23

During her stay in Greensboro, Blue lost count of all the restaurants where she applied for a job, including the cheap diner where she ate breakfast every day. Eight of the places said they were looking for immediate help. Two said to come back the following Monday.

Emboldened by her success, Blue returned to the motel and changed clothes for the evening: ripped jeans, white T-shirt, and a green denim jacket. She would never have gone out by herself in Chapel Hill or Durham. This was a new start for her. As far as anyone in Greensboro knew, she was a budding filmmaker.

Camera tucked safely into her bag, Blue stuck twenty dollars in her pocket and left the motel. It was 8:30 p.m. Crisp. Dark. A street full of shadows.

Nervous at how many sketchy people were idling by her motel, pimps and pushers and addicts, she set her jaw and strode forward, clutching her bag tight, daring anyone to challenge her.

Blue returned to the popular district unmolested and relaxed, basking in the vibrant culture. She browsed the narrow shelves of the local bookstore for a few minutes, enjoying the comics and the pulpy smell of books. Feeling better about her money situation, she had a burger and fries at a diner, followed by a chocolate latte at a place advertising “coffee and libations.” People glanced at her camera when she set it on the table, causing her to preen.

After browsing the bulletin board for a room to rent, fantasizing about sharing a refurbished loft with fellow artists, she left the café and began shooting the city, emulating the professional filmmakers she had seen in documentaries and on YouTube videos: kneeling for a better angle at a street corner, jumping to stand on benches, backpedaling from a crowd of pedestrians, capturing the graffiti scrawled on the side of a train as it passed in the moonlight.

Once all the businesses had closed and the people cleared out, she started toward her motel, as pleased with herself as she had ever been. When she was a block away, she noticed a young Latino wearing a black down jacket, standing on the corner near the Piedmont Inn. He watched her approach and looked down at his cell phone. Then he stared at her again, more intently than before.

As if matching a face to a photo.

Blue stopped walking and noticed the colors on the bandana tied around his left ankle. Gang colors.

Los Viburos colors.

Blue turned and fled.

Behind her, she heard the gang member cursing in Spanish as he gave chase, and Blue had a surge of adrenaline that scooped out a pit in her stomach and made her feel as light as a balloon, except this balloon had arms and legs pumping furiously as she ran. For the first few moments, she thought she could outrun Usain Bolt.

Whipping left at an intersection and sprinting twenty yards down another empty street, she risked a glance back and saw the Latino rounding the corner, stopping to peer in both directions. He noticed her and started running again.

Blue didn’t recognize the guy chasing her, but Cobra must have known she was gone. She guessed the assassin had gone to the trailer park to look for her that morning and put the word out when he didn’t find her. Her stupid mother had probably told him she had skipped town.

Was there a bounty on her head? Dead or alive? Delivered in the back of a trunk or the bottom of a canal ?

She didn’t want to find out.

A few quick glances over her shoulder revealed that her pursuer was medium height and stocky. She was faster, barely, but maybe he had more stamina. When he had surprised her at the corner, she had run back toward the nice part of town, since it was the only area she knew. Yet even if she managed to double back to her hotel, they would just break inside or wait for her to leave.

Blue scanned her surroundings as she ran, desperate for a place to hide. She reached the corner of Elm and West McGee, hoping to see a pedestrian or two, but everyone had gone home for the night.

A fire escape caught her attention, followed by a van she could hide under. Both were too obvious. To her left, after the shops, the street spilled into the high-rise district. Nothing but wide streets and empty sidewalks in that direction. To her right, she saw darkness and the stultified shuffle of the homeless, the unforgiving bowels of the city.

Directly ahead, a block away, the road led through an underpass. She couldn’t see beyond it and didn’t want to get stuck inside. For all she knew, a dozen gang members were waiting on the other side of that tunnel.

