This wouldn't be happening if she'd gone to Copenhagen.
She lays low at a safe house just outside Philly for the first two weeks. It's an old one, one she hasn't used since Neal went to Europe; she'd never used it while she and Neal were together, never used it while Neal was even in the country. She leaves when she can't take being still any longer.
She wonders if she got this, too, from her mother, this itch under her skin, this nameless fear at too long a stillness.
She spends three nights in Atlantic City, ghosting across the busy casino floors at 3 AM picking pockets; hustling pool would attract too much attention, and Neal was always better at it than she was, anyway. The artist in her wants to walk along the quiet boardwalk as the sun rises, sketch the snow fences listing across the dunes, the grey winter waves retreating down the beach trailing lace and seaweed.
Instead she gets on a bus headed south and stows away on the Cape May-Lewes ferry.
In Baltimore one of her credit cards gets declined; she takes a risk and hitchhikes back north, doesn't wait around to see if red flags will be raised.
This wouldn't be happening if she'd gone to Chicago.
It's about a month and a half since she saw him last when she passes by New York again, stopping just long enough to sign a six-month lease on an apartment outside the city.
She uses an alias Neal will recognize and she hopes the feds won't. Just in case, she buys a bottle of cheap Merlot at the liquor store on the corner, leaves it on the floor of the bedroom; a decoy that might fool Fowler, if he saw her message. If Neal sees it, he might know to look for the Bordeaux bottle under a floorboard in the closet.
(He might not. Or he might think she left the Bordeaux bottle as a final farewell, a casting off of the last of their shared history. Her gut twists into a hard knot at the thought.)
She steps off the bus in Chicago two days later, thinking this could have been my life.
Or not. She wouldn't be stepping off a bus in a freezing wet night, kicking dirty snow off the loading platform and pushing her way toward the terminal doors, squeezing past passengers loaded down with plastic shopping bags, drivers huddled near the door smoking and stamping their feet for warmth.
Inside there's a Christmas tree shoved into a corner between a vending machine and a video game console; a gold tinsel garland, draped along the wall over the ticket window, tries vainly to brighten the waiting area. Exhausted travelers form sprawling lines across the terminal, sitting on suitcases or leaning on wet umbrellas; over the intercom, a voice breaks through the bright tinkling holiday music, passengers holding reboard pass number 235 line up at door number 2.
No, she thinks; she'd have flown into O'Hare, walked down a heated jetway, complaining about the bit of cold air sneaking through the hood around the aircraft door, maybe grabbed a latte at the airport Starbucks before she hailed a taxi; the driver would have taken one of her suitcases. (She'd have had suitcases. More than one.) Or Michael might have sent a limo for her. She can see it, a driver in a dark wool peacoat holding up a boldly lettered sign with her real name on it, broadcasting it for the entire baggage claim area to see.
The thought makes her twitch.
Michael had even sent her a plane ticket.
***
He'd called, maybe two weeks after Adler disappeared and her bank account was emptied and the ceiling of her world caved in. Left a voicemail; she hadn't picked up, expecting Nick-who-wasn't-really-Nick or the FBI again.
It might not have been a bad idea, moving across the country somewhere where Adler's name hadn't been in the news for a solid two weeks. She'd put out a blizzard of resumes that first week, hand-delivering those she couldn't email and counting the quarters left in her purse for the public library copier, and been met with a resounding silence. None of her former coworkers or professional contacts were speaking to her; they all assumed she'd been in on the scam. The ones who didn't suggested, not so subtly, that her inability to see this coming was an indication of incompetence.
She might have even gone for it, if Michael had asked her first.
Instead, a week after she called him back and told him she and Nick had split up and all her savings were gone and she'd had no luck finding a job, he emailed her a one-way ticket to Chicago. He attached a note saying he had a friend who needed a secretary, and he was sorry it wasn't what she used to have, and it would probably be boring but it was the best he could do, and she wasn't to think she owed him anything for this, but she was welcome to crash at his place until she got back on her feet. Or as long as she wanted to.
He meant well. And it was sweet, and it was generous, and it was so much more than she deserved from him and it was so much like her father she wanted to scream.
She'd failed, once again, to make her own life work. And here was someone else stepping in to rescue her, to fix everything and set her up somewhere else.
