Dead and Gone

“What?”

“Call for you, okay? Say you go Al-blue-quirk-key.”

“Albuquerque?”

“Yes. What I say. You go Thursday. Go to airport. Two o’clock afternoon, walk outside to parking lot. See big car with stripes like tiger. You wait there. Okay?”

“This Thursday, the next one coming?”

“Say, ‘You go Thursday.’ ”

“The person who called, what did he—?”

“Not man, woman. I say, ‘Who calling?’ She say: ‘Give message to Winston.’ Then say what I just say now, okay?”

“Okay, Mama. Thanks.”

I leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes for a minute. Maybe it was longer. When I opened them, Gem was standing in front of me. “Can that computer of yours do airline schedules?” I asked … before she could ask me anything.

Less than half an hour later, she was kneeling on the floor next to my chair, scraps of paper spread out before her.

“There are many choices,” she said. “Several different carriers, all going at different times of the day.”

“Any of them get in with plenty of margin before two in the afternoon?”

“Oh yes. All leaving from Portland. Let me see.…” She crawled around on all fours from scrap to scrap, oblivious to the sweet show she was putting on. Or not—I know less about women than I do about stamp collecting. “Ah! You have … one, two, three … at least four separate choices. It just depends on how you want to be routed.”

“Routed?”

“Yes. None of the airlines have direct flights. You can change planes in Phoenix, Oakland, Denver, or Salt Lake City.”

“I don’t care which airline. It’s not like I’ve got frequent-flyer mileage to worry about. All I need is something that gets me in there around noon or earlier.”

Gem took a very close look at one of the scraps on the carpet. A long look. I guess I do know a little more than I do about stamp collecting. “All right, then,” she finally said. “Let us make it Phoenix.”

“Great. Do you have a safe credit card you can use to make the reservation? I’ll pay you in cash.”

“Yes, of course. But you will need a—”

“I’ve got all the documents I’ll need to show them at the airport, girl. That’s not a problem.”

“How many days will this take?”

“I don’t have a clue. What difference does it make?”

She looked at me over one shoulder. “How could I pack intelligently if I do not know how long we will be gone?”

“I can pack my own—” I started to say. Her depth-charge eyes stopped me cold, and I realized what she was really saying.

“Do you like it?” Gem asked me on Monday.

I looked at the inch-and-a-half color photo she was holding in her palm. Gem, staring straight ahead, the barest hint of a smile on her face. “It’s okay,” I told her. “Not exactly a glamour shot.”

“But it looks like me, does it not?”

“Sure.”

“Good,” she said. And disappeared.

“Chantha Askew?”

“Of course,” she said, holding the passport with her picture and that name open so I could see it clearly. “Chantha is a good Cambodian name. And Askew, that is yours. Or the one on your passport, yes?”

“Yeah. But—”

“You don’t want to drive to Albuquerque,” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have asked me about flights, much less to book one. There is some risk in flying. It’s not as … anonymous. You have not ever used your own passport before, have you?”

“No,” I told her, wondering even as I spoke how she could know that.

“And you have no fear of the people who constructed it for you revealing—?”

“No!” I cut her off sharp. “Not a chance.”

“All right,” she said, so softly that I realized I must have shown something in my face. Wolfe sell me out? She’d die first. And I’d rather be dead than to ever know about it if she did.

Gem was quiet for a minute. Then she gently pushed at me until I sat down, and followed me down until she was in my lap.

“They don’t have your name, the one on your passport,” she said softly, not having to spell out who “they” were. “And they don’t have your face, either. They don’t know who you are. Or where you are. You are hunting them; not they, you. But that doesn’t mean they don’t know you.…”

“What are you trying to say?”