The Operator
Page 67

That’s why Bill sent him. Mother-sucking Bill.
“Pick a car. Let’s go,” Jack finally said, and she sent her eyes to the outskirts.
“Brown Gremlin,” she said, and he started, looking at the Firebird at the back of the lot.
But then his eyed darted to hers, his coming complaint vanishing. “I hear voices!” he hissed.
“I know the feeling,” she muttered, scrunching deeper behind the tree. “Gremlin, or I’m not going.” Damn it all to hell. Why am I trusting Jack? He’s just another perfect mistake.
“Son of a bitch . . .” Jack whispered, hunched down, his useless rifle in his hand as the chopper rose up, spotlight playing over the building beside them, the winter-dead grass sharp in the harsh light. “We’re not getting out of here.”
“Yes we are,” she insisted, and then she gasped, stifling her shout of affront when he picked her up and boldly strode into the lot. She froze as a memory surfaced, of them together in the depth of the night. “Put me down,” she said, not liking how right his hands felt around her.
“You’ve got the Glock. Keep them off us,” he said, walking fast. “You can’t run.”
“Neither can you while you’re carrying me,” she insisted. “Put me down!”
“No. Deal with it.”
“Gremlin,” she insisted as he angled to the Firebird, and sighing, he shifted direction. His breathing had taken on a harsh rhythm that was both familiar and somehow intimate. His arms around her were the only spot of warmth in the January night, and she hated that she relished it. The scent of two-day-old sweat tickled her memory, and it was gone.
The jarring became harsher as he picked up the pace. Behind them, shouts rose up. Peri turned, firing six shots at nothing over his shoulder. More voices rose in alarm. “We’re not going to make it,” Jack huffed.
“Put me down,” she demanded. “Run ahead and start it. I’ll catch up.”
He didn’t argue, and Peri gasped in pain when her feet hit the stony pavement and he raced ahead. He never looked back, but nowhere in Peri was there the thought that he wouldn’t wait for her. Where is this trust coming from? she wondered as she limped after him, Glock in one hand and leaving bloody prints on the cars with the other. But she knew it wasn’t him she trusted, but his abilities. No one was better. Angry, she quashed the feeling.
The chopper swung close, and when the spotlight hit her, she stopped, hair whipping into her eyes as she shot at it. Immediately it angled away, but not before she took out its light.
The puttering roar of the Gremlin never sounded so good, and Peri limped faster, fumbling for the door and almost getting it in her face when Jack leaned across the seat and shoved it open. “Let’s go!” he shouted, and she lurched into the brittle-cold vinyl, her knee flashing into agony.
The door hit her calf on the bounce, and then she made it, glad it hadn’t crushed her foot as she settled into her seat, fumbling for the seat belt while Jack wove in and around the parked cars for the exit. She braced herself as he took a corner fast and they found the road.
“Interstate,” she breathed, pointing it out, and her eyes closed against the pain as he skidded around the corner. The car roared ahead, the jostling finally easing as they found a street.
Her eyes cracked in the new smoothness, and she took a careful breath. Jack sat beside her, hands gripping the wheel tight as he wove the ugly car through the few vehicles on the road at this hour as if they were standing still. Opti was going small behind them, and she began to wonder whether they just might have done it. For the moment, she thought as she turned in the seat to look behind them.
“A Gremlin?” Jack said. “You wanted a Gremlin?”
She looked at the gearshift, deciding she’d chosen poorly. “Firebirds are shit on ice,” she said, feeling her pockets for the guard’s phone. It was humming, and she looked to see it was Steiner. Allen was caught, then, and had told them she had the man’s phone. But he’s alive.
“Okay. I’ll give you that. But I’m picking the next car,” he said, clearly curious when she set the phone on the seat, screen side down. “Border?”
“Downtown,” she said, not liking having to show him her comic-book apartment. It had been her safe spot since she was eighteen and had bought the entire building for five hundred dollars and a promise to renovate. But in hindsight, she’d probably already shown it to him, and she slumped when she turned the car’s heat on and it only blew cold air.
Clearly not liking her choice of destinations, Jack inched the speed up to a hundred, pushing for more but hardly getting the needle to move. He zipped around the night-driving semis as if he were playing a racing game. “You going to answer that phone?” he asked when it buzzed again.
“What’s it to you?” Blood was soaking through her pant leg, and she looked over the car for something else to wrap it in, finding nothing.
“Will you cut me some slack!” he exclaimed, fingers tightening on the wheel. “I’m trying to make it up to you. If you would just let me render something back, I—”
Let him render something back? “You could what?” she interrupted, the pain from her knee fueling her anger. “You honestly think I’m going to let you into my mind? Ever again?”
“I can’t pretend those three years didn’t happen,” he said. “They did. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” She was angry, and it was all she could do to not shoot him right then and there, but he was driving. “You erased my memory,” she said bitterly, not believing he was bringing this up here and now. “Years of it. To keep me oblivious and dumb. You touch my mind again, and I will open your throat and walk away. Got it? I have one thing I want you to do, and we’re done.”
Jack looked at her. His face, lit from the glow of the dash, was hard to read. “Your complaint is valid,” he finally said.
“Don’t try to make me laugh.” Her foot was cold, and she tugged her pant leg down again to deal with later. “I’m not going back to Bill. We get out of here clean, you make the call, you go your way, I go mine. Actually, there’s no reason you can’t make the call right now.”
“This is stupid,” Jack said. “We could be over the border and gone in an hour.”