Edge of the Heat 5 (26 page)

When they climbed in the car Emma turned to him. “What now?”

“Now we run a check on this name. Hopefully that will point us in some direction.”

“OK.” Emma sighed. Her anxiousness was returning full force, no longer held in check by activity. She was so worried about Jerry she could cry. Craig pulled out of the parking lot and handed her his cell phone. Do you mind calling Hawk? He’s in the air but you could leave a message on his phone, give him the name and tell him to run it through the criminal database.”

“Sure.” Emma did as he asked, happy for something to do. As she was hanging up the phone rang in her hands. “Hello?” she answered.

“Um yeah, can I talk to Agent Masterson please?” Emma recognized the voice of the woman from the car rental place and handed the phone to Craig a look of disbelief in her eyes.

“’Lo?” Craig said. He listened, then nodded as if the woman on the other end could see him. “Where exactly?” he asked. “Great, thanks so much! Did they say anything about the car, what it looked like or what was in it?” He listened and said “OK, thanks again.” He handed the phone back to Emma. She could hear the woman on the other end saying her goodbyes. Emma pushed the
end call
button with satisfaction.

“The car was found yesterday abandoned. She didn’t know what the code in the computer meant but her co-worker told her. That’s why she called. The police found it in Las Vegas.”

Lights bloomed in Emma’s mind. She turned in her seat. “Las Vegas? Jerry loves Las Vegas. He had reservations there in a few weeks.”

Craig nodded vehemently. “Yeah, I’ll bet that’s where he went when I told him to take a vacation. Feel like a road trip?”

Emma nodded. “Our bags are already packed.” She gestured into the back seat where their luggage from Hawaii was sitting.

“OK.” Craig looked around at traffic, then did a screeching U-turn back the way they had come. Emma held on. He pulled over to the side and hit his hazard lights. “Do you mind driving for a bit? I’ll make some phone calls and see what we can figure out before we get there.”

“OK.” Emma ran around to the driver’s seat and climbed in. Once she hit the freeway she punched it to 75, easily passing all the cars sticking to the speed limit.
Hang on Jerry, we’re coming
, she thought.

J
erry noticed he was limping. His leg that had been crushed, yet recovered almost fully as he spent a year in physical therapy, was finally giving out on him. Discreetly, with only the light from the waning moon to give him away, he probed the scar tissue with his fingers. The entire area burned and throbbed.

It was their 5th night walking the desert. By Sara’s original estimation, they had at least 2 nights left before they got there. Tendrils of fear caressed Jerry’s thoughts. Fear that his leg would lock up altogether. Fear that they would have to stop in a small town because he couldn’t walk any farther, and this would get them killed.

So far, they’d survived OK. The helicopter hadn’t even been back. They still had a bit of food. Sara’s water trick was still working so they still were topped off on water.

Jerry rubbed his hip in one of his sore spots and tried not to think about the pain. Besides this darn leg, he felt pretty good. He was dirty and dusty and unsure of Sara’s feelings towards him, but other those things that he felt OK.

He and Sara hadn’t been talking much. And there’d been no real softness between them. As she went to sleep each day he would try to lay next to her and rub her hair or hold her hand, and so far she had tolerated it, although she never relaxed into it anymore. He just kept telling himself that things would be different when they got where they were going. Hiking 20 miles a night in the desert was never conducive to anything other than survival.

Well, except that first day. That was 100% passion,
he thought. He hoped he’d get to see that side of her again.

Sara said something.

“What?”

“I need to go to the top of the ridge line. You can rest if you want.”

What he really wanted was to go with her, but his leg needed a rest. “OK, I’ll stay here.” He sat down stiffly and got out his water bottle.

Sara hiked up the ridge line, and was back in 30 minutes. Jerry dozed lightly, curled up next to a rock as large as he was.

Sara watched him for a few moments, then sat down for a drink. She’d let him sleep another 10 minutes while she rested, and then they would go on.

When she shook him awake, his hand went to his leg immediately. His face contorted in pain.

“Your leg,” she said. “How long has it been hurting?”

“A couple of days.” Jerry struggled into a sitting position.

