What Came After (34 page)

“A person could be very comfortable here,” said Weller.

“That’s what I always thought growing up,” said the kid. “I always wanted this job.”

“How often do you get supplies?”

“First of the month like clockwork. All you can eat.” The kid grinning. Like a person who’d achieved something.

Weller nodded. Coming out of the bedroom and going to the front door and stepping outside into the air. Standing there alongside the shovel that had the same mud on it the boots did. More mud coming this way from a little cut in the wire fence. Weller knowing what the kid had buried out there. “It said a dollar a mile,” he said, “which makes fifty to the next checkpoint.”

The kid brightened.

“Can you read credits or is your scanner down too?”

“I don’t think they give me one.”

“That’s fine,” said Weller. “I’ve got AmeriBank scrip. And a little something extra for you, if management doesn’t mind too much.”

“I guess that’d be all right,” said the kid. “You’re the one’s got the book.” It was almost as if he were onto something. Smiling and coming toward the door and beginning to draw the pistol again. But Weller already had the shovel raised.

*

The National Motors road was pure silk compared with what they’d gotten used to, and the kid had been right about one thing. It was fifty miles to the first checkpoint. Money talked there. Weller was surprised at how easily a rough squad of hardcore ex-Black Rose mercenaries could be persuaded that he and Janey and that fancy car had every right to be driving on their road. He didn’t care where the money went in the end. It was just lubrication.

Toward Baltimore they powered the phone back up because why worry about Bainbridge and his Black Rose helicopters now that they were on good National Motors roads and only a few hours from New York. They’d be there by nightfall. The satellite signal was good and Janey raised the hospital. The receptionist couldn’t find Penny and Liz at first and it just about gave Weller heart failure. The system said they’d been checked out, but he persuaded her to try their old room and they hadn’t. They were on their way, though. Any minute now.

They were sitting at the table in the front room. Penny’s backpack with the white cat on the back of it all loaded up and a couple of plastic bags stuffed full of Liz’s things. Apparently they couldn’t even supply her with a backpack of her own or a suitcase or anything substantial. Just a couple of plastic bags.
Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. And don’t let the screen door hit you on the way out.

Penny was studying the screen on the wall, squinting at it with a kind of intensity that she had once used all the time, only instead of trying to coax a clear picture from the fog of her failing vision she was trying now to resolve a picture of her father from a stream of pure and persistent video noise. Weller saw that little face of hers and the earnest expression it wore and it was all he could do to keep driving. He pulled over and the words tumbled out and he said Penny, I’m coming and Liz, I’m coming. Tell them. Tell them I’m almost there and don’t let them put you out on the street. Not yet. I’ll be in New York today.

Penny jumped up and down in her chair. “Today?”

“Today, honey. Hang on.”

“I can’t wait,” said Penny.

“Neither can I,” said Liz. “It’s been too long.”

“It’s almost over.” He could hardly believe it himself. “So the tests went fine, I guess? That’s good news.”

“The tests went fine. More than fine.”

Penny blinked at the noisy screen. Looked over at her mother. “Are you sure he can see us?” Liz nodded. The little girl turned and reached behind her to get the backpack from the table, drew it around and struggled to get it onto her lap, and unzipped it.

“She’s one hundred percent,” said Liz. “Complete recovery. One for the medical books, they said.”

“Thank God,” said Weller.

“And thank you,” said Liz.

“Thanks to you too, Mom,” he said. “It took teamwork.”

She smiled into the camera and he smiled right back. Just from the happy reflex of it. As if she were right there and as if she could see him. He watched Penny searching for something, his heart running over. The mere presence of the little girl on the screen was almost enough for him, and the notion that he would see her very soon was more than enough for him, and the quick way that she sorted through the contents of her backpack—taking papers out and glancing at them and rejecting them one after another with an acuity of vision that she’d never had before—was in the end almost more than he could bear.

“You haven’t seen all of my pictures,” she said.

“I’ve seen some,” her father said.

“You can show him when he gets here,” said her mother. Words she had just about given up on saying.

“Just a couple. Please?”

“All right.”

She found her latest, her best, and she began putting them in some kind of order. Starting with one of her mother that made Weller’s heart leap. There was truth in it and love too. Truth and love that turned out to be the same thing, from the hand of one so small and one whose vision had only just now cleared. Next there was a drawing of him, less sharp and less precise, with something generic about it. She had his hair color right. The nose was about five sizes smaller than his but finely rendered as if she’d been particularly careful about it, and he wondered if the picture were based more on some doctor than on him. That one doctor who looked like a whippet. There would be time now to get those things right, though. Time to fill in all of the blank spots.

“They’re fantastic,” he said, and he meant it.

She had others. A sunset over the tall wire canopy of the park just outside her window. A still life of the flower arrangements that had been on the table every single day. A drawing of her own hand at many times life size. Last of all was one she said she’d done just yesterday as a part of those final tests. A kind of fanciful landscape, a map of some storybook setting, with a maze of black roads and undulant green fields and a little white building off in one corner that looked like somebody’s idea of home. He thought maybe she and Liz had been reading a storybook with a map in the front of it, a map showing places like Pooh’s House or Injun Joe’s Cave or the location of Long John Silver’s treasure, and she’d been inspired to invent something of her own. He asked if that’s what it was. Some imaginary place.

“No,” she said. “It’s Connecticut.” Looking into the camera as if she could see him through it and as if he were crazy. Or half-blind himself.

“Ahh,” he said. “Home sweet home.” The little white building that looked nothing like home whatsoever. A sad reminder, in its way, of how far she’d come.

