pushed Chub’s face hard against my shoulder, shielding him from the sight of the dead woman. When he’d been crying moments earlier—he’d
known
that something bad waited inside.

I saw that bits of shattered white skull showed through the woman’s ruined scalp and blood-matted hair, and I took a step back. My foot hit something on the floor and I tripped, nearly dropping Chub. Instead, I staggered sideways and managed to stay on my feet. I looked down to see what I’d tripped over: a skillet, an old black one with a wooden handle.

“Welcome home,” came a deep, rough voice. Another lamp switched on and I could see a man sprawled lazily on a floral-print couch, one arm slung along the plump cushions, the other hand dangling a handgun.

It was Rattler Sikes.

A purple bruise showed through the stubble on his jaw, but otherwise he looked none the worse for wear. My heart sank. All our efforts to throw him off—they hadn’t worked. Had he seen every move we’d made?

As if reading my thoughts, he chuckled softly. “Bet you’re surprised to see me. You really thought you could get me off your trail with that wild-goose chase? You must of forgot I ain’t got any quit in me.”

“Rattler,” Prairie said, her voice choked with fury. “What have you
done
?”

“Before you go lookin’ around for something you can throw at me,
Pray-ree
, you might ought to consider I got a gun and you got a little boy with you ain’t done anything to anyone.” The way Rattler said her name, it was like he was mocking her with it. “And I got a itchy finger, so’s if you so much as make me nervous, why, I’m liable to go twitchin’, and I know none of us wants that, right?”

“You’ll have to shoot me first.” I turned so my body was between Rattler and Chub.

“Hold up, there,” Rattler said. “I ain’t shootin’ nobody just yet. Don’t you want to know how I came to meet your friend here, Pray-ree? She weren’t any too hospitable, though, I gotta say.”

“How could you—”

“She saw me knockin’ on your door, and come over wearin’ garden gloves and waving her pruning shears and askin’ me all kinda nosy questions. Liked to have pruned me to death, way she was lookin’ at me. And I got to thinkin’, maybe I’d just wait for you from her house here. Nice window I could look out of, make sure I saw when you got home. And now look, it must be my lucky day, ’cause you gone and come to
me
.”

“She never hurt anyone—”

“Hey, all’s I asked her to do was leave me be and set quietly in this here chair while we waited on you all. I wasn’t fixin’ to kill her or nothin’. Then I tell her to git me some tea and she come back with a skillet and she’s ready to haul off and hit me on the head with it, only she didn’t move quick enough. Guess that didn’t work out too well for her, now, did it?”

I thought about how frightened the woman must have been when Rattler forced his way into her home. His grip on the gun looked sloppy, but I knew better. He could hit a can on top of the trash in the burn barrel in Gram’s backyard while standing in the middle of the field next door. I’d watched out my bedroom window one summer twilight as he and a few of Gram’s customers took turns shooting. The other guys hit the barrel or missed entirely, but Rattler nailed the can every time.

Now he was staring at Prairie with an intensity you could light fires with. And she stared back. There was something between them, all right, something crackling with tension and danger, something almost … alive.

“You slowed me down, girl,” he said, so softly that I knew he was speaking only to her. I might as well have not even been there. “But you can’t stop me. Not when I’m coming for you.”

My fear curled and stretched into something new, a realization that Rattler didn’t want to kill us—he wanted something worse. It was as if he wanted to
own
Prairie, and I realized that I was more frightened of Rattler Sikes and the other Banished men than I was of the professional killers who’d been chasing us.

More frightened of Rattler than
all
of those guys put together.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Prairie said, but there was a tremor in her voice, and she shrank back from him. It was like the twisted energy around him diminished her.

Suddenly Rattler laughed, and the spell was broken.

“Now let’s get back on a friendlier track,” Rattler said, his voice oily. “Set on down, girl, I think you ought to be comfy enough in that chair. We got a little talkin’ to do ’fore we all git on the road.”

“We’re not going anywhere with you,” Prairie hissed.

