No Way Back by Andrew Gross Page A

if I’d scoped him out.
    It was all, all going to back up exactly how they wanted it to look. I read on, until I crashed headfirst into the one moment I regretted from my own past that now was twisted to fit in too:
    Ms. Gould worked in financial sales and studied law at Fordham University. She was a Nassau County police detective assigned to the Street Crime Unit, who resigned in 2003 after she and two other members of the unit were involved in the shooting death of an unarmed twelve-year-old boy in Hempstead. Ms. Gould, then 26, and two other detectives were brought up on charges of reckless discharge of a deadly weapon after Jamal Wilkes was shot five times while being chased through an abandoned building. Sergeant Joseph Esterhaus, the team leader, discharged his weapon eight times believing he had seen a weapon in Mr. Wilkes’s hand. He and fellow detective Thomas Swayze were charged but ultimately cleared in a departmental review. Ms. Gould, Wendy Stansi then, who fired her weapon twice, neither shot striking the victim, was not criminally charged and left the force. Ultimately, no weapons were found on him, only a plastic water bottle, prompting outcries of the reckless use of firearms and racial profiling.
    Senior Homeland Security agent Alton Dokes announced that “as one of the victims was an agent of the Federal government, federal authorities would be taking the lead in this case.”
    I stared at the screen, my body encased in sweat. I could only imagine what anyone reading this would now think of me. What my own children would think.
    That I was a loose cannon. Of questionable moral character. That I had done this kind of thing before. That I had killed their father. With the same gun I had taken after panicking and killing a federal agent.
    After sleeping with someone I had met at a bar just an hour before!
    You have to believe me, I had begged them last night on the phone. You’re going to hear some things . . .
    Not to mention that the very people now in charge of trying to apprehend me were the ones who had set it all in motion. Who had the most to gain by keeping me silent.
    The most nerve-racking, sickening feeling knotted up in me. If I ended up in their hands, I didn’t know what would happen. These agents had already tried to kill me. Twice. And here I was at our house in Vermont, which was easily traceable. The news report had been posted only ten minutes ago.
    I had to get out of here now!
    I threw on some new clothes, a T-shirt and a blue Patagonia pullover over my jeans. I bundled a few other things together—clothes, toiletries, the laptop—and hurled them into a duffel bag from the ski room, grabbed a parka, and ran downstairs. I was about to toss them into the Range Rover when I realized my car was no longer safe to be driving now. An idea hit me. Our neighbor across the street, Jim Toby, was a New Yorker who kept an Expedition in his garage up here. It was a Thursday. He and Cindy wouldn’t be up. I knew the security code. We’d been watching over each other’s ski houses for years.
    I started up the Range Rover and drove it around the back of the house, under the deck, so it was out of sight. Anyone who searched the house would easily find it, but at least someone just passing by wouldn’t realize I’d been there.
    I lugged the duffel and my jacket across the street to Jim’s, a modernized A-frame from back in the sixties. I punched the security code—his and Cindy’s wedding anniversary, 7385—into his garage panel. The door slid up, and the familiar navy SUV was parked there just as I’d hoped. I tossed the duffel into the backseat and hopped behind the wheel. The keys were in the well; I drove out, closing the garage door behind me. I headed straight down the hill, my heart pounding insanely inside me, not a clue in the world where I would head. Suddenly I saw flashing lights appear ahead of me; two state police cars