Armed and Dangerous (The IMA) (19 page)

Michael was still where I had left him. “What's the nearest store to this place?”

I named the drug store where I bought his clothes.

“Do you have any food besides the cold stuff?”

“
Um, ramen. Dried fruit. Cereal. Mac n' cheese.”

“
That'll be our first stop then.”

We took the bus to the store even though it was starting to cool down outside. Michael muttered under his breath the whole time. It sounded like recitation, like prayer, though I knew firsthand that he wasn't a religious man. When I asked him what he was doing he growled at me to shut up, so I left him to his crazy act in peace.

The drug store had a small selection of grocery items. Most of them were the kind that students buy in bulk to munch on during final exams. Michael added pop-top cans of fruits and vegetables, sardines, soups, crackers, and a bottle of multivitamins. He was quick, efficient.

Why wouldn't he be? He's done this countless times.

I didn't appreciate being made to feel useless. Confiding my fear and desperation to him had been a mistake, I thought. Now it seemed as if he were trying to show me that I couldn't possibly function without him.

I marched over to the pharmacy section. I'd assembled a first-aid kit for a badge back in girl scouts. It was pretty simple — rubbing alcohol, band-aids, gauze, anti-itch, insect repellent, sunscreen, allergy pills, aspirin.

Michael came by with the cart. He glanced at what I had gathered but chose not to comment. I took that as a sign of approval. I waited until his back turned before adding Kleenexes, sanitary napkins, and Midol to the cart.

Flashlights, batteries, matches, bungee cords, and a miscellany of other outdoorsy items completed the selection. I wondered if the eighty dollars I had was going to be enough. I'd seen him checking the prices.

At the register, the cashier said, “Going camping?” She said it the same way others might say, “Robbing a bank?”

“
Not here,” he told her. “Up north, where it's cooler—know any good spots?”

Did she ever. While the two of them bantered about the Sierras, I took the crumpled bills out of my purse and flattened them against the edge of the table. It was eerie, I thought, how quickly and convincingly Michael could lie.

How many times had I been on the receiving end?

On the way back, I was silent. How much of what we'd been through together had been real? The dynamic between us was disparate; he was specially trained to manipulate, and was skilled enough that I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a truth and a lie from his lips.

If we were going to work together, I had to trust him.

His quickness to resort to sexual remarks was also worrisome. He knew it bothered me. Since he kept doing that, I could only assume that he didn't care.

I needed to sort out my feelings and I couldn't do that if he kept stirring them up by keeping me in a constant state of uncertainty and unease.

My apartment felt like a different place with the sea of plastic bags covering the floor. It was like a modern-day Ali
Baba's cave. I guess that made sense, actually, since we were technically in the middle of the desert. Michael looked up from one of the bags he was sorting through. “Do you have an extra backpack?”

I nodded and went to retrieve it, grateful to be away from those piercing eyes that saw both far too much…and far too little.

I dumped my school bag out on the bed. Pens and pencils went rolling across the floor. I had a spare in the closet, an old Jansport. Neither of them were as nice as the Michael Kors leather satchel I'd used all of last year. It had disappeared after I'd been kidnapped, and I supposed that meant meant it was still back at the safe house—if the safe house hadn't been destroyed.

That was his agency's philosophy. Destroy all the evidence. Remove all witnesses. Leave no trace of the past so you can rewrite history as you would. Never mind who got hurt in the process, or how many.

I handed Michael the trashed pack. He began dumping out the spoils, removing the items from the packaging with assembly-line efficiency, stuffing them into the packs. Without a word, I sat down and joined him. It felt oddly cozy, which was not only
wrong
, but also bizarre, and it took me a moment to realize that this whole setting reminded me of Christmas. Of wrapping presents with my family. The fact that we were sitting next to the AC helped.

“
You'll want to leave some extra room at the top in case we need to stop somewhere and get more,” Michael said. “Save the plastic bags. They might come in handy.”

I could feel his eyes on me as I continued to assemble the first-aid kit, and so I nodded. I added fruit, ramen noodles, and small baggies of crackers to the bottom of my backpack. I muttered an excuse and went to grab an armful of clothes from my bedroom. Windbreaker. T-shirts. Tank tops. Underwear. I bundled these last up in the shirts so Michael wouldn't see them and offer comment. The fact that I cared made me doubly nervous. I tried to focus my thinking. What else did I need? Sleepwear? ID? Money?

“On the day we leave, go to an ATM and take out your max limit,” Michael said, when I pulled my driver's license out of my wallet. “Then cut your card in half and throw it out. Leave your cellphone. They can trace us with it.”

He was looking at me, but talking for himself, pacing
around my living room like a caged tiger. Because he
was
wild. He was wild in a way most humans didn't have to be, and
hadn't
had to be for hundreds of years.

“
We'll leave tomorrow, or the day after. No later.”

In my writing class, we had been reading
Into the Wild
. Michael reminded me of Chris McCandless in some ways, except he had been heading into Alaskan wilderness. We were in the desert. He had also died, though I was trying not to think about that part of the book so much.

“
Where are we going?” I asked him.

His eyes focused. “Anywhere but here.”

“You have no idea, do you?”

“
Trust me, darlin. I have plenty of experience when it comes to not being found. Now let's get some shut-eye. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.”

Michael:

Arizona is one part sand, one part rock. Everything else is hot air. There are stretches of sand dunes that go on for miles. Sandstone labyrinths. Cacti and tumbleweeds running rampant. Some places are so hot and arid that nothing can grow at all. It was the perfect place to hide.

