“Yes.”
He nodded. “It’s smart. Let law enforcement do the blunt work. If Fallon gets arrested, she’s in the system—full photo, fingerprints, real name. If she runs, there’s a police report with more data for the file. Either way, whoever is behind this gets more intel.”
“Do we know where this is coming from, Cass?”
“Not yet. But this isn’t reactive from your break in the other night. The partial photo is from a previous job. The address, the knowledge of me—none of this came from Chattanooga. Someone’s been assembling this for a while, and they have resources I’m not sure I even understand. We’ve always been so careful.”
The three of them sat with that. Isaac’s hand was on her shoulder, warm and steady, and she leaned into it.
“My apartment is burned,” Fallon said. “Everything in it.”
“Yes. Don’t go back. I’ll wipe the laptop remotely. Anything in that apartment has to be treated as compromised.”
Clothes, computer, supplies, the accumulated pieces of a life she’d assembled in a city she was about to abandon. All of it gone. Again.
“We need to go,” Isaac said. Low, direct. “The longer we stand here, the more dangerous this gets.”
“He’s right,” Cassandra said. “Get away from there. Get anywhere but there. Call me when you’re safe. I’ll keep digging.”
Fallon hung up. She looked at Isaac. He was already moving, his hand shifting from her shoulder to the small of her back, steering them toward the car.
They walked. Unhurried on the surface. A couple heading somewhere with no particular urgency, and if Fallon’s stride was a little stiff, a little careful, that was nobody’s business.
They’d made it a block and a half when the cop came around a corner.
He was alone. Uniform, radio on his belt, the wide stance of a man doing a perimeter sweep of the surrounding blocks. His eyes swept the street and found Fallon.
She watched the recognition happen. His eyes went to his phone, then back up to her face. Down again. Up again. His spine straightened. His weight shifted from casual to alert.
“Excuse me, ma’am? Could you stop for a moment?”
Isaac’s hand pressed against her back. They kept walking.
“Ma’am. I need you to stop.”
The tone changed. The professional courtesy dropped away and something harder took its place. She heard his squawk as he hit the button.
Both she and Isaac took off running.
Isaac could have left her behind in three strides. But he stayed right beside her, matching her pace, his head on a swivel, reading the streets ahead and checking details behind.
His hand caught her arm and directed her left down a residential side street. Then right through an alley behind a row of duplexes. She let him lead, allowing her to focus on the only thing she could manage: keeping her legs moving.
Her body had agreed to walk today. It had not agreed to this. Her knee registered its objection with every stride and her wrist sent jolts up her arm from the impact of her own feet hitting pavement. Three blocks in and she could feel the margins shrinking, the difference between running and not running getting thinner with every step.
Behind them, the cop’s radio crackled. She couldn’t hear the words, but she heard the tone. Backup was coming. More units. More eyes.
They couldn’t outrun a radio.
Isaac pulled her around another corner. Ahead, between two buildings, a gap. A narrow passage where a chain-link fence meta brick wall, the space between them maybe fourteen inches wide.
Barbed wire coiled along the top of the fence. A utility conduit ran along the ground, and an overgrown shrub pressed against the fence, narrowing the passage further at the midpoint.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “We’ve got to go back.”
She couldn’t keep running. Doubling back brought them closer to the cops, not away from them. Isaac and the cop couldn’t fit through that gap in the fence.
But Fallon could.
