Parrish and Claxson were dying but alive. Claxson had a pistol and had managed to claw it out, but it had fallen from his hand, as he faded, and now lay on the floor beside him. Grant stepped over to him and shot him twice in the head, stepped back, shot Parrish twice in the head, and finally went over to Douglas, who appeared to be dead, but she shot him in the forehead anyway.
She’d heard of people who’d been terribly wounded but had survived, so she took time to check each of the bodies: they were all clearly gone. As she bent over Parrish to retrieve his car keys—she’d drive the Toyota back to Washington—there was a bright flash of car lights, coming fast, and somebody at the door, pounding.
She froze. FBI? Davenport and the marshals? No way to get to Parrish’s car. She turned, ran to the back of the house, opened a door on the far wall of the darkened kitchen, and stepped out onto a deck.
The steady drizzle continued, and she ran across the back lawn and stepped through the row of trees at the back of the house. She was nearly blind under the canopy of trees, the starless sky offering no light, the headlights from the cars in front of the house and the glow of lights from within waning dramatically as she moved deeper into the woods.
Then a spark, a light of some kind, barely visible, twohundred yards away, maybe more, blinking on and off, occluded also by individual trees as she moved past them.
She heard a splintering crash from the front of the house and realized that somebody had broken through the heavy front door. She moved deeper into the woods but, unable to help herself, stopped and looked back.
Douglas hadn’t pulled the drapes on the side window in the living room, and Davenport was there, in its brightly lighted rectangle, like a man in a painting, moving toward the bodies, a burly man next to him, as well as two women—one white, one black—and she could now see Davenport shouting something and waving to the black woman, who was carrying a rifle, and she disappeared out the front door.
An insane rush of anger flooded through Grant, seeing Davenport there like a target in a shooting gallery. Without stopping to consider, she raised the pistol and fired three shots at the window and saw Davenport and the white woman go down.
She turned back to the spark of light she’d seen just before. It was a long way away, several hundred yards at least. She dropped the gun in her bag, and with her hands in front of her face to ward off unseen tree branches, she jogged toward it, tripping once, twice, three times, but she managed to stay on her feet.
She kept her eyes on the light, and eventually it grew closer and sharper. Somebody shouted behind her, yet the voice was hushed. The steady patter of the drizzle off the forest leaves, she realized, had the effect of muffling the shouting.
She moved on toward the light, came up behind a house. A different light went on nearby—motion-activated, she thought. There was no further activity.
Had to keep moving, she thought. She ran to the front of the house and out to the street. The street curved back toward Chesapeake, where she didn’t want to go, and the other direction seemed too dark. A cul-de-sac? She wasn’t sure, but she had no choice and ran that way, only to discover that it was.
But there was another spark of light across the lawn and through more trees, a couple of hundred yards to her left and away from Douglas’s house. She crossed the lawn, entered the trees, nearly fell again, eventually worked her way out to another street. This one had more houses, and she ran down the blacktopped road. With the solid footing, she could move faster. The house with the light she saw had three cars parked in the driveway, and she went on by.
She could follow the road guided by the lights coming from the houses on either side, and now by the sky overhead, which was light gray rather than almost black when obscured by trees overhead. She stepped in a hole, stumbled, caught herself, ran on. There was more shouting behind her, now distinctly distant, and, even farther away, the wail of a siren.
She hadn’t panicked. Not yet. But she could feel it clawing at her throat, trying to choke her, but she pushed it down. The farther she could get from Douglas’s house, the safer she should be. And the woods, always lapping at the sides of the road, provided impenetrable cover if she needed to hide from a passing car.
But they would find her, sooner or later, if she didn’t get completely clear, and now. With three dead and the shooter loose and on foot, they’d be putting up roadblocks, bringing in an army of cops to walk the woods.
The sound of the siren was coming from behind her but still distant. She’d gone a half mile or more, jogging and walking fast,when a garage door began rolling up at the house that she’d just passed. She stopped at the side of the road and watched as a small car, a green-and-white Mini, backed out of the garage. The garage door rolled down, and in the light she could see only a single person inside the car, small, probably a woman.
At the end of the driveway, the car turned toward her. She flipped down her hood to show her blond hair, and as the Mini slowly approached, she stiffened one leg to simulate limping and waved at the vehicle, which slowed some more, and Grant could see an elderly woman’s face peering out at her.
The car came up, stopped beside her, and she limped around to the passenger side. She already had the gun in her hand. When the driver’s-side window rolled down, the old lady said, “Is there something—”
Grant shot her in the face.
The car started to ease forward, the car in gear but the woman’s foot apparently still on the brake. With the street gradually inclining upward, Grant was able to reach inside the window and grab the door latch and open it. She had to struggle to stay with the car, as she unlatched the old lady’s safety belt and pulled her out on the street. Then Grant was inside.
She’d lucked out: the car had an automatic transmission. She put it in park, got out, ran back to the woman, dragged her body to the side of the road—she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds—and threw it under a spreading evergreen shrub. As she did, the woman’s phone fell out of her pocket. Grant crushed it underfoot and kicked it into the brush.
Back in the car, she drove slowly out to a main road, the one Parrish had driven in on, and turned back toward Washington. A mile down the road, two cops cars sped past, their lights flashingand their sirens screaming, into the murky darkness. Followed by a third, and a fourth, but no ambulances. She almost got lost twice, thinking about Davenport and the Watergate. There was a public garage at the Watergate.
—
SHE PARKED THE CARat the Watergate forty-five minutes after leaving Great Falls. As she was getting out, she noticed a green bottle in the door pocket: hand cleaner. She rummaged around the inside of the car, found a packet of tissues, soaked one in the cleaner, which was mostly alcohol, and used it to wipe down the steering wheel and gearshift. She pulled her hood up, got out of the car, wiped down the seat, closed the door, locked it, and walked out to the street.
The Park Hyatt was a half mile away. She moved quickly, without running, up New Hampshire Avenue to 24th Street, north on 24th. She checked for cops, dropped the gun and magazine, separately, into sewers; it was still raining, and water bubbled over both as they disappeared through the grates and down the culverts.
At the Park Hyatt, hood still up, water trickling down the jacket, she caught an empty elevator and ten minutes later was back in her room.
Her hair was a mess, and she smelled like raw wet oak bark and the whiskey Douglas had thrown at her, and she was still sweating. She combed her hair out, hit it with a dryer, jumped into the shower, used the hotel soap to scrub herself down for a full two minutes. She had several small cuts on her hands from tree branches, but her face was clear. Out of the shower, she checked her hair and fluffed it with the dryer again, did a quickrework of her makeup, covered a scratch on the back of her hand with more makeup. The five quick dabs of Black Orchid. Her black clothing was locked in the overnight bag, to be dumped as soon as she could safely do it. She’d been gone an hour and a half, needed to mix, needed to be seen.
A lot.
She closed her eyes, took several long breaths, calmed herself.What would the Buddha do?
