Parallel Lies (32 page)

He nodded. It was good thinking and he told her so. He sat down on the bed, flipped through the Yellow Pages, and made the call.

Tyler kept watch from the window, a lone eye peering out alongside the blinds. Dusk fell early, to where everything was a shade of gray, and the air seemed thick with dust. A few minutes before he expected the rental pickup, a Baltimore PD cruiser pulled into the parking lot and one uniform went inside the office while a second kept the structure under surveillance. He had hoped to lure NUS away from Washington but on his terms, not this way. O’Malley must have tipped the local police to their location. No stone unturned.

Tyler’s reaction was immediate. He grabbed hold of Nell
Priest, held her close to him, and gripped her wrist behind her, their chests touching.

“Your dry cleaner,” he asked her.

“What?” Their lips were nearly close enough to kiss. Her eyes seemed enormous at that moment. He held her arm pinned.

“The name of the dry cleaner you use,” he stated.

“Ming Ling. Twenty-third and—”

“If you get a message on your answering machine from them, the invoice number will be the area code and prefix of the number I want you to call. The amount you owe is the last four digits of the number. That’s all you have to remember: combine the invoice with the price.”

“Got it,” she said, her face a knot of worry.

“Call me at the number from a pay phone.” He smiled, “And remember to leave off some dry cleaning. Even if you’re being watched, or if your phones are tapped, we’re cool.”

He yanked the phone out of the wall and used its wire to bind one wrist and spun her around sharply, explaining above her protests, “I took you onto that ship against your will. I left the motel twenty minutes ago.” He hooked the room’s only chair with his foot and dragged it so that Priest would be facing the door. “Peter!”

Working frantically, he tied both wrists together, behind the chair. He kissed her on the cheek from behind. “Remember to act pissed at me.”

“That won’t be too hard!” She strained at the wire.

“Sorry if it hurts.”

“It
does
hurt!” she complained.

“I said I was sorry,” Tyler replied. Grabbing the room’s spare blanket from the open closet’s shelf, he hurried out through the sliding glass door, taking one last look at Nell Priest from behind and wondering if it was the last time he’d see her.

Tyler lay on his back on top of the blanket that he used as an insulator against the solid ice surface of the motel’s winterized swimming pool. Above him, by only a foot, was the underside of a section of the reinforced pool cover, installed for the winter months to prevent accidents.

Tyler counted the voices shouting back and forth—three, maybe four cops out searching for him. In this cold, they would be impatient to quit. Beat cops rarely pursued anything beyond a reasonable effort. They’d be thinking about the warmth of their cruisers.

Suddenly, one of the voices sounded incredibly close. A man’s deep voice said, “Too many goddamn tracks out here.”

If the cops thought this through, they would see that the vast majority of the tracks were small—left behind by kids playing out in the snow. They might notice a particular set of larger tracks that led from the room where they had found Nell Priest tied to a chair. They might observe that those same tracks vanished at the pool.

“Nothing over here!” shouted another man.

The voice near Tyler faded as the man moved away. “Maybe he went over the back fence. Jimmy!” the man ordered. “Get your cruiser out back on Cardiff. And call into dispatch to put it out over the MDT that we think the suspect’s on foot in this area.” MDT: mobile data terminal. To Tyler, that meant that every cop in every cop car in Baltimore had his description. He tried to think, but the smallness of the space, the confinement, got the better of him. He closed his eyes, trying to hold off dizziness and claustrophobia. The darkness helped. The acute cold, too, by winning his attention and distracting him, seemed to help. Nonetheless, the anxiety continued to build inside of him. He felt as if he were suffocating. He felt trapped.

The talk between the cops faded as they returned to the
room. Or was that deep-voiced cop still nearby? With the sound muffled, Tyler couldn’t tell.

As he rocked his head to get a better listen, he heard instead a sharp, loud rap—like a hammer pounding down. Then another. And yet another. At first, believing it was the patrolmen, Tyler wondered what they were doing out there. But then, as another, even louder small explosion filled the tight space, he identified it as coming from beneath him.
Cracking ice!
The warmth of his body, trapped in the confined space, had set into motion the laws of physical science.
Crack!
Another one.

These triggered a bout of nauseating anxiety as his claustrophobia raged.

Tyler knocked away the plywood cover and came out of the pool like a dead man out of a grave—paste pale, sweating, and shaking.

One of the cops, much closer than Tyler had expected, spun around, reaching for his weapon. Tyler lunged, grabbed him by his weapon arm, and flung him toward the open pool cover. The cop went over the edge and broke through the ice in the shallow end. Tyler glanced in the direction of the motel and saw Priest standing in the door there, two cops questioning her. He found himself momentarily paralyzed. This woman had wormed her way under his skin. He didn’t want to leave her, didn’t want to strike out on his own. Didn’t want to run like some fugitive. They met eyes, making a connection, and then Tyler took off. He heard the warning shouts: “Stop!” “You, stop!” These patrolmen were at a disadvantage: Tyler knew they wouldn’t shoot unless fired upon. They could chase, but he had a head start. He also knew that their sense of brotherhood would require them first to save the man in the pool. He’d gone in hard, fully dressed. They would probably split up, one staying with the pool, one or two coming after him on foot.