“Lay back down, I’ll work on it.”

Her hands skillfully palpated the wound she knew so well. She found a few bunches of scar tissues and some trigger points in the supporting muscles and went to work on them. Jerry gritted his teeth against the desire to scream out his pain.

“I’ll need to work on these muscles at least three times a day or we’ll never make it.”

Jerry said nothing. Sweat poured down his face, wetting his collar.

When she finally stopped, he flopped onto his back and breathed heavily, noisily. “That therapy was worse than the pain,” he told her.

“I know. I can’t afford to be gentle.
We
can’t afford for me to be gentle. You have to stay mobile and relatively pain-free while we are walking.”

“You’re not really a physical therapist, are you?”

Sara’s voice went soft, contemplative. “No, not officially, although I have undergone all of the training a physical therapist would go through. I did all the schooling non-traditionally and then went through an internship. My diploma is fake though.”

She watched him recuperate on the hard ground. “Does that bother you?”

He looked at her, trying to figure out the motive behind the question. Her eyes gave up nothing. He decided to just be honest. “If I didn’t know you and I just heard a story about someone passing themselves off as a physical therapist with a fake diploma, yeah, it might bother me. But since I know you, and I know how good you are at what you do, no, it doesn’t bother me. I think it’s a classical case of the ends justifying the means.”

Sara thought about this hard. Jerry could see universes of correlations swirling behind her eyes. He hoped his answer had been the right one.

“We have to walk over the ridge to the other side,” she said, changing the subject abruptly.

“Why?”

“There’s a small town up ahead. We really should detour around the back side, but it would tack another 2 days or more onto our trip and I don’t want to do that. So we go over the ridge and will try to cross the road leading to the town without anyone seeing us.”

“OK, so those were the lights we saw in the distance?”

She nodded. “Yes, and the light from Las Vegas too.”

“How close are we?”

Sara looked down. “I think we will get there tomorrow night. If not tomorrow then the next night.”

Jerry didn’t know if that was good or bad. And it looked like Sara didn’t either. But if they had that little time left, he knew he’d better spring his plan on her soon. He’d been cooking it for 2 days now, but he was scared to share it with her. He wasn’t sure why he was scared. If she said it was impossible ... well that was it, then right? But maybe it wasn’t impossible. And even if it wasn’t a good plan, maybe she could build on it — flesh it out a little. Jerry felt excitement grow in his chest, but then the realization of why he was scared to share the plan with her hit him in the chest like a fastball. What if she thought it was a decent plan, but still wanted no part of it? What if she really had given up? If she truly had given up, their relationship was as good as dead, and so was he. Jerry went cold at the thought, the drying sweat on his face chilling him instantly.

***

J
erry saw the lights of Vegas for himself as they crossed the ridge line to the other side. He still couldn’t bring himself to share his plan. But as the next night broke he knew it was time.
Do or die. Now or never. Die a hero or live as a coward.
They packed up their gear and water and Jerry thought about how to start.

Sara said they could leave the cots there, stashed behind some large boulders. She said the FLIR helicopters wouldn’t try to find them this close to the city. Jerry left his with very mixed feelings. It had been a horribly awkward and clumsy thing, but it had saved his life.

He shared his plan hesitantly, haltingly. Sara listened noncommittally until the very end. He saw a feverish light glowing in her eyes and he was glad. Hope quickened both their paces as they hashed it out, trying to figure if it would really work or not, and when she declared it could, she stopped him and gave him a lip-smacking kiss on the mouth. Did he think he had been glad? He was ecstatic.

After a few miles of thought on her part, she stopped him and pulled him around to look at her.

“Jerry, for this to work, we will have to involve your friends.”

He nodded.

“I was not exaggerating when I said it could mean their deaths. These are very dangerous men we are dealing with. They will see FBI agents as a huge threat.”

Jerry’s chest felt like a thousand pound weight had rolled onto it. “They can take care of themselves.”

Sara nodded. “I’m sure they can, especially if we warn them, but can their wives? I know they are strong, confident women, but I don’t think they are prepared to become targets of evil men.”

