Epilogue: The Next Thing
Madison, Wisconsin
Elizabeth / Emma
I don't know what it was with the night shift guy, but he couldn't mop worth a shit. It seemed to be a disorder common to night shift guys. I looked at the tiles and grimaced. Tiny bits of bell pepper and onion, wads of dough that had been stepped on and ground into the grout. Pizza sauce splattered all over the floor. Flour spread around, some of it stuck in the pizza sauce, which had set up like some gross red lacquer.
I'd find some way to make him pay. I had to.
But I’d do it after I cleaned this fucking place up. That, after all, was my job.
I looked around the inside of Mario's Pizza, taking in the industrial tile floor, the counter that separated the work from the customers, the big conveyor oven were all the magic happened. I looked at it and thought about the month that I had spent here now; plenty of time to become familiar with all of the accoutrement of the pizza business. It wasn’t hard to learn. I thought about how natural this place was coming to seem to me, and about how it felt as if I could just spend the rest of my life here.
And I wanted to scream.
When the Marshal Service had transferred me, I had done everything that I could convince them to let me give Ryan my new name and location. To take him with me. But that, they said, was against protocol. And, of course, it was those protocols that would keep me safe should Marconi's men show up again.
You know, just as they had kept me safe the last time.
Right.
I gritted my teeth as I thrust the mop into the bucket. I wanted to believe that the Marshall service wasn't full of shit. I wanted to believe I was safe. I just couldn't buy it. After all, I had felt safe in Fort Worth, and that it turned into a whole thing. And if Marconi could buy off one United States Marshal, there was no doubt in my mind he could buy off two, or a dozen. There was nowhere safe.
The only time I had actually been safe was with Ryan Calder.
I mopped the floor, scrubbing the hell out of the pasted-on debris from the night before. After that, I set up the toppings line. Pulled dough out of the refrigerator. Washed some dishes.
And Wisconsin. Why fucking Wisconsin? It was winter now, for Christ’s sake. Every time I went outside, I thought that I was going to die from exposure. In a thirty second walk to my car, I was absolutely certain I developed frostbite on my ears. Wisconsin in the wintertime, if you didn't know, is goddamn cold. I hated it.
Plus, I was jumping at shadows now. Every person I saw on the street was a spy for Marconi. Every person I bumped into with a suit was one of his enforcers, come to snatch me away to ransom my father’s silence. Every time I talked to my Marshal, something told me that this was the time he was going to sell me out and send someone to get me.
I wished, at this point, they would just do it and get it over with so I could stop being afraid it was going to happen, and just deal with it happening.
And now some part of me thought that moment had come.
From the time I woke up that morning, I felt some certain something was going to happen. By the time had gotten to the pizza shop, that certainty had developed into a crawling sensation on the back of my neck.
It felt as if someone was watching me.
When I got out of my car, I stood in the parking lot looking around, checking out cars parked along the street, pedestrians walking down the road, the fucking windows of apartments that looked down on the parking lot. Looking, looking, looking for anybody who might be looking at me. And I knew someone was out there. I knew someone had me in their sights. I just couldn’t see them yet.
And so all that day I tried to distract myself by being irritated at night shift, and then by being irritated with my own shift. Bill, the day shift manager, was a pothead who liked to go smoke a joint every couple of hours behind the store. It made him nice enough, I guess, but also made him a bit of a lazy ass. Hector and Jeff, our day shift drivers, weren’t much help in the store at all, preferring to drive their cars around, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee.
So I had plenty to direct my ire at over the course of the day to try to ignore that snaky feeling that I was being observed from somewhere I couldn't see.
But everything, as they say, leads to the next thing. My shift eventually led to the end of my shift.
I thought about calling my Marshal, but what would I say to him? "I feel nervous." Of course I felt nervous. I was in Witness Protection. You're supposed to feel nervous in Witness Protection.
So instead, I pretended to do what I was supposed to do, which was to have faith that the Marshal Service had kept my identity and location a secret, that none of the people looking for me had found me, and that I was perfectly safe.
I clocked out and hung my apron on the hook by the office door. Put on my heavy coat and pulled my knit cap down around my ears. And then it was out into the bright, blue, miserably fucking freezing cold Wisconsin afternoon. It was three o'clock, and so this was the hottest it was going to be all day, but it was still a fucking Arctic expedition to walk from the front door of Mario's pizza to my car. The Marshal Service had hooked me up with a white Toyota Camry, the most nondescript car it was possible to find. I slid behind the wheel, cursing whoever was had driven the car before I had, because I was pretty sure they smoked about a pack a day in it and the car would forever after reek of stale cigarettes.
I left the pizza shop and drove to my apartment. Fortunately, the plows and the salt trucks had taken good care to make sure the roads were perfectly passable. One good thing about Wisconsin is they knew how to deal with snowy roads. As I drove, I repeatedly checked my rearview to see if a car was following me. No one ever trained me to recognize if I was being followed, so I just kind of had to guess. If a car behind me stayed behind me for too long, I would just turn right. And then turn right again. If anybody followed me through enough right turns—in a circle, basically—then I figured it was a safe bet they were tailing me. Either that or they just happened to be lost in exactly the same place I was executing evasive maneuvers, and what were the chances of that? So far, those chances had amounted to exactly zero percent.
Today, it didn't seem as if anyone was following me at all. After the tense day of expecting something, I was torn between feeling relieved, and feeling disappointed. If you build something up for so long and it leaves so much tension in your body, sometimes even something bad happening seems preferable to just waiting.
