Dominic's POV
The rear window comes in like a sheet of ice.
It doesn't shatter so much as dissolve. A thousand cubes of safety glass rain across the back seat, across my wife's hair and shoulders, and a bullet goes through the headrest where her head was a second ago.
"Down!" I shout.
She's already down.
She's flat across the leather with her arms over her skull, and I throw myself over her, my whole body on top of hers, in the hot dark, in the stink of cordite.
Another crack.
The windshield starred. Cho swears.
"Hannah!"
"I'm okay."
"You're driving."
"I know I'm driving, Mr Hale!"
The Ford lurches. We swerve across two lanes, horns howling. A truck swings past with a long, ugly blare. The SUV fills the mirror, huge and black and silent, its high beams a dazzling white.
I get my head up.
Serena's face is a foot from mine. She's pale and grim and gloriously furious. There's a cut on her cheek, a thin red line, beaded with blood.
"Are you hit?"
"No."
"You're bleeding."
"It's glass."
"Serena..."
"I'm fine. Dom. Look at Hannah."
I look.
Cho is gripping the wheel with both hands, her knuckles white. Her face is calm. Her left shoulder is black and shining.
"Hannah."
"It's nothing."
"You've been shot."
"It's a graze."
"There's blood on the..."
"Mr Hale." Her voice is very dry. "I've been shot at by better people than this. Hold on."
She pulls the wheel hard.
We take the Turnpike ramp at sixty, the Ford howling on its springs. The SUV follows, hugging our bumper. Another crack. The wing mirror explodes. The road ahead is a long, dark river of tail-lights and rain.
"I can't lose him," says Cho through her teeth. "He's got a V8. I've got a Ford."
"Give me the wheel."
"What?"
"Give it to me."
"You can't drive like..."
"I used to race," I say.
She looks at me.
Whatever she sees in my face, it makes her swerve to the shoulder. We skid to a halt, and I'm out and round the hood and hauling her across, with her teeth bared and her good hand clamped round my sleeve. I drop behind the wheel.
I've never driven a Ford in my life.
I put my foot to the floor.
***
I race for four miles.
There's a stretch of the Turnpike south of Newark where the road splits in three and the exits come at you like teeth. I use all three. I cut across a delivery van and a minibus full of nuns. I take an off-ramp at ninety, and the SUV, which was a car's length behind, misses it by a whisker and has to brake.
I loop under the flyover.
I come up on the other side, through a truck yard, a scrapyard, a rail yard with a freight train sitting idle. I kill the lights.
Silence.
Rain on the roof.
Behind us, a long way off, an engine roars, rises, fades.
I sit with my hands on the wheel, shaking.
"Dom," says Serena, behind me.
"Yes?"
"You can breathe."
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
"Is it gone?"
"For now."
"Hannah?"
"Alive," says Cho, from the passenger seat. Her voice is a thin thread. "Mostly."
I twist round.
She's slumped against the door with her hand pressed to her shoulder, and blood is running between her fingers in a slow, dark, steady line. Her face is grey. Serena has already got a scarf out of her handbag, her silk scarf, the one she's worn every day for three years, and is winding it round the wound with swift, grim hands.
"Hold that."
"Mrs Hale..."
"It's Serena. Hold it tighter."
Cho obeys.
"Hospital," I say.
"No."
"Hannah."
"No hospital." She shakes her head. "Gunshot wound. They'll report it. The Bureau will know before I'm out of surgery." A grim smile. "I'd rather bleed."
"You'll bleed to death."
"I've been bleeding for three years, Mr Hale. I'm used to it."
"Then where?"
She opens her eyes.
"The unit."
"Bayonne?"
"It's four miles." She coughs. "It's the last place on earth they'd expect us to go. They've already been."
"What?"
"The SUV." She nods at the rear window. "Why d'you think it was waiting at the Starlite? Dawn's husband told a man in a bar that his wife had a key. He didn't mean any harm."
Serena sits back.
"They knew about the unit."
"They knew something. They didn't know when."
"Then they'll be there."
"They might." Cho lifts her chin. "Or they might think we're running for a hospital."
I put the car in gear.
***
Safe-Stor Bayonne is a squat grey building at the end of a cul-de-sac, with a chain-link fence and a flickering sodium lamp. I switch off the engine at the gate. The rain has settled to a hush.
Nobody's there.
The gate is open. The office is dark. A security light swings in the wind.
Unit eighteen is on the ground floor, a corrugated door in a long row, with a dented padlock.
Serena puts the green-corded key in the lock.
It turns.
I haul up the door.
It rises with a long shriek, and a smell comes out: dust and diesel and old rubber, and under it, faintly, the cold salt of the sea.
It isn't empty.
There's a steel footlocker against the back wall, olive-green, stencilled with a Navy serial. A wetsuit hangs from a nail. Three air tanks stand in a rack. A workbench runs along one side, bare, with a vice, a soldering iron, and a row of small, neat, perfectly clean tools laid out in order of size.
On the bench, in the middle, set squarely, like an offering, is a fireproof pouch.
Nothing else.
Serena crosses the concrete.
She picks it up.
Her hands are not quite steady.
She unzips it.
Inside, in a freezer bag, a small black notebook, and a micro-cassette, and a photograph.
She takes out the photograph first.
It's a Polaroid, curling at the edges, taken in a dim room under a bare bulb. On a workbench, the very bench in front of us, sits a silver champagne cooler. The lid has been taken off. A single drill hole, neat and round, has been made in the base. In the cavity beneath, wired into a block of grey putty, sits a little black plastic box with a green circuit board.
A date is scrawled across the bottom in pen.
10/13.
The night before.
Serena doesn't make a sound.
She hands it to me.
I look at it.
I look at it for a very long time, in the grey light of a Bayonne storage unit, while a woman bleeds quietly in a doorway and the rain taps on the roof.
It's my wife's death.
It's a drilled ice bucket on a bench.
"Dom," says Serena.
"I'm all right."
"Read the book."
I put down the photograph.
I take the notebook.
It's small, black, water-stained, in a cramped hand, columns of dates and sums. A ledger of a kind. I turn the pages.
10/09. E.V. Cash. 40K. Deposit.
10/13. E.V. 60K. Balance on delivery. A.B. present. Said grace.
10/14. Done.
I stop reading.
Under A.B., in the margin, he has drawn a tiny anchor.
"It's him," I say.
It comes out almost soundless.
"It's enough to hang them," says Cho, from the doorway. "With the tape. And the unit. And Dawn's statement. If I can get it to the right person."
"Who?"
"Someone who doesn't eat lunch with Edmund Vance."
I turn the next page.
The next. A list of names and sums. Payments that began four months before the blast and ran to a month after. A column of meetings. A column of places. A last page, half torn, with a few words scrawled and then crossed out.
I hold it up to the light.
The ink is dark, jagged, a man writing in a hurry.
H. Greaves. Portland. Has Walter Q's second ledger. E.V. wants it. Told him I'd handle it.
And underneath, in a different pen, in a steadier hand, a single word, underlined twice.
Didn't.