Chapter Eleven
Nathan
"We can't stay here." I tugged on Bree's arm again but she wouldn't move. She was slumped against the wall of the alley within sight of a busy thoroughfare.
All I had to do was get her to her feet and we'd be back to the motel in no time. The police had chased off the armed men, but my sense of urgency was growing by the second. Bree's behavior and bloodied arm would be noticed soon enough, and I couldn't let us get tied to the scene of the shootout. If the bank manager and security guard hadn't mentioned us already.
"Don't make me carry you," I said.
Bree's eyelashes fluttered, and she flashed an irritated look up at me. "I got shot in the arm. I can still walk."
I hauled her to her feet. "You caught a ricochet. Trust me. An actual gunshot would have been a lot cleaner."
Bree shook off my hand. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
She spun around and marched toward the mouth of the alley. I caught her steps before the police squad car that marked where the shootout happened.
"We have to keep out of sight." I pulled her back, and she blinked as if she didn't recognize me. "Let's get you back to the motel. ASAP."
Bree walked with me but her breath escaped in little whimpers. "I don't want to go to the motel," she said. "I want to go home."
"Topeka?" I asked.
"No. Really home." Bree raised her sore arm to wipe her face on her sleeve but winced at the pain. "Home where my sister is always playing the perfect music for the mood. Where she's stashed something silly like a snail kite or a pack of dog poker cards. Something to make me laugh when it's all too much."
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and swayed. I caught her just before she dropped to the ground again.
"Fine. We'll get you to your sister." I would have told her anything to keep her moving. A squad car was cruising down the street behind us.
Bree shook her head. "I forgot. I can't go home. She won't talk to me. She doesn't want to see me."
I pulled her along. "Sounds like some fight. Maybe you should call her first."
"Where am I going to go?" Bree's voice took on a high, brittle edge. "What am I going to do?"
"You're going to calm down." I pulled her close to me and tucked my arm around her. My hand almost covered the bloodied section of her shirt, but I was afraid another passing squad car would notice.
Bree was silent the rest of the walk, and I wasn't sure what was worse, her panicked tears or her defeated silence. She walked like a zombie, and I could have led her anywhere.
I should have pointed her in the direction of the nearest police precinct. She would have been safer there. Bree could have told the police I kidnapped her. Then she would be free to return to Topeka, or find her sister, or start over somewhere completely new.
"Almost there," I said. My grip on her was too tight but she didn't complain.
I could see the motel at the end of the block. We only had a few hundred more feet and she could collapse. We both could.
"My car." Bree snapped out of her daze and fought against me, trying to turn around.
"A few bullet holes but no broken windows," I said. "It'll be fine where we left it until things cool off."
"Cool off?" Bree's eyes had a distant look. "I'm freezing."
"We're almost to the motel. Think blankets, sweatshirts, a hot bath." I said anything I could think of to push her along the last few feet to safety.
With the motel room door shut behind us, I was finally able to take a deep breath. It didn't help. All it did was make me realize I was more worried about Bree than I was about getting shot at. Those men knew me, knew that I had been at the bank before.
Thank god, I had been right about them not wanting to kill us. But where did they want to take me? How did I know them?
It felt like a huge, heavy curtain covered up my last few days. I wanted to tear at it with my bare hands, but there was nothing I could do.
Bree was shivering despite the sweatshirt she had pulled out of her small suitcase. I wrapped her in a blanket and tried to tempt her with the selection of snacks I had grabbed from the vending machine the night before.
"Not hungry," Bree said.
"How about I run you a bath?" I sat down next to her on the bed and moved to put my arm around her shivering shoulders.
Bree inched away from me with wide eyes. "No, thanks."
I fought the urge to groan and growl. I could feel Bree pulling away from me, and that was the last thing I could handle at that point. She was my only ally. The only one who knew as much about where I had been and what I had done as I did. Without her, I knew I would quickly lose hope.
"It's just shock," I told Bree. "Your body is trying to preserve itself. Try to think about something besides what happened. Maybe something that happened just before everything went south."
Bree nodded and stood up. I had to lunge across the motel room to block her from grabbing the shoebox.
"What?" she snapped. "I'm doing what you said. I'm concentrating on what we were doing before the guns… I mean, all the rest."
I tried to catch her hands. "Yes. It would be really helpful to go over what we already know. What was the name of the street the little girl's postcard mentioned?"
Bree narrowed her eyes at me. "Ginger Road Park. I think it's a place, not a street name."
"In El Paso," I said. Bree reached for the shoebox again but I stepped in the way. "And the postcard was addressed funny. 'Dear Someone,' right?"