She spent most of the first two days being interrogated by the FBI, learning in the process just how little she'd really known about any of Adler's business dealings. The rest of that week was sorting through her files at home and putting her place back together after they'd searched it, putting the couch cushions back in place and the paintings back on the walls, and maybe an hour sitting on the floor in the middle of everything that had been thrown out of her filing cabinet telling herself, over and over, that she would not let the bastards make her cry.
She'd managed to avoid the press, at least.
She had a total of five more visits from the feds, over the next two weeks, along with a dozen phone calls asking for clarification of details. After the third visit and the fourth phone call she figured out they weren't, actually, incapable of writing it down when she told them the first time but rather checking to see if she'd give a different answer, if she'd forget her story, if they could catch her in a lie.
We'll get it all back, Nick had said. Neal. Nick did not exist. Had never existed. She had loved him, and he'd never existed.
She spent the rest of the time on the public library computers (they'd confiscated her laptop) going through job search websites. And once, on the fifteen minute express terminal (the one you didn't need ID or a library card to sign in on), she did a Google search on "Neal Caffrey".
She hadn't mentioned his real name to the FBI; she only said they'd broken up and she had no idea where he was. She couldn't say if it was because she still wanted to protect him, or because she was being treated like a criminal by the people who were supposed to protect people like her from people like Adler and she'd be damned if she'd make their lives any easier after they'd worked so hard to turn what was left of hers completely inside out.
Or maybe after they'd given her the third degree for working for Adler, she figured if they found out she'd been dating a wanted art thief and bond forger she'd really be screwed.
Of all the people who had betrayed her, he was the only one who hadn't completely disappeared.
He hadn't come home since the day everything fell apart. She'd told him to get lost. It had been one shock too many, on top of everything else, when he'd told her he wasn't Nick Halden at all. That he'd been trying to con Adler, even as Adler conned them. She'd stared at him, thoughts moving thickly as she groped for words: get away from me.
But a day later he sent her a burner phone in a bouquet of flowers; for some reason she didn't throw it out immediately. She didn't pick up when he called, but she couldn't help listening to the voicemails. He called at least once a day. Hey, it's … it's me. And who was that? she wondered, each time. Look, I know - I know you're pissed. I would be, too.
By the time Michael sent her the ticket she'd started applying for waitressing jobs. But there she was both suspicious and overqualified and no one was offering to hire her and rent was coming due and she'd about spent all the cash she'd had in her purse the day her bank accounts were emptied.
Please, can we just talk?
She was acutely aware, this time, of having no safety net left. She thought about her great-grandmother's stories of the Depression, how the only ones who survived were the ones who had cash stuffed under a mattress. Maybe she'd try that, next time.
She wondered, briefly, if all the safety nets had always been lies.
She could hear Nick, again, see him focused on her face like it held the answers to all his most desperate questions. All this - it feels like I could blink and it would all be gone.
Was that what it had felt like, living a lie that might be revealed at any time? That, she thought, may have been a rare moment of honesty.
She'd blinked and Adler was gone. And she thought that if she went to Chicago she'd understand that feeling, rebuilding her life on foundations she knew to be sand. She'd always know it could all be taken away in less than a heartbeat. Even after her initial anger at Michael faded to a dull throb of background rage, she was left with a crawling fear of depending on such a rescue again. All her past rescuers had a habit of disappearing without warning.
She wondered if she'd never feel safe again.
She wondered if that was a bad thing.
She sent Michael a politely worded refusal; then she took her sketchpad and a box of pencils and walked down to the park. Maybe she could try the starving artist thing again.
She folded a piece of paper into a tent, a sign with: Portraits, $10. Sat on a bench, thinking she was probably supposed to have a permit for selling things in the park. Thus begins my life of crime.
The air was humid and close under an overcast sky, and the Italian ice stand on the other side of the walkway did a brisker business than she did. Six hours and three highly satisfied customers later, she'd learned that a) she could still draw and b) it would never pay the rent. The first was more satisfying than it probably should have been, under the circumstances.
