No Cry For Help (4 page)

CHAPTER
7

Wallace cleared customs without incident, his emotions too numb to explain his living nightmare to the officer in charge. Where would he begin? How do you explain something that even the police believe is a lie?

No, he had nothing to declare.

Yes, it was a miserable night.

Thanks, same to you.

Back on the road, he pressed the accelerator hard, speeding northeast along the rural back roads of Surrey with a plan to connect with the TransCanada highway before turning west towards North Vancouver
— and home.

Home? The evocation brought him up short
.

Home didn’t exist without Alicia and his sons.

Tears sprang to his eyes, a salty trickle that quickly became an unstoppable flood until a powerful tsunami of suppressed emotion broke over him all at once. Lethal debris churned in its wake, slashing at his soul and kicking his tortured mind with steel-toed boots.

Wallace gasped, drowning beneath the suffocating weight.

He couldn’t breathe.

He couldn’t see.

A painful realization:
What was he doing?

He had to go back.

NOW!

An agonized howl erupted from deep within his core as he cranked the wheel too aggressively for the van’s speed.

The ungainly vehicle reacted — badly.

Near-bald tires howled as the brakes screeched and smoked and caused something deep within the steering column to
snap
. The wheel was torn out of Wallace’s grasp as the rear tires lost their grip on the slick tarmac and the van slid out of control.

When it hit the gravel shoulder, its top-heavy frame tilted precariously before two of the tires blew and forced the metal rims to chew across a narrow grassy verge.

Wallace held on for dear life, praying to survive and wondering if he had foolishly wished this upon himself. A way to end the pain of losing everything that mattered.

The van lost its battle to stay upright as it slammed into a deep trough. The passenger window exploded inward, spraying Wallace in a shower of blunt-edged fragments.

He gasped as the glass was followed by a surge of cold, rank water.

Then, it was over.

The van settled onto its side in the water-logged ditch where its engine sputtered and died.

Wallace hung precariously by his seatbelt, barely scratched despite the non-deployment of air bags. He punched the roof in frustration, bruising his knuckles, and struggled against his bonds. The buckle was jammed and the seatbelt cut deep into his waist every time he moved.

To calm his racing pulse, Wallace closed his eyes, listening to the burst radiator hiss and the strained engine tick as it cooled. Above the mechanical sounds, a cacophony croaked from a puddle of angry frogs.

He breathed deeply. He was a better driver than that. What the hell was he thinking?

The answer was simple: he wasn’t thinking, he was reacting. Blindly. Stubbornly.

He contorted his body again and attacked the belt mechanism with both hands.

This time the lock snapped open and Wallace fell, his body twisting uncontrollably as gravity took hold. His feet flew skyward, his bad leg smashing painfully into the steering column while his arms vanished through the shattered opening of the passenger window to sink into the murky, foul-smelling ditch beneath.

He panicked as his head and shoulders quickly followed. Grimy brown water filled his mouth as he thrashed around to find a purchase on something solid. His hands slipped across sunken roots and submerged grass while his fingers sunk into deep loose clay and his lungs began to burn. He flailed his feet, but that only pushed him deeper into the suffocating murk.

Desperate, he realized it was impossible to fight his way back into the van. Instead, Wallace twisted onto his back, grabbed hold of the broken side mirror and yanked himself forward. His body slid barely two feet, his shoulders and back squelching into a layer of thick clay. The weight and angle of the van seemed to push him deeper into the dank and he suddenly wondered if he had just made his perilous situation even worse.

He scrambled to grasp the slippery hood, but his fingers failed to find a grip. Blind and frantic, his lungs on the verge of collapse, he tucked in his knees and felt his feet hit the edge of the broken window.

This was it. Last chance.

He braced his feet against the window edge, wincing slightly at a sharp pain in his left leg, and pushed with all his might. A loud, internalized sucking noise filled his ears as his shoulders fought against the vacuum of mud
—

His mouth opened in a silent scream as the vacuum popped and he was suddenly launched like a loosed torpedo.

