In a moment, we were moving again. Annalise stood at Maria’s shoulder, telling her where to go.
I hobbled down the aisle to the back of the bus, where I found a mini-fridge nestled among bags of chips, crackers, and candies. In the fridge were the tiniest bottles of water I’d ever seen and a bin full of hard-boiled eggs. They were already peeled, and I began cramming them down my throat. My knee began to improve, little by little.
Of course, the bloody handprint from the woman in overalls was still on the side of my face. I snatched a polyester scarf off one of the seats—it smelled like lilac and spoiled milk—and used it to wipe my face clean.
“Keep eating,” Annalise said, joining me. “I need you ready to run when we catch up to these assholes.”
“Boss, this wasn’t my blood.”
“So what, Ray?”
“Some got into my mouth. Accidentally.”
“Shut up.”
“Boss…”
“Shut the fuck up, Ray. This isn’t the time. In fact, it will never be time for that conversation. I got nothing to say to you that you don’t already know. Not one fucking thing.”
One of the most important rules of the Twenty Palace Society popped into my head. I could hear it again, right now, in Catherine Little’s voice.
No feeding the monsters.
Fuck this. I crammed one smooth white egg into my mouth after another without sating my hunger. I didn’t know where these thoughts would lead me, and I wasn’t willing to take that path. Fuck this. Whatever happened, I was not going to cross that line again, under any circumstances.
I crammed the last of the stolen eggs into my stomach, idly wondering where Catherine Little was living now—assuming she was still alive—and if she was happy. I would probably never know, and I figured she would want it that way.
“There,” Annalise said from the front of the bus. I hurried to join them. My knee wasn’t completely healed, but it was close enough to run on.
We were on a narrow asphalt strip. On our left was a high chain link fence with barbed coils mounted on top. On the right was a dry, scrabbly lot. A plane passed over us, loud enough to rattle our teeth.
Up ahead I saw a black SUV pulling into a secure entryway. There was a bullet hole in the back panel and a slot cut into the back windshield. I couldn’t see anything inside. I hadn’t expected to catch up to them, not in a tour bus, but California traffic hated everyone, good or bad.
“That’s our boy?” Maria asked.
“It is.”
“Want me to ram our way through?”
The question startled me. The gates had men on either side, concrete pylons that only a dump truck could smash through, and retractable road spikes. Maria had to have seen all that too, but I guess she was still pissed about the gunfight and wanted to play at being a wrecking ball.
“No,” I said. “We’d end up inside the airport but only after flying through the windshield and bouncing off the tarmac. Drive alongside instead. I want to see where this bastard is going.”
“Copy that.”
So, we trailed the SUV from the other side of the fence. The chain link had strips of green plastic through it to offer some concealment, but from a moving vehicle, what we could see though the gaps all flowed together like a fucked-up film projector. We watched it slowly make its way around the perimeter.
Annalise leaned forward, like a sprinter at the start of a race. “Think they’ve spotted us?”
“If they had, one of them would shoot at our tires.”
“I’m staying in their blind spot,” Maria said. Their side mirrors will show what’s behind them, but as long as I’m between four and five o’clock, I’ll be out of their normal field of vision. Besides, a big charter bus like this is common enough at airports. Maybe not on this road, but there’s no reason— Whoops, there they go.”
The SUV had swerved left, away from us. “Stop against the fence,” Annalise said. Maria jumped the little curb, braked, then opened the side door.
In that moment, I was worried about her. “If the cops ask, just say—”
“I don’t talk to cops,” she said. “Go get ’em.”
Annalise gripped the top of the door and used it to climb onto the roof of the bus. I followed, and we both leaped over the barbed coils. Pain shot through my knee when I landed and rolled, but I sprinted after Annalise anyway, who was already running after our enemy. I didn’t have to limp too much.
Behind me, I heard the bus’s brakes release and the engine rumble as it pulled away.
We ran together through a pair of hangars, both painted an ugly almost-white and both decorated with corporate logos that I didn’t recognize. Annalise paused a moment when she came out between them, then started running to the right.
I lumbered after her, only catching up ten seconds later.
At which point it was already over.
Annalise had already thrown one of Serrac’s men to the ground. A second—moving faster than any human should—lunged at her with a long knife, which she slapped out of his hand, then threw him onto his partner. A moment later, a bonfire of green flames erupted, engulfing the three of them.
Luckily, she was more than a dozen yards away from the jet, because I had no idea how her magical fire would interact with jet fuel, and I was sure she did not want to find out. I’d seen Annalise after she’d been burned to a crisp, and it wasn’t pretty. Jet fuel would be worse.
Friend Two was all the way out of the hangar, and its engines were already going. It was smaller than I expected but not small, and some idiot thought it would be cool to paint stripes down the side, as though racing stripes would make it go faster. These were in the blue, white, and gold of FriendShip, and there was a stylized three-masted sailing ship on the tail.
