Rivals (15 page)

With his
super-strong vision, Brent had no trouble seeing the screaming woman in the
front seat—or the child’s car seat in the back.

Brent didn’t
have much time to think about what to do next. He could catch the Volvo
easily, but it was coming at him so fast and at such a steep angle that even if
he kept it from smashing into the street, the shock of his catch would probably
throw the car’s occupants right out of their seatbelts.

So instead of
just catching it, he had to slow it down before impact. He ran forward, the
muscles of his legs screaming as he pushed them harder than he ever had before.
When the Volvo was still ten feet up in the air he leapt right at it, smashing
into the front end with his shoulder. The car shook and rattled from the
impact but not enough to hurt the people inside. As Brent started falling
back, away from the mid-air collision, he grabbed at the fender, the hood, even
the windshield wipers trying to get a good grip. A moment later his feet
touched the ground. His knees bent under him and threatened to collapse, but
he managed to keep his legs under him as he gently, slowly, lowered the car to
the ground and set it down on its tires.

He rushed
around to the driver’s side and pulled the door open. “Are you okay?” he
asked.

The driver, a
woman who kind of looked like his mom, was pale and shaking but she didn’t seem
to be hurt. Brent glanced over her shoulder at the child safety seat in the
back. The boy in the seat couldn’t have been more than three years old. He
looked up at Brent curiously, then picked a piece of cracker off his shirt and
ate it.

“I think
you’ll be alright. I’m sorry if I damaged your car,” Brent said, trying to
meet the driver’s gaze again. She was staring straight ahead, holding onto the
steering wheel with both hands as if she was ready to drive off. “It was the
only way. Listen, the police will be here soon—you may want to wait
until they can check you out, make sure you weren’t hurt.”

“Thank… you,”
the woman said. Then her head fell back against the headrest of her seat and
her eyes fluttered closed.

“Damn,” Brent
said.

He stood up
and looked around for Maggie. She was gone, of course. Throwing the Volvo had
been a diversion, a trick to get Brent to stop chasing her. It had worked. He
couldn’t leave this woman and her baby, not until he was sure they would be
okay. Maggie could be blocks away by then, and he had no idea which direction
she’d gone. He would never catch her.

A police
helicopter came buzzing overhead first. Brent was sitting on the crumpled hood
of the car. He looked up and saw it hovering in the darkening twilight air.
He waved it away, trying to tell the pilot he needed to look for Maggie, that
everything was under control where Brent was. Instead the helicopter just
stood there in the air, not moving. Brent could barely hear sirens over the
whirring of its rotor.

A cop car came
racing around the corner and nearly hit the Volvo. Brent started to get up,
intending to push it back with his hands if he needed to, but the driver was
able to brake in time. Two police officers got out and came running toward him
with their guns drawn. “You can put those away,” Brent said, shouting over the
noise of the helicopter. “But do either of you have any medical training?”

“I know first
aid,” one of them said. She knelt down by the open driver’s side door and
reached in to take the unconscious woman’s pulse. Her partner moved quickly to
string up yellow police tape to block off the road.

“She got
away,” Weathers said when he arrived a few minutes later. “She had to smash up
half the town but she got away.”

“Yeah,” Brent
said. “Well, now that you’re here I’ve got better things to do, so I’ll just
be going—”

“Not so fast.
We’re going to need an official statement from you. A detailed account of
everything that happened. Do you know how much paperwork I’m looking at?
There are going to be lawsuits enough to keep a judge busy for years.”

“Forget it,”
Brent told him. “You can figure it out on your own.”

Weathers
grabbed his arm. Brent looked down at the FBI man’s hand, then up at his face.
Brent tilted his head to one side and frowned.

“Don’t try to
intimidate me. I know your secret weakness, now. So does your sister?”

“You do?”
Brent asked. He wasn’t aware he had one.

“Yeah. You
always do the right thing. That makes you predictable. Maggie knew you
wouldn’t let this woman or her baby get hurt. That you would give up chasing
her if that’s what it took to save them. That’s a dangerous precedent, you
know. What happens next time? How many people will she endanger to throw you
off her trail?”

“Maybe there
won’t be a next time,” Brent said. He shrugged off the man’s hand. “Maybe
after today, doing the right thing doesn’t look so good anymore.”

“Like you have
a choice,” Weathers said. The he sighed. “Alright. You can go. But stay by
a phone. I want you where I can reach you at all times.”

“I already
told you! I don’t work for you,” Brent said.

“No. In a
way, you could say that
I
work for
you
. Because you’re on the list of those honest,
innocent people I work to protect. Make sure you stay on it,” Weathers said,
and then turned away, done with him.

Helicopters
circled the city all night, looking for her. Maybe they thought she had no
place to go, and that she would be out on the streets. Maybe they thought she
wouldn’t be foolish enough to find a place to lie low. Maggie was too tired to
be smart, though. She found a mid-price hotel at the edge of town, out by the
airport, and decided to treat herself. If they caught up with her, if the
management turned her in—she would just have to fight her way out. It
was worth it to have a real bed, a real shower, and maybe even a radio. Maybe
she could get some music, and drive away the darkness in her head.

At the front
desk she told the clerk she wanted a room for one night. She had taken the
precaution of putting her disguise back on—hoodie, baseball cap, and even
a pair of sunglasses, though outside the sun had already gone below the
horizon.

The clerk was
a guy not much older than herself. He had long sideburns and the bored, tired
eyes of somebody working a job they didn’t take very seriously. He gave her a
momentary smile and shoved a book at her. “Sure. Just sign in here and give
me seventy-nine dollars.”

Maggie took a
pen and signed herself in as Greta Garbo, because she just wanted to be left
alone. The clerk didn’t even look at the name.

