They were halfway across Richmond when the kid woke up.
Puffy lids parted, revealing glazed eyes. David Smith lifted his head groggily, groaned, and lowered it back to the bench seat of the minivan.
Joey peered down from the passenger seat, concerned. “He’s up. Pull over.”
Evan parked across from a high school that stretched to encompass the entire block. He killed the engine and checked out the surroundings. On the near side of the street, magnolias fanned up from a verdant park, their crooked branches bare and haunting. A man-made river drifted beneath the low-swooping boughs, white water rushing across river stones to feed an elaborate fountain at the center. There were speed walkers and young couples and dogs chasing Frisbees—a good amount of activity to get lost in.
Evan leaned around the driver’s seat to peer back at the boy.
“You’re okay, David,” he said. “You’re safe now.”
The boy blinked heavily. “That’s not my name.”
“We know it is. We know you were trained by Tim Draker, that you had to go on the run, that Jack Johns hid you in that mental-health center until you were kidnapped yesterday.”
“Is this another mind game?” the boy asked.
“What?”
“You know, like SERE stuff. You take me, mess with my head, see what I’ll give up.”
Evan said, “Not even close.”
A bell warbled, and kids started streaming from the school, pouring down the front steps, zombie-mobbing the minivan on their way to the park. The added movement was good, even easier to blend into.
Joey pointed to the sutured slice on the back of David’s left forearm. “What happened there?”
The boy regarded the cut and his arm as if he’d never seen them before. “I don’t … I don’t remember.”
He tried to sit up, wobbled, finally made it. His face was pale, his lips bloodless. He shook his head. “I don’t feel so good.”
“Let’s get him some fresh air,” Evan said, already stepping out into the sea of high-schoolers.
He slid back the side door, and Joey helped David out.
“Off the street,” he said, and she nodded.
They joined the current of kids flowing through the magnolias and across the park. Kids clustered to take phone pics and compare the results. Braying laughter, deafening chatter, a cacophony of ringtones. Evan led Joey and David, cutting between cliques. They stopped at the fountain. Students rimmed the encircling concrete. The air smelled of chlorine, hair spray, the skunky tinge of pot. A family of black ducks paddled across the still water at the fountain’s edge. Buried treasure glimmered beneath, copper wishes waiting to be fulfilled.
No one took note of the three of them; they’d vanished in plain sight.
Color crept back into David’s cheeks, his lips pinking up. He sat on the rim of the fountain, poked at the sutures.
“Looks like you were drugged,” Joey said.
His head bobbled unevenly. “But why? I woulda done whatever.”
To one side a crew of girls crowded around a ringleader with gel nails and green-and-white Stan Smiths. “Loren’s totally gonna uninvite her from her sweet sixteen, because—get this—she posted a pic of herself with Dylan in his backseat. They were just sitting there, but still. Hashtag: trashy.”
This doubled the girls over. Leaning on each other, weak with laughter, retainers gleaming. Their sneakers matched. Their haircuts matched. Their backpacks were mounded at their heels, different shades of the same Herschel model.
Joey regarded them as one might a herd of exotic animals.
“Where’s that guy?” David asked. “The big guy?”
Joey refocused. “We got you from him.”
“But he was gonna put me in that program. The one Tim was training me for.” David’s gaze sharpened. “Wait—where’s Tim? What happened to him?”
Evan said, “They killed him.”
David’s mouth opened, but no noise came out.
Evan crouched and set his hands on David’s knees. “We’re gonna make sure you’re taken care of.”
“Evan,” Joey said. “Evan.”
She’d clocked something at the park’s perimeter. He picked up her gaze, spotting a black Suburban flickering into view behind clusters of students and the skeletal branches of the magnolias. It turned at the corner, creeping along the front of the high school.
Shea at the wheel, Delmonico in the passenger seat, Jordan Thornhill in the back, bouncing his head as if to music.
Joey somehow had one of the Herschel backpacks at her feet, unzipped. She’d already taken out an iPhone hugged by a rubber Panda case. She tapped in 911. When she put the phone to her ear, her hand was trembling.
They watched the Suburban prowl.
Evan popped the bottom two magnetic buttons of his shirt, creating an unobstructed lane to his hip holster. The breeze riffled the fabric, tightened his skin. Thornhill and the two freelancers would try to flush Evan, Joey, and David from the park. Presumably Candy and Van Sciver were in the surrounding blocks somewhere, lying in wait.
There were at least two hundred kids on scene—a lot of flesh to catch stray bullets.
“I just spotted two fugitives,” Joey said into the phone. “Paul Delmonico and Shane Shea.”
As she named the high school and the park, paranoia bubbled up in Evan. He looked down at the slit on David’s arm.
Dried blood at the seam. Fresh sutures. Good placement.
David blinked up through bleary red eyes. “What? What is it?”
“Come,” Evan said. “Now.”
As the Suburban drifted around the block, Evan circled to the far side of the fountain, keeping the spouting water between them and their pursuers.
Joey brought the stolen backpack, still talking into the phone. “There’s kids all over here, and those guys are armed, and they’re gonna start shooting people.”
The Panda phone case undercut the gravity of her tone, lending a surreal touch to the situation.
Youthful movement churned all around. Two skinny kids sat cross-legged at the base of a tree, testing each other with math equations on flash cards. An older kid in an artfully torn flannel snickered with his compatriots. “Dude, I am so gonna hit that this weekend.” One of the girls on the far side of the fountain had produced a selfie stick, and she and her friends were leaning together, making pouty lips, adjusting wisps of bangs. A half block away, three assassins glided down the street.
Joey hung up, pocketed the ridiculous Panda phone. “Let’s see how long it takes PD to respond to prison-escapee pedophile cop killers in a park full of children.”
David said, “What?”
She shushed him.
Through a jetting arc of water, they watched the Suburban ease into a parking spot a half block behind their minivan. Evan did a full 360. Nothing but kids on the grassy expanse, the weaving faux river, more trees. Van Sciver and Candy weren’t showing themselves.
They didn’t have to.
All around the park’s periphery, parents were picking up their kids, the Suburban just another SUV. Its doors opened, and the three men got out. They stood at the curb, scanning the park.
Joey said, “How?”
“His forearm,” Evan said.
She looked down at the four-inch seam sliced through David’s flesh.
“Wait,” David said. “What do you mean?”
“They chipped you.”
Thornhill’s stare moved to the fountain.
And locked onto them.
He rocked back on his heels, a small display of delight, and said something to Delmonico and Shea. All three sets of eyes pegged them now.
They were about a quarter mile away. The spray beneath the bent spurt of fountain caught the fading sunlight, suspending a rainbow in its web of drops. Evan glared through the gauzy veil of color. The men glared back. Except Thornhill.
Thornhill was grinning.
They stepped forward in unison, cutting through groups of students. Delmonico and Shea wore trench coats. With each step the barrels of their M4s nosed forward into view beside their knees. Thornhill angled away from them behind one of the gnarled tree trunks, opening up a second front.
Evan slid his hand through the gap of his shirt, clenched the grip of the ARES, and readied to draw.