Deep Sky

He came to rest with his shoulder blades against the far wall, the pistol in his hand and leveled back toward the direction he’d come from. Toward the woman.

She pulled up short six feet away, frozen on all fours like a cat in the last instant before pouncing.

Her eyes were locked onto the pistol’s barrel.

“Take it easy,” she said.

“It’s only a memory,” Travis said, and pulled the trigger.

The bullet shattered her collarbone and she collapsed, screaming and holding the wound. Travis was already up and sprinting, ignoring her, going right over her and through the doorway.

Across the living room. Through the still-open entry door and onto the landing. He was two flights down before he realized he still had the gun. He stuffed it into his front pocket coming off the final step, hit the exterior door’s latch bar and burst out into the cool night.

He faced the intersection, and the north stretch of Johns Hopkins beyond it.

No sign of Ward at either one.

The man was already out of sight. He’d reached the crossroads and made a turn, one direction or another.

Travis broke into a sprint toward Broadway. He dissected the situation as he ran. Ward couldn’t have crossed Broadway and continued along Monument—Travis would’ve seen him already in that case. He also couldn’t have gone into the parking structure; there was no entry to it anywhere near this street corner. That left north or south on Broadway, and south would keep Ward right next to the hospital for another eight hundred feet. The place he was desperate to get away from.

North, then. Had to be.

Travis was already looking in that direction as he passed the last townhouse. The whole width of Broadway slid into his view.

Ward was nowhere on it.

Travis spun to look south. No Ward there, either.

He faced north again. Looked for places the man could’ve ducked into. Only two were close enough to be plausible options: an alley behind the row of academic buildings to the east, and another behind the row of town houses to the west.

Something metal crashed onto concrete. Maybe a trash-can lid. Definitely in one of the alleys—but which? The acoustics were tricky.

Travis sprinted again, covering the hundred feet north to the midpoint of the shallow block. Faced the left- side alley—behind the town houses—as he stopped hard.

The lid lay thirty feet away in the spill of amber light from the street. Five feet beyond it there was only darkness: a channel of fractured and cluttered space that separated the town houses on the south half of the block from those on the north. It stretched all the way to the west end, almost three hundred yards.

But there were lots of ways out of it, north and south. Mini-alleys that divided parallel homes here and there. Travis could see these only by the gaps in the rooflines three stories up. Down in the dark at ground level there was no detail at all. Ward could be slipping into one of these passageways right in front of him, right now, and he wouldn’t know. Travis threw himself forward into the channel.

Deep shadow. Random shit strewn everywhere. Hazy light from the occasional back room.

Travis found his eyes adjusting after the first ten seconds. Saw a child’s wagon and stepped over it quietly.

Something moved in the dimness fifty feet away. A clatter of wood and concrete and—what else? Human hands striking the ground, Travis thought.

A man cursed softly.

Travis advanced. One careful step at a time.

Faint sounds of movement ahead. Junk being shoved aside. Plastic bags rustling. Ward was struggling to get back on his feet.

Travis tried to fix his eyes on the sound source. No good. At any distance the darkness was still nearly perfect.

He took another slow step—and crushed an aluminum can that’d been lying on its side. In the stillness the sound might as well have been a car alarm.

A man’s voice called out, raspy and sore and full of fear: “Who’s there?”

Travis didn’t answer. He waited. Took soundless breaths with his mouth wide open.

Five seconds passed, and then the rustling noise came again. Ward was still trying to get up.

Was it really that difficult for him to do? That was hard to believe, given the agility he’d shown so far.

Bags slid on the alley floor. Something made of plastic flipped over and skittered.

Suddenly Travis understood.

These weren’t the sounds of a man laboring to right himself.

They were the sounds of a man searching for something.

Ward had lost the notebook when he’d fallen.

Travis advanced again, still trying for silence but not as carefully as before. His right hand went to his pocket and settled on the .38.

He was forty feet from the sifting sounds now, still trying to peg the location. The brick walls on either side played hell with his directional hearing.

Travis was keenly aware of the situation’s risk: Ward knew now that someone was here hunting him. The instant the man recovered the notebook, he’d go silent again, and the advantage would be all his. He could pick any narrow alley at random and disappear.

Travis continued forward. Thirty feet away.

The rustling stopped.

So did Travis.

He froze and held his breath and listened for movement.

Instead there came a shout: “Leave me alone!”

It echoed crazily along the rift between the townhouses, in staggered and distinct reverberations.

But Travis’s ears picked up something else. Some other sound, barely audible beneath the panicked words. He thought he knew what it was, though it made no sense: a zipper being undone.

What zipper could Ward have except the fly on his jeans? Had his pants snagged on something when he’d sprawled? Was he sliding out of them so he could get away?

The echoes of the shout faded and the alley dropped to absolute silence.

Five seconds.

Ten.

Travis felt panic begin to stir. Ward was leaving, and there was no way to stop him.

Fifteen seconds.

Not a sound anywhere.

Travis let go of the gun in his pocket, cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted.

“Ruben! I know about the VLIC! I know about the instructions!”

A foot scraped on concrete, maybe stopping fast and turning, far away in the dark. Fifty or sixty feet.

Silence.

“I’m supposed to help you!” Travis said.

For a moment nothing happened. Then Ward called out: “Who the hell are you?”

Travis thought about his reply. Saw no reason to be inventive.

“Travis Chase! Let me help!”

He heard a fast exhalation. It sounded like confusion, though it was hard to tell. More likely it was just a physical response to the past minute’s stress.

“You’re only a kid!” Ward yelled.

Travis started moving again. Homing in on the voice’s location: not just far ahead but all the way against the alley’s left side.