ZERO HERO (The Kate Huntington Mystery series) (20 page)

            Was that the same car, or a different one that just looked similar? No front license plate so not registered in Maryland. That didn’t mean all that much. Almost every nearby state, and Washington D.C., only required back plates.

            He slowed for a traffic light that had just changed to yellow, then quickly turned right and accelerated. At the next corner, he turned right again, barely slowing for the stop sign as he made sure nothing was coming on the cross street.

            Kate glanced back over her shoulder. “Either you’re in the mood for a traffic ticket or someone’s following us.”

            “Can’t tell for sure. Plain dark sedan.” In his peripheral vision, he saw her shudder. They’d been followed by plain dark sedans before. He knew she still had nightmares sometimes about one of those car chases.

            “When did we pick it up?” she asked.

            “Couple blocks from the house, if it’s the same one. He fell back a few cars for awhile. Could’ve turned off when I wasn’t looking, and this is some other innocent soul running their Saturday morning errands.”

            He slowed almost to a crawl as he stared at the rearview mirror. “Nope, it’s a tail. Just came around the corner a block back.”

            He nudged the accelerator, gradually picking up speed. At the next corner, he slowed and quickly looked in both directions. There was a pick-up truck coming on his left, half a block away. He whipped his Expedition into a left turn and hit the gas.

            The driver of the oncoming truck gave Skip the finger as they buzzed past him. The guy sped up and almost slammed into the dark sedan that screeched to a halt just in time.

            Skip made several turns in rapid succession, moving through the side streets of the Towson business district, then turned south again on York Road. Several blocks past Towson University, he was convinced he’d lost the guy. He turned right into a residential neighborhood, hoping this street came out on Charles Street. They were in luck. Another turn and they were finally headed in the right direction.

            Kate spoke for the first time in several minutes. “Gee, that was fun.” Her tone said
not
loud and clear.

            He grinned over at her. “Almost as good as a carnival ride.”

            “Almost made me as nauseous. That was some fancy drivin’, sir.”

            “Thank ya, ma’am. Funny, it’s been, what, twenty-two years since the police academy, but it all kicks back in when needed.”

            “They taught you to drive like a maniac?”

            “You learn how to do stuff a lot wilder than that. Those car chases on TV are a bit exaggerated, but you definitely know how to handle a vehicle by the time you get out of the academy.”

            “Good skill to have,” Kate said.

            They chatted about various things as they headed around the Beltway, then onto I-70 for the long trek to western Maryland. By unspoken agreement, they avoided the topic of The Case, as it was now called in their household. Granted Kate would be working for an hour or two while she met with Pete, but they were determined to make the most of their getaway.

            “Want to stop here for lunch?” Skip pointed to the exit sign for Hancock, Maryland. “Or do you want to wait ’til we get to Cumberland?”

            Kate’s stomach growled. They both laughed.

            They ate turkey club sandwiches at an old-fashioned lunch counter, then started out again. There had been no more signs of nondescript dark sedans.

            They were now on I-68. A comfortable silence settled around them.

            The road was a giant roller coaster. Long slow climbs followed by equally long but not nearly so slow descents into valleys. Often the ground fell away on one side of the highway or the other. The land was mostly undeveloped, although you could sometimes spot a house, or even a street of houses, tucked in amongst the trees on the hillsides. Bare-limbed deciduous trees lined the roadway in the valleys. Evergreens dominated the hilltops.

            “Why do evergreens survive better than deciduous trees at higher altitudes?” Kate asked.

            “An excellent question, for which I have no answer,” Skip said cheerfully. He was starting to enjoy himself. The further they drove, the more the stress of the last few weeks seemed to slide away behind them–even though they were driving toward the source of that stress.

            No, that wasn’t fair. Pete Jamieson wasn’t the cause of the stress. Whoever killed his friend, Matthews, was.

           
Nope, not going there, brain!
Searching for something else to think about, he glanced over at his wife. She was looking out the window, a relaxed smile on her face.

           
Note to self: thank Maria for suggesting this.

            It dawned on him that he hadn’t felt afraid during his evasive driving. His calm was back.

           
Hmm, might not be back for good. Have to wait and see.

            He glanced at his wife again. She was now watching him, with the same dreamy smile she’d bestowed upon the trees and valleys. He picked up her hand and turned his eyes back to the highway. As he lifted her fingertips to his lips, he voiced his earlier thought. “This was a good idea.”

            They held hands in companionable silence as the miles went by. Skip let go to nudge his blinker on. He took the exit for MD 546, headed for the small town of Finzel, Maryland.

            He almost missed the entrance to Pete’s land. A for-sale sign, splattered with mud, marked the dirt track cut between the trees.

            “Good thing this truck’s all-wheel drive.” They bounced along, in and out of muddy ruts.

            The trailer was surprisingly new-looking, a large camper, probably twenty-five or so feet long. Skip couldn’t imagine what vehicle had been used to haul it back the dirt road. He parked behind a red pick-up.

            Kate looked out at the stretch of mud between them and the trailer’s door, then down at her tailored pantsuit. “I was going for a compromise between casual and professional. Should’ve worn jeans and my hiking boots.”

            “Wait a sec.” He got out and walked around to her door, the mud sucking at his shoes. He opened the door and then scooped her up in his arms.

            “Hope Pete isn’t looking out the window,” she said. “This will blow my professional image.”

            “These aren’t exactly normal therapy conditions to begin with.”