They were getting that plane ready for takeoff in a hurry.
I couldn’t imagine what bullshit they had to spin to convince the pilots and the tower to get them a space on the runway so quickly, but they had the bullshit and the power to make it stick.
A man in coveralls that matched Grant’s pulled a rolling staircase away from the plane, the wheels rattling on the tarmac, and the jet’s engines began to roar.
Annalise looked up at the jet and put her hands on her hips. I’d seen her tear metal in the past, but for some reason she was hesitating. It could have been the fuel, I guess, but…
The SUV was sitting beside the entrance to the hangar, and I ran to it. The gunmen had left the keys inside. I climbed inside and started the engine.
On TV, it’s pretty common to see a car chase a plane on a runway. The plane built speed, the car maneuvered in front of it, and all that was supposed to look exciting. Honestly, I always figured it was more dangerous to do than interesting to watch, but it didn’t matter to me, because nothing like that happened now. The jet crept toward the runway at, maybe, half a mile an hour, building speed so slowly that it didn’t deserve to be called acceleration. The SUV, on the other hand, roared to a perfectly reasonable thirty miles an hour for the few seconds it took me to circumvent the jet’s wing and jam the brakes to a halt right under the cockpit.
The jet was going nowhere. I climbed out, taking the key with me. Annalise was already retrieving the rolling stairs. The engines powered down while she nestled the upper landing at the exit door.
Silence. No one came out. Annalise noticed the way I was looking at her, and said, “One of this fucker’s jets has already taken off, and we have no idea where it’s going. Someone on this plane is going to tell us, and then they’re going to give us a nice, friendly ride so we can catch up. So, let’s leave this one intact.”
That made sense, but I didn’t have a lot of faith we could pull it off. Every time we’d clashed with Hardy or his assholes, the area looked like it had been carpet-bombed. Hell, we’d collapsed a whole building just… I tried to figure out how long it had been since we’d run from the predator in Serrac’s office, but it felt like yesterday and last year at the same time.
But if these guys were going to wait us out, we were going to have to deal with the cops again. I jogged over to the SUV and opened the door. There were no guns lying around for me to pick up, but I did find one in the glove compartment. It was a little revolver, only five chambers, and it was as shiny as a new toy.
I fired two shots into the air. That caught the pilot’s attention, and they leaned forward to look down at me. One had a mic to his face, and I assumed he was telling the tower to send help. Oh, well. I gestured for them to get out, then aimed the gun at the wing.
The wings held the fuel tanks, and while a bullet wouldn’t have caused a huge explosive fire, it would have leaked fuel all over the ground. Which would have let me start a huge explosive fire.
The pilot and copilot took off their headsets and moved back out of sight.
I tossed the gun away and rejoined Annalise. They took longer than they should have, presumably because they were chatting with Lauren Woo.
When the door finally opened, the sirens were loud enough to hear over the whine of the jet. Only the pilot stepped out. He had Fun Uncle energy to him, with long silver hair and a dangling earring in his left ear. He held up both hands as though imploring us not to shoot him.
“It’s too late,” he said, yelling over the sound of the engines as they slowed. “There’s no way this kidnapping can work. If you—”
“Kidnapping?” I shouted, “You fucking moron, you’re helping a murderer flee the country. That makes you an accessory.”
The pilot blinked at me in the midmorning sun, then took a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his face. “Murderer? Who did she kill?”
“Evelyn Hardy.” By the shock in his expression, I knew he recognized the name. “If you fly her out of here, you’ll be the one who—”
“Look, I just fly the jet. I go where I’m told and I don’t ask questions.”
The sirens were louder now. The copilot stuck his head out the door, forcing the pilot to move closer to the stairs, and then Lauren Woo herself leaned into the daylight, squinting at the harsh sun.
The pilot now found himself crowded onto the top stair, with the copilot directly above him on the top stair. And as Lauren Woo made her way onto the platform, she gently led another person into the light.
She was three inches taller than Woo and had the same eyes and jawline. She was wearing a white robe over that green medical-style shirt I’d seen in hospital TV shows. I saw gray hairs and care lines on her face and thought she was Woo’s mother, but no. She was thin and tired, but with a second glance I realized that she was actually quite young—maybe still a teenager—and that her hair was not just gray but brittle, and her eyes were dark and pouchy from sickness.
This was someone important to Lauren Woo, and she was dying.
No wonder Woo had stuck by a knob of uncooked dough like Milton Hardy. She was all in because she wanted to save her sister’s life.
Then I looked at Lauren Woo’s expression, and it was as if I could read her mind. I knew exactly what was going to happen next.
“Boss,” I said, “she’s going to do it here.”