"Nathan, we know all this, and it's not helping." Bree shoved me aside and picked up the shoebox.
It was heavy enough that she had to catch it with her other hand. She clutched it to her stomach and moved to sit down on the motel bed again. I wanted to knock it out of her hands, but that would have only made things worse.
Instead, I sank down to sit beside her on the sagging mattress. "I really don't remember, Bree. You believe me, right?"
Bree nodded but didn't say a word. She couldn't speak. Underneath the ragged shoebox lid, she spied the flash of the gun. Then her wide, terrified eyes lifted to mine.
"It's a Glock 49," I told her. "I have no idea why it's in there."
"It's yours?" Bree asked.
I shook my head. "I didn't own a gun before. I don't know. I told you I can't remember."
I stood up to pace off my agitation, and I accidentally knocked the shoebox from Bree's hands. The Glock rattled to the floor next to two bricks of white powder.
"Is that cocaine?" Bree asked.
"I wouldn't know, and I'm not going to open those up," I said. "You believe me, right?"
"Nathan, I…" Bree swallowed hard and wrapped her arms tight over her stomach. "I believe that you can't remember, but I don't know who you are. I don't have any idea who you were."
I started to rattle off my credentials, my schooling, even my old addresses, but my voice gave out. How could I pretend she wasn't right? I remembered who I used to be, but whatever I had done could have changed everything. I could have transformed into a completely different person and just not realized it yet.
"I've never done cocaine." It was the only honest thing I could tell Bree. The doctors at the clinic said my tox screen was clear of everything but alcohol.
"And the gun?" Bree asked.
I leaned against the dresser in front of her. "I probably needed it. We need it. Now that I know armed men are trying to grab me."
"But not kill you," Bree said.
"Right. They only wanted me to come with them," I remembered. It was small comfort but I was willing to take what I could get.
Then I remembered Bree's arm. I ran to the motel bathroom and was lucky enough to find a first aid kit, or the remains of one. As soon as Bree saw me returning with rubbing alcohol, she stirred.
"I can do that myself. Thanks," Bree said.
I bit my lip as she tried to peel off her shirt. It stuck to the wound, and Bree gave a little cry as she tore the wound open.
"I never meant for this to happen," I said.
"How would you know?" Bree snapped. She opened the rubbing alcohol and scowled at the clean motel towel that I handed her. "You can't remember, right?"
"I can remember how to clean and dress a wound." I snatched the towel out of her hand and swatted her hands back until she let me help her. "And I think I would remember if I had a group of men in dark suits trying to hunt me down."
Bree waited as I put gauze over the jagged cut across her bicep. "Well? What do you remember now?" she asked.
The patience was gone from her voice, and I knew I was losing her. Bree would listen to me flounder around one last time and then she would get up and walk out of the motel room forever. Just the thought was enough to kick my heart back up to panicked speed.
"I remember how you didn't run away and leave me to die. I remember how you hung on to that shoebox even though the world around you was exploding." I finished dressing her wound but caught her hand. "I remember you were the first person who believed me."
"Fat lot of good that's done either of us," Bree said.
I forced myself to go and sit at the small round motel table in the corner. Bree fussed over her arm for a minute and then stood up to pace the motel room. All I could do was watch her and hope she didn't head for the door.
Not that I would have blamed her. She probably thought she was getting in a fun little fling before heading back to the diner in Topeka. Bree hadn't counted on the mystery of the little girl, Maggie, or the men in dark suits with shiny guns.
"Were those men speaking Spanish?" I wondered out loud.
Bree flinched at my words as they broke her from her own terrified thoughts. "I don't know. Things got a little loud when they started firing at us."
She paced back and forth again, then stopped to pick up a bag of chips. Bree lifted it up with her thumb and one finger, crinkling up her nose as she considered the prepackaged dose of sodium.
"Hungry? I'll order a pizza. Then we should find something on TV. You know, relax a bit. Isn't that what I should do if I want to recover my memory?" I asked her.
"Relax?" Bree gave me an exhausted look.
"Well, at least say yes to the pizza." I picked up the brochure on the nightstand. "This place says they can deliver in thirty minutes. You should eat something."
Bree nodded and sank back onto the motel bed. I tossed her an extra blanket and was relieved when she wound it around herself. She certainly didn't look like she was going anywhere, but I was still worried.
Bree should have left. I shouldn't have wanted her to stay. But the only thing that kept repeating through my head wasn't the shattering gunshots but the thought that I didn't want to do any of this without Bree. I needed her to stay even as I understood exactly why her eyes kept sliding toward the motel room door.