The Program Read online

  The door didn’t budge.

  Carl examined the lock. There was a latch and a dead bolt. He cursed and tried to ram through the door once more. Twice. The door was made out of metal textured to look like wood. The result of his pounding was the same each time: no movement of the door, definite movement of the structure of Carl’s shoulder.

  At the sound of the concussions that were made by his master ramming the door, Anvil dropped his tail from an almost perfectly vertical position to a location solidly between his legs.

  Convinced the door wasn’t going to give, Carl ran to the side of the town house looking for another way in. Other than the big garage door, there wasn’t one. He ran back to the front door, took the Longmont Dairy milk box off the porch and threw it through the window that was closest to the front door. He then yanked off his purple Colorado Rockies windbreaker and wrapped it around his right forearm and fist and used the bundle to clear the rest of the glass from the window frame. Then he reached through, turned the dead bolt until it clicked free, and twisted the doorknob.

  Carl was inside. The staircase rose straight ahead, the first step maybe ten feet inside the door.

  With the commotion of breaking in coming to an end, Anvil regained his composure. He was back in familiar territory at his master’s side. His tail popped up and he stayed at Carl’s left side as they moved toward the stairs.

  Carl hesitated a moment at the foot of the stairs to get his bearings. As he leaned over to touch Anvil on the head, he thought he heard a little cough from the back of the town house. Was that the little girl, he wondered?

  Was she down here?

  He immediately adjusted his plans, which had been limited to getting upstairs to assist Peyton.

  Before he moved in the direction of the cough Carl picked up the dog and placed him on top of a sideboard near the front door. Carl knew that no matter what happened Anvil wouldn’t jump from the perch; the dog seemed to be paralyzed by heights—a “height” for Anvil being anything above thirty inches or so.

  Carl searched the living room adjacent to the entry way for something he could use as a weapon and came up with a heavy glass vase. He dumped the flowers and water onto the floor and tested the heft of the crystal, holding it by the open end. He smacked the base against his open palm. The base was as solid as a hammer. It would have to do. He grasped the vase in his right hand and moved in the direction that he thought he’d heard the cough.

  A narrow hallway led to an empty dining room and then to a galley kitchen and family room. Carl proceeded carefully, examining each space as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. All three rooms appeared empty. Three pine doors led off the kitchen and a sliding glass door separated the family room from a small yard. A broomstick lock braced the sliding glass door. In the distance, Carl could see the silhouette of a wooden fence marking the perimeter of a tiny backyard.

  All the doors were closed. He’d have to check them one by one.

  10

  Landon? Did you run, baby?

  As I pressed myself against the window I could hear and could even feel Carl’s efforts as he tried to pummel his way through the front door. But he was below me, hidden by the covered porch, and I couldn’t see him pounding away.

  Cheering him on in my head. Do it Carl. Do it Carl.

  Finally, after a series of deep thuds, I heard the sound of glass breaking and seconds later could even hear the front door finally swoosh open. I waited to feel the concussion of Carl’s heavy footsteps on the stairs.

  But the reverberation didn’t come.

  I wanted to yell to him, “Go check on Landon, first. She’s down the hall.” But the gag stifled me.

  Straining, I thought I could hear him moving around downstairs. But he said nothing to me. He didn’t call and tell me he was going to check on my baby. I tried to hop to the door, to get down the hall to her. Instead I fell hard on my face.

  IF I COULD have had my dreams come true I would’ve wanted to say, “Don’t worry about Landon, she’s gone. She flew away like Mia Hamm. She’s safe.”

  But my dreams were under the control of devils, and instead of all my dreams coming true—instead of that—all the clocks in the house had stopped ticking and my lungs had ceased processing oxygen and my synapses had stopped firing and all the time in my universe stood still. Totally still.

  Again.

  I was waiting for his next words, it seemed, forever.

  Tell me how my baby is, Carl. Tell me how my baby is.

  I HEARD A door open downstairs somewhere and I began to count. At six, the door closed again.

  A second door opened. I counted to eight before it closed.