It was on a Wednesday, four weeks after Adler left and two days after she drank the last of the coffee left in her kitchen, when Michael wrote again to say the offer was still open. She'd just sold the last of the furniture her father had bought when he moved her out of that crappy studio; it had taken her and the buyer, a young naïve college freshman painfully like a younger version of herself, nearly half an hour to wrestle the armchair down the stairs and onto the back of a pickup. (She'd wondered how much it would cost to move her furniture, when Michael first made the offer two weeks before; that was one problem solved, she thought, staring at her empty bedroom, the pale rectangles on the wall where paintings used to hang and the sleeping bag rolled up in one corner.)
That night she packed two suitcases and four boxes. She'd buy new furniture when she got to Chicago. Once she was working again. Or maybe not; she'd just have to sell it again or leave it behind next time. (But without a mattress where would she hide her cash?)
Neal still called her every day. At least let me try to explain.
She missed Nick Halden; in some ways his lies had cut the worst. More than that, she wished that she wasn't alone in this mess, that they could work through this together. She missed Nick, but she had no idea who this man was who kept leaving her voicemails.
Lying in bed listening to his latest message, staring up at the dusty ceiling fan before turning out the light, she thought that in all of his frantic voicemails Nick had never offered her money. He'd never offered help of any kind, or even suggested they get back together. He only apologized, in great detail, told her he loved her and pleaded for a chance to talk to her.
She could almost imagine there was one person in the world who needed her, more than she needed him.
The next morning she took her sketchpad down to the park, more for something to do than anything else. She sat on that bench for nearly two hours before someone dropped a ten in her pencil case.
She looked up and there he was.
"Neal." She said his name deliberately, wondering if this was the real one.
"Kate." He said hers like a prayer.
"I don't want your charity."
"It's not." He sat on the other end of the bench, slowly, like he was afraid to scare her. He picked up one of her pencils, twisted it slowly in the sharpener and blew the dust off the point. Then he reversed it before holding it out to her, offering a weapon hilt-first. "I want to know what you see when you look at me."
The breeze stirring past her face was unexpectedly cold, shifting away the still, humid air like a current forced up from deeper waters; the sky was growing heavy, threatening blue steel rain.
We'll get it all back, he had said. By lying and stealing?
Some fierce, wounded part of her leapt at the thought, said why shouldn't I?
Maybe she shouldn't be angry at him. Maybe the only way to avoid being conned was to learn how to con better than anyone else. She took the pencil.
She'd drawn him before; they'd drawn each other, sprawled face to face on the carpet in front of the couch. It was practically foreplay; there had always been something erotic about that degree of focus, of concentration on the contours of each other's faces, the details of each other's skin.
After a long silence, broken only by the scratch of pencil on paper and the growl of approaching thunder, he asked, "How are - things?"
She stopped squeezing the pencil before she snapped it. "Oh, you know. Boss skipped town with all my money. FBI tore my place apart thinking I was involved. Oh, and my boyfriend turns out to be an extremely talented bond forger and art thief who's wanted in at least three different countries."
"Sounds like a hell of a month." Half his mouth attempted a smile, uncertain and twisted with regret. "Thanks for that, by the way. Not telling the feds about me."
"Could have been worse." At his raised eyebrows: "Well, he could have been some second-rate bond forger with no talent at all. That would have been embarrassing."
"Yeah, well." A real smile this time, tentative, flickering and then gone. "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet."
"What about you?" she asked. "You find another job yet?"
"Working on a couple things." The park was slowly emptying, wiser people recognizing the signs of the approaching storm. "Screwed the last job up pretty bad."
"By falling in love with the mark?"
"You weren't the mark." The words were hoarse, urgent; for the first time he leaned in toward her, and his hair fell forward over the ear she'd been trying to outline.
"Don't move," she said, reaching out without thinking to push his hair back into place; he froze at her touch, and she let her hand fall slowly. "Seriously. I can't draw you if you won't sit still."
"Kate." His eyes were dark, focused on her with an intensity that felt like falling without a net. "You - us - it wasn't part of the job."
"Don't lie to me."
"I'm not. My partner was pretty pissed about - all this. Said you were a distraction. You can ask him."
So he had a partner? In spite of herself, she was curious. But she made herself concentrate on roughing in the outline of his face, smoothing the paper down when the wind caught at the corners.
"I'm a distraction?"
"You're very distracting." It felt like their familiar banter and God, she missed it, with an ache she'd barely acknowledged.
And she'd forgotten how he could do that, look at her like she was all he could see.
