Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

We crawled through the unmown grass to the untended field beyond. I was lightheaded with fatigue and hunger, my shoulders ached, I was scared. Only the snuffling from the boy in front of me, tears manfully suppressed, air sucked painfully in, kept me going.

The deputies had rigged up the searchlights while we were stumbling through shrubs. The sudden light arcing through the night sky behind us startled me. I tripped on a fallen branch and landed in rotting leaves. At least if they sent dogs after us they wouldn’t find us by our smell.

When we reached the ditch by the side of Coverdale Lane, I cautiously poked my head through the shrubbery to survey the road. A squad car blocked the intersection of Coverdale with Dirksen, where I had left my Mustang. I couldn’t see clearly at this distance, but they had probably found the car, might be waiting next to it for me.

I sank back down into the ditch, close to screaming with fatigue and frustration. We were trapped. I fought back panic. Benji whispered, “How we are going to do?”

The only possibility was to cross Coverdale and fight our way through the hedge to Anodyne Park on the far side, taking a chance that they

wouldn’t see us in the road. If I had the wings of a dove or the shovel snout of a mole. A mole. If that culvert I’d stumbled on yesterday came this far… Under cover of sirens and of a helicopter that had arrived on the scene, I explained to Benji as best I could what I was looking for. I would explore east, toward my car, he would crawl along the ditch to the west.

“Let it open up here, on this side of the road,” I begged the whimsical ruler of the universe. “Let me find it, before they find me.”

I crawled along slowly, patting the embankment, praying for it to give way. About fifty feet from where the squad car stood, Benji tapped my shoulder with a soft, timid hand. He had found the entrance.

I crawled back after him. The opening was a black hole on the road side of the ditch, not high enough for me to stand upright but just wide enough for us to move side by side. It smelled of mold and animal droppings, and it was as dark as the entrance to death. We couldn’t afford to show a light. I grabbed Benji’s left hand with my right. He didn’t try to withdraw; indeed, he clung to me, trembling, as we squelched along the muddy floor.

It should have been a quarter mile, getting to the hedge, going under Powell Road, coming up in Anodyne Park, but the tunnel seemed to stretch endlessly in front of us. What if we weren’t under Powell Road at all, but were shuffling into the Deep Tunnel? We could wander for hours until we collapsed and died of hunger and thirst. No one would find our bones for years, if they ever came on them at all. Morrell, Lotty, everyone I loved who cared about me, they would forget me. Already they were so far away that they didn’t exist.

My breath rasped dry against my tonsils. My back ached from walking in a stoop, red darts flashed across my eyes. And then we were suddenly breathing fresh air, smelling the juniper berries, scrambling uphill, standing upright on asphalt.

I shuddered in relief. We stood trembling for a few minutes, stretching sore muscles, listening for pursuit. All was blissfully quiet. Anodyne, the healing of pain. All we needed was a car, and we’d be home free.

I led Benji up the winding path toward the town houses, where cars were parked for the night in the drives that lay behind them. In this wealthy

enclave I didn’t expect to find an old car, the kind where I could break the steering column and pull out the ignition rod. But the fifth house we came to, luck favored us: someone had left their keys in a Jaguar XK-12. I’d always wanted to drive one of these. I opened the door for Benji.

“You are stealing this car?”

“Borrowing,” I grinned. “The owner will get it back tomorrow”

So it’s you, my girl, is it? Been long enough since you showed your face around here. Come to serve early mass for me?” Father Lou stood at the rectory door in T-shirt and trousers, his face still red from shaving.

As I’d driven along Ogden Avenue into the city, I figured if I didn’t get to the rectory before Father Lou started robing, I could slip into the church with the handful of neighborhood people who came for the six A.M. service. As it was, even taking the long slow route, I managed to pull around to the back of the building by five-thirty.

Benjamin had fallen asleep before we reached Warrenville Road. I kept my window open, needing cold air on my face to keep my own longing for sleep from overpowering me, but I ran the heater so that the vents pointed on the young man. His book fell from his slackened hand; I leaned over at a stoplight and put it in his lap so he wouldn’t wake up distressed. He’d dropped it while we were in the ditch and revealed-in a defiant gasp, as if he expected me to strike him or abandon him on the spot-that it was the Koran, his father’s own copy, he could not lose it.

“In that case, we’d better hang on to it,” was all I said.

When I had us both strapped into the Jaguar, a wave of fatigue crested over me, pulling me under. I only woke a few minutes later because a

helicopter thundered directly over us, heading east. I blinked at it, hoping it was taking a teenager to a hospital, not to a morgue.

I put the car in gear and drove slowly past the guard station. The man in the booth nodded at the car: he was there to keep the world out. It didn’t matter who left the complex.

I bypassed the tollway, preferring to take Ogden Avenue. If Schorr decided to issue an APB on me, they’d stake out the expressways first. They wouldn’t know what car I was driving, but they might guess I’d taken someone else’s when I didn’t show up at the Mustang.

Even forty miles out, Ogden is not a beautiful street. Every town along its route had decided this was the place for car dealerships, for fast-food joints, for gas stations and junkyards. Once the street crosses the city limits, it goes from tacky to grim, finishing its life near the Cabrini Green housing project. A number of Cabrini’s towers have been torn down as the Gold Coast oozes west, but those that remain, with their broken windows and bullet-pocked playgrounds, still present an ominous face to the city.

As we drove in, a fair amount of traffic already filled the road-early commuters pulling into the endless strip malls for the day’s first coffee, people coming off the night shift stopping for a burger. At one point I dozed off again at a traffic light. The hydraulic honk from the truck behind me scared me awake-I thought I’d heard another shot, I thought we were surrounded. The adrenaline from that kept me alert for the rest of the route.

The Jaguar engine was quiet as a feather dropping on a leaf, and the power inside made me itch to swoop in and out of lanes, or go sixty on roads posted for forty. On an impulse, waiting for a light at Austin, just before crossing the border into Chicago, I called Murray Ryerson on my cell phone. He was grumpy about being woken up, but became alert, even aggressive, when I told him I’d met sheriff’s deputies out at Larchmont.

“They were going nuts, thinking they had some Arab terrorist in their sights. They shot someone. I didn’t feel like hanging around-they were being mean to me-but I have a queasy feeling about the shooting.”

“What about killing a terrorist makes you queasy?” he demanded.

“I don’t think that’s who they shot. I think they may have hit a member of the Bayard family. Perhaps even Calvin Bayard’s granddaughter. And if that’s the case, they will try to keep it very, very quiet.”

“You actually see the body? Is that the basis of your feeling?” Murray was truculent-he’s known me too many years.