            “True.”

~~~~~~~~

            The inside of the trailer was surprisingly roomy. The bedroom even had a real door. Skip was now behind that door, ostensibly taking a nap, after asking Manny and the other guard to wait outside.

            Kate was relieved. It was more privacy than she’d hoped for.

            Pete gestured toward the dinette area at the far end of the trailer. “Want some coffee?”

            “That’d be good.” She settled herself on the padded bench on one side of the table.

            Pete poured two cups from a carafe on the counter and brought them over. “Is this a therapy session?”

            “Not if you don’t want it to be. I just wanted to see how you were doing. And Skip said the cell phone service was pretty sketchy up here.”

            “Yeah, one of the guys has to drive out to the road to check in.”

            Kate filled Pete in on where things stood in the investigation.

            When she’d finished, he said, “I don’t get it. Two cops believe I’m innocent but I’m still under arrest.”

            “It’s frustrating, I know. But Detective Anderson can’t drop the charges until we have some proof. At this point, it’s just a plausible story.”

            Pete nodded.

            “Is it hard being out here?”

            “Not as hard as I thought it would be. The guys have been real good about ignoring my nightmares.”

            “How often are you having them?”

            “Not as often. Not even every night.” He paused. “And they’re not as bad. It’s more like things are happening at a distance.”

            After another pause, Kate said, “And when you wake up?”

            “I usually wake myself up. I call out to the people in the dream. ‘Look out,’ or ‘Run!’ My heart’s racing, but I’m not covered in sweat like I used to be.”

            “That sounds like progress. How are you feeling otherwise?”

            Pete shrugged. “Better. Not so guilty. Mostly just sad, that we couldn’t get more people out.”

            Kate noted the use of
we.
He was part of the team again. “Pete–”

            “I know, I know, I saved a bunch of people that day.” The knuckles of his hands, gripping his coffee mug, were white. “But there were a lot more who died that shouldn’t have.”

            That hadn’t been where she’d planned to go, but anger was a good sign. Far better than depression. “Who are you angry at about that?” she asked in a soft voice.

            He looked at her for a long moment. “Not myself, not anymore. And in a weird way, not even the terrorists. Maybe Osama bin Laden. Mostly I’m pissed at how fucked up the world is, that anybody’d think it’s okay to do something like that. That God’s actually gonna reward them for killing innocent people.”

            Kate just nodded. She waited a beat, then said, “I feel the same way.”

            Pete took a sip of coffee. Kate followed suit, giving him time to digest the idea that his reactions to 9/11 were now normal.

            “If I go to trial, do we have to play on that whole hero thing?”

            “Why does that make you so uncomfortable?”

            “’Cause I wasn’t doing anything special. I was just doing my job. Well, it wasn’t my job that day, but I was just doing what I’d been trained to do. Look, if you’d been there, you would have tried to comfort people. Would that have made you a hero? No, you would’ve just been doing what you do.”

            “I don’t run into burning buildings.”

            “Yeah, but what you do, it’s pretty intense. It’s gotta be hard.”

             “It’s intense at times, but no, it doesn’t feel all that hard to me.”

            He cocked his head to one side.

            “When I was a kid, everybody told me their troubles,” Kate said. “Even my brother Jack, who’s two years older than me. I think I was ten, the first time someone told me I should be a psychologist when I grew up. I didn’t even know what that was. I was two years out of graduate school before it dawned on me that most people couldn’t see what I saw. Couldn’t read people’s emotions like I can or understand the odd, convoluted logic of the unconscious mind like I do.”

            He was watching her intently.

            “I’m talented at what I do. But I always took that talent for granted, because it came easily to me. It was no big deal.”

            “And my talent,” Pete said, with a small smile, “is that I’m crazy enough to run into a building that everybody else is running out of.”

            Kate grinned at him. “Exactly. It doesn’t feel like a big deal to you because it’s what comes easily to you, but the rest of us are damned impressed. Because we know we couldn’t do that.”

            Pete was quiet for a minute, staring into his coffee cup. When he looked up at her, his eyes had some of their old haunted look in them. “I don’t think I can do it anymore.”

            She paused, then asked, “Run into burning buildings?”

            “Yeah. I think I’ve lost my nerve.”

            “Think about this before you answer. Are you afraid of the fire, or of your own reactions?”

            He only paused a second. “Not the fire.”

            “You’re afraid of having flashbacks.”

            He nodded.

            “I think that’s a legitimate fear. It’s why your previous therapist wouldn’t sign off for you to go back to work, remember?”

            “Yeah, I was kinda pissed at her, even though I knew she was probably right. But I thought maybe once I was there, at a fire, I would somehow be okay.”

            “You might be, but then again you might not. And the problem is, there’s no way to really test that. There’s no shallow end when it comes to burning buildings, is there?”

            Pete stared at his cup again. “I don’t think I can be a firefighter anymore, and I don’t know what to do with that. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

            “Firefighters don’t always fight fires.”

            He looked up, startled.

            “Think about other jobs people do for the fire department. You could train to be a paramedic, a dispatcher. You could teach at the fire academy. You could go around to schools and talk to kids who want to be firefighters, and tell them what it’s really like. And those are just the things occurring to me off the top of my head. My guess is there’s a dozen other jobs you could do that would contribute to the department. Make it possible for them to continue to fight fires.”

            “You’ve got to have special training, get certified to teach at the academy.”

            “So get the training.”

            He snorted. “And live on what in the meantime?”

            “Pell grants, student loans, scholarships.”

            Pete’s eyes lit up. “I’d like to teach. And go to the high schools and talk to the kids.”

            “Hey, I can’t think of a better way to serve the department then by passing the torch–no pun intended–to the next generation of firefighters.”

            Pete grinned at her.

~~~~~~~~

            As Skip drove the Expedition down the winding mountain road, he glanced over at his wife. “You look like the cat who ate the canary, darlin’.”

            “Pete and I had a very good session.”

            “Excellent. So we can now focus exclusively on each other for...” He twisted his hand on the steering wheel to see his watch. “Say, the next eighteen hours.”