🌁 chapter twenty-three: whatever remains [let me be your ghost]

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” -Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

-Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of the Four

previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve | chapter thirteen | chapter fourteen | chapter fifteen | chapter sixteen | chapter seventeen | chapter eighteen | chapter nineteen | chapter twenty | chapter twenty-one | chapter twenty-two

Author’s note: Heads up: this one’s 18+, no minors beyond this point, please. If you’re under 18, at work, or related to me — this is your stopping point.

…

I came out of the high desert in the back of a produce truck, between pallets of romaine, colder than I have ever been in my life and freer, and by the time the driver stopped for diesel outside Mojave, my face was on the television bolted above the register.

PERSON OF INTEREST, the chyron said, over the tabloid photo—of course that one, the party, his hand at my waist, my traitor laugh—SOUGHT IN CONNECTION WITH ONGOING FEDERAL INVESTIGATION. The anchor pronounced my name correctly. Nine years of professional nonexistence, and I debuted to the nation as a fugitive with good lighting.

That was fast. Overnight-fast. Media blitzes were engineered—and there was one person in this story with a documented gift for putting the right narrative through the right channels at inhuman speed, one person who had already test-driven the frame the writer did it on a prison island in front of homicide, and I stood in a truck-stop aisle in a stolen Kevlar vest under a farm coat, watching him hunt me through every screen in America without leaving his desk.

The trucker bought my story—runaway wife, bad husband, the oldest cover in the West and the only one nobody questions—and took me as far as Bakersfield out of a chivalry I intend to believe in for the rest of my life.

From a gas station older than area codes, on the last pay phone in California, I called the only number on earth that lives in my body instead of a device.

Two rings.

“Cracked Spine,” said Tabur, at two in the morning, because he kept abysmal hours for a bookstore that never needed to be open that late, except perhaps because he needed to be there.

“It’s me.”

A pause the length of a heartbeat. Then, unsurprised, easy, the desert absorbing weather, “Been holding a package for you, friend. Real popular lady lately. Some suits came by the shop yesterday asking after my customer base, and I developed this terrible memory, it’s a tragedy at my age.” The sound of him standing up, keys already jingling. “Where?”

Not what happened? Not is it true, what they’re saying? Just—where? I felt my heart warm at another piece of kindness today.

I gave him a crossroads. He drove five hours with the package in a saddle blanket, and I want the record to show that the man who came for me when the whole federal government was advertising my face was a used-bookstore cowboy who’d known me since the hallways of our high school, back when I was an Ohio expat and neither of us was anybody, and that when he found me shivering behind a closed fruit stand at dawn he looked me over once—vest, farm coat, scalp blood—handed me a thermos of black coffee, and said, “You look like you’ve got a story to tell.”

“Tabur—what I’m in the middle of—”

“Is your story.” He shrugged, cowboy-simple, and put the padded envelope in my hands—my own block letters, HOLD FOR L—and with it a second, smaller thing—my grandfather’s brass lighter, which I’d left on a mailbox ledge outside Gilroy in another life. “You mailed this too, genius. Loose, no padding. Rattled the whole envelope.” He watched me hold it, and something old passed over his face, the kid from my hometown looking out. “Whatever it is, Lola—go finish it. And then come home and tell me the whole thing over darts, ‘cause I have been reading you sideways for two years and I’d like the actual book this time.”

“You’ll be in the acknowledgments,” I said, and my voice broke on it, and he pretended not to hear that, which is the whole definition of a true friend.

…

Eze found me because I let one crack of light out, and only one.

There is a classified island whose control room sees everything, and there is a man wired to its every movement, discharged against medical advice, who I had to assume was tearing the western hemisphere apart—and there was no channel to him that the machine couldn’t hear. Except one. The machine read signals. It had never once read shelves.

So I did the only thing I had left, the thing that was ours—I called The Cracked Spine back from a burner phone and had Tabur list a book for sale, online, in the shop’s dusty little inventory system that maybe eleven humans alive have ever browsed. Writing for Dummies. Note the condition line, I told him, and he read it back to me deadpan, “Water damage. Smells like jazz. Inquire at the Padre Motel, Bakersfield, ask for the author.”

If Eze was looking—and he would be looking with the world’s eyes—somewhere in the terrible engine of Babylon, a crawler was hoovering every database on earth for anomalies with my fingerprints. A used bookstore in Arizona listing that book, that title, the day after my face went national, was a flare only two people alive could read.

He knocked on the door of room 14 at eleven the next night.

I know it was him before the door because the knock was the boxing rhythm—thump, thump-thump, thump—and then he was inside and the door was shut and neither of us said anything for a long time, because there was nothing in either language we shared, English or the other one, that fit. He looked like hell. Gray around the edges, thinner, moving carefully around the poison’s wake, this man who had been dying on a bedroom floor five days ago and had discharged himself into a manhunt. His hands did the inventory—my face, the scalp cut, my shoulders—and mine did mine—his pulse, wrist then throat, the actual green of his eyes—and the reunion happened the way ours would—two field medics checking each other for damage, furious, wordless, and then his forehead came down against mine and stayed, and we breathed there in a motel that smelled of bleach and old cigarettes like it was the sea air of Babylon.

“You were supposed to stay in the hospital,” I said, unsteady.

“You were supposed to be unfindable. A book listing, Lola.” His laugh came out cracked. “The FBI’s people are chasing your face through nine states. I found you through a bookstore’s condition notes.” His thumb traced my cheekbone once. “Nobody on earth would have caught it but me.”

“That was the whole point of it.”

“I know.” Quiet. Fierce. “I guess I have to give that book a read now, don’t I?”

And then the space between us stopped existing.