Afterparty (18 page)

She scowled. We waited for ten, fifteen minutes. The pen didn’t ring. I said, “I gotta pee.”

“We wait here,” Hootan said.

“Like a fucking racehorse,” I said.

Hootan took off his glasses to look at me. “Why do you have to be so crude?”

“You want me to just go all over your upholstery?”

“Aaqila goes with you,” he said.

“As long as she lets me go first.” I hustled toward the convenience store, and Aaqila was forced to walk quickly to keep up. The clerk, a chubby blond girl, read my pained expression and pointed me toward the restroom.

“Wait,” Aaqila said. She put a hand on my shoulder and pushed open the door with the other. The room was a few days of hard use past clean, with squares of toilet paper pasted to the grubby linoleum. There were two stalls, a sink, and a stainless steel mirror. One stall door was ajar, the other closed.

Aaqila knocked on the closed door. “Hello?” She knocked again.

I flashed on a fantasy:
The door bangs open, knocking Aaqila back. Ollie steps out with a gun. We tie up the girl, duct tape her mouth shut, then …
It got hazy after that. The money was back in the car, in the Mr. Squiggly box. So we’d have to get the drop on Hootan too.

Aaqila crouched to look under the stall door.

Second fantasy:
I smash Aaqila in the back of the head
(with what?)
, drag her into the stall, and press her face into the toilet.

“Thoughts like those aren’t helpful,” Dr. G said.

I disagreed.

Aaqila got to her feet and looked at her palms in disgust. “Nobody there.”

I took the empty stall. I scanned for pens taped to the toilet, messages scrawled on the toilet paper, words drawn into the grime on the wall … but no. The five sentences that Ollie had beamed onto the wall at Aaqila’s house were all I had to go on:

Been listening

Heard deal for chemjet

All OK

Stop at 401 Morrisburg SC K756

Wait for call from smugglers. XXOO

Historically speaking, phantom messages that appear on walls tend toward the cryptic. I had no Daniel to call on, but I did have an angel on my shoulder, and while we watched episodes of
Beam Me Up!
Dr. Gloria and I interpreted the words as follows, adding emotional subtext:

This is Ollie. I love you and care for you and have been tracking you through the pen I gave you. I have also, using the same pen or perhaps other devices I’ve placed on your person, overheard the deal you made with Fayza for the chemjet printer. I have a plan that will save us all and get us to America. Just drive toward Cornwall on the 401, and stop at the Morrisburg Service Center located at kilometer marker 756. The smugglers will call with further instructions. Hugs and kisses.

Perhaps, I thought, we’d read too optimistically. Maybe Ollie had no plan at all. Maybe
I
was supposed to come up with the plan.

“Everything will work out,” Dr. Gloria said, hovering over the stall. “How could you not trust someone who signs a secret message with those middle school
X
s and
O
s?”

“She was being ironic,” I said.

“No, she
said
it ironically, but she was really being sincere. It was both.”

“Bi-ronic.”

“Bi-rony,” Dr. G agreed.

“So what happens when the smugglers call?”

“I have no idea,” Dr. Gloria said.

“Then would you let me pee in peace?”

In the next stall, a pen began to chime. I heard Aaqila answer. There was a pause, and then the girl was standing on her toilet and looking over the stall at me. “It’s for you.”

She handed me the pen. There was no video. A voice said, “Lyda Rose?” It was electronically modified, and sounded like LYda ROZE.

“Speaking.”

“I’M SENDing GPS coORDinates. DRIVE THERE.”

“Why are they using so much distortion?” Dr. Gloria asked. “There’s perfectly good speech modification technology out there.”

I ignored her. The voice said, “PARK and turn OFF your LIGHTS.”

“They could sound like a British nanny or Samuel L. Jackson, any accent they like, and it would be just as untraceable.”

“WAIT for FUR-thur inSTRUC-tions.”

“No lights, wait for instructions,” I repeated, for Aaqila’s benefit. I didn’t want to give them the impression that I was making any of this up. “Got it.”

The call cut off. A few seconds later I received a text message with a travel link in it. The little map showed our route. I couldn’t decide if the call had been from Ollie or from the actual smugglers. Then I couldn’t decide if it mattered.

“I suppose they think it makes them sound tough,” Dr. G said. “It’s like a font for gangsters.”