I pulled in the parking lot of my apartment complex. Here, the plows had done their work, but had pushed all the snow into giant embankments at the edge of the parking lot, which meant there were huge piles of snow in between the parking lot and the actual apartments. The complex had hired snowblowers to come through and cut paths through the giant drifts to create access. When I got out of my car and walked to my apartment, there was a fifteen-foot stretch in which walls of snow ten feet high loomed over me. It was eerie, but also kind of cool.
When I got to my door, I checked it to make sure no one had kicked it in, or scratched up a lock while they picked it. Satisfied nothing had damaged my door I unlocked and opened it. I always left a small piece of yarn sandwiched between the top of the door and the jamb. If anybody opened the door the yarn would fall and I would know the door had been opened. On two occasions, this had caused me to call my Marshal because I found the yarn on the ground outside the door. Upon investigation, they discovered the apartment complex had sent in a pest removal service on one occasion to spray for cockroaches (ick!), and on another occasion sent in a maintenance man to make sure the furnace was working properly. Marshal Reynolds had listened to my story about the yarn, making a wry face, but for the most part kept his mouth shut. He said he believed that it was better to be safe than sorry.
Today, nothing had disturbed my yarn.
All should be right with the world.
I went inside, turned on my TV so I could have something that felt like company, and made myself a sandwich.
I had taken two bites of my sandwich when there was a knock at my door.
I froze in mid chew, my mouth full of wheat bread and mustard and turkey. At first I didn't move at all, just stood there beside the small counter in my small kitchen with my mind simultaneously frozen and racing through nine thousand different thoughts, none of them good. After a moment, the knock came again. Finally choosing to act, I grabbed my purse and went to the door. I looked out the peep-hole.
This was something that the Marshal had told me to never, ever do.
"If you look out the peep-hole," Marshall Reynolds had said, "somebody can tell that you're standing in front of the door because a shadow crosses over the lens. If you do that, they can kick the door open and knock the shit out of you. Or shoot you through the hole."
Marshal Reynolds was a comfort.
But, unthinking, I threw his advice right out the window and looked anyway. When I saw the man standing outside my door, my breath caught in my throat and my heart rate tripled. I had no idea who this guy was. He stood with his back to the door. He wore a work jacket and baseball cap. I could tell by his profile that he wore a thick, dark beard. I slipped my hand into my purse, and pulled out my gun. The Marshals didn't know I had this, and would probably throw a shit-fit if they did. I had purchased it from Jeff, the delivery driver, for, as I told him, personal protection. I don’t know if he was trying to get my pants, or if he was just a nice guy, but he sold me this gun for a couple hundred dollars
Now I raised the gun to the level of my midsection, pulled back the chain on the door, threw off the deadbolt. I jerked the door open.
The man turned around. His hands were jammed into his pockets, and I couldn't tell if he had a gun in one of them, pointing at me, or if that was just my imagination playing tricks. His baseball cap was pulled down low over his eyes so I couldn’t make out the top half of his face.
I couldn't even tell his eyes were blue until he saw my gun pointed at him and they went wide. Obviously without thinking, he pulled both hands out of his pockets and held them up, palms toward me.
"Whoa, whoa!" he said. "Ain’t no need for all that."
I knew that voice. Those blue eyes. And I lowered my gun. Without a word, I threw myself into Ryan's arms.
He wrapped me up, holding me as if he would never get the chance to hold me again. His beard was scratchy against my forehead.
"I see the Witness Protection folks are making you feel safe." I thought I detected a hint of a smile in his voice.
"I'm a cautious girl," I said. I rubbed my hands up and down his back, and then realized I was still holding the gun in one of them. I pulled him inside and close the door.
I stepped back and looked at him. Just looked at him. The sight of his wide shoulders and cocky grin made the last month of anxiety and cold fall away. I felt, for the first time in a long time, as if everything might somehow be okay. His eyes twinkled at me, and he pushed the ball cap back on his head.
"It's good to see you, too," he said.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. That he was standing in my apartment. "What are you doing here?" They were the only words my stupid brain would think for a minute. His face started to fall, and I realized how unwelcoming my question must have sounded. I hurried on. "I mean, I'm glad you're here. It's perfect that you're here! Just, you know, how the fuck did you find me?"
He looked slightly uncomfortable, slightly guilty. "You remember I told you I was in the Marine Corps." I nodded. "While I was there, I made some pretty smart friends. The kinds of people who can find out things." He paused.
I leaned forward. "And?"
He shrugged. "Aaaaaand," he said, drawing the word out, "I called one of them. And he found out some stuff for me. And I came to find you."
"I was in momentary awe at the resources that Ryan Calder seemed to just casually have at his disposal. Elite military units to set ambushes for well-armed mobsters. Elite military intelligence to find out classified information. "So you just came and found me."
"I did."
"In Wisconsin."
He took my hands. "Miriam, or Elizabeth, or Emma, or whatever the hell your name is, I would come find you anywhere. If you were in Beirut, or at the North Pole, or on the surface of Mars, I would go there to find you." His eyes searched mine. "Is that okay? Is it okay that I would do that?"
I felt warm tears slipping down my cheeks. My throat tightened up and I couldn't talk, so I nodded. At last, I squeezed out, "Yes."
"Thank God," he said. "Because after Castillo ran his car into Rosa Linda, I'm pretty sure Reggie wants to kill me. So I kind of put myself under witness protection as well. If you turned me away, I don't know where I’d go." He paused. “That guy is fucking crazy about that car. It’s irrational.”
In spite of myself, I started laughing through my tears. "I would never turn you away. Not in Beirut, not at the North Pole, not on the surface of fucking Mars."
He drew me to him until our lips were only inches apart, so I could feel his breath on my mouth. "What about Madison, Wisconsin?"
"Not here, either." His lips found mine, and I melted into him. Ryan Calder.
My protector.