‘I have to pee first,’ Daniel said.
‘Go,’ Annalee said. ‘Never resist the call of nature. It strains the organs.’
‘She’s a wise woman, your mother,’ Shamus said to Daniel, looking at Annalee.
Daniel came back in almost immediately. ‘Hey, I hear a helicopter coming.’
‘Fuck!’ Shamus hissed. He shoved his notebook into the briefcase, extracting, as if by some magical exchange, a Colt 9 mm. automatic. ‘Let’s go,’ he said calmly. ‘Right now or we’re dead.’
Daniel grabbed his coat from the rack. As he hustled to put it on, a sleeve whipped the kerosene lamp off the end table. The lamp shattered, instantly bursting into flame.
‘Now!’ Shamus commanded, flinging him toward the door. Annalee grabbed Daniel and they sprinted toward the flat, Shamus right behind them, the helicopter suddenly louder as it came over the ridge. They plunged downhill at the flat’s edge, following a runoff ravine, the water shallow but numbingly cold. They could hear the helicopter swing over, the pulsing mechanical chop like the heartbeat of a frenzied locust. Annalee in the lead, Daniel between her and Shamus, they headed downhill toward the South Fork, battling a passage through the ferns and gooseberries and redwood suckers.
They rested a moment at the creek. Shamus panted ‘Coast?’ Annalee nodded, and they each took one of Daniel’s hands and forded the creek, the water shallow but swift, the rocks slippery. In moments they were gasping up the steep eastern slope of Seaview Ridge. Daniel felt like he was burning and freezing at the same time. Mindless, breathless, falling down and getting back up, he scrambled for the top.
They collapsed at the crest, huddling against the trunk of an ancient bay laurel, heaving for breath. Across the canyon, flames from their cabin paled the stars. At the edge of the flames they could make out six or seven vehicles, red lights blinking. With a strangled sob, Annalee began weeping. Shamus put his arm around her and pulled her close. ‘Just as well. Leave them ashes. You could have never gone back anyway.’
Annalee tried to slug him, all her fear and rage and grief gathered into the blow. She was in too close and Shamus, feeling her weight shift as she drew back her fist, caught it with his forearm. He grabbed her wrist and held it for a second before pulling it toward his chest, bringing Annalee’s face to his. ‘I’m sorry, Annalee. Even though it’s the truth, it was a crass and thoughtless remark. I forgot it was your life. I’ll try never to let it happen again. Your life – and Daniel’s – matter to me.’
Annalee sighed raggedly, then wiped her face. ‘Do I have time to cry?’
‘Survival says no; love says forever.’
‘Mom,’ Daniel said, ‘do you think you can still love someone when you’re dead?’
Annalee wasn’t sure if it was an innocent question or not. ‘I don’t know.’
‘We want the nearest bar or cafe or motel from here,’ Shamus said. ‘Without being seen.’
‘Three miles south,’ Annalee said. ‘Tough ones.’
Shamus asked Daniel, ‘You got three miles left?’
‘I think I do.’
‘Let’s vanish then,’ Shamus said.
They followed the ridge line for almost a mile, then angled downhill until they saw the occasional flash of headlights on the highway. They traveled parallel to the road for another half mile, keeping to the trees, then descended abruptly into the Shell Cove Inn parking lot. Shamus hotwired a ’59 Impala and they took off for San Francisco, heater on full blast.
Shamus stopped at a gas station in Santa Rosa and made a call from a pay phone, then drove them south to a wrecking yard on the outskirts of San Rafael. There he introduced them to Jose and Maria Concepcion. Maria loaded them into an old Chevy panel truck while Jose wheeled the Impala into the wrecking yard for some fast midnight dismantling. Maria whipped them across the Golden Gate and into her warm Mission District apartment, replaced their wet clothes with luxurious terrycloth robes from the hotel where she worked part-time as a maid, and filled their bellies with a spicy menudo.
When they woke the next morning, Jose was there with a suitcase full of clothes for each of them. When they had dressed, he drove them to an airstrip near Sacramento and turned them over to a pilot who flew them to Salt Lake City in his battered old Beechcraft while regaling Daniel with tales of World War II dogfights in the clouds over France.
A thin, hawk-faced man was waiting for them at the landing strip near the Great Salt Lake with new driver’s licenses for Shamus and Annalee (now James and Maybelline Wyatt), credit cards in the same name, four thousand dollars in cash, and a ’71 Buick registered to Mrs Wyatt. He told them to drive to Dubuque, Iowa, and make a phone call to the number he provided. It wasn’t until the three of them were alone in the Buick and moving east that they finally caught up with themselves. Shamus tried to explain what he thought was going on.
Three weeks earlier, after eighteen months of meticulous planning, Shamus had attempted to steal some uranium-235 from a Tennessee refinery. When Shamus slithered through the hole he’d cut in the cyclone fence, a guard who wasn’t supposed to be there called halt, but Shamus clubbed him with his flashlight just as the guard pulled his gun. It went off harmlessly, but the shot brought security at full alarm. A searchlight pinned him to the ground. He kicked the guard’s gun away, pulling his own when they started shooting. He took a wild shot at the searchlight, missed, instantly understood he didn’t have a chance in a gunfight, rolled to his left as a burst of automatic rifle fire geysered dust behind him, rolled again, and came up running. Using the dust cloud for cover, he sprinted for the nearest building.
He got lucky twice in a row. The first piece of good fortune was a bullet that grazed his lower lip, so close it raised a blister but didn’t break the skin. The second break was a rumpled old man walking toward the parking lot, oblivious to the probing searchlight and bursts of gunfire, so lost to the moment that when Shamus pressed the gun barrel to the back of the old man’s head and told him, ‘Get in the car and go,’ he’d turned around and said, puzzled, ‘Escargot?’
Finding a hostage, however obtuse, wasn’t the end of Shamus’s luck, for the old man who drove him through the front gate with a gun at his head was Gerhard von Trakl, Father of Fission and the ranking nuclear scientist in America. Shamus intended to keep von Trakl only until they reached the getaway car, the first of three switches he’d already set up.