*   *   *

I took the front seat with Hootan to relay directions. He wanted me to send the map to his glasses, but I refused on the grounds that HUDs were fucking crazy, blindfolds for people with ADD, and Aaqila agreed. The pen directed me, and I directed Hootan. After forty minutes we left the 401 and took 138 south through Cornwall City, which at night looked like every small city at night. We passed an abandoned port-of-entry station, crossed a short bridge, and came down on Cornwall Island.

The island sat in the middle of the St. Lawrence like a mossy stepping stone between nations. It was technically part of Canada, but it was also inside the Akwesasne Reserve, the territory of the Mohawk Nation. The reserve (or “reservation” if you were speaking Anglo-American) included parts of New York, Quebec, and Ontario. The Mohawks had little use for borders. The tribe went to court every time the Americans or the Canadians tried to set up toll stations or immigration controls, taking the position that you could no more divide up their land than you could cut soup. There were homes on the southeast of the reserve where the New York/Quebec border ran straight through the living room. Sometimes the tribe won the case—like the closing of the port-of-entry on the Cornwall City mainland—and sometimes the governments did.

If we stayed on the highway it would turn into the International Seaway Bridge and carry us to America—and straight into the Hogansburg port-of-entry and the arms of the United States Border Patrol. The legal battle over
that
POE was one the tribe had definitely lost.

(I came to know these facts the way we all came to know things in the twenty-first century: My internet told me so. The map on my pen came chock-full of textual tidbits, like this Fun Fact: In winter, smugglers used to cross the frozen St. Lawrence in trucks, but for the past five winters the river has failed to freeze solid. Huh!)

We did not stay on the highway. Well before the Seaway Bridge the pen directed us to turn east. Hootan cruised at unsuspicious speeds through the island’s tiny downtown, then into a woodsy residential area. We kept going until we’d almost reached the eastern end of the island, where we were surrounded by a lot more woods than residences. It was still winter here: Snow lined the road and lay thick under the trees.

I pointed to a gap between two large firs. “Pull off the road,” I said. “And turn out your lights.”

Hootan gave me a look. He didn’t like to be ordered around—especially by a woman—but he did as he was told. “Now what?” he asked.

I didn’t bother answering. He knew what they’d told me.

There wasn’t much traffic on this road, but we tensed up as each pair of headlights passed us. After fifteen minutes Hootan said, “We’re going to get stopped by the cops.”

“Can you be stopped if you’re not moving?” Dr. Gloria asked from the backseat.

“Relax,” I said to everyone, including myself.

It was another half hour before the pen chimed. Aaqila had taken it back from me. She held out the device, and all four of us leaned in to hear. “WALK toward the WA-ter,” the same electronic voice said. “Bring the MON-ey. Come ALONE.”

The call ended. Hootan said, “Screw that.”

“Don’t be crude,” Dr. G said.

“We’re going with you,” Aaqila said.

“Didn’t think I could stop you,” I said. To Aaqila I said, “The money?”

She handed me the Mr. Squiggly lunchbox. I thought about opening it to count the cash, but decided I didn’t need to antagonize her. Yet.

Dr. Gloria took to the air, and the rest of us entered the trees. I tried to step around the deeper patches, but the snow kept tipping into the tops of my boots. According to the map, the car shouldn’t have been more than a hundred meters from the water, but I couldn’t see anything through the trees, and I couldn’t make out any sound over my huffing and puffing.

Suddenly I stepped out onto a dirt road—really no more than a pair of deeply rutted tire tracks. Dr. Gloria landed in a flurry of wings.

“This wasn’t on the map,” Hootan said. He sounded hurt.

“I think that’s on purpose,” I said.

To my right the trail curled into the trees, heading roughly back the way we’d come. To my left it ended in an open area shaped like the head of a sperm. At the edge of the clearing, the land dropped off. Beyond was the moon-flecked river.

A flashlight raked us from the trees at the western edge of the clearing, then focused on my face.

“I told you to come alone!” a female voice yelled.

“At least she’s not using distortion,” Dr. G said.

I shaded my eyes against the glare. “I have the money,” I called back. “You have the printer?”

“Come forward—
just you!
”

I started forward, and Aaqila put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said.

“I think it’s too late for that,” Dr. G said.

The flashlight moved to cover Aaqila and Hootan, and I walked out into the dark. But not alone; Dr. G of course followed me out. When I was in the middle of the clearing, the voice called, “Stop!” A few feet away stood a mound about two feet high, covered by a tarp; in the dark I’d thought it was a boulder.

