Signal by Patrick Lee Page A

sure they couldn’t find me with their … system. Maybe they found me the old-fashioned way. Jesus, I went to my old coffee shop this morning. Maybe they were just watching…”
    His eyes were wet now. The shock was losing ground to the pain, or else the fear.
    Then something changed. Curtis blinked and exhaled hard and forced himself into a state of alertness. He turned and stared out through the shattered passenger window, then swept his gaze left in a slow arc, eyes darting everywhere.
    Looking for some threat out there in the woods.
    Like Claire had done in the desert.
    Exactly like Claire.
    Dryden’s scalp prickled. He turned fast and raised the Beretta, studying the surrounding trees.
    Nothing there.
    He pivoted slowly counterclockwise, his eyes and the pistol tracking around, a few degrees per second.
    He ended up facing back the way they’d come from: toward the paved two-lane road, which was just hidden from view by the curve in the gravel lane through the forest.
    A hand seized his arm. He spun toward it, reflexively.
    Curtis had reached out through the driver’s-side window frame and taken hold of him. The kid’s eyes were intense, keenly aware.
    “Hide our bodies,” Curtis said.
    “What?”
    “You can’t leave any record for anyone to pick up on. The people we’re up against … if there’s anything tying me to this place and time, then … they’ll send other killers here. They’ll have … already sent them. Hours ago. They’d already be here waiting.”
    As crazed as the kid sounded, his words lined up eerily well with what had happened in the desert.
    The gunmen there had already been in place. Claire had begun looking for the threat once it was clear the cop was going to stop and question the two of them.
    Once it was clear there would be a record of their presence there.
    At that place and time.
    Dryden felt the dots trying to connect. In some sense they did, but only partly.
    “Hide our bodies,” Curtis said again. “Me and these two guys. Put us in their car and hide it someplace. It has to stay lost for a long time.”
    The kid’s burst of alertness was leaving him. The skin of his face was paper white. His voice was back to a whisper.
    Dryden said, “But this Tahoe—”
    Curtis shook his head. “Can’t be traced to me. I was already careful about that. Stolen plates. Filed off the VIN. Just burn it.”
    He took a deep breath. It looked like it hurt.
    “Do it,” Curtis sighed. Then a strange little smile crossed his face. “I already know you’ll manage it. ’Cause they’re not here right now killing you.”
    The odd smile stayed on his face as his eyes went still.
    Gone.

 
    CHAPTER THIRTEEN
    When Aubrey Deene pulled into the carport in front of her apartment, one of the maintenance guys was mowing the lawn. Her eyes fixed on the mower: an old Husqvarna, like the kind her father had beaten to hell every summer of her childhood back in South Bend. Sometimes a fouled spark plug would set him off, and he’d burn up a day’s worth of anger in five minutes of wrench throwing in the garage. Other times the mower would only get him warmed up, and then Aubrey and her sister and her mother would have a long night in store for them. Rod Deene had been dead for five years now—heart attack a month before Aubrey finished undergrad at Iowa State—but the damnedest things could shove him right back into her head.
    The engine of her ancient Miata coughed and threatened to die. She killed the ignition and pocketed the key, then turned and rummaged through the textbooks and folders on the passenger seat. Any day now, the car was going to give up the ghost and leave her hitchhiking. Which would be fitting, in its own way. Her life had taken on a distinctly hitchhiker kind of feeling lately. Like her future was no more plotted than that of a paper cup in the wind.
    Not so far off the mark, you know.
    That internal voice had an irritating, teen-angst edge to it. If there was anyone