“Have you ever been through the desert before?”

“
I'm a professional survivalist,” I told her.

“
So no.”

I didn't respond.

“The IMA isn't going to have to kill us. We'll already be dead by the time they find us.”

“
Your faith in me is so encouraging.”

She winced but she didn't apologize.

Before we went off the grid I made a last trip to the store and bought another backpack, which I filled with water bottles. I had Christina go through her apartment a final time. She called her utility providers and had them shift the payments to her mother's address. I then checked to make sure she had destroyed both her debit card and her phone. She had. We were off.

The sun beat down hard on the both of us and soon our clothes were plastered to our bodies like papier-mâché. I'd rubbed on sunscreen and still, my skin was blistering. It was too hot to feel anything but hot.

Sand crunched beneath the heels of her and my boots, punctuated by the occasional snap of dead branch or desiccated tumbleweed. The sky was the searing blue of a gas burner. Flecks of mica flashed pinpoints of blinding light from the sand every time I turned my head. It wasn't as bad as Louisiana in the summertime, with its hot wet heat that wrapped around your body like a serpent and squeezed, but it sure as hell wasn't a temperate Oregon September, either.

“
So out of all fifty states to choose from, why Arizona?” I asked to take my mind off the heat and the weight of the two backpacks glued to my chest and spine with sweat. “I'm curious. Why this hell-hole?”

She turned around to glare at me. “It isn't a hell-hole.”

“If this place isn't hell, then it's God's fucking ashtray.”

A bead of sweat dripped down my forehead and into my drying eyes. I flicked my tongue out and tasted salt.

“All right,” I said into the silence. “Why this not-a-hell-hole?”

“
Because it's quiet and peaceful, I guess.”

“
You must have had some other reason in mind. The Olympic fucking Peninsula is quiet and peaceful, and
it
isn't one hundred degrees in the summertime.”

She looked out at the desert. “I can't explain it. There's something about this place, like it absorbs sound as well as
water. In the forest, everything is chattering and alive. The desert has this slow-paced stillness; it makes me feel calm.”

Only because it was too goddamn hot to do anything else. I did understand what she meant. The Cascades were like that — standing pools of wilderness where you could let go of your inhibitions and focus on being alive.

That was the basis of my existence. Check your conscience at the door. Follow these rules. Do this, and you will survive.

A shadow skimmed over the sand. I shielded my eyes to search for aircraft. Just a large bird circling lazily overheard in the updrafts. I thought it was a vulture at first but the shape of the head and neck were all wrong. It was a red-tailed hawk.

I was a little glad it wasn't a buzzard. A buzzard would have seemed too much like a bad omen. Not that I'm a superstitious man, but it's hard to escape your heritage. Especially a heritage that comes from growing up in a fucking state whose population still predominantly believes in the
gris-gris
and all that other voodoo bullshit.

I wasn't about to look any gift optimism in the mouth, though. Lord knew, we needed it.

Christina continued talking. Apparently she had warmed to the subject of school. “I got accepted into Reed,” she was saying now, and I remembered reading that in the file I'd done on her back when she had been my charge. “Stanford, Oregon State, Washington University.” She looked at me—trying to impress me? I looked back, not impressed. I knew people who went to Brown, Harvard, Yale. “But all those schools seemed too high-profile.”

“
Too cool for school?”

She turned away. “No. It's not like that. None of that hipster 'don't label me' posturing. I really don't want to stick out. I've had enough drama in my life what with my mother, and being kidnapped, and never being able to just be
me
. I wanted to go somewhere I could just…quietly fade away.”

“
The desert.”

She sighed. “The desert.”

“That's pretty fucking sad,” I told her.

“
Why is that sad?”

“
You want to waste away in this million-degree sandbox. I don't know. Sounds pretty pathetic to me.”

“
Look at it this way: you can't understand, not until you experience it for yourself. The pictures don't tell you anything. Being here…it's existential.”

I spread out my arms to indicate that we were standing in the middle of her so-called existential experience and I didn't feel shit.

“It's relaxing,” she insisted, wiping sweat from her face. “The sandstone is beautiful at sunset, and I've never seen the stars as clearly as I do here at night.”

“
Too bad it didn't work,” I stated.

“
Yeah.” Her voice was flat. “Too bad.”

I eyed her. “You're starting to sound a little cranky. Why don't you drink some water?”

Christina caught the water I lobbed at her and took a long drink. The plastic crumpled. “You're a jerk.”

“
I'm the jerk who's keeping you alive,” I reminded her. “I suggest you remember that.”

She handed back the water with more force than strictly necessary. “Is that all you think about? Survival?”

I shoved it into my pack. “It's all I can afford to think about.”

“
Now
that's
pretty fucking sad,” she told me, quickening her pace so she didn't have to walk with me. I could have kept up, easily, but I didn't. Her statement cut a little too close to the truth.

We were both pretty fucking sad, getting our jollies where we could—except the Jollies Super Store was all sold out of “jollies.” And right next door to that, the Give-A Store was all out of “fucks.”

I leaned back. The red sandstone contrasted sharply against the blue of the sky. Christina was probably right about the view being something else at sunset, though I couldn't picture her coming all the way out here by herself just to watch the play of light on stone. That was ridiculous, even for her.

Such a strange woman, to see beauty in a deathtrap and goodness in a killer. I couldn't afford to indulge in such romantic dallying, and neither could she. Regardless of what she believed, this was survival, not a nature walk, and she was distracting me from my purpose.