He ran.

At the end of the small parking area he cut left, along a cracked sidewalk bordered by a wood fence.

He heard the sound before he fully identified it:
cha-cha-hmmmm, cha-cha-hmmmm.
The clatter of a slowly moving freight, traveling toward the north edge of Baltimore’s downtown.

From over his shoulder he saw one of the uniformed cops, still a distance back, running for him but clumsily because of the artillery and hardware on the man’s belt.

Tyler turned left at the end of the fence and ran through the snow parallel to the moving train. Ran hard. Ran fast. Grabbed hold of a handrail on the far end of a car and hung on. Pulled himself up.

By the time the cop rounded the corner, there was no one to see, the train now going fast enough to make the man think twice about jumping.

Tyler, above a coupling, hung on for dear life, marveling at the fine line that now separated him from Alvarez. He had become the man he was after.

Tyler’s fingers felt frozen as he clung to a metal rung of the ladder bolted to the rumbling freight car.

His toes were numb from the steady forty-mile-an-hour windchill of the train’s progress, his ankles were stiff, his neck was sore from craning to watch the passing landscape. He had lost sight of Baltimore an hour earlier, consumed by suburbs and finally engulfed by the starkly barren dark tree trunks of the endless deciduous forest that blanketed western Maryland.

He wanted off this train, needed to be off it before those cops back at the motel made the necessary calls to determine which train it was and went about stopping it. Maybe they
wouldn’t care enough about him to go to that kind of trouble, but Tyler couldn’t take any such chances.

His focus had to be the bullet train. He needed to know more about this test run than Nell had mentioned. On or off Rucker’s payroll, it didn’t matter to him now—he had to reach Umberto Alvarez before Alvarez derailed that train. Perhaps the freights, with no passengers aboard, were nothing more than test runs. But the F-A-S-T Track was a media event, a publicity spectacular, including dozens of dignitaries. O’Malley had to know it was the ultimate prize.

Several times he’d been tempted to jump, but the broken and frozen body of Harry Wells reminded him that this was dangerous sport.

However, weighed against the prospect of encountering small-town, trigger-happy police the first time this train stopped, Tyler had to decide not whether to jump but when and where. He knew nothing about jumping from a moving train, only that the one time he had faced such a jump, he had frozen.

He studied his situation: there was a pipe handrail mounted to the side of the freight car, just around the corner. He thought it might be possible to stretch from where he stood, around to this handrail, grab hold, and drop from the train, but timing would be everything.

His cold fingers gripping the steel rung of the ladder, Tyler waited for the train to slow, for the blur of the ballast that formed the railbed to come into better focus. Five minutes passed, ten, twenty, the pain in his fingers and toes excruciating, and yet the image of Harry Wells preventing him from jumping.

Finally, the train slowed significantly as it began ascending a hill, cutting its speed in half. Tyler stuffed his cell phone deep into his front pocket, attempting to protect it. In the middle of nowhere, as he was, if he broke a leg, that phone might be his only way out.

Before he made the move, he thought of Nell, and how he wanted more time with her, he thought of the derailed train outside Terre Haute, and of Harry Wells. Then, he lunged for the pipe rail around the corner, his left foot and hand firmly gripped to the ladder as the rest of him hovered over the blurred railbed below. He missed, swinging like a door from the hinge of his left hand, perpendicular to the train car, suspended out over the blurred railroad ties. He crashed back against the car, his unwilling fingers groping for purchase on that handrail and catching hold. He let go with his left hand, pushed away with his foot, and swung to the outside of the car.

He lifted his knees, scouted up the track, and let go, pushing off the car like a swimmer starting a backstroke.

Cha-cha-hmmm… Cha-cha-hmmmm…

He crashed onto the frozen earth and rolled down the embankment. He rolled, collided with something hard, and tumbled into a bramble patch that tore at his skin.

Finally he came to a stop, every joint aching. After a moment of a prayer or two, he caught his breath and slowly checked his aching joints and bones to see what worked and what didn’t.

Everything responded, and though painful, it all moved.

The train chugged past him,
cha-cha-hmmmm, cha-cha-hmmmm….

He had no idea where he was, but he knew where he was going.

“You’re a photographer,” Alvarez said.

“I’m a starving artist. Everybody starts somewhere.”

He had not noticed the appointments of Jillian’s apartment on his first visit. He’d been consumed with fatigue and with this sweating, sensuous woman he’d taken home from a dance club at four in the morning. But the black-and-white photographs of New York’s homeless, of the subways, the cab drivers, and the street vendors, struck him as both gritty and accessible. She had talent. The studio apartment was crammed with paperback books. The sparse furniture, begged and borrowed mostly, was eclectic, pleasant to the eye and revealing of a woman comfortable matching contemporary with Junko Victorian.