FIFTY
They had to drive back through town first before they could to get to the old industrial area. The main streets were mostly deserted. Jack’s familiar sense of paranoia was beginning to set in. With so few cars on the streets, he felt like anyone could be watching them.
At one traffic light some guys in a car pulled up beside them on the driver’s side. The driver revved the engine as some of the men opened their windows to make lewd offers to Angela.
Angela glared at them as she gave them the finger. They all laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world.
“Jerks,” she muttered as she pulled away when the light turned green.
They stayed next to her. She abruptly cut around a corner to the right. She had turned too late for them to follow without stopping and backing up. By then she was gone. She took side streets for a while until returning to her course through downtown. The men were nowhere to be seen.
Jack knew that she could have ignored them. It said something about her nature that she didn’t.
They wouldn’t think it was so funny if they had followed her and stopped her truck only to find themselves looking down the barrel of her gun. She might not look it, but this was a woman you messed with at your own peril. The fact that she went out all alone to a deserted area late at night hoping to find the guys who had tried to kill her also said a lot.
Jack had only met this woman, and already he felt a bond with her. It was rare to encounter another person who shared an understanding of the things he dealt in, and more than rare that she was prepared to handle them alone.
As they left the lights of Milford Falls behind, they drove for a time down a lonely, winding highway. Trees in the darkness to either side of the road flashed by in a seemingly never-ending procession until the road eventually emptied them out in the middle of a vast, deserted, commercial landscape. It was an eerie scene.
Lit by moonlight, the place felt like life on earth had died out long ago and they were the last people alive in the world, wandering among the crumbling remains of civilization.
Angela drove slowly into the maze, looking left and right around every building. He could see windows broken out on most of the buildings. All of them were dark. After they made their way through the tangle of deserted buildings, stacked industrial equipment, and fenced implement yards, she turned down a road going past a long building and then parked at a door along the side. The door had a hand-painted address on it.
“This is where I delivered the package,” she said as she cut the engine. “If you want to look around inside, I’ll keep watch out here.”
Jack thought that wasn’t a bad idea, but at the same time he didn’t think it was a good one, either. “All right. I’ll try to be quick.”
“It’s pitch black in there,” she said.
He pulled out his small light and clicked it on briefly to show her how powerful it was.
The door wasn’t locked. It scraped on the ground as he opened it. Inside the enormous building there were walls for several rudimentary offices. Between several of the office spaces stood gray metal shelving. Some of the shelves had crumpled, dirty blankets left on them, but there was nothing underneath.
There was a filthy, greasy moving pad on the floor. He knew why Angela hadn’t wanted to come inside.
Jack looked around for a good ten minutes, trying to find a clue as to what the men had been doing. He found a variety of milling machines back beyond the shelving, but they had been cleaned and the floor vacuumed. A specialized search team could probably find a speck of something, but he couldn’t. Since the site had been abandoned, at this point, with the clock ticking, whatever had been there was irrelevant. They needed to find where whatever they had been making had been taken.
As he climbed back up into her truck, she said, “Told you.”
Jack sighed. “They appeared to have been using milling machines for something. Like you said, they’ve cleared out. It was worth a look. I don’t know what else we can do out here.”
She started the truck but didn’t answer. She pulled out and drove slowly on through the maze of crumbling buildings, chain-link fencing, and razor wire guarding piles of rusted junk. There were broad concrete areas as well and streets of sorts, even alleyways between clusters of the old buildings.
“Aren’t you going to turn on your headlights?”
“No. The moon is out. The moon is enough to see by if you don’t drive too fast. Your eyes will adjust.”
Jack didn’t object. He knew what she was doing and he couldn’t say he blamed her. Besides that, those men were the only clue they had. If by some stroke of luck she was able to find them, they might be able to provide some answers.
The problem would be getting them to talk.
They drove slowly for almost an hour, weaving their way among the ruins of what used to be a thriving complex. Angela didn’t say anything. She was intently focused on surveying the moonlit ghost town.
Jack hadn’t had much sleep on the plane the night before and he was exhausted. The low rumble of the engine was making him even more sleepy. He slumped down in his seat. He could feel the engine’s low drone through his whole body. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open as she drove slowly onward into the decaying ghost town.
“Shit,” Angela said under her breath, “I don’t believe it.”
Jack sat up, suddenly wide awake. “What?”
She rolled to a stop and turned off the engine.
“There,” she said, pointing through the windshield.
Jack squinted into the distance and finally saw a small orangish glow get brighter, then dim. It was a man smoking a cigarette. He was coming out of an alleyway and across the road they were on. Jack then spotted another man walking beside him. He was smoking, too. The two glowing dots moved along with the shadowy shapes of the two men crossing their path, their faces briefly lit whenever they took a drag.
“That’s them,” Angela said in a whisper.
Angela reached up and turned off the switch for interior light before carefully opening her door. Jack got out with her. They both pushed their doors closed quietly just enough to catch but not letting them latch so they wouldn’t make a noise.
“Do you really think it’s the men you’re looking for?” he whispered.
“It’s Miguel and Emilio.”
“Two of the men who attacked you? Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
She sounded convinced. He didn’t know that he was. He thought that it might simply be two vagrants. He couldn’t make out any features of the two dark shapes silhouetted against moonlit concrete and brick of abandoned factories.
Angela was convinced, though, and she was already moving out ahead of him. Jack pulled one of his knives out of a pocket and popped the blade open. She walked on the balls of her feet, making virtually no sound.
The way she moved reminded him of a large cat advancing in on prey. She would freeze in place, watching, motionless, then move again in short dashes. Jack stayed close, trying to mimic her movements. As he started to hear their voices chattering in Spanish, she moved slowly as she kept her eyes locked on the men.
When they talked and laughed and looked the other way, pointing off at something, she moved more swiftly.
Jack was surprised that she still hadn’t drawn her gun as she closed the distance to the men.
He was alarmed when she suddenly broke into a run. As fast as she was moving and with her long legs, before he knew it she had opened some distance out ahead of him. He was even more alarmed that she didn’t have a weapon in hand as she rapidly closed the distance to the men.
Both men halted abruptly when they saw her coming. They flicked their cigarettes off to the side and drew big knives. Jack could see the moonlight glint off the combat blades.
They started running toward her.
It seemed insane. A girl in cutoff shorts and boots with no weapon to hand, her platinum-colored hair flying out behind her, her arms pumping as she charged at a dead run toward two men with knives.
Jack didn’t think this would end well, and it was too late to stop her.