Shoofly Pie & Chop Shop (79 page)

Fire.

She looked back at Nick. He was on the passenger side again, but now he was facing away from the car. Thirty feet ahead of him was a house; shielding the house from the street was a tall hedge, and in front of the hedge was a short retaining wall. He seemed to be doing something with the retaining wall. He was holding on to it—no, he was
tugging
on it. He stumbled back away from the wall and looked down at something in his hand. He turned, raised his arm, and brought his hand down against the passenger-side window.

An instant later a sound like crunching gravel reached her ears, and right behind it came the shrill, piercing scream of a car alarm. Nick reached through the window, opened the door, and slid into the passenger seat.

Riley turned back to the greenhouse. She could hear the sound of the ceiling panes shattering from the heat and tinkling to the ground. Now the woman appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the rising flames. She turned her head from side to side, searching for the source of the shrieking siren. She turned back to the greenhouse now and pointed urgently in the direction of the car. Santangelo bolted through the doorway and stopped, listening;
he took two halting steps forward, then took off running toward the street, with the woman not far behind.

Riley jumped to her own feet now, oblivious to the ominous edge and the fifty-foot plunge beyond. She searched frantically for Nick; he was out of the car again, standing on the sidewalk beside it, waving something in the air at her. She waved back with both arms, urging him away from there, desperately trying to warn him of the danger coming his way. She could see him clearly under the orange streetlamps—but could he see her? “I doubt it,” Nick had said. “The moon is on the other side of the river.”

Santangelo was on the street now, headed for the corner, and the woman was less than ten yards behind. In another few seconds they would round the corner, and Nick would be clearly visible less than two blocks away. Riley dropped her arms to her sides and staggered closer to the edge. Her utter helplessness almost overwhelmed her.

Moments from now Santangelo would round the corner and discover Nick standing by his car. Nick would turn and try to run, but Santangelo didn’t need to overtake him. He only needed to get within firing distance, and then he would pull his gun and put an end to Nick’s life, just as he had done to Leo—and all she could do was watch.

Riley took a deep breath, threw back her head, and screamed.

The sound rivaled the car alarm in intensity. On the street, Santangelo and the woman both skidded to a halt and turned to search for the source of the scream—but echoing off the hillside, it must have seemed to come from everywhere at once. Two blocks farther away, Nick heard the scream too. He started down the sidewalk toward the corner, then spun to his right and ducked into the tall hedge.

The thick brush rustled and shook, and an instant later Nick appeared on the other side. Riley held her breath, waiting for him to dart across the yard to safety behind the house—but to her dismay Nick remained where he was, kneeling in the darkness behind the hedge directly across from the car.

Nick! Get out of there!

Santangelo rounded the corner and raced down the sidewalk to the car. He threw open the driver’s door, ducked inside, and
silenced the wailing alarm. Riley could hear everything now—
everything.
The piercing siren had flayed her auditory nerves like sandpaper on the fingers of a safecracker, sensitizing her to even the tiniest sound. She heard the angry slam of the car door, the whispered curse from Santangelo’s lips, and the grinding sound his soles made as he stepped through the bits of glass by the smashed-in passenger window. He pulled out a dangling piece of shattered safety glass and threw it aside; it landed like a beaded purse on a kitchen counter.

Hands on hips, Santangelo turned and surveyed the surrounding area: down the street toward the river, up the row of cars that lined the far sidewalk, over the shadows between the houses on the opposite side of the street. Now he turned to the hedge. He was looking almost directly at Nick now—there was no more than ten feet between them.

Half a block away, the woman with the long auburn hair had stopped running. She kicked off her shoes, picked them up, and continued at a walk. As she approached the car, Nick began to crane his neck up and down, trying for a better look.

Suddenly the porch light behind Nick went on, flooding the front yard with blinding luminescence. A storm door opened and an old man stepped out. “What’s the problem out there?” he called to the street.

Nick jumped to his feet and spun around.

“Somebody broke into my car,” Santangelo called back from the sidewalk. “Have you seen anybody around here?”

The old man looked at Nick. Nick gestured frantically for the old man not to answer.

“Nick, is that you? Nick Polchak? What are you doing out there?”

Without a word, Nick took off around the side of the house and disappeared into the shadows.

On the sidewalk, Santangelo began to dart from side to side, searching through the thick hedge for a glimpse of Nick—but he was staring directly into the blinding porch light. He turned away in anger and kicked the passenger door, leaving a noticeable dent.

The old man walked to the end of his porch and peered around the corner after Nick; then he slowly shook his head and turned his
attention to the street again. “You want me to call the police?” he called over the hedge.

“No thanks,” Santangelo said. “My insurance will cover it.”

He hurried around the car and motioned for the woman to follow; she opened the passenger door, brushed off the seat, and climbed in. The engine raced, the car pulled away from the curb, and they headed back down the road toward the Allegheny River.

Riley sat down hard and rolled onto her back. She lay staring at the spinning stars above, trying to bring her breathing under control. The hollow water tower amplified her throbbing pulse like a massive bass drum.

Where have you
been
?” Sarah said frantically. “You’ve been gone for hours!”

Riley slipped through the motel door, and Sarah quickly shut it behind her. “Pack your things,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

“Right now? In the middle of the night?”

“It’s an hour and a half to Mencken. We want to arrive before daylight.”

“Doesn’t this boyfriend of yours ever sleep?”

“We’ll talk about it in
Mencken.
Right now we need to hurry.”

“I’ve been worried sick about you! What happened out there? Where did you go?”

“We’ll talk about it in Mencken.” She tossed Sarah a pair of jeans and opened her suitcase on the bed.

