Michelle leaned over and opened her purse. Felt around for the two iPhones and the signal-blocking bags.
“Well… you could always just take a couple of days,” she said, as she tucked the phones into the bags. When she straightened up, she had a lipstick in her hand. “Maybe… get away someplace where you can really have time to think about things.”
Someplace out of the country, preferably.
“Yeah.” Caitlin sat up straighter. “You know what, maybe I’ll go to the condo in San Diego for the rest of the weekend, fly home on Monday. Come up with some kind of a public statement. I’m not going to change my mind. I just need to figure out what I’m going to say and how I’m going to approach this.” She took a healthy slug of her rioja. “And steel myself for this confrontation with the board. It’s going to be ugly.”
San Diego wasn’t nearly far enough.
“You sure you wouldn’t rather go to… I don’t know, Maui?” She smiled and lifted her eyebrows, like it was a joke. One she hoped Caitlin might take seriously.
Caitlin snorted. “Wouldn’t I, though? Maybe after I drop this little bomb.” She pushed her plate aside. “Anyway, I can drive myself down. No need for you to come along if you need to get back to Houston.”
“Oh, no, I don’t have anything going on,” Michelle said quickly. “I can drive us. And I can be close by in case… you need anything.”
Caitlin smiled. One of her real ones.
“Thanks, Michelle. I really appreciate that. To tell you the truth, it’ll be nice to have someone in my corner while I work through all of this.”
“I’ll email the office and tell them you won’t be back till Tuesday. That way you won’t get drawn into a conversation you’re not ready to have. In the meantime…” Michelle smiled. “Maybe you should just turn off your phone.”
“Maybe I will,” Caitlin said, smiling back.
They drove back to their hotel. It was close enough to rush hour that Caitlin wanted to wait a while to make the drive-“Since we have the rooms anyway. I’m beat, hon. I want to go get a massage and fall asleep on the table.”
“Sounds good,” Michelle said, though she didn’t think it did. Even if she kept her phones off for the trip, even if Caitlin actually had powered hers down, there were so many other ways Gary could be tracking them, and the longer they stayed in one place, the more time Gary had to set up and change whatever plans he’d made to adapt to the new situation.
She went back up to her room. Her shoulders ached. Maybe she’d lie down. Maybe she’d go get a massage.
Christ, why am I doing this? she thought. It was stupid. She didn’t know how she could protect Caitlin. She didn’t have a plan. Except to try to sit Caitlin down and tell her an impossible story, show her Danny’s logbook, and if Caitlin did believe her? Then what?
She took her phones out of the signal-blocking bags, plugged them both in and flopped down on the bed. She was so fucking tired, and there was just no end to it.
I should take the passport, the money and go, she thought. She wasn’t sure to where. Maybe someplace in Asia or Africa. Somewhere off the grid.
Was there any such thing as off the grid any more? Timbuktu? Outer Mongolia?
She was dozing when her Emily phone rang. The default Marimba that she used for unknown callers.
She bolted out of bed and grabbed the phone.
“Em? It’s me.”
“Danny?”
“Yeah.”
“Are you… are you out?”
“Yeah.” His voice caught. “I am.”
“Oh thank god,” she said in a rush. “Where are you?”
A shaky laugh. “Beautiful San Angelo, Texas.”
“Are you… is this a good number?”
“Yeah.”
“Let me call you back.”
She disconnected and started to cry. “Not now,” she muttered. She jotted down the number from her received calls, wiped her eyes, blew her nose and grabbed her last burner phone.
In the bathroom, she turned on the shower, full blast.
“Hey.”
“We shouldn’t talk too long,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“California. Orange County.”
“Do you know… why did I get out-?”
“I went home and got the book. I sent a copy to Sam. I didn’t know what else to do.”
A moment of silence on the other end.
“Em, why didn’t you just go? I wanted you to take the money and the passport, and just…”
“Am I supposed to be a fucking mind reader?” she snapped. “And run… run where? What kind of life was I supposed to make for myself? If I have to live this way, I don’t want to do it alone. Unless you’re sick of me, and if that’s the case, let’s table it for now, and figure out what we’re going to do to get out of this first.”
A deep chuckle. “I told you I thought you could kick my ass.”
The bathroom was steaming up from the running shower. She hated wasting water during a drought, and she was crying again.
“Aren’t I allowed to care about you?” she asked.
“You’re allowed. I’m just not the best investment you could’ve made.”
“Better than my last one,” she said.
“We need to pop smoke, get some distance between us and this shit storm. There’s an expiration date on what my logbook’s going to buy us.”
“Why?” she asked. “I don’t understand. Can’t we hold it over them? Say we’ll send it out if they don’t leave us alone?”
He made a noise that was something between a laugh and a sigh. “There’s stuff in that book that’s pretty embarrassing. They’re not going to want people talking about it. But it’s all hard to prove, and if it does get out? They’ll swamp it in a tide of shit. They’ll smear me-and let’s face it, that ain’t too hard to do.”
She sat down hard on the toilet. She realized that she’d thought of the logbook as a nearly magical object, something dangerous and powerful that could solve their problems if it didn’t get them killed.
If it wasn’t all that…
“Why did Sam get you out, then?”
“He looked at the options and figured getting me out was less risk and hassle than dealing with the flak from that logbook.”
So she’d been right in her evaluation of Sam’s character, at least.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We just go far enough away that we’re not worth the trouble for them to fuck with us. We don’t make any more noise, they’ll most likely leave us alone. But if someone like Gary decides he wants to take a shot while we’re in range? We’re on our own.”
“Okay.” She thought about it. “Can you get to San Diego?”
“I have a buddy in Dallas with an SR20. Cute little bird, comes with its own parachute, which given this guy’s flying chops is a good thing… Once he picks me up, we could get to San Diego in about nine hours from here. We’d have to stop once to refuel.”
“When can he pick you up?”
“Don’t know. Haven’t asked him yet.”
“Can you trust him?”
He chuckled. “I can pay him. If he fucks us over later, so what? All we need is a little time. We go to Tijuana International and fly out with our new passports.”
“I don’t know if I can get to San Diego without being followed,” she said. “I’m going to be with Caitlin.”
“Caitlin?”
“The woman I’ve been working for.”
“I’ll call you when I have an ETA. You ditch her when you can.”
“I’ll try,” she said. “It’s complicated.”
“Do the best you can do. If you need me to, I’ll come to you. Just don’t use the new passport unless you absolutely have to. Those are the ones we use to get some distance between us and them.”
“And after that?”
“We become somebody else.”