“I’ll just
need to see your credit card. We don’t charge you yet, not until you check
out, but—”

“I want to pay
cash,” she told him.

He shrugged.
“‘S cool, but I still need a credit card. So in case you trash the room or
something we can bill you later.” He looked at her face for the first time,
but because he didn’t go pale or run away, she assumed he didn’t recognize her.
“You aren’t planning on trashing the room, are you?” he asked, and gave her a
smile. It lasted longer this time. “If you are, confidentially,” he said,
“I’ll be glad to help. This place could use a little redecoration. And if you
want to party, I can get you anything you want—”

“Look, here’s
the cash, upfront,” Maggie said. She laid four twenties on the counter between
them.

He looked down
at them and stopped smiling. “It’s our policy. We need a credit card.
Everybody has one, right?”

Maggie sighed.
“Sure,” she said. “It’s right here.” She put another twenty on the counter.

He licked his
lips. “You got some ID? Maybe a driver’s license?”

Another
twenty. She had plenty of them.

“Passport?
Birth certificate? Green card?”

Each time he
named a type of ID she laid another twenty on the counter. Then she held up
another five of them. “This,” she said, “is a tip.” When he reached for the
hundred dollars in her hand she said, “I’ll make sure you get it tomorrow.
When I check out.” Hopefully, if the police came sniffing around he would say
he hadn’t seen her—because if she had to run again he wouldn’t get his
tip.

He handed her
a key and she went up to the room and took a very long, very hot shower. She
shampooed and conditioned her hair with the little bottles the hotel staff
provided and went through most of a bar of soap that smelled like vanilla and
cinnamon.

There was a
bathrobe in the closet. She happily took her field hockey uniform and her
disguise clothes down to the hotel’s laundry room and put them all in for the
longest possible wash cycle.

Back up in the
room she sank her toes into the plush carpeting and then fell back on the
starchy maroon coverlet of the bed. The air in the hotel room tasted of stale
air conditioning and ancient cigarette smoke. It was too cold and too dry
but—unbelievably, after the conditions she’d been living in the last week
or so—she could
change that
. She
could turn a couple of knobs and make it perfect for herself.

It was like
heaven. Room service was more than happy to bring up a steak dinner that cost
her another three twenties, including tip. The minibar was full of alcohol she
decided she didn’t want—she’d been to parties before where kids her age
drank so much they got sick, but Maggie had always been a jock and she’d tried
to treat her body right. There was no reason to change that now, so she dug a
diet coke out of the back of the little refrigerator and sat down to watch some
TV.

There wasn’t
much on. There never was, but it seemed especially bad that night. There were
plenty of sitcoms on about normal happy families laughing their way through
problems. There were reality shows about people in situations that had nothing
to do with her reality. She almost started watching a show about how wood
screws were made, but then caught herself and decided that if she was going to
be that bored, she might as well go to sleep. She flipped through one more
time and caught a news broadcast. When she saw Brent’s face she turned up the
volume.

Despite what
she’d told her brother, Maggie had been following the news pretty closely.
She’d watched for any sign of his exploits—despite herself, she’d been
proud of her little brother—and any indication of what the police were
doing while trying to catch her. She had seen Brent’s speech to her several
times, and it looked like they were running it again.

Maggie sighed
deeply and had to fight to keep tears out of her eyes. As always when she saw
the video it made her think of when they really had been brother and sister.
When Mom and Dad had both still been alive, and Grandma was an unpleasant
social obligation she only had to meet once or twice a year. A time when she’d
been normal. When everything had been normal.

She’d planned
on going to college, once. She’d planned on having her own family. Now it
looked like neither of those plans were ever going to work out.

“—not
going to cause trouble for you. I just want us to be a family again. I want
us to be okay,” Brent said.

“Oh, baby
bro,” Maggie said, letting herself weep a little now. “If only it was that
simple. If only it were—”

On screen the
face of Special Agent Weathers appeared. “As of tonight she’s still at large.
I don’t want to minimize the danger, but I don’t want to cause panic either.
If you see Margaret Gill please, please, stay away from her. Don’t under any
circumstances try to apprehend her yourself.”

The tears
dried on Maggie’s face. “They’d better not try,” she said. She could feel the
anger coming back, but it was almost welcome this time. Weathers—if he
was in her hotel room right then she would have grabbed him by the throat.
He’d tried to kill her!

“I have every
reason to believe we’ll take her into custody shortly,” Weathers went on.
“Especially now that we have Brent working with us. He’ll do whatever it takes
to bring his sister to justice.”

The television
set exploded, because Maggie shot across the room and kicked in the screen.
Broken glass and sparks glittered and flashed on the carpet, all around her
bare feet. It didn’t matter. Her feet were tougher than anything she could
step on, now.

Baby bro
, she thought.
Oh, Brent. You’ve sold me
out. You want us to be okay, do you?

Next time,
I’m going to break more than your nose.

There was more
to the newscast, however, and it made her sit up on the bed and pay very close
attention.

BRENT’S BIG BLUNDER!

SISTER GETS AWAY

Cops curious: did he let her run?

Brent read the
headline again. He was still too mad to read the full text of the front page
story in the morning paper. The picture showed him standing next to the Volvo.
It was taken from a high angle, maybe even from the helicopter he’d seen
hovering over the scene, so you couldn’t see the mother or her baby inside the
car. You could see the blood that splattered downward from Brent’s nose and
stained his shirt, and the way his nose was kind of tilted over to one side.

Lucy came over
and touched his nose gently. “It doesn’t hurt any more, does it?” she asked.

“No, it’s
completely healed. It felt kind of weird for a while but then I figured out
why. It was bent out of shape when she punched me. The cartilage had to shift
back to the right position. The paramedic who checked me out nearly had a
heart attack when he saw it crawling across my face like that.”

“Yuck,” Lucy
said.