But Rattler only shrugged. “I’m gonna take you girls home, where you belong. You can go easy, or you can go hard. Up to you. Hailey, go on, take the kid and git him settled in one of those bedrooms. And take that mangy hound with you.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. I edged through the room, avoiding looking at the dead woman, Rascal at my heels. I wished he was a better watchdog—it was like he didn’t care at all that Rattler was threatening us. My heart was pounding so hard, it seemed like everyone ought to be able to hear it. In the hall a door stood open to a small room with a tidy bed made up with a quilt and a pile of embroidered pillows. As I put Chub on the bed and slid my backpack off my shoulders, I tried hard not to think about the woman with half her head leaking out in the other room.

“I like how you look all eased down in that chair,” I heard Rattler say from the other room. “You’re lookin’ real good, Prairie.”

I had to do something to stop Rattler. I unzipped the backpack and dumped everything out. I handed Chub his giraffe and sorted frantically through the rest of the contents.

“Bedtime?” Chub asked, yawning. “I want
my
bed.” Even through my terror I noticed how well he was speaking, how clear his words were. Evidently he had forgotten his fear, or maybe he was simply too tired to care.

“You can just nap here for now,” I said, pulling the quilts and covers back from the pillows. I could hear Prairie murmuring something.

“Okay. Good night.” Chub got up on his knees to hug me and I kissed the top of his head.

Chub started to wiggle under the covers, but suddenly he sat up, frowning. “I don’t want to watch.”

“What, sweetie? What don’t you want to watch?”

“Bad man’s eye. I don’t want to watch.”

My nerves were so skittish, it took some effort for me to smooth the hair off Chub’s forehead and kiss him gently and get him to lie down again. “You don’t have to. You just go to sleep.”

“ ’Kay.” He closed his eyes, his long lashes casting shadows on his soft cheeks.

In the other room Prairie and Rattler talked in low, intense voices. There was nothing I could use—just my old clothes and Prairie’s purchases. I glanced around the room but saw only framed snapshots, a fancy silver comb and brush, china figurines, a basket of dried flowers. There was a chest of drawers pushed up against the wall and I ran my hand along the top of it.

“You can’t tell me you don’t remember how much fun we used to have,” Rattler said, his voice rising. “You used to love skinny-dippin’ with me and the rest of ’em.”

“I
never
loved it,” Prairie snapped. “I hated it.”

“That ain’t true. You know you an’ me should of been together.
Everyone
knew it.”

“No.
No.
”

I yanked open the top dresser drawer. Slips and camisoles, folded tissue. I tried the next drawer.

Scarves. A soft pile of scarves, lengths of silk in every color of the rainbow—beautiful, but nothing I could use. My heart plummeted.

“Only, you didn’t do like you were supposed to,” Rattler continued. “I waited, I followed your mom’s rules, even if
you
didn’t. You think I didn’t know about you and that boy from Tipton?”

“He was—”

“You thought you were so smart, sneakin’ around with him? Thought nobody’d figure it out, just cause you kept it from your mom? Well, I knew. I
knew.
” I was shocked at the bitterness in Rattler’s tone. Was he … jealous? Was that possible?

I stuck my hand in the drawer and seized the scarves and pushed them to the side. My fingers brushed against something hard and sharp. I picked it up. It was made of pale bone or ivory, with two delicate long, curved points at one end and a pearly fan-shaped decoration carved at the other. Some sort of hair ornament, I guessed.

I picked it up and held it in my right hand so that the long, curved points lay against my wrist, then stepped into the other room.

“Don’t matter anyway,” Rattler said. “ ’Specially since your sister beat you to the big prize.”

I heard Prairie’s sharp intake of breath. “What do you mean?”

Rattler laughed bitterly. “Only that once you took off, your mom said she guessed Clover was old enough to date after all. It took some convincin’, like to hurt my feelings the way she kept turnin’ me down, but I finally got her to see things my way. I guess I had a mighty fine time with—”

“
Don’t say her name!
”

“I’ll say what I want, Pray-ree,” Rattler hissed. “You need me to spell it out?”

I stepped into the light.

Rattler glanced at me, and for a split second his face was open to me, his expression unguarded, and I saw something there I would have never imagined in a million years.

Pain
.