"I have a job offer in Chicago," she said, after another long pause, once she'd finished his eyes and the weight of the silence was too much. "From a friend of Michael's." And she should go; it was the responsible thing to do. A job was waiting for her there, and it was something she could depend on, as much as she could ever depend on anything. Her art wasn't enough to pay the bills, and it was stupid to turn down a rescue when you were drowning.
It didn't feel responsible. It felt like pulling the covers back over her head, like choosing the illusion of safety, of protection, over learning to live in a world where the monsters were real.
Neal watched her hands, with a soft, defeated look, as if he didn't want to miss one second of her continued presence. She looked at the pitiful forty dollars in her pencil case, thought of her two suitcases and four boxes; he was a professional con, and he could probably fake this kind of hopeless adoration. But she couldn't imagine what she still had that he might want, that would make it worth the effort.
She said, "Tell me something that's true."
By now the park was nearly deserted; early afternoon and the sky was already dark. Thunder whispered again, closer, intimate.
"I miss you."
"No, really."
"I'm serious. My partner says he can't work with me moping at him like this."
She asked, knowing it was a bad idea, "What's he working on?"
"He's - well, you told me not to lie to you." Half a grin that she couldn't resist answering, and a helpless little shrug.
"If you told me you'd have to kill me?"
"Oh, please. I'm an art thief, not a super spy."
And she couldn't help but laugh at that, and he laughed with her, and she thought con men were supposed to be slick and suave and smooth and sophisticated. And okay, she'd seen Nick (Neal, dammit) do suave, with Adler's clients, with prospective investors. But never with her. With her he was like a goofy, floppy-haired golden retriever puppy tripping over himself in excitement at her attention. He was as utterly irresistible as any golden retriever puppy, but she'd hardly call him suave.
"What if I wanted to work on it with you?"
She tossed it out, careless, the next volley in a brief flirtation, just to see how he'd respond.
His face went absolutely still, lit from behind by a sudden wild hope that nearly stopped her heart, like bruised yellow light flooding through stormclouds. Replaced in half a second by a terrible uncertainty, wondering if she'd meant it the way he heard it; but he didn't ask, didn't speak, didn't move. For a long moment she didn't think he was breathing.
She laid her hand over his where it rested on the bench; his fingers curled over hers, clasping tight, as they both leaned in until their foreheads touched. She'd rationalize it later in any of a hundred ways, but she knew then, in the space between one heartbeat and the next, that she wasn't going to Chicago.
The rain opened up like an artillery burst, bending the grass and spattering the walkway, soaking their unguarded shoulders; heavy drops fell on her sketchpad, warping his image like a face seen through rippled glass.
***
She gets as far as Des Moines before she finds out. It's hardly even a surprise.
She's sitting on the warped linoleum floor of a 24-hour laundromat, watching the dryer toss her clothes and wondering if the young woman who left hers drying and went across the street for gas is about her size. She unplugged the last washer at the end of the row to charge her laptop, and she's managed to get a spotty wifi signal from the Starbucks next door.
Four more years.
It's three AM, and when the last dryer stops the only sound is the scratchy buzz of the single fluorescent bulb flickering overhead. When she clicks on the headline the connection drops; she beats a fist against the washer beside her, biting back curses as she stabs at the mouse.
The article is sparse on details, after she's reloaded the page four times. It was Burke again; they'd caught Neal at an apartment in Queens. She'd left the bottle there; she wonders if he found it. She wonders what message he read in it, if he thought to look for one (if he had time to look for one).
That he could break out of a maximum security prison with less than two months to plan and no backup is no surprise to anyone who knows him. That he would, with barely three months to go by the time he walked out the front door, is no surprise either.
She knows him. She knows how brilliant he is, how brilliant and how blindingly stupid.
The lot outside is black ice, a frozen stillness that the streetlamps by the sidewalk, sprouting from three-foot-high piles of dirty snow, can't begin to penetrate.
She wants to call Mozzie.
It's an insane impulse; she clenches her fist, nails scraping the inside of her palm, and breathes until it passes. She hasn't caught a glimpse of Fowler in more than two weeks, but she can't imagine he's far behind, and if Mozzie's cover is still intact she won't risk it now.
Mozzie will blame her, she thinks. She's not entirely certain he's wrong.
