The deputy sheriff arrived in less than five minutes. Even with such an admirable response time, there was little to see. A broken rail on the staircase, some blood on the carpet of the second-floor landing. One very distraught innkeeper.
Karounos said, “They are violent, I tell you. One of them had a gun!”
“Any shots fired?”
“No, I don’t think so. But I haven’t checked the rooms.”
“Where did they all go?” the deputy asked.
“The one from the second floor, the crazy one — he ran toward the back door. The other two staggered out front together and got into a truck.”
“Can you describe the vehicle?”
Demetri Karounos tried. Something white or perhaps gray, he said. A big SUV.
The deputy frowned and stepped outside, ostensibly to see if any of the perpetrators were loitering in the parking lot. He keyed the microphone mounted on his chest, and began talking to the dispatcher.
When Karounos came outside a minute later, what he heard was, “I dunno, some kind of altercation. Doesn’t sound too serious. I’ll see if I can get the owner to avoid an official complaint…”
The Tahoe sped south on a secondary road, the Toyota locked in trail. No one had spoken since leaving the Calais town limits.
The commander was in back, bruised but functional. His second in command was next to him — he’d regained consciousness, but his bloody head lolled against the window and his eyes remained glassy. The man in the front passenger seat turned and looked at the backpack their target had dropped — the commander had snatched it up in the course of a rushed egress.
The man in front exchanged a look with his commander, then pulled the backpack onto the center console and yanked the zipper open. Everyone gaped at the wads of cash.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed, rifling through the stacks. “There’s gotta be close to a million bucks here. Where did he get that?”
Of the four men in the car, three still had their wits about them. The driver spoke for everyone when he said, “I don’t know who this guy is … but I’m done thinking he’s some ordinary Coastie.”
21
UBER REQUEST SENT
INTERSECTION LINCOLN AVENUE/SPRING STREET
CALAIS, MAINE
DESTINATION MACHIAS, MAINE
DeBolt stood away from the curb as he waited for his ride. He’d seen a small-town cab in the distance, and that set the idea of an Uber call into his head. He’d made the request on the fly, thinking it wouldn’t work — Uber only dispatched cars for people with active accounts. He had barely caught his breath when the response came:
UBER CONFIRMATION
PRESENT LOCATION TO MACHIAS, MAINE
FARE ESTIMATE $35 USD
DRIVER 2 MINUTES AWAY
So apparently he did have an account. Somewhere, in some name.
He was hopeful the immediate threat was gone, but all the same DeBolt kept in the shadow of a large maple tree. He’d kept tracking the Tahoe, and minutes ago had actually seen it speed past on Route 1 in the distance, no more than a white flash from where he stood — and precisely where the map in his head said it would be. It was an overwhelming tactical advantage — knowing your enemy’s position in real time. Comforting as that was, he kept out of sight as best he could until a Volkswagen Golf arrived three minutes later. A young woman with purple hair was at the wheel.
“Going to Machias?” she asked as he got into the backseat.
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Machias, Maine, was thirty miles south. DeBolt had plucked the town from the map in his head because the most direct route there looked isolated, and because it looked big enough to offer transportation options going forward. He would have preferred Bangor, but that was nearly a hundred miles south. He had no idea if Uber would take him that far, but more critically, it would mean uploading a destination two hours before his arrival. His greatest advantage, DeBolt reasoned, was unpredictability.
The driver kept to herself, and he was happy to do the same. They followed a narrow road through a tunnel of leafless trees that had probably been stunning a month ago, but now appeared lifeless and gray, their branches shivering under chill autumn gusts. The road was virtually devoid of traffic, and other than an occasional farmhouse he saw few signs of life. He’d made a good choice, in both using Uber and selecting a route. Any sense of victory, however, was dimmed by the uncertainty that lay ahead.
DeBolt massaged a new bruise on his shin — acquired when his legs had been chopped out from under him. In that same moment he’d dropped the backpack. He felt no remorse about losing the money. He’d never even bothered to count it, and it was dirty in the first place. The cash was no more than a tool, a necessity to keep moving forward.
Ensuring the driver’s eyes were on the road, he pulled out the wads of bills he’d stuffed into his pockets, and took the time to count a more manageable sum. Fourteen thousand five hundred dollars. He folded the bills, more carefully this time, and put them back, thankful he’d had the foresight to separate a stash. Maybe I do have a talent other than jumping out of helicopters, he thought.
He sat back and closed his eyes. The window next to him was cracked open and fresh air buffeted in through the gap, an evergreen scent that belied the forest’s lifeless appearance. He was somewhere in a remote bend of eastern Maine, and predictably he’d lost his connection. The Tahoe had long ago dropped from his private radar. DeBolt didn’t want to put too much trust in that anyway — his pursuers would at some point acquire a new vehicle, something he couldn’t track. The road was smooth, the air cool, and with his eyes still closed his thoughts drifted.
His makeshift meditation lasted ten minutes, at which point, without even a request, a map flashed into view. It startled DeBolt — would he ever get used to this? — and for a time he didn’t understand what he was seeing. The map was full of red dots, the majority concentrated in two clusters. Only when he discerned that one group was centered on Cape Split did he realize what he was looking at: the results of his search last night for a track on Joan Chandler’s phone. Arriving ten hours after his request.
Why the delay? he wondered in frustration. For all his capabilities, he had little understanding of how things worked, how the information was being acquired and fed. But he had what he wanted — a record of the movements of Joan Chandler’s cell phone.
He had requested two months of data, but the result framed in his vision was clearly labeled as covering the last thirty days. No matter. He had a pictorial display of where she’d been in the weeks before he had ended up at her cottage. Not for the first time, it struck DeBolt that the data he was receiving was eminently user-friendly. Unlike some interfaces, it came presented in a format that was easily deciphered and direct, implying that the system was designed with a certain type of user in mind. A distinctly tactical approach.
As expected, the largest concentration of hits on Chandler’s phone had occurred near the cabin on Cape Split, with a few scattered nearby — travel for groceries, clothing, undoubtedly a liquor store. A secondhand wetsuit. Of more interest to DeBolt was a second cluster of dots, these twenty-five miles west near a place called Beddington. Oddly, this group appeared to be in a remote district, a place where lakes and forest predominated. With some trial and error he was able to focus on individual hits, and he acquired what appeared to be time and date stamps for a few. Each predated October eighteenth, the day he had awakened in the cottage by the sea.
There could be no doubt. This second grouping identified the place where she had worked. But was it also where his nightmare had begun? Where his surgery had been performed? It seemed an implausible setting. What kind of clinic was situated in the middle of nowhere? What kind indeed.