Afterparty Part 17

"You did not kill Mikala," the angel said, but the woman could not trust her. The angel's job, the mother believed, was to comfort her, to tell her things she wanted to hear, and show her what she needed to see.

She decided to sign the form. Her daughter deserved a real mother, a loving mother, who had not committed terrible crimes.

She held fast to that decision for several minutes. Then she thought, But what if...?

There were 71 hours and 30 minutes to go.

-G.I.E.D.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

East of the city the 401 rode the lip of Lake Ontario like a dare until it lost courage and angled north into farmland. I'd grown up in a small town an hour north of that highway, and I'd traveled a good chunk of the road from Windsor to Quebec. It was a boring drive, and I was exhausted. Despite the fact that I was traveling against my will with armed gangsters, the trip would be a five-hour exercise in maintaining consciousness.

Throughout the night I'd dreamed of white corridors, then awoke suffocating, unable to catch my breath. For the rest of the day I'd been kept prisoner in the family living room by Aaqila's mother, a woman only a few years older than me who spoke adequate English. I never caught her name. She fed me microwave lasagna and orange soda and forced us to watch a marathon rebroadcast of her favorite reality show, Beam Me Up! Each episode, a wealthy first-world family switched places for a month with a third-world one. It was evidently a huge hit. Half the show, the audience could chuckle warm-heartedly at yokels from Darfur oohing and aahing over the Albertson's produce section; the other half they could laugh out loud at white Republicans from Ohio pulling ticks off their a.s.ses.

Aaqila came in and out of the living room, but spent most of the time in another part of the house, playing the sulky babysitter. Dr. Gloria and I talked about running away. We were pretty sure I wouldn't get far in this neighborhood. Plus Aaqila still had my boots and other belongings, including the pen. G.o.d, I itched for a phone. All I wanted was two minutes with a keypad. If I couldn't reach Ollie, I was never going to get out of Canada, at least not breathing. Fayza would find out soon enough that there was no chemjet coming by boat from America, and I'd find out soon enough what it was like to be dead.

Just before episode nine of Beam Me Up!-"The Mackenzies of Colorado are arrested by North Korean police!"-Aaqila's mother paused the screen and went into the kitchen to make us a snack. Something glimmered at the edge of my vision, and Dr. Gloria said, "The writing is on the wall."

Red letters flickered across the striped wallpaper. It said: Been listening.

"Are you doing that?" I said to Gloria.

Gloria put up her hands. "Don't look at me."

The words changed-a longer sentence. I jumped from my seat, and my body obstructed some of the message. I turned toward the living room window. There was a two-foot gap between the curtains, and through it I could see a few people on the street. One of them, standing directly across from the window, was a figure in a baseball cap and heavy jacket who could have been a twelve-year-old boy.

I stepped back. The message changed again. Three more sentences written in flickering laser light appeared. Dr. Gloria studied them with me, memorizing them.

Aaqila's mother walked into the room. "Ready?" she asked.

The words were still glowing on the wall. I jumped toward the woman and took the bowl she was carrying. It was full of a.s.sorted nuts mixed with a spice that smelled like rosemary.

"Are these an Afghan snack?" I asked, trying to keep her attention on me. "They look delicious."

"I got them at Whole Foods," she said, and reached for the remote.

"Clear," Dr. Gloria said. The words had disappeared.

I tried to look as bored and anxious as I had all day, but inside I was almost collapsing from relief. Ollie had told me that pens were tracking devices, and ever since Hootan had picked me up at Bobby's apartment I'd been praying that she was following me. Now I knew that she'd done more than that: She'd tracked me, listened in, and formed a plan.

Sometime around 5 p.m. Hootan arrived, and we started the long haul to Cornwall. Dr. G sat up front. Aaqila sat beside me in the backseat, looking unhappy. In her lap she held a pink nylon Mr. Squiggly lunchbox. She spent the entire time with her pen open, talking to ... who? Other emo girls on TalentForTorture.com? The WillingToWaterboard social network?

The sun dropped behind us, filling the car with light for perhaps a half hour before it sank below the horizon. We drove in the dark for another two hours, no one speaking. Hootan wore his gla.s.ses, blinking messages or watching a show, an absurdly dangerous thing to do. Aaqila stayed glued to her pen.

I said, "That's the place." A sign announced the Morrisburg Service Center in five kilometers.

"I don't like this," Hootan said.

"Well too bad. They told me to pull over there and wait for further instructions, so that's what we're going to do." Aaqila didn't involve herself in the argument.

