“Start moving,” she said.
I turned to confront her, but her face made me pull up short. “Jesus, are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Her right eye was swollen over like a boxer’s who had gone the distance. There were yellow-purple bruises around her neck. Her face had a giant red mark across both cheeks. I could see scarlet indentations from where her attacker had dug in his fingers. The fingernails had even broken the skin. I wondered if there was deeper trauma to her face, if whatever blow she took to the eye had been powerful enough to break a bone. I doubted it. A break like that would normally knock someone out of commission. Then again, best-case scenario and these were only surface wounds: It was amazing she was still upright.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
She had her Palm Pilot out. The screen was dazzlingly bright in the dark of the car. She looked down at it and said, “Take Seventeen south. Hurry, I don’t want to get too far behind.”
I put the car in reverse, backed up, started down the highway. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the bottle of Vioxx. “These should help deaden the pain.”
She pulled off the top. “How many should I take?”
“One.”
Her index finger scooped it out. Her eyes never left the Palm Pilot’s screen. She swallowed it down and said thanks.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
“You first.”
I filled her in as best I could. We stayed on Route 17. We passed the Allendale and Ridgewood exits. The streets were empty. The shops—and, man, there were lots of them, the entire highway pretty much one continuous strip mall—were all closed up. Rachel listened without interrupting. I glanced at her as I drove. She looked in pain.
When I finished, she asked, “Are you sure it wasn’t Tara in the car?”
“Yes.”
“I called my DNA guy again. The layers are still matching up. I don’t get that.”
Neither did I. “What happened to you?”
“Somebody jumped me. I was watching you through the night-vision goggles. I saw you put down the money bag and start walking. There was a woman in the bushes. Did you see her?”
“No.”
“She had a gun. I think she planned on killing you.”
“A woman?”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t sure how to react to that. “Did you get a good look at her?”
“No. I was about to call out a warning when this monster grabbed me from behind. Strong as hell. He lifted me off my feet by my head. I thought he was going to rip my skull off.”
“Jesus.”
“Anyway, a cop car drove by. The big guy panicked. He punched me here”—she pointed to the swollen eye—“and it was lights-out. I don’t know how long I was lying on the pavement. When I woke up, the cops were all over the place. I was huddled in a corner in the dark. I guess they didn’t see me or figured I was a homeless guy sleeping one off. Anyway, I checked the Palm Pilot. I saw the money was on the move.”
“Which direction?”
“South, walking near 168th Street. Then suddenly they went still. See, this thing”—she gestured to the screen—“works two ways. I zoom in, I can get as close as a quarter mile. I go out a little farther, like right now, I get more an idea than an exact address. Right now, based on the speed, I figure they’re driving about six miles ahead of us still on Route Seventeen.”
“But when you first spotted them, they were on 168th Street?”
“Right. Then they start heading downtown fast.”
I thought about it. “The subway,” I said. “They took the A train from the 168th Street stop.”
“That’s what I figured. Anyway, I stole the van. I started downtown. I was near the seventies when all of a sudden they started going east. This time it was more stop and go.”
“They were stopping for lights. They had a car now.”
Rachel nodded. “They sped up on the FDR and Harlem River Drive. I tried to cut across town, but that took too long. I fell behind by five, six miles. Anyway, you know the rest.”
We slowed for night construction near the Route 4 interchange. Three lanes became one. I looked at her, at the bruises and the swelling, at the giant handprint on her skin. She looked back at me and didn’t say a word. My fingers reached out and caressed her face as gently as I knew how. She closed her eyes, the tenderness seemingly too much, and even in the midst of all this we both knew that it felt right. A stirring, an old one, a dormant one, started deep inside of me. I kept my eyes on that lovely, perfect face. I pushed back her hair. A tear escaped her eye and ran down her cheek. She put her hand on my wrist. I felt the warmth start there and spread.
Part of me—and, yes, I know how this will sound—wanted to forget this quest. The kidnapping had been a hoax. My daughter was gone. My wife was dead. Someone was trying to kill me. It was time to start again, a new chance, a way, this time, to get it right. I wanted to turn the car around and start heading in the other direction. I wanted to drive—keep driving—and never ask about her dead husband and those pictures on the CD. I could forget all that, I knew I could. My life was filled with surgical procedures that altered the surface, that helped people begin anew, that improved what was visible and thus what was not. That could be what would happen here. A simple face-lift. I would make my first incision the day before that damn frat party, pull the fourteen-year-old folds across time, close the suture at now. Stick the two moments together. Nip and tuck. Make those fourteen years disappear, as though they’d never happened.
Rachel opened her eyes now and I could see that she was thinking pretty much the same thing, hoping I’d call it off and turn around. But of course, that could not be. We blinked. The construction cleared. Her hand left my forearm. I risked another glance at Rachel. No, we were not twenty-one years old anymore, but that didn’t matter. I saw that now. I still loved her. Irrational, wrong, stupid, naïve, whatever. I still loved her. Over the years, I might have convinced myself otherwise, but I had never stopped. She was still so damn beautiful, so damn perfect, and when I thought of how close she’d just come to death, those giant hands smothering away her breath, those niggling doubts began to soften. They wouldn’t go away. Not until I knew the truth. But no matter what the answers were, they would not consume me.
“Rachel?”
But she suddenly sat up, her eyes back on the Palm Pilot.