Out at Night (35 page)

She rolled to her knees, coiled her fists. She pounded on the wall in a flurry of blows, the sides of her fists stinging.

Stuart slammed on the brakes and she lost her balance and smashed into the opposite wall. Fresh pain shot up her shoulder.

“Grace. I know you can hear me. You make another sound, one move, and I’ll put a bullet through the head of whoever it is that’s coming my way. Can’t see who it is in the headlights, but I guarantee I’ll kill him. Tap once on the wall next to my seat, if you understand.”

She closed her eyes and curled her body into a small tight ball. Her heart tripped. She felt broken. She tapped.

For some irrational reason, she thought of banana pancakes and Mac, how they’d improvised in Guatemala, frying them over the campfire he’d built by the river, how they’d sat side by side on his hammock, the way the light filtered through the trees. How supremely happy she’d felt next to him. Safe.

She thought of Katie wearing a pair of clogs and a tutu, hanging upside down on monkey bars at Cabrillo Elementary, her brown eyes locked on Grace, screaming
Mommy Mommy Mommy look no hands
!

Grace needed to believe her life still would contain moments of such happiness again, but more than that, she needed to know that the life of the person approaching in the car, stopping the car, the motor idling, that person’s life would also have the chance for small moments in the future of unexpected grace.

Stuart stopped the car, rolled down the window. “Judith!”

Grace licked her lips. They felt cracked. Judith Woodruff. The owner of Windlift.

Stuart’s voice was too hearty and Grace feared for her. She ducked her head into her arms. She couldn’t breathe.

Judith said something unintelligible.

“Borrowed it.” Stuart’s voice changed, tensed.

The car. Judith was asking about the car he was driving.

Another comment from Judith, something light. She half laughed at the end.

“She’s Vonda’s cousin. She’s okay.”

More words from Judith.

“Yeah, the baby’s great, Vonda’s great. It’s all good. Just swung by to check in, give you my keys. So everybody’s gone, huh?”

Judith spoke again, the words lost in the rumble of the engines.

Grace heard keys jangling. Stuart must be separating out his keys to Windlift, passing them through the open window.

“I’m good. Thought I’d cruise down, take some night pictures from the hill. Don’t know when I’ll be back this way.”

More words, the noises someone makes saying good-bye and Grace held her breath, wondering where Stuart’s gun was, if he had it in his hand next to him on the seat, if he was getting ready to use it.

Judith’s car pulled away and Grace sagged and let out a breath.

The car bumped forward for fifteen seconds and came to a jerky stop. The driver’s door opened. He stepped out and slammed it shut. He walked away, his footsteps receding. Minutes went by. The sweat on her face turned cold.

Maybe he wasn’t coming back. Maybe he had another identity already established. Maybe he’d never intended to stay with Vonda and Sam. He’d sell his doctored soy to the highest bidder. There had to be a market for it. Such a clean, elegant solution to what had proved, by the very shape-shifting fluidity of its nature, to be an intractable problem.

If everybody was gone at Windlift, that meant the Union Pacific trains would blast through; no reason to stop to pick up freight at an abandoned yard that only now was beginning to come back. She wondered how long it would be before she was found.

A crunch of footsteps followed by silence.

She strained to hear. Nothing.

Cautiously she rolled to her knees and coiled into a crouch. She braced herself. She’d throw herself out at him, digging, clawing.

The trunk snapped open; a beam of light blinded her. His hand closed around her arm and he wrenched her out.

Chapter 44

He flung her to the ground and she banged against the car as she went down.

He was wearing goggles and held a crossbow. Up this close, it looked medieval: a double-humped rifle with a thin metal foot-brace at the tip. A packet of bolts pricked out of a holster on his back A breeze riffled his wild hair, a soldier of death dressed in fatigues, bent on destruction and fire and ruin.

“Stand.” His voice was flat.

“Don’t do this.” Adrenaline spiked and her mouth dried out.

“I’m giving you to the count of ten. I’ll be using the crossbow. Not the gun. More sportsman-like.” He smiled mirthlessly. “Ten.”

