Pyramid Lake (40 page)

He let go of my arm. “No, no,” he said in a small voice. “I just need to go away forever, like I promised—”

“You’re repeating yourself. And I really don’t have time to argue about this.” I checked my phone: Amy’s flight arrived in an hour. “I have to be someplace.”

“Where?”

“The airport.”

“Perfect. If you can let me borrow a little money—”

“You’ll
what
? Catch a flight and disappear?” I brought up the phone’s front-facing camera and handed it to him to use as a mirror. “Blake, have you seen yourself? You look like you crawled out of a fucking morgue drawer. Do you think you can walk into an airport looking like that, no ID, buy a ticket with cash, and no one’s gonna notice?”

“I don’t know what to do.” Blake took a deep breath. “To you, this is some kind of big joke, I guess—all fun and games. Everything is. But I don’t want to die, Trevor.”

“Then
tell me who hurt you
, for fuck’s sake. Was it Homeland Security?” I watched his face closely. “Is it the Navy? Is Kate involved somehow?”

“If you really don’t know, then you should run away, too.” His bruised and swollen face was impossible to read. “They’re setting you up to take the blame for all of this.”

“
Who
is? Don’t protect them. You’re being such an idiot—look what they did to you!” My hands tightened on the wheel. “Just. Fucking.
Tell me.
Or, I mean it, I’ll…”

“Beat it out of me?” Blake turned his mournful, swollen, lopsided moon of a face toward me. One of his eyes was an orb of solid red.

“Are
you
going to hurt me too now, Trevor?”

I shook my head. I could have made him tell me—it would have taken all of thirty seconds, I figured, before I got it out of him. But I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterward.

My jaw hardened in anger and I started the car. I resented Blake’s selfishness and cowardice, even though I knew that wasn’t being fair. He had spent the past two or three days cowering in his storage unit, terrified and in pain, frozen up like a jackrabbit staring into the headlight of an oncoming train.

Whoever beat him up had broken him.

We drove in moody silence for a while. My side throbbed with pain. My head hurt, too, and I could feel the tacky stickiness of drying blood on the back of my neck. Touching the place where Blake had hammered me with the gun, I winced.

“Are you mad at me?” he asked.

I shook my head, even though it made my skull throb worse and sent a wave of nausea rippling through me.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said.

I patted his shoulder, and he flinched away, which made me feel terrible. “I’m sorry I smashed up your lab,” I told him.

He stiffened. “But… why would you do something like that?”

“You got me good, Blake.” I gave a sour chuckle. “It was funny, I’ll admit, but you scared the crap out of me. That fucking robot of yours—I still get goose bumps every time I think about it.”

Blake didn’t say anything, but his posture stayed stiff.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m over it now. Hell, I probably even deserved it.”

He started shaking. “I swear I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

My chest tightened, sending a spike of pain through my injured side. “The night McNulty died—you
didn’t
rig a trap in your lab?”

Blake shook his head. His trembling intensified.

“Then why were you in so early?” I asked.

“He called me. R-Rich called me and woke me up. He said there’d been a security breach, that I should come in and ch-check my lab.”

“
McNulty
called you? What time was this?”

“Five a.m.—an hour before we f-found him… you know, dead. I thought he called
all
of us.”

I shook my head. “Did McNulty seem any different on the phone?”

“He sounded really stressed. It was a short call.”

“But are you
sure
it was McNulty?”

“I think so. He said someone had used my workstation to b-break into the admin subnet, and he was pretty damn sure he knew who.”

Blake pushed his trembling palms against the dashboard. “He meant
you,
Trevor.”

I took the freeway on-ramp and didn’t say anything. I
had
used Blake’s workstation to crack the admin subnet and McNulty’s computer. There was only one problem with what Blake was saying: I hadn’t done it until two or three hours after McNulty died.

Someone had really been putting in the overtime to make sure I looked guilty.

But Amy’s flight would be landing soon. I had to figure out what to do with Blake. I silently considered my options and came to a decision.

After a few minutes, he spoke up. “Where are we going?”