I pulled off the plastic. Two cardboard boxes, one big enough to hold a printer. I yelled back to Aaqila and Hootan, “It’s here!”

“Throw me the money,” the figure behind the flashlight said. She was twenty feet from me.

“No!” Hootan yelled. He marched forward, arm straight in front of him, one-handing the pistol like a Hollywood bad guy. Aaqila followed closely behind him. “Show yourself!” he said.

“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled to them. “Get the fuck back!”

That’s when I noticed the man in the cowboy hat. He stepped out of the northern trees halfway between Hootan and me. He was short, maybe only 5’4”. I couldn’t make out his face under the big brim, but something about the hat and the white shirt and that formal suit jacket looked familiar.

“The bar,” Dr. Gloria said. Yes: He was the man at the bar who’d tipped his hat at me.

Before I could answer her, a police siren wailed. Blue-and-red flashing lights lit up the trees. Headlight beams bounced; a police car was coming down that rutted road. In a second it would enter the clearing.

Hootan stopped and whirled toward the lights. Aaqila began to turn too, and then noticed the man in the cowboy hat. For what seemed like a long moment (but was not, the brain grabbing every detail in high def), no one moved.

Then, everyone moved at once. Everyone except me.

The person in the trees behind me with the flashlight said, “Lyda! This way!” Hootan spun toward the printer box. The cowboy raised his arm. Aaqila ran toward the cowboy, arms spread.

And I … watched.

The cowboy fired. Aaqila was almost directly in front of the man, but it was Hootan who fell, dropping to the ground as if his knees had been cut out from under him. Then Aaqila smashed into the cowboy and they went down tumbling, a confusion of arms and legs flashing in the glare of the headlights. The strobing blue-and-red lights seemed to sway the trees like a high wind.

Someone seized my arm. “Let’s go!” It was Ollie, in twelve-year-old-boy drag: the baseball cap and heavy jacket I’d seen her wearing on the street outside Aaqila’s house, plus a backpack I’d never seen before. She yanked me into the trees and we ran, crunching through icy snow, the beam of her flashlight hopscotching ahead of us. I hugged the lunchbox close to my body and followed as best I could.

“Who the fuck
is
that guy?!” I said.

Another gunshot, the sound splintering in the dark. I grabbed Ollie’s jacket and jerked her to a halt. We were surrounded by trees. The river should have been nearby, but I couldn’t see it.

I grabbed Ollie by the elbow. “Stop, damn it!” I said. “The guy in the hat! Is he a cop?”

“Cops aren’t real,” Ollie said, and sucked in a breath. “That car—it’s Bobby.”

“What do you mean it’s—?”

“His
car
,” Ollie said. “We put a light on it, wired the sound. Distraction. Everybody scatters, you get away.”

Dr. G appeared behind me. “You left him back there with those
killers
?”

Fuck.

The doctor unfurled her wings into Maximum Righteousness Mode. The flaming sword was in her hand. She pointed with it like the archangel casting us out of the garden. “Get your ass back there!”

“No,” I said aloud. “No no no.”

“Come on,” Ollie said. “We’ve got to go—the boat’s coming.”

I looked back toward the way we came. Ollie said, “Lyda, he’s fine, just—”

“Be right back,” I said. I shoved the money into her arms and ran. Drifts tugged at my ankles. Hidden roots kicked at my toes, sent me stumbling in the path of trees that seemed to rush at me out of the dark. I burst through curtains of pine branches, scattering snow.

Suddenly I was yanked sideways, and realized it was Ollie; she’d caught up with me and had seized my arm.

“This way,” she said. Her flashlight was turned off. “Quiet now.”

She led me to my right, around a jumble of boulders. Ahead, the headlights of the stopped car cut through the branches. I could hear nothing but my own breath and the crunch of the snow, which suddenly seemed obscenely loud. Ollie stopped me with a hand on my chest.

We stood at the edge of the clearing. Fifty feet away, Bobby knelt in the grass, his hands up. He was babbling. I couldn’t make out the words, only the panicked somersault rhythm of his voice. The man in the cowboy hat held his pistol to his side, so clearly in control there was no need to aim it at the kid. A few feet from Bobby lay a crumpled form: Hootan. But where was Aaqila?