Neal knows her as well as she knows him; he wouldn't risk waiting until her trail was five months cold. He knows how quickly and thoroughly she can disappear.
She's done it before.
Mozzie can't help her now. Still she wishes desperately she could talk to someone else who comprehends the magnitude of the disaster printed in eight point font in the bottom sidebar of the New York section of the Times. Let him blame her; she'd take it, just to talk to him. For the first time since she left New York she feels completely, utterly alone.
A neon sign blinks from the gas station across the street, promising cigarettes and burnt coffee to all the lost souls out in this bitter Midwestern winter night.
Four more years.
She closes the laptop with a snap, unplugs the cord and slips it in her bag. Her clothes are next; she stops to pull a pair of dryer-warm wool socks over her hands. She could sit here and rage at Neal until sunrise, but she should have expected this. She did expect this.
Neal doesn't think when he's in pain.
And she can hurt him - she has hurt him - like no one else.
Glancing out the front windows at the empty parking lot, she opens the dryer next to hers and grabs a heavy black sweater, pulling it on over her head. Her coat, fastened over it, will hold the heat in for a few minutes at least.
Wrapping a scarf around her head and neck, pulling a wool hat down over it, she shoves the door open and plunges into the frozen night. She walks quickly, past shoulder-high piles of snow forced to edge of the street, burying forlorn scraps of post-holiday evergreen and tinsel, alert for ice on the ground and anyone following. She's no use to Neal, to anyone, if she lets herself get caught.
Half the letters are shorted out on the sign in front of her motel, but it's enough light to show an unmarked van parked some hundred yards up the block.
No light shows from inside the vehicle. It could be nothing. But she hasn't stayed ahead of Fowler this long by taking chances.
Neal would at least leave a note. One of his ridiculous little origami butterflies, or something. And God, she misses him. She remembers the first time the feds got close, Neal and Burke practically teasing each other, and grits her teeth against a wash of fond exasperation and regret.
They'd been so young, then.
She knows how to disappear. Her mind is strangely clear, under the faint stars visible through the city's glare; she's on the move, and they haven't caught her yet. This is what she's good at, and she thinks with a sour twist of guilt that she is more relaxed now, moving through the night when she wants to be sleeping, than she ever was in New York.
She keeps walking toward the bus station, arms hugging her chest against the cold.
***
They'd been lying low at a resort upstate the first time the feds got close, with two stolen paintings they couldn't unload under 24-hour surveillance. Burke didn't have a warrant, but he knew they were there and he knew the paintings were in their suite, so he'd settled in with a not-at-all-conspicuous giant utility van to wait for their move.
She'd been sleepless and irritable by the third night, pacing just out of sight of the window, while Neal treated the whole thing as a game.
"You realize they're not going to drink that," Mozzie said, looking up from his work; he was the only calm one.
Neal hung up the phone, where he'd just instructed a bemused room service to deliver a bottle of very expensive champagne to the utility van. "It's New Year's Eve."
She knew this was his way of coping with the strain, as much as snapping at him was hers. That didn't make it any less annoying, watching him yank Burke's chain because he could.
"And they're on duty." Mozzie shrugged. "It's your money. Well, technically, it's not -"
"Details -"
"And when they get off duty they'll probably ship it off to some evidence lab to see if you left prints on it, or tried to poison them, or something."
Neal caught her hand, pulled her in toward him until their noses touched; a silent apology for the close quarters, for his nerves, for the feds - for all of this. She could hear the distant pop of fireworks starting outside.
"It's the thought that counts," he said to Mozzie, without looking up. "At least we made the effort."
***
The countdown clock in her head runs out at a travel plaza on the highway outside Boulder.
She arrives after ten PM, washes her hair in the restroom sink and sits under the electric hand dryer until someone comes in. At the food court she buys a sticky cinnamon roll and stuffs a generous tip in the cup on the counter, tucks herself into a corner booth and props a newspaper open over her face; the clerk at the register pretends not to notice when she closes her eyes, leaning her head against the wall.
She wakes and it's five minutes till midnight.
He should be getting out today.
Folding the newspaper, she stands abruptly and pulls her gloves on, twists her still-damp hair into a knot. She nods to the clerk before leaving the building, crossing the parking lot to the convenience store by the gas station. Walks past the coffee pot, grabs a beer from the refrigerator case and slips between two truckers who try to grab her ass; one succeeds, and she takes the opportunity to lift his wallet.