I pointed at the sign for the airport turnoff, signaled, and spiraled down the ramp.

“But you said…”

I laid a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down. “Duck.”

Blake hunkered as low as he could, trying to stay out of sight, but it didn’t work too well—he was a big, hulking guy. I turned into arrivals and drove past the luggage carousels, all the way to the darkened vacant end of the pickup area. Then I pulled over and turned the car off.

Opening my door, I stepped out and handed Blake the keys. I found a couple of hundreds and a bunch of twenties in my wallet and gave those to him, too.

“Go back to Flanigan,” I said. “To
my
house, not yours. Pull into my garage—the opener’s in the glove box. There’ll be a couple cops parked outside my door, trying to keep tabs on me—which is good, because they’ll keep you safe. Just make sure they don’t realize you aren’t me. Stay away from the windows, and don’t answer the door. Not for anyone.”

“But what if—”

“There’s food in the fridge and a first-aid kit under the bathroom sink. Don’t worry about anything. Just rest and heal up. I’ll be back soon, and we’ll figure this out together.”

I thought of something else, and stuck my head back in the door just as he was sliding over to the driver’s side. “Blake, one more thing…”

He looked up in sudden alarm.

“Don’t smoke in my car. Or in my house,” I said. “Don’t even think about it, or the people you’re hiding from now will be the least of your worries.”

I closed the car door and walked away before he could reply. I heard him start the Mustang and pull away from the curb before I had taken three steps.

I headed toward the terminal, and another wave of nausea rolled over me, making me feel light-headed. I shook it off and pulled out my phone to check the time. Amy’s flight arrived in fifty minutes, and I needed to find a bathroom and clean up the blood so I wouldn’t scare her. But I could also see several missed calls on my phone from Cassie. And texts. They all said pretty much the same thing, but with increasing degrees of urgency: she wanted me to call her ASAP.

I dialed, and she picked up immediately.

“We need to talk,” she said, breathless. “I’m at my uncle’s, outside on the driveway. No one can hear me right now. Where are you?”

“At the airport.”

“Oh shit, Trevor. That’s not good news. Listen, I can be there in… forty-five minutes.”

“What’s going on?”

“Not over the phone. But don’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t worry.” I didn’t have a car, anyway. “I won’t.”

“Promise you’ll wait for me.”

“I already did,” I said, annoyed. “I’m not running away, if that’s what you think.”

“I didn’t say you were—”

“First floor. Arrivals.” I hung up and went in the terminal, wondering what Cassie had to tell me, but not really able to give it much attention. Instead, my gaze was drawn to the digital billboard listing incoming flights. I searched for Amy’s plane and found it. On time.

Back at Pyramid Lake, a train wreck was unfolding in slow motion. It was mangling and killing my colleagues and threatening my freedom—maybe even my life. But right now none of that mattered to me. Not even Frankenstein.

I’d be seeing my daughter soon.

H
olding an airline-issued unattended-minor escort pass and my driver’s license in a palm that tingled with pinpricks of sweat, I stood next to the airport’s twin rows of slot machines and watched deplaning passengers stream out of the security entrance. Pain needled my scalp from my head injury, which throbbed with a rapid, shallow pulse I could also feel in my throat. My gaze was fixed at chest height as I craned my neck for a sight of Amy’s blond curls.

The last time I’d seen my daughter was almost two months ago. We had driven out to Black Rock Desert because she was curious about it, and swam in the lake and hiked around the Needles. When she got on the plane to fly home to her mother again her wave good-bye had torn a hole in my chest.

Back then I had no inkling of the invisible jaws that were closing slowly around her like a bear trap. But now Amy was firmly ensnared in the jagged teeth of a broken educational system that ground up and destroyed children like her—a system that mirrored the hypocritical, lying society of which it was a part. It wasn’t
her
fault that lazy, autocratic institutions hated and feared people like her simply because she challenged their illusion of control.

Still, I couldn’t ignore the stomach-turning name that psychiatrists had assigned to Amy’s condition.

She was a
psychopath
.