Scrambling, desperate, he squeezed around the van’s front bumper and clawed his way skyward.

HIS HEAD
broke the surface just as his lungs gave out. He gulped in air and spat out slime, cursing his own damn stupidity.

After crawling out of the ditch, Wallace slopped off as much of the mud and rotting vegetation as he could. He looked like hell, but didn’t care. That was the least of his worries.

He started walking, his limp more pronounced but the pain manageable.

He needed to find a phone.

CHAPTER
8

Crow answered on the first ring. Sleep had proved impossible. His thoughts too troubling. His answers too few. If he still drank, it would have been a bad, bad night. When the phone rang, he silently thanked his ancestors for helping him stay strong.

On the other end of the line, Wallace said, “I need your help.”

Crow sighed with relief at the sound of his friend’s voice.

“Where are you? What’s happening? Is everyone OK?”

“It’s a mess. Can you pick me up?”

“Yeah, of course. Are Alicia and the boys with you?”

Crow heard the catch in his friend’s throat.

“I can’t talk on the phone.”

“Hang tight,” said Crow. “I’ll be right there.”

Wallace gave him the address.

Crow’s clothes were in a heap on the floor beside the bed. All he had to do was step in and zip up.

Delilah didn’t stir.

TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES
later, Crow pulled into a 24-hour gas station in Surrey and spotted Wallace sitting on a plastic bench out front.

He was alone and he had spoken true. He was a mess. His clothes were ripped and soiled with a mixture of mud and blood from numerous shallow cuts and scrapes.

Wallace limped over to the truck and climbed inside. His shoes squelched and his eyes revealed a roadmap of sorrow and pain. He had a difficult time meeting Crow’s questioning stare and Crow felt his heart sink.

“I need to get across the border,” said Wallace.

Crow hesitated. “I thought that’s where—”

“You know people, right?” Wallace interrupted. He dragged filthy nails across his teeth, breaking off tiny slivers and spitting them on the floor.

“What do you mean? People.”

“I can’t use my passport.”

“Why? Did something happen—”

Wallace interrupted again. “I’ll also need a gun.”

Crow raised one eyebrow.

The pain that wracked his friend’s face was palpable. He was struggling to keep his composure, but his body trembled with all the fragility of a featherless bird fallen from its nest. Wallace had aged a decade since Crow last saw him and he smelled as though he had recently bathed in a sewer.

With his requests delivered, Wallace lowered his head and focused on the floor mat. A sudden violent tremor coursed through his body, making his shoulders twitch and his legs jerk in uncontrolled spasms. He looked ashamed, destroyed, but also in the latter stages of shock.

Crow switched on the truck’s heater and aimed the dashboard vents toward his passenger. He studied the blood on his friend’s clothing. There wasn’t a lot of it, but still . . .

Before he went any further, he had to know.

“Where’s the van?” Crow asked.

“In a ditch,” Wallace mumbled. He didn’t look up. “A few miles back. I . . . I lost control.”

Crow swallowed, suddenly afraid as every dark thought, every dark question that he had tried to suppress bubbled up to the surface. “Where’s Alicia and the boys?”

Wallace inhaled deeply and his mouth struggled to form the words. “I . . . I . . . don’t know.”

“But they’re alive?”

Wallace jerked, his eyes suddenly wide with horror, his voice incredulous. “Why would you ask that?”

Crow had no choice.

He told Wallace about the police at his house and the blood on the floor. The discarded mop and concerned neighbor. He told him about Marvin. And finally, the missing clothes and toys.

Every detail landed like dirt on a coffin lid. There was no way to fake it. Unless the man sitting beside him was a different Wallace than the one Crow had known for over twelve years, he hadn’t known about any of it.

“The police think I killed my family?” Wallace said.

Crow nodded. “They’ve issued a warrant for your arrest. They’ll be looking for the van.”

