Endings by Linda Richards (portable ebook reader .TXT) 📗

I nod. And I get it. Really. I do. Here’s this low-man-on-the-totem-pole soldier stuck here most of the time on his own. And then I plop into the middle of everything. Clearly, that’s going to be nothing but trouble. If I were him, I’d do the very same thing. Keep things simple and moving forward. I’m beginning to plot desperate measures doomed to fail when he speaks again.

“Atwater, huh?”

I nod.

“He’s the one killed the little kids an’ then got loose?”

I nod again, daring to feel the faintest hope flutter in my chest. “What makes you think you can get him?”

I consider before answering but, when I do, I can see I chose the right words.

“I’ve got nothing to lose.”

He grunts while he nods agreement. “I get that,” he says and I can see he means it. “Guy like that,” he says. “Would be better if he was dead.”

“I aim to kill him.” My voice is calm and determined.

He smiles at my words, but he isn’t laughing at me.

“Yuh. Better or worse, I think. That’s your aim. Can smell it on you.” Then a little more seriously, “I know that smell,” and then I understand that there is more to his story than just being shunted off to a backwater. Something led him here. Something happened first.

“I can’t let you go,” he says, and I feel the slender hope I’d held die at the back of my throat. It tastes like sawdust.

“Oh,” I say. I just don’t have any more words.

“Yuh. Can’t just let you go,” and I can hear him thinking now. I can almost hear the clicks of the wheels speeding up. “But maybe you got the jump on me.”

It takes a second for me to understand what he’s getting at and, when I do, I feel something grow in my chest. And the taste of sawdust is gone.

“Jump,” I prompt. Because I am not sure.

“Yeah.” His voice is brighter now. He can feel a purpose. “Because you had a gun. I couldn’t safely disarm you and you held it on me and …” He has an idea. I can tell because of the smile that floods his face. He is having fun with this. And maybe fun doesn’t come to him every day. And my mission? It’s a good one. He knows that, too.

“And I ran away? Scrabbled back through the fence?”

“Naw,” he says. The smile has dimmed to a grin, but it is still beautiful. “Or maybe. You got away from me. And then you hid or whatever. I didn’t see you get away. Don’t know where you went.”

He turns his back. Pulls the Bersa from his waistband and plops it on the desk. Raises his arms over his head like I’d told him to stick ’em up and says, “Good luck.”

I hesitate. And then I don’t. I move forward cautiously, in case it’s a trick. It’s not though, because he stays there like that even after the Bersa is back in my bag.

“Thanks,” I mumble.

“Don’t,” he says. “Just get ’er done.”

I put my hand softly on the back of his head—a silent thanks—and then I scurry away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I HEAD FOR the exit. Getting out of the compound is easier than getting in had been. Though I had feared some drama, in the end, it is easy. I just walk out the front gate.

Back at the car, the dog is ridiculously happy to see me. Ludicrously, rapturously happy. I open the door, and he practically pours out of the car in his joy. Maybe he’d thought he was a goner, trapped inside a car in the wilderness. I let him run around and do dog things for a few minutes, but I keep one eye on the empty road. From my perspective, the sooner we leave the area, the safer we will be. We get on the road, and I track us back to where I made my phone calls and it all starts again.

It does not take long before I come to the gas station at the fork in the road. It seems right. Correct. My excitement grows. Viewed from the north looking south, the gas station is located in the deepest part of a vee. Take the left road, she’d said. And so I stop. First, I take the dog around. It just seems the right thing to do. Then I park the dog and go inside.

I use the restroom. Buy a muffin and two large bottles of water. Garbage in, garbage out.

Among the chips and cookies and beef jerky and cheap electronic crap they are selling in the store, there is a rack of poorly made T-shirts. “San Pasado,” one declares, a map of the county front and center. “It’s where my story begins” is printed on the back. I take one off the rack, and if the clerk notices the rip in the shirt I am wearing while I pay for the new one, he doesn’t say anything. Some things are best unremarked. Most people know that.

In the car, I pull the shirt on over the one I’m wearing, then go back over my notes. She had been very clear. “Two roads. You understand? Go left.”

And am I actually following the advice of a psychic? I chide myself for maintaining even the faintest glimmer of hope that young Sara Jane Samaritano’s predictions will pan out. At the same time, I’m excited, though trying to hold that excitement down. The doctor I’d spoken to before I connected with the psychic is probably the one who is right: therapy is likely what I need, but I have a hunt on my hands. For better or worse, I put my head down and lean in.

After the dog and I do another round of the parking lot, we get back on the road. It is now fully dark, but my energy doesn’t falter. I am in the home stretch. I can feel it in my bones.

First, a gas station. And it’s dark. There will