She goes outside, making for the edge of the lot where the asphalt runs out into weeds beside the onramp, long grass dead and washed silver-grey under the lights. A line of big rigs purr sleepily, idling beside the diesel pumps, red eyes in the dark. The moon is rising full over the mountains.
He won't see the moon for another four years.
She twists the cap off the bottle, turning to the east and raising a silent toast: we made it through the first four. (And okay, she's stretching the definition of "made it" more than a little, but they're both alive. It's a start.) She drinks slowly, shivering, walking across the grass into the shadows below the highway and almost running into a utility pole in the dark.
When it's empty, she flings the bottle at the base of the pole. Flinches at the sound, a pathetic crunch of glass that's too loud for safety and not loud enough for the hot helpless rage squeezing her lungs. She kicks the pole, twice, hard; then she's on her knees in the grass, pounding her fists against the splintered wood, biting the insides of her cheeks and trying to breathe, trying to force out the sobs choking her without making a sound.
Sometime much later she stands, slipping through shadows alongside the parked trucks. She climbs into the back of the first one with a simple lock and no hazmat symbols, pulls the door shut and falls asleep within minutes.
Bright sunlight wakes her; bright sunlight and sirens.
She blinks and there's narrow strip of shoulder with two patrol cars, six lanes of highway on one side and a guardrail on the other, a steep embankment falling away into tangled brush and dead winter trees beyond.
"If you'll step out of the truck, miss." And there's a silver-haired cop with a gun. Lowering a gun, looking slightly apologetic, like he'd expected a threat and hadn't found one.
"… radioed the Marshals," she hears another cop saying, and thinks, Fowler.
They'd have had cameras at the gas station. As she'd have realized, if she'd been thinking clearly. If she'd had more than six hours' sleep in the last three days. They'd have seen her get in, got her face and the plate number.
Fowler isn't here yet, at least. And the officer in front of her, holstering his gun and offering her a hand to step down from the trailer, clearly feels sorry for her. She's not sure what message was passed from Fowler to the Marshals to the Colorado highway patrol; he sees a girl on her own, confused, cold and exhausted, and hardly capable of giving him any trouble.
She doesn't have to fake the cold and exhausted part. She lets herself stumble a little, climbing down.
"Come on," he says, pulling her arms behind her back. She flexes her wrists as he locks the cuffs in place; he tightens them half-heartedly. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"The hell's going on?" The driver, she assumes, approaching from the other side of the truck; in a leather jacket and a battered ball cap, he's the only one not in uniform. She lets him distract the cops while she works a pin free from her coat sleeve, slides it into the lock and waits to feel the familiar click.
In less than twenty seconds her hands are free, and she's leaping the guardrail and running down the slope, crashing into the brush below.
***
Neal had a buyer lined up with a getaway vehicle on the fifth day. Either that, or he finally got bored with tweaking the feds; he'd bounded into the room after spending all morning in the hotel kitchen, where he'd been flirting with the staff while examining the air ducts.
"We're getting out. Moonrise, tonight."
She raised a skeptical eyebrow. "You clear that with our friends outside?"
"Oh, they'll know soon enough." And he flung open her sketchpad, quick pencil diagramming the kitchen and the grate in the ceiling, the branching path of the ventilation shaft. "I'm going out the front door while they're changing shifts, Moz goes out the back. You black out all the lights and stay away from the windows, wait for my signal."
"Make them think we left already."
He grinned, sharp and bright, nodding at the drawing. "You can get the paintings out through there?"
"I'd like to see them try and stop me."
She sat in the hallway, watching as the bright squares of light on the floor in front of the windows stretched and slanted, elongating and fading with the sunset. Shielding the light from her phone display in the dark as Neal texted her updates, reminders, playful fragments of poetry. Got the truck, be there soon. Don't forget to wrap everything twice.
I'll come to thee by moonlight though hell should bar the way.
He'd left a folded paper cat on the windowsill; she saw it just before she closed the door, ears and tail up, alert.
***
Somewhere west of Eugene, she hitches a lift with a lanky, weathered man in a tanker truck. Three hours later, passing by a diner and a fire station in some town she's never heard of, she abruptly decides she doesn't want to be in the cab with him anymore.
