Читать книгу Alice Isn’t Dead - Joseph Fink, Joseph Fink - Страница 17

Savannah looked like a city half remembered from a visit years before. Hazy and dreamlike. Brick buildings sagged into themselves. The trees were more moss than tree. The park at the center of town was full of gutter punks. Kids who had run away out of choice, not out of fear. Two of them catcalled passersby, the same line over and over. They’d removed themselves from the system enough to stop showering but not enough to stop harassing women.

Keisha and Sylvia walked the few blocks to the station and scoped it out. The front of the station was a big glass window, fine, but the rest was cinder-block blank, barred windows, a back door hazardously blocked by a dumpster, nothing that could be crawled through or into. It was a box with one available opening, and that opening was right on the street. Even trying to case the place was hard. There were cops everywhere, hanging out, chatting, and staring at Keisha and Sylvia as they tried to casually walk by.

“Nothing casual about the two of us, I guess,” Keisha said.

“Could we just run in and run out?”

“There’s one usable door. You run in, it’d be tricky to run out.”

They took their fourth walk down the block. An officer across the street watched them with open suspicion. Keisha felt her heart pound seeing the uniform, remembering a dark parking lot in Kansas.

“Not the front then,” she said. “I’m going to walk down that alley, meet me on the other side.”

At the end of the alley was another dumpster. Well, fuck it then. She climbed up on it and from there got on the roof. Body prone so there would be no footsteps, she crawled along the top of the building. There were skylights at regular intervals. She peered over the edge of one, down at a desk that needed decluttering and a floor that needed mopping. She inched her way back, hopped from roof to dumpster to ground, and continued through the alley to where Sylvia was waiting.

“So here’s what, Sylvia. I’m going to need you to make a distraction.”

“What kind of distraction?”

“That I don’t know, but I need to do something very stupid and very loud, so I need you to do something stupider and louder than me.”

She grinned.

“I know just the thing.”

“Oh, man, don’t tell me. I’d have to try to stop you. Just do it.”

Keisha clambered back on the roof and waited. She couldn’t see anything from her crouched position, but then, if she couldn’t tell when Sylvia’s distraction started, the distraction hadn’t been big enough. As she waited, she wondered how stupid she was, letting a teenager lead her to sitting on a roof waiting to do somesilly stunt that would land her with a felony charge. But all that became moot as time passed with no sign of Sylvia, and Keisha knew that it had gone wrong and that Sylvia had been caught, with Keisha aiding and abetting her in this nonsense.

Then the distraction came, and it was big enough.

Sylvia had strolled a few blocks away, broken into a car, and hot-wired it. A few years on the road had made her good at that, for the days when hitchhiking wasn’t working or she had a gut feeling that today would be the day a murderer would pick her up if she tried thumbing a ride. She drove the car to the street in front of the station, pointed it at that big glass front window, and, in a move that she managed with far more grace than she would ever have expected, simultaneously gave it a rev and rolled out. The sedan heaved forward, then rolled on momentum, slow enough that everyone could get out of the way but fast enough to be unstoppable. It entered the front window with a pop and came to a rest there. A lot of the cops ran after Sylvia, which she knew would leave the station empty for Keisha, great!, but also meant, oh shit, there were a bunch of cops after her. There was no way she could outrun them, but she had planned a route to a hiding spot down a side street. Her one chance was to get to the spot before any of her pursuers turned the corner and saw her hiding. She couldn’t waste time looking back and so she dove behind the wall she had picked out and crouched there, praying to whatever was out there, praying that none of them had seen her. All of them ran by. She put her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Now it was all up to this woman she had met only a couple days before.

Keisha heard the car and was immediately on her feet, stomping on the skylight until it gave and her body went with it. She landed hard on her side in a shower of glass and found she was somehow unharmed. The cops were all either out front inspecting the damage or failing to catch Sylvia, and so she was alone in a room with five desks. She wasted a good thirty seconds finding the one with Ben Campbell’s nameplate. By that point she had no time to look at what she was grabbing. She seized every scrap of paper on top of and inside of his desk and threw it into her bag. It was time to get out of there.

Which is when it occurred to her, with the usual stab of disappointment in herself, that she had not fully thought through this plan. Because get out of there how? The front was a swarm of uniforms, the back door was blocked, and the skylight was high above and rimmed with vicious broken glass. She was trapped. Panic welled up her neck, sloshed around her brain, made it difficult for thoughts to connect. Giving up felt like a reasonable option, but she shook that off, tried to find determination or at least manufacture a simulacrum of it. Every second she stood there, the probability of getting caught ticked toward one. She tried jumping, but the skylight was way too high for that. She scrambled around for a miracle. But there was no miracle. There was only her, and her body, and whatever she would be able to do with that body.

So she clambered up on Officer Campbell’s desk, turned, and, without giving herself time to think, hurled herself from the desk up at the skylight, sucking in her stomach in a half-assed attempt to keep from bleeding out on the glass.

Her hands slapped onto the roof, and her chest slammed into the edge and that did some bad things, but there wasn’t much glass where she hit, so she avoided getting completely skewered. Even with the excitement of the car, there was no way a bunch of cops wouldn’t notice a woman jumping off a desk and half landing up through a skylight. She had to move fast. Her chest was on fire, and her hands were painfully sliding on the sandpaper roof, about to lose grip. Footsteps, louder and louder. Shouts. In a few moments, there would be a hand around her ankle. She thought again about a parking lot in Kansas. About an arm on her throat. And she dug her hands harder into that roof, pulling with whatever she had and ignoring the pain as her chest slid along the edge. In a moment, she was off the roof onto the ground with a brief, awkward stop on the dumpster that didn’t so much slow her fall as roll her ankle. And so, bleeding and limping, she tore as fast as she could away from the station.

She ran until the world flickered at the edges, until she could hear the hollow of her breath. She made it back to the truck where Sylvia was already waiting. They were about a half hour out of town on the highway, the long slashes on Keisha’s chest no longer bleeding, her ankle throbbing, when she started laughing. She laughed and laughed, and Sylvia started laughing too. Every time they glanced at each other another wave would come. They laughed until there was no sound, only shaking, and Keisha had hiccups for the next two hours.