Hadley & Grace(72)

Then he said it again and again. The only variation in his continued refusal was the occasional addition of, “I want to go home.”

Finally, after twenty minutes of haggling and pleading, Hadley told Grace she needed to physically carry him out. It was the only way, and it was a horrendous ordeal for all of them. Skipper screamed and kicked as Grace struggled with him. Mattie walked behind them trying to console him. And Hadley hopped on her crutches as she gritted her teeth against it all.

By the time they’d made it to the car, they had an audience of several people standing on their balconies of their hotel rooms, watching.

They drove away with Skipper still in hysterics, rocking and crying and kicking the seat in front of him, all of it fraying everyone’s already strung-out nerves.

An hour later, Skipper finally exhausted himself and collapsed against Mattie, crashing into a twitchy sleep, and Grace looked at Hadley and said, “He needs to stop wearing that uniform. It’s going to be the end of us.”

Hadley doesn’t disagree. Skipper stands out like a walking billboard advertising that they are, in fact, the ones from the shoot-out last night outside Pat’s Barbeque. She just isn’t sure what to do about it.

Mattie and Skipper walk back toward the car, Mattie keeping Skipper on the side away from the minimart windows, her body shielding him as best she can. They climb in, and Hadley turns. “Hey, Champ, how you holding up?”

He lifts his face to hers, his blue eyes wide. “I want to go home.”

“I know, buddy. I know.” Heart twisting, she turns back in her seat.

Grace walks from the store, her face blanched and her shoulders hitched up around her neck. In her hands are a couple of bags filled with drinks and food. Something is wrong, and Hadley expects her to jump behind the wheel and tear away, but instead Grace sets the bags in the back seat with Mattie, then continues to the pump to fill the car.

When she finishes, she climbs in and pulls back on the road, her eyes glued to the two-lane strip of asphalt that stretches endlessly in front of them.

“What’s wrong?”

“We made the Fox four o’clock news.”





48





GRACE


Renegades, rebels, modern-day Robin Hoods—those are the words the reporter used. She was young, Hispanic, pretty. She stood in front of Pat’s Barbeque, the neon sign blinking behind her. The headline beneath her read, Female Fugitives Still at Large. The television was above the cashier’s head, and Grace watched while the girl rang her up. There were photos and even a short video. It was dark, and it was hard to make out much but the silhouette of Hadley, the flash of the gun firing, and blurry shadows in the distance diving, but it was enough to make compelling television, the five-second clip gripping.

The reporter gave a surprisingly accurate account of what has happened over the past four days, starting with the FBI’s pursuit of them at the hospital, then describing the search for them in Barstow and the FBI agent’s abduction in Baker, and finishing with the events of last night in Salt Lake City. They even had a map and a timeline.

“All set,” the cashier said, causing Grace to look away just as the reporter was introducing Burt, the man she danced with last night.

“Grace was a heck of a dancer . . . ,” Burt was saying as she walked from the store.

Renegades, rebels, modern-day Robin Hoods—Grace doesn’t feel like any of those things. She feels like a little kid who’s accidentally broken a window because she was playing where she wasn’t supposed to, and who feels bad and is now desperately trying not to get caught.

“You okay?” Hadley says.

Grace glances at her, then returns her focus to the road.

“You haven’t said a word for hours.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something.”

“The agent got away.”

“Mark? He got away?” Hadley says, clearly excited. Then, realizing she’s not supposed to be excited, she forces her smile away.

“It’s okay,” Grace says. “I’m glad he’s okay.”

The truth is Grace felt awful leaving him there. It was a terrible thing to have to do. She left his firearm in the trunk of his rental car so he would get it back, and she tried to make him as comfortable as possible, but it hasn’t stopped her from feeling bad. He was just a guy trying to do his job.

“This is a bad idea,” she says a moment later as she pulls into the bumper-to-bumper traffic eking its way down the exit ramp toward Coors Field.

“We have to,” Hadley says with a concerned glance back at Skipper, who is sitting up erect, his eyes scanning out the window to take in the flood of fans.

Grace inches the car forward, her heart pounding.

“Think about it,” Hadley says, “this is the last place anyone would expect us to be. And besides, it’s the one place we blend in.”

She’s referring of course to Skipper and his insistence on only wearing baseball uniforms. They stopped at a sporting-goods store outside Denver and swapped his Dodgers T-shirt for a Rockies jersey, and Grace has to admit he looks a lot like most of the kids on the sidewalk.

“I don’t like the idea of leaving the money,” she says as she follows the parking attendant’s gestures to pull into a spot at the far end of a lot the size of ten football fields.