Because of Prairie. It wasn’t love—I refused to believe a man like Rattler could love—but a longing so strong he wore it like a second skin; and it was suddenly easy for me to believe that their connection went back not just generations but centuries. The thing binding Rattler to Prairie knotted tighter the more it was resisted.

But when Rattler saw me staring at him, the hurt vanished and was replaced with something else, something sharp-eyed and crafty. Amused, even.

“Little Hailey girl,” he said. “Look at you, practically grown up.”

“You never—you couldn’t—she wouldn’t—” Prairie gasped for words and looked like she was going to come out of her chair and attack him. But Rattler raised his gun hand without even looking and leveled it at her.

“Go easy, Prairie,” he warned, his voice barely more than a raw whisper.

Then he looked at me full-on, his eyes glinting green sparks in the dim light. One corner of his cruel mouth quirked up.

“You know who I am, don’t you, Hailey girl,” he said softly, and suddenly I did—I knew, and my hand clutched hard at the handle of the hairpin as the knowledge thundered in my brain. “I’m your daddy.”

I lunged at him and raised my hand, clenched that hairpin tight, and the sound when those elegant curved points found their mark wasn’t like much of anything at all, like sliding a knife into a melon—

But the sound that came out of Rattler made up for it, a sound that was neither human or animal but something in between, a wild something, a furious something, as he clawed at the thing that was sticking into his right eye.

“Prairie!” I yelled. I whirled around and saw her bolt out of her chair.

I ran to the bedroom and yanked back the quilts. Chub was propped on his elbows, his little face winding up for a scream of his own. He wasn’t all the way awake, I could see that—it happened sometimes, when he was startled out of a deep sleep; it was like a sleep-waking nightmare.

“It’s me, it’s me, Chub,” I said as I yanked him out of the bed, stuffing everything back in the backpack and shrugging it over my shoulders. He started to wail, squirming in my arms as I ran out of the bedroom. Rattler had got the hairpin out of his eye—blood covered the hand he had pressed against it—and he raised his gun hand and swung it from Prairie to me.

Then he shot at me.

I waited for a jolt of pain that didn’t come, but there was a crash from the bookshelves behind me.

“Down,” Prairie screamed, and pushed me away from her, but I stood my ground as she raced for the kitchen and jerked open a drawer and pawed frantically through the contents.

“Rascal!” I screamed, and he appeared in the hall, looking uninterested. “Sic him, boy!”

The change in Rascal was astonishing. In a flash he went from standing still to snarling and hurling himself at Rattler, teeth bared. He clamped down hard on Rattler’s shin, and the sound coming from his throat was guttural and feral. Rattler yelled in pain. As he brought his gun hand down on Rascal’s skull, the gun went off again and Prairie stumbled against me. She didn’t say a word, just made a sound like “unh.”

“Are you—”

“I’m fine,” Prairie said, yanking on my hand and pulling me toward the door.

“Rascal, come on!” I yelled, and we ran as Rattler hopped back, clutching his leg where Rascal had attacked him.

When we reached the porch, Prairie stumbled and barely caught herself.

“You’re
not
fine,” I said, heart pounding. “Did he shoot you?”

I saw the spreading damp of her blood and the jagged tear in her sweater, the awkward angle at which she was holding her arm.

“Ahh,” she said, breathing hard. “All right, I’m hit. But we have to get out of here. It’s not just Rattler, Hailey. There were lights on in my house that weren’t on before. Didn’t you see? Bryce’s men are over there, and they must have heard something going on.”

“But—”

“They’ll come here, Hailey. To see what happened.”

And then they’d come after us.

Again.

“How—What can I—”

“Just help me run. We can get to a pay phone, there’s one a couple of blocks back.”

I remembered her cell phone, crushed under the Buick’s tire.

If there was a moment for me to be strong, this was it. Prairie had taken the lead since the moment we’d met, and I’d followed. Not always willingly, and I hadn’t always believed or trusted her, but I followed.

Now, though, she needed me. And I had to set aside my doubts, my questions, my fear. I set Chub down, yanked my old shirt out of the backpack and tied the sleeves tightly around her arm, above the bullet wound, to slow the blood flow. She stood still and pale, biting her lip but not making any sound.