Hootan took the exit ramp. The rest area was a vast, empty parking lot somehow made more vast and empty by the three semitrailers parked under the lights. No cars I could see, which worried me. A paved road led off into the trees to the right, toward what I a.s.sumed to be a picnic area.

Hootan pulled up to the only building, a brown rectangular shed that had been built by the government but ceded to a "Snoopy's," a convenience store chain I'd never heard of.

"You have the pen?" I asked Aaqila.

"Stop asking me that."

"Is it turned on?"

She scowled. We waited for ten, fifteen minutes. The pen didn't ring. I said, "I gotta pee."

"We wait here," Hootan said.

"Like a f.u.c.king racehorse," I said.

Hootan took off his gla.s.ses to look at me. "Why do you have to be so crude?"

"You want me to just go all over your upholstery?"

"Aaqila goes with you," he said.

"As long as she lets me go first." I hustled toward the convenience store, and Aaqila was forced to walk quickly to keep up. The clerk, a chubby blond girl, read my pained expression and pointed me toward the restroom.

"Wait," Aaqila said. She put a hand on my shoulder and pushed open the door with the other. The room was a few days of hard use past clean, with squares of toilet paper pasted to the grubby linoleum. There were two stalls, a sink, and a stainless steel mirror. One stall door was ajar, the other closed.

Aaqila knocked on the closed door. "h.e.l.lo?" She knocked again.

I flashed on a fantasy: The door bangs open, knocking Aaqila back. Ollie steps out with a gun. We tie up the girl, duct tape her mouth shut, then ... It got hazy after that. The money was back in the car, in the Mr. Squiggly box. So we'd have to get the drop on Hootan too.

Aaqila crouched to look under the stall door.

Second fantasy: I smash Aaqila in the back of the head (with what?), drag her into the stall, and press her face into the toilet.

"Thoughts like those aren't helpful," Dr. G said.

I disagreed.

Aaqila got to her feet and looked at her palms in disgust. "n.o.body there."

I took the empty stall. I scanned for pens taped to the toilet, messages scrawled on the toilet paper, words drawn into the grime on the wall ... but no. The five sentences that Ollie had beamed onto the wall at Aaqila's house were all I had to go on: Been listening Heard deal for chemjet All OK Stop at 401 Morrisburg SC K756 Wait for call from smugglers. XXOO Historically speaking, phantom messages that appear on walls tend toward the cryptic. I had no Daniel to call on, but I did have an angel on my shoulder, and while we watched episodes of Beam Me Up! Dr. Gloria and I interpreted the words as follows, adding emotional subtext: This is Ollie. I love you and care for you and have been tracking you through the pen I gave you. I have also, using the same pen or perhaps other devices I've placed on your person, overheard the deal you made with Fayza for the chemjet printer. I have a plan that will save us all and get us to America. Just drive toward Cornwall on the 401, and stop at the Morrisburg Service Center located at kilometer marker 756. The smugglers will call with further instructions. Hugs and kisses.

Perhaps, I thought, we'd read too optimistically. Maybe Ollie had no plan at all. Maybe I was supposed to come up with the plan.

"Everything will work out," Dr. Gloria said, hovering over the stall. "How could you not trust someone who signs a secret message with those middle school Xs and Os?"

"She was being ironic," I said.

"No, she said it ironically, but she was really being sincere. It was both."

"Bi-ronic."

"Bi-rony," Dr. G agreed.

"So what happens when the smugglers call?"

"I have no idea," Dr. Gloria said.

"Then would you let me pee in peace?"

In the next stall, a pen began to chime. I heard Aaqila answer. There was a pause, and then the girl was standing on her toilet and looking over the stall at me. "It's for you."

She handed me the pen. There was no video. A voice said, "Lyda Rose?" It was electronically modified, and sounded like LYda ROZE.

"Speaking."

"I'M SENDing GPS coORDinates. DRIVE THERE."

"Why are they using so much distortion?" Dr. Gloria asked. "There's perfectly good speech modification technology out there."

I ignored her. The voice said, "PARK and turn OFF your LIGHTS."

"They could sound like a British nanny or Samuel L. Jackson, any accent they like, and it would be just as untraceable."

"WAIT for FUR-thur inSTRUC-tions."

"No lights, wait for instructions," I repeated, for Aaqila's benefit. I didn't want to give them the impression that I was making any of this up. "Got it."

The call cut off. A few seconds later I received a text message with a travel link in it. The little map showed our route. I couldn't decide if the call had been from Ollie or from the actual smugglers. Then I couldn't decide if it mattered.

"I suppose they think it makes them sound tough," Dr. G said. "It's like a font for gangsters."

