Clearly, I needed to brush up on my sleight of hand.
"Someone looking for you?"
"None of your business."
He rolled his eyes, but continued as if I hadn't answered. "Do you want them to find you?"
I stared at him, my expression completely flat, prompting another werewolf eye roll.
"OK, then. Well, before my little detour at Flapjack's, I was on my way to scoop this guy, Jerry Stepanack, up from Flint Creek. That's about two hours from here, so you didn't cost me too much time," he said, ignoring the way I rolled my own eyes at that statement. "Jerry's none too bright, and there's a pretty healthy price on him."
"What did he do?" I asked. "And I am assuming this is not an assignment from legitimate law-enforcement authorities?"
"To answer the first question, you don't want to know, and to answer the second, you really don't want to know," he said. "But a word to the wise, sweetheart. If you borrow lots of money from bad people to buy a couple of tow trucks so you can steal cars and sell them for parts, don't default on the loan and sell the trucks for parts. It makes those bad people cranky."
I frowned, sliding my oversized sunglasses onto my nose, and settled back into the seat. "I'll try to keep that in mind."
4
All the Best Friendships Start with Lost-and-Found Underwear
It turned out Caleb's job was mostly driving around and talking on his cell phone.
I spent the first fifteen minutes of our "business arrangement" gathering the foam coffee cups and jerky packets from the floorboards and stuffing them into an empty grocery bag. Caleb insisted that I keep the gas receipts, as he needed them for expense reports, so I stacked them in the glove compartment.
Cue the wolfy eye roll.
"I just don't want to spend the next few days sitting around in filth."
The drive reminded me of why I'd fallen in love with living in Alaska in the first place. After spending so many years closing myself up into safe, cramped corners, the wide-open spaces were a welcome remedy to my growing claustrophobia. I loved the crazy patchwork of foliage across the landscape, the expected greens mixed with a riot of purples, golds, and grays. All of this would be buried under a dense blanket of blinding white in a few weeks, but even that would be beautiful and welcome.
I finally got to see some of the country, now that I wasn't always on the run. Some of it looked too beautiful to be real-purple stone mountains and trees that seemed to swallow the road whole and forests so thick no light could break through the evergreens. I loved never knowing when a little town was suddenly going to pop up around a bend in the road. Caleb seemed to know this road like the back of his hand. I had the idea that if he'd driven down a road just once, he would still be able find his way back and tell you in detail what sort of rocks he'd seen by the side of the road.
I would miss this landscape. I didn't know where my new identity would take me. I knew it wasn't likely that I would stay in the Great North. And the southeast was definitely out-too close to Glenn. I could only hope that I wouldn't end up in the desert somewhere. I had come to love the snow. I just couldn't handle one-hundred-plus-degree summer days and scorpions in my living room.
We wound through rolling, low-lying mountains lightly dusted with snow, the landscape laid out before us like an endless Christmas card. I wrestled with the fatigue I'd kept at bay over the last twenty-four hours. But between the warm truck, the full belly, and the late-afternoon sun beating through the window on my face, I fell asleep long before we arrived in Flint Creek. It had been a long time since I'd simply ridden along in a car, and the exhausting events of the last few, well, years caught up with me. I still slept lightly, waking with every turn Caleb made, checking to make sure he hadn't driven us to Tijuana or taken liberties with my ChapSticks. But he hadn't even changed the radio station. He just glanced in my direction every few minutes, frowned, and then turned his attention back to the road.
Resting my forehead against the warm glass, I wondered if there would be an opportunity to send an e-mail to my Network contact, "[email protected]" I needed to explain that my situation had deteriorated quickly and ask for a rush job on my new identity. Red-burn was pretty good about responding to e-mails within twenty-four hours, so all I had to do was come back the next day to buy more Internet time.
Although I'd never met her, Red-burn had been instrumental in my move to Alaska. She worked as part of the Network, a widespread group of people who helped women escape from abusive domestic situations, particularly when those situations involved stalking. Operating beneath the radar of law enforcement, the group arranged for new, untraceable driver's licenses, social security numbers, and birth certificates in new names, not to mention securing employment and housing. They were discreet, well funded, and frighteningly good at making people disappear.