“Would Thorpe do that?”

Sara shook her head. “I don’t know. My guess is he would, if the circumstances meant he thought it would gain him something.”

The thousand pound weight on Jerry’s chest became a ten thousand pound weight. He staggered under its burden.

“I can’t do that to them, then.”

Sara nodded. “I understand.” She started walking again. Jerry tried to follow. After a few moments he got his legs to work again.

Sara’s pace slowed to a plod. As Jerry caught up to her he was going to ask her what was wrong, but when he saw her face he bit it back. Her brows were furrowed in concentration. Her lips were pressed into a small, blue line, all the blood pushed out of them. She was ticking thoughts off on her fingers and muttering to herself.

Jerry allowed himself to hope.

F
inally Sara spilled. “I think I’ve figured a way to do it with minimal risk to your friends.” Sara counted off the parts she would change that would keep Craig and Hawk out of the plan. Jerry nodded along more enthusiastically with each point she ticked off.

“Yes! It could work! Couldn’t it?” he said, his heart beating overdrive at the thought of what they might now do. The odds were so greatly stacked against them. One or both of them could easily be killed. But if it played out just right ... Sara could have her freedom. He could have his life.

“It could work. We’ll need an awful lot of luck and some divine help. If you’re a praying man, you better start praying.”

Jerry nodded. He wasn’t a praying man, but he was going to start right now.

“And we somehow have to get in contact with them, without tipping off Thorpe. That means we can’t call their phones. We can’t send them anything in the mail. We can’t tweet them or facebook them. And we can’t go to Westwood Harbor.”

Jerry lapsed into silence. He didn’t need Sara to spell it out for him that their options were now exactly zero.

“They aren’t in Westwood Harbor anyway. They are on their honeymoon. Both of them,” he said grumpily.

“That might make things easier then. We could call their hotel. I’m sure Thorpe has computers monitoring the network, so we’d have to be careful what we say, but as long as we don’t say any triggering words, there would be no reason for our conversation to be picked out of the other millions. Do you know what hotel they are staying in?”

Jerry thought hard. “Not Hawk and Vivian I don’t, but Emma told me what hotel she was staying in. I just can’t think of it right now. It’ll come to me.”

“OK.” They lapsed into a short silence, their footsteps beating a metronome across the desert floor.

“Money. We’re going to need money, too. A lot of money,” Jerry said, thinking out loud.

“Don’t worry about money. I’ve got money,” Sara said.

“I know you have money, but where is it? Neither one of us has an ATM card or even an ID. Or do you have an ATM card?” He looked suddenly hopeful.

Sara shook her head. “I don’t have an ATM card either.” She pulled a small wad of bills out of her pocket. “I took this off Brian at the house. It’s not much but we’ll be able to pick up a few things as soon as we get into the city.”

“But we are going to need tens of thousands of dollars!”

Sara looked thoughtful. “Maybe. Maybe not. You let me worry about that.”

“What about the guns? It’s going to be impossible to lay our hands on that many illegal guns in a few days, isn’t it?”

Sara grinned. “We won’t need as many as you think. And I know how to find what we do need.”

The moon smiled down on their journey. Jerry let his mind wander, hoping the name of the hotel would come to him.

“Jerry, do you think there’s any chance that your friends would have realized something happened to you and are searching for you already?” Sara turned to him questioningly.

Jerry snapped his fingers and pointed at her. “I never even thought of that! I bet they have! After they left on their honeymoon I was talking to Craig every day on the phone, asking for advice. He’s the one who told me to go to Vegas. And earlier when I talked to Emma she said ‘I’ll call you tomorrow’ but I haven’t seen my phone since you - well since you drugged me. It’s been what? 5 days?”

Sara's cheeks flamed red. She dropped her eyes.

“Hey, it’s OK, Sara. I’m not upset about it or anything. Why did you do that anyway? We never did talk about it.”

“Because I thought you were agency. You were carrying a gun.”

“You thought
I
was with the DCIA?”

“Yes. Or with somebody who was looking for me. I thought you were suspicious of who I really was and you were trying to flush me out.”