The Big Dark Sky (51)

Both the engine and Barry McGuire had fallen silent, but Kenny smelled gasoline. We’re going to be burned alive! He shouted at Leigh Ann—“Get out, out, get out!”—as he struggled to release his safety harness, but she was already gone, the passenger’s door open wide. He pushed through the driver’s door and scrambled from the Nautilus into an elegant foyer. He heard the house alarm wailing as a recording of a stern voice warned, “You have violated a private residence. The police have been called. Leave at once.”

The vehicle had taken a header into a massive newel post at the foot of a grand staircase that divided at midfloor and curved in opposing flights to a gallery above. Through an archway to the left lay a drawing room. On the right, tall library doors stood open.

Leigh Ann was hurrying along a hallway toward the back of the house, carrying the grocery-store tote bag that Kenny had dropped in her lap when they had fled the garage under his apartment building. He sprinted after her, caught up with her in the kitchen, grabbed her by one shoulder, and halted her. Raising his voice to compete with the security alarm, he said, “Is everything in the bag?”

Trying to pull away from him, she said, “We’ve got to get out of here quick, so we can say your wheels were stolen, it wasn’t us crashed into this place.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s the plan.”

“I don’t want cops in my life.”

“Who does?”

“Things are smooth with me. I like them smooth.”

“But do you have both the ice cream and fish sticks in there?”

“Fish sticks? What fish sticks? In where?”

“In the bag.”

She looked in the vinyl tote bag. “What the fuck am I doing with ice cream and fish sticks?”

“Don’t drop them. Come on, let’s get the hell out of here.”

“I don’t even like fish sticks.”

The back door opened to a limestone patio covered by a trellis.

She said, “All that breading and probably just cod underneath.”

Beyond the patio lay a deep backyard with a lap pool, and at the end of the property stood a pool house or maybe guest quarters.

Hurrying with him alongside the pool, Leigh Ann said, “Nothing is gonna be smooth ever again, is it?”

“Sure it is. It will be. This is just a hiccup.”

“Why did you have to be so cute and so nice? I wouldn’t have slept with you, wouldn’t be here now, if you weren’t cute and nice.”

“It’s my curse, I have to live with it.”

To the right of the guesthouse was a solid wood gate in the brick property wall. It featured a gravity latch, but not a lock.

A wide alley served walled properties. They turned right, north. To avoid looking suspicious, they hurried but didn’t run.

Strung from utility poles, power lines stirred in the breeze, humming softly as they passed through strain insulators.

Kenny and Leigh Ann came to a residential street, crossed it, and entered a continuation of the alley. He stopped at a drainage grate in the pavement and took his iPhone from a jacket pocket.

“Who’re you calling? Let’s keep moving,” Leigh Ann urged.

“A smartphone is a GPS, a locator. It tells him where we are.”

“You don’t really think he’s got that kind of reach, he can nail us by our phones?”

“What I think is he’s the überultimate, king of the black hats, and if we underestimate him, we’ll deserve what we get.”

Movement glimpsed from the corner of his eye caused him to look up as one plump rat followed another along a power cable, their long tails held straight behind them to aid their balance. The rodents paused to peer down, but then scurried on faster than before, as though instinctively aware that they were at greater risk by just being in the vicinity of this man and woman.

Wondering if the rats were an omen, surprised to be capable of such a thought, Kenny dropped his phone into the street drain. It clattered on the floor of the concrete conduit below.

Leigh Ann said, “This can’t be right.” She turned her attention to the sky, perhaps on the lookout for the 747 that, mere minutes earlier, Kenny had not believed could be made to crash on them.

“We’ll buy burner phones,” Kenny said. “If he doesn’t know the numbers we’re using, he can’t track us.”

She met his eyes. “You make it sound like we’re on the run.”

“Because we are. At least for the short term, a few days, until we track this sonofabitch to source and deal with him.”

She was smart and quick. “But if we use credit cards, maybe he’ll still know what phones we bought. We need a lot of cash to be on the run, even for a few days.”

“That half-gallon container in the tote isn’t ice cream. It’s full of rolls of hundred-dollar bills. Ninety thousand bucks.”

Her blue stare scanned him with the intensity of a laser. “You said you were a white-hat hacker.”

“I am. But even good guys need to prep for a shitstorm. I knew this loser who didn’t prep, and some MS-13 types cut his head down the middle with a chain saw.”

That claim silenced her for a moment. Then: “I never knew a guy who knew a guy who got his head chainsawed.”

“Adds a little glamor to my résumé.”