It's nothing she can pinpoint, and she doesn't wait to try. Something in the silence, or the way he looks at her, that didn't ring alarm bells when she got in. The next time they pull up to a stoplight she unlocks her seatbelt and opens the door in one smooth motion, stepping down into the street with a breezy, "Thanks!"
It's the absolute worst sort of little town to be dropped in, too small for her to disappear into a crowd but just large enough to have traffic cameras at that intersection. But she hasn't stayed alive this long by ignoring her instincts.
She can't afford to be this tired. If she'd had any sleep in the past two nights, she might not have gotten on that truck in the first place.
She drops off the grid, picks up a pocket map at the railroad museum just past the courthouse and follows the tracks out of town as the sun sets.
Fowler was right behind her when she crossed into Oregon three days ago. She's running out of cash; worse, she's running out of clean IDs. She has to stop reacting; she has to get far enough ahead she can stop to breathe, and sleep, and think.
She walks all night, flashlight beam picking out the ties, skittering across snow and gravel, bending around dark shadows of trees. It's a freight line, running through twenty miles of what looks like nothing but trees, if the map is right. Two days' walking should get her to North Bend.
She needs space to think clearly and plan her next move. She's been on the run for nearly six months and she's worn and exhausted and heartsick and scared and she's starting to make mistakes she can't afford.
She needs to get a message to Neal.
She has no idea how, and she can't risk it now. But soon. It has to be soon, once she's a little further ahead, once she's put a little more distance between her and Fowler.
Watching the sun rise, she wishes fiercely for her watercolors. She wants to paint the long curve of the tracks, dark metal and wet wood under white snow and brown pine needles, seashell-pink sky arching over tall pines climbing to shade the tracks like a Gothic archway.
Neal doesn't handle being still any better than she does, and he won't sit quietly in prison for four years alone. She has no idea what he might do, now, and she's afraid to find out.
Escape might be the best option at this point; she doesn't know what Fowler wants, or how far he'll go to get it, but if she stays ahead of him long enough he might give up the chase and go after Neal instead. But any future breakout plans have to be coordinated, with a route out of the country in place for both of them ahead of time.
She wonders if she dares try to get in touch with Neal's attorney. He'd done as well as he could for them; she'd never trust him with escape plans, but he might at least be willing to deliver I'm sorry I still love you I'm waiting I'm all right I just have to hide for a while.
They'd at least have to let him see Neal.
She feels the rumble of a train before she hears it, slides down the embankment and puts a thick pine trunk between her and the tracks, settling against the bole. Filling her water bottle with snow, she sets it on a rock in a sunbeam, slanting between pine boughs. Leans her head back against rough bark and waits.
She thinks she could disappear here, swallowed up in the stillness of the majestic trees. The silence is relaxing, enveloping, invites awe and contemplation like the ceiling of a Renaissance church.
She closes her eyes.
When she wakes it's almost noon, and she's not alone.
"Found anything?"
She blinks, shoving to her feet in a whirl of sleep-fogged panic, but it's only a young couple in tie-dye scarves and ripped jeans.
"We're hunting mushrooms," the woman clarifies, at her stunned look. And then, "Are you lost?"
Kate takes a breath, steadies herself, holds up the folded map with a rueful smile. "I've got this."
"You sure you don't need a ride somewhere?" the man asks.
"Where are you headed?"
"Delivering produce to farmers' market stands for the next fifty miles or so," the woman says. "Then we're driving all the way to LA. You're welcome to tag along, if you don't mind riding on the back with the cabbages."
From LA it's two hundred miles to the cache in San Diego. It's a risk, but she'll have to take it; she needs cash, or something she can fence quickly, and she needs a clean passport. After that, twenty miles and a straight run to the border.
Two hours later she's sitting in the bed of a battered pickup, wind tearing at her hair, picking up speed on the way south toward California and the Pacific Coast Highway.
She'll find him. Somehow. She just needs to clear her head long enough to think. She'll find him, and they'll run together, like great hunting cats across the plains, like hawks riding down the wind, glorious in flight. They'll run and keep running, and together nothing will stop them.
***
"You really shouldn't bait them like that."
It had been a long, cobweb-filled crawl through a ventilation duct, but she'd gotten the paintings out just as she said she would. The twenty-yard sprint from the exit to where a stolen delivery truck idled got her heart thumping wildly, but no alarms sounded and she vaulted into the back.
