Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

As he headed down the hall, the skinny one at his side, he heard their small voices like toy bells, off-key but lovely in their clarity.

“As you can see…” the matronly ER nurse explained to Larson, “we’re a little bit busy right now, Officer.”

It was deputy marshal, not officer, and Larson considered setting the record straight in order to take control. The nurse wore a set of extra-large scrubs that nonetheless stretched to contain a continental shelf of breast and a hula hoop-sized waist. She wore a St. Christopher cross around her neck. A mouth-breather, she exposed a thin slice of white teeth, like a sleeping cat. She glanced up, locked her flinty eyes onto Larson. “Do I know you?”

The question was not uncommon. People said he had a little bit of Harrison Ford in him, a little bit of movie-star quality that seemed familiar at first glance. He’d looked for it, but sadly had never seen it. But this woman didn’t mean it as a come-on, but a qualifier; she was simply being stubborn.

“I need a street address for Alice Stevenson.”

The woman complained, “You know how hard it is shorthanded?”

He saw her name on her badge pinned above the shelf. “Ms. Rathmore, I need your undivided attention here.” He awaited those annoyed eyes of hers, then lowered his voice. “I’m conducting a federal investigation. I’m not going to throw around words like bioterrorism and national security”-he immediately won her full attention-“because you’re not authorized to receive such information, but let’s just say a little bit of help would go a long way, and you’re not going to want to look back on this opportunity and have to tell your friends you were the broken link, you were what took more time than necessary, you were the one who cost lives.”

“We don’t have an address in the system,” she told him. “But I can tell you this. Alice doesn’t make friends easily. She’s a little off, you know? I mean, who makes the kind of money she makes and still rides the bus? And with her looks… I mean the docs hit on her all the time, and she turns a blind eye to every one of them. So the talk is, you know… that she likes other women… and that stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s not a lot of them around here. I’m not saying I feel one way or the other about that, you understand. But she does have a little daughter… Penny. Thick as thieves, those two.”

Nurse Rathmore’s mouth kept moving, the words kept coming, but Larson no longer heard. The request Hope had made for a second protected identity had been for a daughter , not for a husband or lover. He filled in the blanks almost automatically. He considered the timing. My god. Maybe Hope had jumped the program because of her daughter. Our daughter?

Larson rushed his words, a fluttering inside him like something had broken loose. “The daughter. Penny… Did you mention a father?… A nanny?… Who takes care of her during work hours?”

Rathmore nodded, tilted her big head. “Daycare’s over in the basement of the Children’s Hospital. Not so easy to find. You’ll have to ask.”

When she looked up, she saw only Larson’s back, the automatic doors already closing.

Paolo explained the rules to the pale, trembling woman behind the wheel. He’d removed and pocketed all the cash, credit cards, and the three driver’s licenses from the women’s wallets, the rest of the contents spilled out onto the floor mat at his feet. She’d gotten the message, loud and clear.

She slowed the car suddenly. “This is where I dropped her off.”

“Pull over.”

The woman’s glassy eyes and twitching fingers did nothing to convince him she’d heard him. Nonetheless, the car pulled to the curb and stopped.

He said, “The easy out is to kill you and put you in the trunk and steal your car.” She tensed, and went yet another degree of pale. “But you’re a teacher, and I like kids. I’m ready to let you go if this is the right place. Is it?”

She nodded.

“Okay, then drive home and lock your door and turn off your phone and don’t talk to anyone . You wake up tomorrow morning and you go to work, and you deal with this shit then. You think you can hide from me?” She shook her head vigorously. “Your Alice Stevenson’s been hiding for six years, and look where she’s at. Keep that in mind.”

She nodded, her fists tight on the wheel.

At first Paolo thought he’d done a convincing job with her, but then he took the cue and followed her line of sight to the sidewalk in the middle of the next block.

He glanced once more at the driver, then again at a pretty little blond girl facing a doorway but staring straight up at the building.

Looking lost.

The first smile in a long time curled across his lips as he thought: God helps those who help themselves .

Each time the bus shuddered to a stop, Alice was stung by impatience. Convinced her daughter had fled to the one place that felt safe to her, she was on her way to the hospital’s daycare. If she’d seen any taxis on the street, any other means to reach the hospital more quickly, she would have bolted the bus in a heartbeat, but cabs weren’t a common sight in St. Louis, a city dominated by its suburbs.

She chastised herself for panicking over the alert on CNN, for her lack of an explanation to Penny, who was old enough now to understand some of this. She could have handled this so much better. If she’d turned this into a surprise trip to Disney World, they’d already be on their way, riding some Greyhound toward Atlanta. So why had she reacted like that, a fit of worry?

But then again, she’d been trained to worry; trained to be paranoid. Her daughter wanted nothing of it, and who could blame her?

“The Romeros can and will find you. If you make so much as a single mistake, they’ll be on your doorstep.” Had Lars told her that, or one of the others? There had been so many debriefings, orientations, meetings with psychologists. She couldn’t remember them all. But the warning had been convincing then, and she heeded it still. Caution was a way of life, not a switch she threw when convenient. She’d overreacted to the alert. She understood that now, but knew this was part of her programming, and her programming had kept them alive this far.

Penny was the only one who had the number to the cell phone Alice carried. It was their leash, their fallback. She never phoned out on it, never created a call history. She might have used it now to call ahead but feared that if Penny got even a hint of that call, she might run off again in protest. Anything to delay their next move. Penny was far too smart a child, far too intent on making her mother pay for their nomadic ways. Surprise remained Alice ’s best chance.

Larson entered the hospital’s daycare center only minutes behind a pair of uniformed security guards. Two women, the children’s caregivers, were trying to explain the events to one of the uniformed security guards, while a nurse attempted to entertain the children and a second guard, on his knees, quietly interviewed three of the kids.

Larson pulled rank and removed the two teachers from the room. The more athletic and attractive of the two maintained her composure.

“He said he’d come back and kill us and our families,” she said calmly. “But we- I , actually,” she confessed, eyeing her hysterical friend, “felt the threat to Penny and her mom was more immediate. So we called security.”

Larson sought a description from her, wincing as he heard mention of the intruder’s police uniform, for it stirred up his own memories of the bus attack years before. If he’d harbored any doubt, any question that they were pursuing the same cutter, this initial description sealed it for him. As she went on to describe the man as Mexican or Hispanic, lanky, late twenties, early thirties, Larson nodded. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the man in the bus, but the general description combined with the razor and the use of a uniform was enough to further convince him.