Despite the temporary “Dr. Simon Frank” deception I had engineered, we wouldn’t be able to hide her disease from the world forever. My daughter was grievously ill; her brain was different from a normal person’s. Her only hope now lay with Frankenstein—a sentient machine of my own creation, who would discover a cure for what modern psychiatry considered untreatable. Frankenstein was safe now, his vulnerabilities protected by the Navy guardsmen, which would give him the time he needed to find an answer. And he
would
find it, because we had no alternative.

Failure was unthinkable.

The awful knowledge of Amy’s sickness pressed inside my head like a tumor. Would it color my view of her? I didn’t want anything to change the way I felt about my daughter, but I was terrified that she might seem different to me now.

Through the surge of exiting businesspeople, gamblers, and families, I caught a brief glimpse of her. She was holding a flight attendant’s hand and pulling her little travel bag behind her.

The crowd between us obscured Amy from me for a moment. Then it parted.

She stood stock-still, twenty feet away, and her blue eyes locked on me and widened. Her whole face lit up with joy, and she tugged on the flight attendant’s sleeve, pointing me out.

Heart hammering, I stared at my daughter. She seemed a little taller than I remembered—and thinner, too. She was growing up
so
fast. Jen had dressed her in a little sundress and done her hair up in a new sort of French braid, but loose curls were already working their way free to float around her face. She blew an errant curl out of her eyes and waved at me.

Then her expression changed.

Her chin crumpled and her lower lip started to tremble. Dropping the handle of her bag, she ran toward me.

I dropped to one knee, spreading my arms, and her warm, compact little body plowed into my chest. She wrapped her arms around my neck and a sob burst from her throat. She was saying something over and over again, her cheek pressed wet against my collarbone. Her choked, high voice sounded so sweet in my ear, but I couldn’t make out the words.

I teetered off-balance, my arms still spread wide like an airplane’s wings, as my daughter clung to me. Through her tears, her words tripped over each other. It sounded as though she was trying to tell me everything at once.

Slowly, tentatively—fearfully—I curled my arms around Amy’s back. I slid the fingers of one hand up beneath her feather-soft curls, tracing the contours of the back of her head, cupping her damaged brain in my palm. And then I bowed my head and hugged her tight, crushing her to my chest. I closed my eyes.

A shudder racked my body and I clenched my jaw, stifling the silent sobs of relief that were trying to burst out of my chest.

Because knowing about her illness changed nothing. Amy didn’t seem any different to me. She was still my daughter. Nothing could change the way I felt about her. How had I ever doubted that?

I held my little girl as she laughed and cried, telling me about some funny thing that had happened at school that morning, and—despite knowing that Jen had kept her home from school today—I only hugged her tighter.

I had forgotten to breathe. I sucked in a lungful of air, feeling it tickle my chlorine-burned lungs, and suddenly, it was all too overwhelming. The noises of the airport faded around us. I clutched my daughter like a lifeline as waves of dizziness rocked my balance.

“Daddy?”
Amy’s concerned voice, right next to my ear, sounded like it was coming from a distance. “Are you okay?”

Not wanting her to worry, I struggled to get myself back under control. A wave of nausea gripped my throat, forcing me to swallow my answer. Then I felt a strong, steadying feminine hand on my shoulder.

“Hi, Amy,” a familiar voice said. “I’m Cassie. Your father and I are friends.”

I felt my daughter’s body stiffen in my arms. Her face pulled away from my neck to look up.

“Friends?” she asked.

“Close friends.”

The escort pass and my ID were gently plucked from my nerveless fingers, and I heard a brief murmur of conversation as Cassie squared things away with the flight attendant who had accompanied my daughter off the plane.

Then Cassie’s hand was back on my shoulder, and she gave it a reassuring squeeze.

“Your dad’s okay, sweetie,” she said to Amy. “I think we just need to give him a moment. Why don’t we step over to the coffee shop right there, and I’ll get you something to drink.”

With an effort, struggling with dizziness, I forced my eyes open. The faceless crowd flowing around us swam and doubled before my eyes.

Amy seemed reluctant to let go of me, but she did. “Do you work with my daddy?” she asked Cassie.