Jeff Abbott - Fear

‘Uh-oh,’ Miles said.

‘What?’ Then Celeste saw herself, put her face into Miles’s shoulder.

A couple coming out of the diner, chatting, smiled a good morning at them. Then the woman followed their gazes, riveted on the newspaper dispenser.

Miles steered Nathan and Celeste back toward the hotel. He peeled out of the lot, thinking, Those people didn’t see her face and the picture, they couldn’t have, but as they shot by the diner the couple were still standing there, studying the front page of the paper they’d pulled from the machine.

Andy rode with them, talking, murmuring, all the way to Fish Camp.

The town lived up to its simple name. Highway 41 wound high into the mountains, and a few miles before Yosemite the town stood before them: a couple of modest stores, a wide fishing pond, a scattering of rental properties and modest homes, a couple of bed-and-breakfasts and restaurants on the mountain’s side, a scruffy 1950s motel called the Yosemite Gateway on the narrow ribbon of highway. Tall pines covered the landscape; every trash can in the motel lots and along the roadside was metal, with cover mechanisms to keep the bears from foraging in the garbage. To Miles, who had spent his entire life in Florida before that life ended, the mountains and the forests reminded him of drawings from a German storybook he’d had as a child.

Miles checked them into the Gateway, two adjoining rooms with a connecting door between them.

‘Where’s my room?’ Andy asked. ‘Okay, I’ll just stay with you all.’

He’s angry because you’re close, Miles thought. Close to Frost, close to having a way to banish him from your head, once and for all.

Nathan landed on one of the twin beds in his and Miles’s room and stretched out. Miles noticed Nathan kept glancing at the digital clock.

‘I think Nathan has an engagement on his calendar, Miles,’ Andy said.

‘Now what do we do?’ Celeste asked.

‘Find Edward Wallace. But first, we’re dyeing your hair,’ Miles said. ‘We can’t have anyone recognizing you from the newspaper, and if you’re on the front page of USA Today, I bet you’re on television too.’

‘I don’t think I can go out anymore,’ she said. ‘I need walls right now. I need – I need to cut myself.’ She swallowed, braced her shoulder against the door frame.

Miles went down to the motel office and asked for a rubber band. He brought it back, went into her room where Celeste sat at the end of the bed, knelt before her, took her hand, slipped it on her wrist.

‘We are so not engaged,’ she said. ‘But thanks. The urge passed.’

He wished he had a rubber band to drive away Andy. Then he heard the soft, deliberate crack of glass. ‘Oh, goddamn.’ He rushed back to his room. Nathan stood, his fist covered by the room’s chipped and faded ice bucket, the bathroom mirror fractured, two jagged Nathans frowning back at him from the glass.

‘Can’t you control yourself for just one blessed minute?’ Miles said.

Nathan let the ice bucket fall to the floor, walked past Miles, threw himself back on the bed. ‘I’ll remember that when you start talking to air.’

‘We don’t need trouble with the motel, we don’t need attention, we can’t have anyone remembering us. Do you understand?’

‘Sir, yes, sir,’ Nathan said into the pillow. ‘But I can’t calm down. I can’t. I need my meds, man, now.’ Desperation kicked in to his voice.

‘Miles, take it easy,’ Celeste said. ‘He can’t help himself…’

‘I’m sick of it. Sick of being sick.’ Miles stumbled outside. The air, in May, was still chilly, cooler than the high desert of Santa Fe, and fingers of snow hid in the shadows of the heavy pines and furrows of land between the rental cabins. The air was crisp in his lungs, against his face.

He walked away from the car, from the motel, from the intermittent swoosh of passing cars heading the final two miles to Yosemite.

I can’t do this, he thought. I can’t keep them calm and straight and focused. He had no real plan after finding Edward Wallace, and he didn’t want to admit his uncertainty to himself or to the others. How did you expose a conspiracy and have anyone believe you? What if, in bringing Frost to light, he killed the medicine’s chances for acceptance and production because of its illicit creation? What if they got caught just because they went to get food and a television fan recognized Celeste? The whole enterprise was tottering, ready to collapse in rubble and dust, burying him under what he thought had been an impulse, a need to Do the Right Thing.

He stopped at the motel’s corner, leaned his head against the brick. He took a fortifying breath of mountain air. He could do this. He had to, he had no choice. Celeste needed Frost, so did Nathan. They needed help. They needed him.

‘No one really needs anyone,’ Allison said to him from the corner.

He raised his head and she was leaning against the bricks, dressed in the clothes she had worn the last morning of her life.

His breath caught in his throat, he shook his head, closed his eyes. Counted to ten.

He looked again. She was still there, her arms crossed.

‘I – I…’ he started to say.

‘Miles, your path is clear. It’s simple. Load the gun. Find a private place. Leave a note if there’s anyone you want to say goodbye to – such as DeShawn and Joy. They’d miss you’ – and she shrugged – ‘but they didn’t really know you long enough to care about you.’

He tried to speak; nothing came but a harsh hiss of breath.

‘No one blames you for not wanting to hear Andy bitching in your head for the rest of your life. Years and years of him talking.’

‘No.’

‘You’re worried about failing your – friends. You worried over failing me. But I failed you, Miles, I gave you false hope.’

He clenched his eyes shut, ran his fingers along the even lines of the bricks. A man from another room walked by him and Miles felt the burn of his curious stare.

‘And that’s all Frost is,’ Allison said. ‘False hope. You don’t really think Nathan is better, do you? He’s not. It doesn’t work.’

He whispered a prayer. ‘She’s not real, I know she’s not real, even if she was she’d never say these things, it’s the sickness.’

He opened his eyes and ran into the space where she’d stood, but there was only the Sierra breeze.

She was gone. He pressed his palms against the brick wall. Nathan and Celeste were real, they were his responsibility. He had to get a grip. If he stayed strong, Celeste and Nathan could stay strong. So they could get the drug. He craved it now; strange to want something you’d never had, but he needed Frost to be real.

So get moving.

He walked back to the room. Nathan sat on the bed, watching a celebrity poker tournament on TV.

‘Nathan, I’m sorry I yelled.’

‘I’ve got five hundred years of bad luck from mirrors,’ Nathan said. ‘You yelling doesn’t scare me.’ He shook his head at Miles with a dawning fear. ‘I haven’t had Frost in days, man, and I’m falling apart. I got to have it, man.’

‘Be straight with me. Was it your mom you called?’

He nodded slowly. ‘You don’t believe me.’

‘I was under the impression you didn’t get to talk to your mom at all when you were in the hospital. So I know you didn’t call her every week.’

‘True. But I did call her last night. I told you she’d be expecting to hear from me because I didn’t want you to freak that I’d called her.’

‘Then I believe you. Try to rest.’

‘Miles.’

‘Yeah?’

‘About your friend that died. You can’t stand there and let someone shoot you. You just protected yourself.’