“And the photograph cements it.” Wallace shook his head in disbelief. “It makes this shopping trip look like a stupid, ill-planned cover-up.”

“What photograph?” asked Crow.

In one breathless soliloquy, Wallace recounted the hours at the mall, the missing luggage and passports, and the damning photograph.

“See?” Wallace’s voice verged on hysteria. “I’m not just a murderer. I’m a stupid fucking one, too. No luggage. No passports. And a bloody picture of me driving alone across the border.”

“How is that even possible?” asked Crow.

Wallace shook his head and looked over at his friend. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“No, I do,” Crow said quickly, trying to hide the quiver in his voice. “It’s just so . . . hard to imagine. Somebody’s gone to a lot of trouble, but why?”

Wallace closed his eyes and released a heavy sigh. “I don’t know.”

Crow almost didn’t want to ask, but before he could stop himself, the words tumbled out. “Do you think Alicia and the boys are okay?”

Wallace flinched before opening his eyes and wiping away some of the mud that had streamed down his cheeks.

“I have to believe so.”

CHAPTER
9

After Crow’s truck pulled away, a black-on-black Lincoln Navigator SUV drove into the gas station and parked beside the middle pump on the island farthest from the Plexiglas-enclosed cashier.

The Navigator’s lone occupant climbed out, swiped a credit card through the pump’s electronic reader and began filling the vehicle’s fuel tank with mid-grade unleaded.

Although he stood with his back to the late-night attendant locked inside the brightly-lit kiosk, he easily observed the sloth picking his nose and thumbing through a glossy magazine in the reflection of the Lincoln’s heavily-tinted glass.

If the bored clerk happened to take an interest and look outside, he might wonder if he was looking at an empty silhouette — an echo — rather than the man himself. A charcoal two-piece suit draped seamlessly over an ebony shirt and a minimal Western-style shoestring tie. Even the piercings in each ear were invisible: black metallic tunnels in the same circumference as a .45 shell.

If the driver closed his gloriously bright eyes and sucked bruised plum lips inside his mouth, he could almost disappear.

The cashier wiped sticky fingers on one of the magazine pages before turning it, causing a visible shudder to run down the driver’s back.

Observing was a force of habit. As natural as breathing. And at times like these, a curse, especially when he was forbidden from bringing any undue attention to his presence.

More the pity.

The clerk was disgusting. A poorly-shaved monkey with an IQ no larger than his waistband, he was one of those useless specimens whom nobody would miss and whose only benefit to the planet would come when he stopped consuming its limited resources, especially oxygen and water.

With his gloved left hand engaged with the gas nozzle, the driver’s bare right palm glowed purple from the screen of his personalized cellphone. Although to call the slender, touch-screen device a phone was a tragic misnomer. Boasting military-level encryption and specialized apps, the phone was the closest thing to secure communication since the Navajo Windtalkers stumped the Japanese.

While texting with only one thumb slowed his overall speed, it was only a slight impediment as the phone’s artificial intelligence had a surprisingly good record of correctly auto-completing his words.

When his latest message was composed, he hit Send. The phone’s software automatically encoded all of his outgoing messages and decoded his incoming. It did it with such alarming speed, it was virtually invisible.

Like him.

The driver returned the nozzle to its housing. Before pocketing the printed receipt, he glanced at the customer name gleaned from the credit card: Sean Black. He didn’t care for the Christian name, but the surname was surprisingly delicious.

He could enjoy being Mr. Black.

Before getting behind the wheel, Mr. Black endured one last unobserved glance at the sloth-like attendant. The young man’s skin was the color of ash under the booth’s harsh fluorescent lights. His milky eyes were already dead to the dim future of his existence.

Spilling his blood would be a blessing, but such things were no longer that simple.

It was better before. Much better.

Inside the vehicle, Mr. Black placed his phone in its dashboard cradle and activated the tracker application. A detailed map appeared on the phone’s generous high-resolution screen.

A pulsating red dot, like a single drop of blood, showed him exactly where to go.