She had seen this phenomenon on a hundred nature shows, a wounded eagle nursed back to health, a falcon, and the gate to the cage lifted, the sudden burst of wind, the explosion of feathers, the silence when the bird disappeared into the sky or the shadowy trees.

In a burst of adrenaline, Grace sprang to her feet and ran.

Ahead of her lay the shadowy ruins of the roundhouse and beyond that, the switching yard. A single light illuminated the WINDLIFT sign, and more than any other thing, that made Grace afraid. The building was empty. No help there. A faint sliver of moon illuminated the rubble of cement berm that had once been a wall. Bristling acacia balled like wire brushes.

“Nine.”

She angled toward the roundhouse, lost her footing and skidded, scattering a wash of pebbles. She wondered if he could see through concrete pillars. She stumbled past a broken, brick outcropping with a metal rebar poking up.

“Eight.”

She gripped the crumbling edge of a pillar and pulled herself up into the roundhouse. Moonlight angled down through the damaged roof, creating a spidery pattern of shifting shapes.

Faintly, she could hear him still counting, the numbers indistinct.

She looked around. She’d seen glittering broken bottles when she’d driven past it, useless unless she could lure him close enough, and risky in the dark.

She patted along the wall, almost tumbling outside when it ended abruptly in a pile of concrete.

Through the gap, she could see the ghostly forms of boxcars parked on a siding and she had to stop herself from crying out. The sliding door on the fourth boxcar was open and in a wash of moonlight, she saw the painted serial numbers. It was the same boxcar she’d crawled up into earlier with her uncle.

Leaning against the boxcar, Grace saw the dim outline of a man.

She half ran, half stumbled and took a flying leap out of the roundhouse. She hit the ground hard. The shock rocked up her legs and she took a series of shambling steps to regain her balance. The wind was picking up. She heard the faint shrill of a train whistle.

She ran toward the silvery boxcars, her ankles and shins stinging with pain. She moved deeper into the yard, creeping around the steel beams, weaving erratically, keeping low to the ground. Her feet slipped on the gravel berm and she stuttered over the tracks and darted around to the other side so that the boxcars themselves stood between her and the roundhouse. She kept running, her body low, head down.

She passed the first boxcar, a high blur of metal. She shot past the gap, glancing toward the opening between the cars, afraid of what she’d find. Only darkness.

She kept running. She passed the second boxcar and then the third and folded herself into the gap between the cars. She bent over gasping, the raw sound of her breathing cutting through the dark. Maybe it was a trick of light, seeing someone. She’d made too much noise not to have been heard. A policeman would have called out to her. Commanded her to stop, ordered her to state her business, so it wasn’t a policeman. And a transient would have been as scared as she was. Already melted into shadows. Disappeared.

She wiped her mouth. An owl hooted. She eased herself over the metal knuckle connecting the two boxcars and inched out her head so that she was looking backward toward the roundhouse. In the shifting light, it looked like a ruined scrap of metal and cement surrounded by sand and stunted palms.

Nothing moved. She jerked her head back and pressed flat against the boxcar. She had no idea where Stuart was now and that scared her. She strained to hear footsteps, a grating on sand, a breath. There was nothing except the sound of an uneven wind blowing against the rusted boxcars on the edge of the darkened yard.

She was going to have to move, and it was going to have to be now. She calculated the distance to the open door of the boxcar. Grace took a breath, turned toward it and ran.

It was Johnstone. Leaning against the boxcar in the wavering half-light as if thinking through a serious subject. Strong, solid, wearing the black uniform of a Union Pacific railroad policeman. He stood bent into the boxcar, motionless. Her relief made her angry. Sleeping on the job.

“Johnstone.” She grabbed his shoulder and spun him toward her.

He slid. He landed heavily, his massive shoulder hitting the ground first, followed by his head slamming at an odd angle. A crossbow bolt pierced his throat. The front of his uniform was bright and shiny red.

There was lots of blood and it was still fresh. She screamed.

The moon slid behind a bank of clouds. A section of track glinted and winked out, as if it had been snuffed.

“Grace.”

Stuart made the name sound like a caress. She was exposed, kneeling, Johnstone’s body cooling and heavy in her arms.