She had no time to decide. Her choices were poor. On impulse, she darted toward the underpass, then turned left just before she reached it, at the next block. She swallowed as the scenery took a turn for the worse. Addicts and homeless men prowled the street ahead, zombies of the night waiting for a warm body to wander into their midst. They would give her up in a heartbeat. After debating slipping over a low brick wall and hiding on the patio of a brewery, she eyed the embankment to her right. A grassy slope led up to a set of train tracks that crossed over the underpass.

The embankment intrigued her. Whatever was up there, if anything, was invisible from the road. It meant she would no longer have the chance to run into more people or even a cop, but she had lost hope in that. Greensboro had died on the vine after the shops had closed.

With a quick glance to make sure her pursuer couldn’t see her, she bit her lip and raced up the embankment, slipping in the mud and wet grass, planting her palms on the slope as she scurried up on all fours, terrified someone on the street would yell at her and alert the gang member.

At the top of the slope, she pushed through a low thicket with a homeless camp hidden inside: a few pairs of old shoes, empty bottles, and a filthy blanket that smelled like urine. Thank God it was deserted. After emerging from the copse of undergrowth, she clambered over two sets of railroad tracks, one of which led to the underpass, before pausing to absorb her surroundings.

What she saw caused a shiver of unease to whisk through her.

Three more sets of tracks curved into the darkness opposite the underpass. Two of them dead-ended not far from where she stood, as if chopped up long ago. On the far side of the tracks, a flat plain filled with gravel extended for a few hundred yards, ending at the back of a line of buildings. It was hard to tell in the moonlight, but they looked like warehouses.

She had stumbled onto some sort of nether world forgotten by the city below, an abandoned terminus of roads and civilization. Isolated, deserted, eerie.

The kind of place people went to disappear.

A brisk wind cut through her coat. She felt the chalky taste of gravel on her tongue. She debated crossing over the underpass and slipping back down the embankment, but that would expose her to view. She looked to her left and saw nothing but tracks and gravel. Too open. Behind her, in the distance, a handful of skyscrapers rose like giant candles in the darkness.

Someone grunted at the bottom of the embankment. Without thinking, Blue dashed across the tracks and fled across the gravel plain, away from the overpass. She had to find a place to hide before her pursuer reached higher ground.

Puddles of water pockmarked the gravel. An abandoned railcar emerged in the darkness. She eyed an old propane tank, a mound of silt, and the outline of a station house in the distance. As the rustling on the embankment grew louder, she noticed a cement platform off to her right, about fifty feet away.

The railcar was too obvious, the old station house too far away. She veered toward the platform, searching desperately for a place to hide. She could make a dash for the buildings on the other side of the gravel plain, but she would definitely be seen, and then it was a footrace with no clear destination. Her pursuer would probably just shoot her in the back.

About three feet high and hemmed in by railroad ties, the cement platform extended for a hundred feet on either side of her, parallel to the tracks. What in the world was its purpose ? She began to lose hope when she saw a square of blackness at the base of the platform, deeper than the night, almost hidden inside a thicket of weeds and low shrubs.

Thorny branches clawed her face and hands as she fought through the undergrowth to view the hole. A square had been cut out of the cement, two feet by two feet. Just enough to squeeze through. She peered inside and saw a pool of filthy water that had collected at the bottom of the opening.

Footsteps crunched on gravel behind her. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed nothing. She still had time to act. Left with little choice, Blue pushed deeper into the thicket, wondering if she could squat where she was and stay hidden.

No. She had to take this all the way. With a shudder, she squeezed into the hole, alarmed to find that the freezing water at the bottom was more than a foot deep. With a shudder, she squatted and wrapped her knees with her hands, recoiling as the plastic baggies and urban scum floating in the water brushed against her. She tried not to think about the gross things that might live at the bottom.

As the footsteps drew closer, Blue huddled alone in the hole, terrified of being discovered, her shoes and jeans already soaked through, so cold she had to bite down to keep her teeth from chattering. She tried to think of a movie to help her deal with the situation, but no fictional world she summoned gave her any comfort.

Even the movies, she supposed, had their limits.