“Not home, silly. Just
Connecticut.”
She ducked out of the frame and put the drawing up closer to the camera. One little hand coming in from one side to point out the white building in the corner. “The schoolhouse? Remember?”

But he wasn’t looking at the schoolhouse. He was looking at the places she’d labeled on the map in careful letters—she’d learned something about that, too—and in spite of the misspellings and the backwards bits and the perilous slant of everything he could see exactly what part of Connecticut she had rendered after all.
Tunnell. Tobaco feelds. Ninetyfive.
It wasn’t accurate but it was accurate enough.

Weller could hardly breathe. Between the hole that he’d cut in the fence a few weeks ago and the direction they’d been traveling back then and this map, it wouldn’t be any problem to locate Patel’s station. “I’m so proud of you,” he said.

“Thanks, Daddy.”

“Did someone ask you to draw these things? These particular things?”

“Mostly” she said. Putting a finger to her head and thinking. “The flowers and Mommy and the map, I guess.”

“Has anybody else seen them?”

“Everybody’s seen them,” Liz put in. “They were part of her therapy.”

“Did anybody keep copies?”

“Why?”

“Just asking. I’ll bet they kept copies is all. They’re really first-rate.” Looking beyond his wife and daughter, at the flower arrangements standing side by side on the table behind them. The little card that he couldn’t make out but that he knew was there all the same.
Your friends at PharmAgra.

It had cost them so little to get this information. A month’s worth of cut flowers. Some technician paid off or maybe the therapist or even the person who delivered the arrangements. Either way, they knew where to find Patel. They were probably on their way right now.

He told Liz and Penny that he had to go. He’d try to raise Carmichael and get them a reprieve since he was just hours away, but as a precaution they ought to tell everybody they could that he was almost there. Anybody and everybody. He was coming with the car and he’d be in New York soon. He was keeping his promise.

In the meantime, though, it was time get back on the road. Time to get moving again. Because he just couldn’t wait to see them.

*

“She’s adorable,” said Janey.

“Both of them,” he said. “I know.” He hadn’t thought about it in exactly those terms before, but he thought about it now.

“That last drawing,” Janey said. “That map.” Giving him an opening.

“It’s Dr. Patel’s station.”

“I thought maybe.”

He glanced at the melon seeds drying in the cup holder. “If those are worth a fortune, imagine what her entire tobacco operation is worth. Plus the engineering she does for other folks.” He goosed the engine and the car hunkered down and flew. “People would kill for it,” he said. “They’d kill to get rid of it.”

“Honest?”

“Penny and I met a fellow on our way down, this truck driver who gave us a lift. PharmAgra security took him for a smuggler. Not even a smuggler. Somebody who gave a little help to a smuggler. I don’t know that he lived through it. I don’t know that he wanted to, by the time they were done.”

“So we’re heading to Connecticut first?”

“Unless one of us comes up with a better idea.”

*

The better idea turned out to be the PharmAgra checkpoint on the George Washington Bridge. Call it a hostage swap, the car for Penny and Liz. Except Weller didn’t exactly plan on giving up the car.

Janey tried raising Carmichael on the satellite phone but he was out of the office and nobody knew where. Nobody who’d say. His cell number wasn’t listed and they wouldn’t give it to her no matter how she pleaded. Weller got on and said he was somewhere south of Philadelphia with that car that the boss had been so eager to get his hands on, and the woman on the other end played it cool. Said if he was who he said he was then why didn’t he turn on his video. A person with nothing to hide didn’t go around switching off his video. Weller getting the idea that she thought he was dead too. He said give me Carmichael’s assistant if you won’t give me Carmichael. He said she knows me. She knows who I am. But that didn’t help either.

So he hung up and tried Bainbridge in Washington. They had a signal for a minute but it died as they drew near the smoking wreckage of the Marcus Hook refineries. Some kind of work still going on there. MobilGo insignia on smokestacks and gray towers with blue gas flames. They ran onward for a while, the car eating up the miles, until they reached the Delaware and veered northward. Janey trying the phone again and again and Weller’s hands going white on the leather steering wheel. They passed the sunken ruin of the Benjamin Franklin bridge, with nowhere to connect to anymore since the fall of Camden. The deck broken to pieces and slanting down into the deep green of the Delaware, the tops of the first towers still just visible above the waterline, the long iron cables snapped and coiled back on themselves in great looping filigrees of rust.

A few miles later Janey raised Black Rose headquarters and got patched through. Bainbridge zapped onto the screen with that little knife-cut mustache of his that couldn’t hide his grin, looking bright-eyed. “I must say you’ve become a regular goldmine for us, sonny boy. You’re a fighting man’s new best friend.”

“How’s that?”

“First we get paid for your training, then there’s bonus money to be had, and now there seem to be new missions popping up everywhere. Our profile’s never been higher. Between AmeriBank and PharmAgra, I might owe you a commission.”

“That’d be nice.”

“The military kind, I mean.”

“I’ll let you know,” said Weller. “How does PharmAgra come into it?”

Bainbridge didn’t even look abashed. He didn’t miss a beat. “Jesus, buddy,” he said. “They’ve got a finger in everything.”

Weller didn’t pursue it. Now that Bainbridge was working for PharmAgra, it wouldn’t be just a team of corporate security thugs on their way to Patel’s station. It would be Black Rose. The real deal. He kicked the accelerator to the floor, glad that the satellite phone had no video and Bainbridge couldn’t see the distress on his face. “Look,” he said. “What I was really calling about was I seem to have mislaid Anderson Carmichael’s private number.”