I took the front seat with Hootan to relay directions. He wanted me to send the map to his gla.s.ses, but I refused on the grounds that HUDs were f.u.c.king crazy, blindfolds for people with ADD, and Aaqila agreed. The pen directed me, and I directed Hootan. After forty minutes we left the 401 and took 138 south through Cornwall City, which at night looked like every small city at night. We pa.s.sed an abandoned port-of-entry station, crossed a short bridge, and came down on Cornwall Island.

The island sat in the middle of the St. Lawrence like a mossy stepping stone between nations. It was technically part of Canada, but it was also inside the Akwesasne Reserve, the territory of the Mohawk Nation. The reserve (or "reservation" if you were speaking Anglo-American) included parts of New York, Quebec, and Ontario. The Mohawks had little use for borders. The tribe went to court every time the Americans or the Canadians tried to set up toll stations or immigration controls, taking the position that you could no more divide up their land than you could cut soup. There were homes on the southeast of the reserve where the New York/Quebec border ran straight through the living room. Sometimes the tribe won the case-like the closing of the port-of-entry on the Cornwall City mainland-and sometimes the governments did.

If we stayed on the highway it would turn into the International Seaway Bridge and carry us to America-and straight into the Hogansburg port-of-entry and the arms of the United States Border Patrol. The legal battle over that POE was one the tribe had definitely lost.

(I came to know these facts the way we all came to know things in the twenty-first century: My internet told me so. The map on my pen came chock-full of textual tidbits, like this Fun Fact: In winter, smugglers used to cross the frozen St. Lawrence in trucks, but for the past five winters the river has failed to freeze solid. Huh!) We did not stay on the highway. Well before the Seaway Bridge the pen directed us to turn east. Hootan cruised at unsuspicious speeds through the island's tiny downtown, then into a woodsy residential area. We kept going until we'd almost reached the eastern end of the island, where we were surrounded by a lot more woods than residences. It was still winter here: Snow lined the road and lay thick under the trees.

I pointed to a gap between two large firs. "Pull off the road," I said. "And turn out your lights."

Hootan gave me a look. He didn't like to be ordered around-especially by a woman-but he did as he was told. "Now what?" he asked.

I didn't bother answering. He knew what they'd told me.

There wasn't much traffic on this road, but we tensed up as each pair of headlights pa.s.sed us. After fifteen minutes Hootan said, "We're going to get stopped by the cops."

"Can you be stopped if you're not moving?" Dr. Gloria asked from the backseat.

"Relax," I said to everyone, including myself.

It was another half hour before the pen chimed. Aaqila had taken it back from me. She held out the device, and all four of us leaned in to hear. "WALK toward the WA-ter," the same electronic voice said. "Bring the MON-ey. Come ALONE."

The call ended. Hootan said, "Screw that."

"Don't be crude," Dr. G said.

"We're going with you," Aaqila said.

"Didn't think I could stop you," I said. To Aaqila I said, "The money?"

She handed me the Mr. Squiggly lunchbox. I thought about opening it to count the cash, but decided I didn't need to antagonize her. Yet.

Dr. Gloria took to the air, and the rest of us entered the trees. I tried to step around the deeper patches, but the snow kept tipping into the tops of my boots. According to the map, the car shouldn't have been more than a hundred meters from the water, but I couldn't see anything through the trees, and I couldn't make out any sound over my huffing and puffing.

Suddenly I stepped out onto a dirt road-really no more than a pair of deeply rutted tire tracks. Dr. Gloria landed in a flurry of wings.

"This wasn't on the map," Hootan said. He sounded hurt.

"I think that's on purpose," I said.

To my right the trail curled into the trees, heading roughly back the way we'd come. To my left it ended in an open area shaped like the head of a sperm. At the edge of the clearing, the land dropped off. Beyond was the moon-flecked river.

A flashlight raked us from the trees at the western edge of the clearing, then focused on my face.

"I told you to come alone!" a female voice yelled.

"At least she's not using distortion," Dr. G said.

I shaded my eyes against the glare. "I have the money," I called back. "You have the printer?"

"Come forward-just you!"

I started forward, and Aaqila put a hand on my shoulder. "Don't do anything stupid," she said.

"I think it's too late for that," Dr. G said.

The flashlight moved to cover Aaqila and Hootan, and I walked out into the dark. But not alone; Dr. G of course followed me out. When I was in the middle of the clearing, the voice called, "Stop!" A few feet away stood a mound about two feet high, covered by a tarp; in the dark I'd thought it was a boulder.