After leaving Glenn, I'd bounced around the country for nearly a year before I heard about the Network from a fellow waitress. Red-burn was the one to connect me with the Crescent Valley job, informing me that the people in Crescent Valley, Alaska, needed a new physician, as the old Dr. Moder had retired.
I was pretty annoyed with her for failing to mention the whole werewolf issue. Of course, she didn't know about it, but still, I reserved the right to be irritated. A Dr. Moder had treated the valley's residents since before the government started insisting on all of those pesky birth and death records. In addition to dramatically shortened pregnancies and high fertility rates, were-wolves tended to die in violent, somewhat difficult-to-explain ways, such as disagreement with a large bear while in wolf form. Eventually, census boards and medical examiners start to pick up on those things. It was easier for the pack to have someone they could trust to file the important papers. The first Dr. Moder took the position in 1913, but when he died, his successor didn't have a strictly legal medical license, so the pack simply passed his credentials along to make it seem as if the original Dr. Moder was still working. My predecessors were like me, medical professionals who'd inadvertently ended up on the wrong side of the legal line. The name "Dr. Moder" stuck and became a tradition. (I suspected that we all shared the same degree from a medical school in the Philippines.) The Dr. Moder just before me had testified against a prescription-pill mill linked to organized crime in Miami. She'd hidden in the valley for ten years before she felt comfortable moving back to the lower forty-eight.
Red-burn was the one to convince me that I was strong enough to move so far away, to a cold, alien place where I would be isolated from anything I knew. She was the one who called me the night before my cross-country drive and told me not to be a wuss. Red-burn believed in tough love. She told me about her own past abuse. Although she was happily married to a much nicer guy, she still regretted that she hadn't been brave enough to leave on her own terms. So now she helped other people escape their bad relationships and felt as if she was taking some of her power back, bit by bit. She was funny and sweet, but she brooked no bullshit. She insisted that I do half the work to get myself moving, telling me I wouldn't appreciate my safety without a little effort.
Then again, it was Red-burn who had sent me the e-mail warning me that there had been a not-elaborated-upon but still quite scary "development" with my ex-husband. She said it was time to pull my "escape hatch," my preplanned departure route that we had put in place before I even moved to the valley, while she worked on establishing a new place for me. That did secure some of my loyalty.
And run I did, tout de suite. I took my truck, which technically belonged to the village, and drove it as far as Grundy. I left it in the care of Nate Gogan, the town lawyer, whom I could trust to get it back to Maggie, and I tricked him into accepting twenty dollars for his trouble and gas money, which officially earned me attorney-client privilege and kept him from giving Maggie any details. I hitched a ride to Dearly with Evie, who had to make her weekly run for supplies. I gave her some excuse about needing to pick up some prescriptions and then disappeared through a side door of the pharmacy. I walked to the nearest used-car lot and plunked down seven hundred dollars for my poor departed Pinto. Of course, if I'd known I was buying an extremely expensive incendiary device, I might have upgraded to a Camry.
I drove as far as I could trust the Pinto to take me, camping out in McClusky and getting the job at Emerson's while I waited for Red-burn to come up with a new identity for me. I shivered, tucking the collar of my coat closer to my chin. Although it was early autumn, the first hard frost wasn't too far off. And that meant winter, with its rural-road-crippling snows and blood-freezing temperatures, was nipping at my heels. In the valley and the nearby town of Grundy, the first frost meant a big party to celebrate the last opportunity the locals would have to see one another socially before the snows set in and isolated them in their homes. Now it meant I had precious few weeks to get my butt to Anchorage and then haul ass across the state to wherever the Network had established a place for me. There were definitely times I despaired having to travel relatively close to the valley after "pulling my escape hatch" and running all the way east, but Anchorage was my checkpoint and that's where I would go.