They split up as before, with Nick and Riley driving one car and Sarah following behind—but this time they took an altogether different route. Route 28 was the single major artery in and out of Tarentum, and the one place Santangelo could lie in wait for them. Instead, they turned right across the Tarentum Bridge and into
Lower Burrell, heading for Mencken by a series of convoluted back roads that Santangelo could never follow. Even Pittsburgh natives cursed the bewildering tunnels, endless bridges, and cratered roads in the area; for the first time, they provided a measure of protection. Nick knew the back roads halfway to Mencken, and Riley and Sarah could lead them home.

“You’re quiet,” Nick said, glancing over at Riley.

“I’m tired. My species sleeps—most higher life forms do.” She glared at him. “I’m also angry. What’s wrong with you anyway?”

“We’ve only got an hour and a half. Can you be more specific?”

“Why did you stay behind that hedge? You scared me to death. I almost fell off the water tower!”

“That seems to be a recurring problem for you. Do you suffer from vertigo?”

“Santangelo was less than ten feet away from you. He could have reached through the hedge and grabbed you by the throat.”

“He didn’t know I was there. It’s the last thing he would have expected. Sometimes the safest thing is the most unexpected.”

Riley rolled her eyes. “You must be the safest person on earth.”

“Besides, I was in darkness, and he was under a streetlamp. He couldn’t see me.”

“And when that old man turned the porch light on?”

“Mr. Davidek? I didn’t count on him.”

“But why didn’t you just run in the first place? Why did you stay? What was the point?”

“I wanted to get a better look at the lure.”

“What if Santangelo came after you? He would have killed you for sure.”

“Out of doors? In front of Mr. Davidek? The one thing Santangelo fears most is exposure. That’s why he wanted to catch us at home.”

They cut through New Kensington and headed east on 56, then south on 66 toward the town of Greensburg. The narrow roads curved back and forth between the rounded hills, following the paths of ancient creek beds and valleys. Under the shadow of a hillside the road would lie in utter darkness, but just around the bend the asphalt would glisten in the bright moonlight.

“So what did she look like?” Riley asked.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“I never got a look at her. Mr. Davidek turned on the porch light before she got close enough to see. I only saw what you saw; she had long red hair.” Nick glanced at her. “And great legs.”

Riley stuck out her tongue at him.

“If you like that sort of thing,” he added.

“Please, spare me. What did you take out of Santangelo’s car?”

Nick held up a half-filled Aquafina water bottle.

“I get it,” Riley nodded. “Saliva.”

“If we run this through a centrifuge, we’ve got a sample of Santangelo’s DNA. Now that we’ve lost the blowfly specimens, this is the only physical evidence we’ve got left.”

“Sorry about your greenhouse. Won’t the police figure out it was arson?”

“I doubt it. Santangelo knows his business—besides, I kept gallons of ethanol and ethyl acetate in there. The police will just think I left the cap off the wrong bottle. All it takes is a spark.”

Riley glanced down at the water bottle. “How do you know it’s Santangelo’s? How do you know it’s not hers?”

Nick held it up again. “No lipstick.”

“Do assassins wear lipstick when they’re on the job?”

“She’s the lure,” Nick said, “and lures need to be attractive.”

They followed I-70 west almost to Washington, then headed south again on 79. They were well south of the city now. The area took on a much more rural look, and the names of the towns along the way reflected it: Lone Pine, Prosperity, Ruff Creek. At the town of Lippincott, Sarah flashed her lights at them and signaled for a left turn.

“Sarah’s turning off,” Nick said. “Should we go back?”

“She’s just stopping for food. The last grocery store is in Lippincott. She’ll meet us at the house; she knows the way.”

“Mencken has no grocery store?”

“Mencken has no people.”

Ten minutes later they came to a stop in front of two black-and-white barricades that completely blocked the road.

“It’s not exactly the Welcome Wagon,” Nick said.

Riley opened her door and stepped out. A moment later she appeared in front of the bright headlights; she lifted the end of
each barricade and walked it slowly out of the way. Nick pulled ahead, and Riley slid back into the car. She winced as she stretched her back from side to side.

“I could have helped you with those,” Nick said.

“I’m not helpless, you know.”

“Never thought you were.”

They drove slowly forward. Mencken was, in fact, a ghost town; it looked more like a movie set than a place of human habitation. The yards, untended for years, had reverted to coarse yellow buffalo grass. Tall brush grew in clumps right up to the roadside, and in places pushed its way up through cracks in the pavement.

“Stop here,” Riley said.

Directly ahead of them, a jagged crack cut across the road, and wisps of smoke seeped out of it and vanished into the darkness.

“Problem?” Nick said.

“That wasn’t here the last time I came. We’ve got a little ground subsidence problem here in Mencken. The coal vein runs right under the town. When they mined it out, they left huge columns of coal in place to help support the roof; but as the fire works its way through, it consumes those columns. Now there are huge areas that have no support at all, and they can collapse at any time.”

“That’s what you call a ‘little problem’? Where are these areas?”

“There’s no way to tell. Pull forward.”

Nick drove slowly across the hissing crack. Riley watched through the rear windshield until the smoke appeared again behind them. She turned to Nick and smiled.

“That wasn’t one of them.”

Nick blinked at her and continued on.

They passed through the town itself now, with abandoned stores and offices lining the road like empty boxes. The structures themselves still looked solid, but badly in need of paint and repair. Most of the glass had been broken, courtesy of the Lippincott teenagers, and there were even charred patches where fires had apparently been set. The town ended just as abruptly as it began, and the storefronts gave way to a cluster of small single-family dwellings—all just as vacant as the town itself.