Neal hugged her fiercely with one arm, rapping softly against the wall with the other fist, a signal in iambic pentameter. The pitch of the engine changed as they pulled the doors closed, and the truck started moving.
She laid the paintings carefully inside a crate, turned to see Neal grinning at her. "You're amazing."
She laughed, soft and breathless, adrenaline singing in terrified exhilaration and relief. "Nice of you to notice."
He stepped closer. "You're beautiful."
"I have cobwebs in my hair."
"You're still beautiful."
She threaded one hand through his hair, dragged him in for a kiss that lasted a good deal longer than she'd intended; breaking long enough for air, she said, "I mean it. They're feds. It's not safe."
"Admit it." His hands found her waist, backing her toward the wall; something wild and reckless leapt in his eyes, arcing like a live current between them. "You enjoyed that."
She kissed him again, just to shut him up, blood still pounding in her ears; he hummed against her mouth as she tugged his shirt up, sliding her hands up his back. The phone buzzed.
"As a reminder, we have a delivery to make." Mozzie, in the cab, voice too dry to tell if he was amused. "We unload the stolen property first. Getaway sex later."
"Moz. Please. We're professionals, here." She could see Neal struggling to keep a straight face in the light from the phone display; catching her eye, he mouthed, "I love you."
"Later," she returned silently, through a wide grin.
Mozzie only said, "But of course," before hanging up with a snort, and they both collapsed on the floor laughing.
***
Her own face is the first thing she sees in San Diego.
She'd taken a risk and caught a Greyhound in LA; she'd even managed maybe two hours' sleep between rest stops, though it doesn't seem to have made much difference. Pushing open the door to the terminal building, she catches the bulletin going out over local news on the TV overhead. If you see this woman, please contact law enforcement at once …
He's here.
It's twenty miles to the border and she's tempted to start walking, pull a hat over her face and head south out of town without trying to find a ride. The sun is slipping already, throwing long late afternoon shadows along the sidewalk; if she moves now, and quickly, she might make it before sunrise and sneak across in the dark.
First she needs cash. She can find cash and clean passports and millions of dollars worth of stolen art less than three miles from where she stands, but with Fowler this close behind her she can't risk leading him right to it. Instead she pulls out a pile of cards, scanning the street for an ATM and sorting them into stacks of maybe burned, probably burned and almost definitely burned, trying to think which of the first category has the most money in the account.
She'll find a payphone in Tijuana and call Neal's lawyer; she might have more than one use for him before long. She knows better than to assume Fowler won't follow her across the border, but getting permission from the Mexican government should take some time.
She makes for the first ATM she sees; it's not until she sees the car door opening across the street in the convex mirror that she realizes she's on a side street with only one exit, blocked at the far end by two dumpsters and a fence as tall as she is. Two men in plainclothes are approaching from the other end.
And now she sees Fowler behind her, getting out of the car.
She briefly considers trying to run, jumping the fence; it's high, and no way to tell what's on the other side. She shuffles the cards in her hands; most are old accounts she used while Neal was in Europe. Except one. Purdue is in the definitely burned pile and linked to a nearly empty bank account, but it's an alias Mozzie made for her only last year.
Mozzie will know it's her, if he's looking. And a hit after all this time, after she's gone dark for six months on every name he'd know - he'll recognize this as a distress call.
It's the only card she has left to play, as the car door slams shut behind her. In the seconds she has left, she shoves it into the slot. She's not sure what help she expects from Mozzie, or if this is only a flare sent up to mark where she disappeared.
She looks up into the camera as she punches in the PIN, waits for the name to appear on the screen.
Purdue. Perdu.
Lost.
How appropriate.
A hand grips her shoulder. "Ms. Moreau."
Her throat is too dry to swallow, her heart is battering like a hummingbird trapped behind her ribcage and a sudden sick drop in her stomach says you're not as good as you thought you were, says no help is coming. Still she checks her warped reflection in that mirror, pauses a beat before turning; she's worn thin and exhausted, she's slept in her clothes for a straight week and she hasn't had a proper shower in nearly as long. But she'll be damned if she'll let this man see she's afraid.
"Agent Fowler."
"You'll need to come with us."
