Chapter 3 - THE ASHES OF TERRE HAUTE
We burst through the tool shed door just as the frosted glass of the front office exploded inward.
The sound was not like thunder; it was the sharp, flat crack of a suppressed pistol round punching through quarter-inch plate, followed immediately by the tinkling cascade of safety shards hitting the linoleum. Mr. Harris let out a hoarse, confused shout from the other side of the garage.
"Run!" I shouted, shoving Marianne through the muddy breezeway between the mower shed and the rusted perimeter fence.
Cold rain instantly soaked through my thin denim jacket, pasting the fabric to my ribs. Marianne slipped, her high heel snapping off in the mud with a wet pop. She went down hard on one knee, gasping, her designer coat dragging through gray, decaying leaves. I caught her under the armpit, hauling her upright by sheer leverage.
"Leave the shoes!" I ordered.
She kicked the other heel off into the mire, running in stocking feet across gravel that must have cut like flint. We rounded the stack of split oak just as the caretaker's old red Dodge Ram came into view. The paint was oxidized to the color of dried brick, the bed loaded with rusted shovels and bags of quicklime.
I yanked the driver's door open. The interior smelled of wet dog, stale tobacco, and hydraulic fluid. I reached above the visor. My fingers struck cold metal—the spare key was taped to the cardboard with a strip of yellowed masking tape.
Behind us, around the corner of the shed, the man in the mackintosh appeared.
He didn't run; he walked with terrifying, methodical purpose. His right hand was raised, braced across his left forearm. He saw me behind the glass of the Dodge and adjusted his aim with the detachment of an exterminator lining up a rat.
"Down!" I screamed, slamming my hand onto Marianne’s neck and shoving her head into the filthy bench seat.
The truck’s rear window vanished. A spray of safety pellets showered my neck like hail. I twisted the key. The starter ground—whir-whir-whir—a pathetic, mechanical wheeze that seemed to last an eternity.
Come on, you piece of junk, come on.
The engine caught with a deafening, manifold-leaking roar. I dropped the column shifter into reverse, slammed my boot on the gas, and the rear tires spun wildly in the saturated clay before catching the gravel. The Dodge leaped backward like a kicked mule. The tailgate slammed into the cemetery's decorative chain-link fence, flattening steel posts with a terrible screech of tearing metal.
The shooter leaped aside as the Dodge's steel bumper scraped the edge of the tool shed, ripping off the truck’s passenger-side mirror with an explosive crack. I jammed the lever into drive, spun the wheel until my wrists crossed, and pinned the accelerator.
We hit the cemetery road at forty miles an hour, rooster-tails of muddy water blinding whatever was behind us. In the rearview mirror, through the shattered back window, I saw the black SUV lurch forward, its headlights cutting through the gray gloom like twin scalpers. Behind it, standing near the wrecked office, the man with the gun was already speaking into a radio clipped to his lapel.
"He's following," Marianne gasped from the footwell, her face smeared with engine grime and tears. "Matthew, he won't let us hit the highway. Julian has state troopers on retainer. He owns half the county commissioners."
"Don't call me Matthew," I snarled, dodging a rusted tractor tire half-buried in the grass as we blew through the side gate onto Route 61. "My name is Matt. And if Rose wanted you to have me, she would have brought me back to your big house twenty years ago. She ran from you people for a reason."
Marianne sat up, her teeth chattering so hard I could hear the enamel clicking. She reached into her torn coat and pulled out the yellow envelope, clutch-gripped against her chest like a shield.
"She ran because she was terrified of what she had done," Marianne cried, her voice cracking over the roar of the Dodge’s broken exhaust. "Look at the dates! Look at the transfers! Rose wasn't a saint, Matt. She was my husband's private secretary. She sat outside his office every day for four years. When Victor got sick—when his heart began to fail—she was the one who saw Julian altering the family ledgers. Julian promised her half a million dollars to take you from the nursery at St. Luke's and drop you at a motel in Cairo, Illinois. She took the money. She took the down payment!"
I swung the truck hard onto an access road running along the railroad tracks, tires screaming on the wet asphalt. "Then why didn't she give me up?"
"Because when she got to the motel," Marianne said, her voice dropping into a register of utter horror, "the men Julian sent weren't there to adopt you. They were there with lime and shovels. Rose saw the trunk of their car. She realized Julian was never going to let an heir exist. She shot one of them in the shoulder with a thirty-eight she kept in her purse, stole their rental car, and vanished into the Midwest."
The words hung between us, heavier than the rain beating against the windshield.
"She saved you from the monster who hired her," Marianne whispered. "And she spent twenty years hiding you in roach-infested rooms because the moment you appeared on a tax form, a census record, or a high school roster, Julian's lawyers would find the trail."
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I looked into the side mirror. The black SUV was three hundred yards back, closing fast, its massive chrome grill bearing down on the Dodge like an oncoming locomotive.
"Hold on," I said.
