Brian Freeman - Marathon

“Have you found Malik?” Ahdia asked.

“No.”

“So maybe he’s not there.”

“I hope that’s true, but I can’t reach him, and he won’t answer his phone.”

“Are others searching, too?”

“Yes, but no one has seen him.”

“How are you?” she asked.

“You know how I feel about crowds.”

“I do. Come home, Khan. There is nothing more you can do. Pak misses you. So do I.”

He lowered his voice to avoid drawing attention to himself. He was as skinny as a street sign, but he was also tall and handsome, with a mane of jet-black hair and a neat beard. His dark, Arabic features were enough to attract suspicion on the street, especially today. He didn’t really blame people for that. Evolution had programmed the human heart to fear what was different. When he saw a muscled, tattooed man eyeing him, he turned around to hide his face.

“If Malik is here, I have to find him,” Khan whispered.

“Then be careful.”

“I will.”

He didn’t want to tell Ahdia that if he found Malik, it was possible that neither one of them would come home alive.

Malik was one of his closest friends, but he’d crossed to the wrong side. The side of violence. Online recruiters and angry radicals in the Cedar-Riverside coffee shops of Minneapolis had poisoned him with talk of jihad . All of it was so foolish, so pointless. A deadly game played by stupid boys. It made Khan want to tear out his hair, because if he lost Malik, it would be like losing his own brother all over again. Another brother dying in a crowd for nothing.

He wanted to shout: Where are you?

Because he was sure that Malik was close by. Somewhere. Khan needed to find him before the police did. Find him and stop him before he threw away his life, along with the lives of others.

Khan left the spectators packed in front of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop and walked quickly toward the other end of Canal Park.

It was 12:26 p.m.

“I am so sorry,” Max Guppo told Stride and Maggie. His round white face was even paler than usual, and his mustache drooped. Next to him, his youngest daughter, Gloria — eight years old — clutched her Barbie backpack to her chest. Her wide eyes and white bubble coat made her look like a snowy owl.

“Well, I think we can call off the SWAT team,” Stride said, struggling not to laugh. He knew Guppo and his daughter both felt bad. At least a dozen officers had surrounded the bag before the girl wandered between them and casually grabbed her backpack from the ground.

“Honestly, boss, I had no idea Gloria left it behind,” Guppo went on. “And then when the call came in... I didn’t realize—”

“It’s all right, Max.” Stride bent down to Gloria’s level and smiled. “You okay there, Glo?”

The girl nodded without saying a word.

“Good. Now you keep your backpack with you from now on, okay? You don’t want somebody walking off with it, do you?”

She shook her head silently.

“Okay.” Stride tweaked her pudgy cheeks and straightened up. He patted Max on the back. “Go on, Max, get back to your mac-and-cheese balls. You’ve still got a lot of hungry runners coming through here.”

“Thanks, boss.”

Guppo took Gloria by the hand and led the little girl away. Stride and Maggie watched them go. When father and daughter were out of earshot, smiles broke across both of their faces, and the laughter they’d been holding back bubbled out of them. The other cops around them laughed, too. Stride shook his head.

“A Barbie backpack,” he said. “That’s one for the record books.”

“Needless to say, the woman who called 911 didn’t mention that,” Maggie told him.

“Well, we tell people, if you see something, say something. And she did.”

Maggie zipped up her red jacket against the rain. Her bowl-cut black hair was soaked. She pointed at her yellow Avalanche, which was pebbled with dents in the doors and fenders. She was a terrible driver. “You want a ride back down to Canal Park, boss?”

“I’m not that brave, Mags.”

“Hey, I got the airbags replaced,” she pointed out.

“Still no.”

“Okay, suit yourself.” She chuckled again, her hands in her pockets. “I guess we’ve had our excitement for this year’s marathon.”

“I guess so,” Stride said.

It was 12:29 p.m.

Wade Ralston checked the rubber fitness tracker on his wrist. Despite the rain and the perspiration on his skin, it was working fine. Even so, he was upset with himself, because he was way behind the schedule he’d mapped out. He’d pulled his right hamstring at mile sixteen and had to walk off and on since then to shake off the pain. What should have been a three-and-a-half-hour pace — bringing him to the finish line at 11:15 a.m., his record time — was now a frustrating four-hour-and-forty-five-minute jog. He’d never fallen so far behind in a marathon, and he’d run twelve races in ten years.

Other runners passed him, because he was limping. The finish line wasn’t even a hundred yards away, but the distance loomed like ten more miles. The race clock on a banner stretched across Canal Park Drive ticked off the seconds, reminding him of his failure.

Someone shouted at him, “You’re bleeding!”

Wade looked down at his white tank top, which had been specially printed to advertise his business: RALSTON EXTERMINATION: THE BUG ZAPPERS. Where cartoon ants and cockroaches marched across his chest toward two men carrying foggers, his nipples had begun to bleed from the friction with his shirt. The bugs appeared to be walking into two crimson pools for a swim.

A volunteer medic on the street offered help, but Wade waved him off. A little blood didn’t matter. He’d developed a blister while running the Chicago marathon four years earlier, and by the time he reached the finish line, his left sneaker had turned cherry red.

He jogged another step and then another step. That was what it was all about. One foot in front of the other, one step at a time, adding up to 26.2 miles.

Thanks to his running regimen, Wade didn’t have an ounce of fat on his body. He was a compact package, no more than five-foot-five and a rock-hard 120 pounds. In school, as a child, his small size had worked against him. Girls had teased him and bigger kids bullied him mercilessly, but as an adult, he had always been determined to outrun everyone else, outwork them, outsmart them, and out-earn them. He’d had the last laugh. If you were willing to do things that no one else had the guts to do, you could always get what you wanted. Not many people wanted to deal with bugs and rodents.

He found himself getting dizzy, but he had to keep moving. Nothing else mattered. Just keep moving forward.

The finish line was fifty yards away.

He looked for his cheering section. They’d promised him they would be here, but he was so late that he wondered if they’d given up on him and gone for a beer. It wouldn’t mean a thing if he couldn’t see their faces. He peered through the crowd lining the street — and there they were, all three of them, in front of the Duluth Outdoor Company shop, exactly as they’d promised, so they could watch him take the last steps across the finish line.

Travis Baker was there, in front of a tree and built like a tree. They’d worked in the bug business together for five years, ever since Travis’s sister, Shelly, had introduced them. Wade and Travis went down into the places no one else would go, taking out cockroaches from building basements by the shovelful. Travis spotted him first and cheered wildly, as if Wade were a football player scoring the winning touchdown.

“Wade! Wade! Wade!”

Shelly stood next to Travis. She took up the cheer, too.