She was trapped. He was going to kill her and that’s how it would end. He pattered around in the darkness, the sound seeming to be come from all over, shifting as if he were examining her from all sides, figuring out the best angle, the cleanest kill.

A numbness spread from her lips across her face and her fingers felt clumsy. She shifted her position and the analytical part of her took over.

“How do you think Vonda’s going to feel about you when she finds out?”

She risked a quick look down at the body, hunting for the regulation Sam Browne belt. It was gone. Johnstone’s gun. The cuffs. The handie talkie two-way radio, all the paraphernalia that could save her. She shifted and felt something in the dirt. A metal lock. A big one. Her hand closed around it.

She realized what had happened. Johnstone and Judith Woodruff, the head of the company, had been signing off on the contents of the boxcar and were about to lock it up when they’d heard the sound of a car.

Judith had made the decision to drive toward it, find out who it was. Maybe they’d been running late. Maybe she trusted Johnstone to finish locking up without her. Maybe she was just exhausted.

But her choice had saved her.

Grace swallowed the sour taste of fear, wondering if the last sound she’d hear would be the thin whine of a bolt. She wished she knew where he was.

Maybe Johnstone still had his keys. She remembered his car parked along the outskirts of the yard. There should still be keys.

“You didn’t have to kill him.” She shifted Johnstone’s weight and smoothed her palms down the body. His shirt was slick with blood. She found the keys in the right-hand pants pocket, her fingers moving delicately until she located what she needed.

“You don’t know shit.” Stuart’s voice was weary and cold. It was coming from a place low to the ground and dead center, and seemed closer by maybe a yard.

Was he creeping up on her? Would he shoot her point-blank, the tip of the weapon exploding inside her? Judging from his voice, he was maybe fifteen yards away now. She shifted to her knees, still holding Johnstone’s body.

The clouds split open, exposing him. The night-vision goggles blanked out his eyes. He angled the crossbow down, bounced a foot onto the metal bar to steady the weapon as he guided the bolt into the groove and yanked the string toward the scope. There was a small, snicking sound as the string caught. He raised the crossbow and found her in the scope. The entire action had taken less than two seconds. He clicked off the safety and eased his finger onto the trigger.

This was the moment when it hit home. Grace had carved out a world with Katie, a world she was going to have to share with Mac, a small, compact orderly world from the outside, but exploding under a microscope when she scratched the surface was a universe teaming with soccer practices, lists undone, melting ice cream left too long in the car, a world of late nights in the lab and early mornings with Katie on the roof huddled in damp, dewy sleeping bags, watching the stars fade and the sky turn into a rosy ball of suffused light.

A world where porpoises jumped, if only on the pages of Katie’s pink and orange stationery. A world of light.

She hadn’t cared about anything bigger than that, when she’d been called. She wasn’t interested in saving the world. She’d only wanted to save what was left of her own. And now she realized they were related.

She saw Katie’s face. The light in her eyes. She needed to give Katie a hero to believe in. And more than that, she needed to give herself one.

She yanked Johnstone’s car keys from his pocket and came roaring to her feet. She punched the car alarm button. Red lights flashed in the dark. The alarm shrilled. There was just enough light for her to see him, a red strobe washing over his face.

Startled, Stuart jerked his head toward the sound and Grace reared back with the lock in her hand, took aim and let it fly.

The lock was strong, steel, American made, and her aim was good. The lock clipped him on the side of his head and sent him dancing into the yard, still on his feet. He lost his balance and the bolt shot across the yard toward the flashing lights of the car.

Grace scrabbled along the length of the boxcar until she found the first metal rung. She was making small sounds as she climbed, knowing she was giving him a clear shot at her back.

The air changed and she knew she was close; it smelled fetid, sweaty, the air inside a contained space. She flung herself forward into the boxcar and fell to her knees, patting along the grooves until she found the metal bar that had been wedged in to keep the door open.

She dropped to her knees and yanked the bar and it scraped free as Stuart shot to his feet and screamed. It was a guttural cry, savage. He jumped, feet high. A Ninja posture, legs thrusting, hands curved, the crossbow aimed straight at her. The hairs on her neck rose.