  A third door opened. I didn’t even get to the number one before I heard a deep hollow thud, the kind of thud that sends shudders through a mother’s heart, the kind of thud that says that a child’s head has met a dense object and that the object has proved less resilient than the child’s head.

  I almost threw up into my gag.

  A groan, a masculine groan, resonated through the house. It felt as though the baritone wail was going to go on forever, and then the sound stopped as abruptly as a radio being turned off.

  For a few seconds no new sounds emerged from downstairs. Then I began to hear scraping noises, as though something was being dragged across the kitchen floor below me.

  Another door opened. I remembered to count and got all the way to thirteen before it closed. For almost five minutes I heard nothing else.

  Then, finally, I heard footsteps on the stairs and Carl calling out to me, telling me he was going to check on Landon.

  I DON’T REMEMBER exactly how I did it, but somehow I hooked the gag on a sharp edge of the bed frame and yanked it from my mouth.

  I yelled, “Carl? Landon?” and waited another eon for an answer.

  11

  Carl came back inside from the garage and paused for a moment before he turned toward what he remembered was the front of the house, in the direction of the stairs that would take him up to the room where he’d seen Peyton standing in the window. He took the pause to allow himself time to begin to catalog all the surfaces he may have touched during the scuffle.

  At the front of the house Anvil was sitting precisely where Carl had left him, his perfectly vertical tail wagging maniacally. Carl lifted the dog from the sideboard and lowered him to the floor and side by side the two of them mounted the stairs and moved in the direction Carl had first spotted Peyton.

  At the top of the stairs he called out. “Sit tight in there. It’s me, Carl. I’m going to check on your kid first.” Earlier, Carl had seen the gag in Peyton’s mouth; he didn’t expect a reply.

  He dropped Anvil’s leash and took measured strides down the short hall, poking his head into the doors that opened off the second-floor landing. The tiny bathroom was empty. Laundry closet? No, she wasn’t there. Another door led to a linen closet that was almost devoid of bedding. Finally Carl entered the door that led to Landon’s bedroom and he stopped in the doorway, aware that he was feeling something he hadn’t felt in years.

  His heart seemed to hollow itself of blood, and he thought for a moment he was going to faint.

  Anvil stared up at Carl, his tail still wagging, the retractable leash trailing behind him like a ten-ton anchor on a skiff.

  12

  When Carl finally walked into my room, I didn’t say hello or beg him to untie me. I leaned left and then right to look past him, over his shoulder into the hall, to see the spot where I was sure he’d left my sleeping daughter as he came to untie me.

  But she wasn’t there.

  He helped me to my knees and spun me around and reached for my wrists. He started talking to me, but I couldn’t process anything but the sight of the empty hallway. Over my shoulder, I looked again, searching up at the ceiling, down, everywhere. The volume of tears that were flooding into my eyes almost kept me from seeing anything at all.

  Finally I heard him. He was saying, “Just one man? That’s al
l?”

  The bad man? “Yes. One man. My baby?”

  “I told you, she’s sleeping. She’s all right. It’s like nothing happened down there at all.”

  “My baby, she’s all right?”

  “Yeah. She’s all right. I tell you she’s sleeping.”

  He dropped down to my ankles and tugged at the tape that bound me there. I tried to pull out of the restraint too soon, almost falling on top of him.

  “She’s breathing?”

  A mother’s question.

  “Sleeping, breathing. The whole thing. I tell you she’s fine. The guy who did this to you, I found him downstairs. He came after me. Let’s say I prevailed. He’s in the trunk of your car right now. Hey, where’s Anvil? You see my dog?”

  But I was already past him. Down the hall, into her room.

  Carl was wrong. My little girl wasn’t sleeping. She was sitting up in bed. A little black dog was curled back onto her chest like it was his favorite place to be in the whole world.

  Landon looked up at me, puzzled. I realized I was standing almost naked in the doorway to her room. She certainly saw Carl behind me, added two plus two, and got lord-knows-what.

  Trying to keep my evaporating terror from dripping into my voice, I said simply, “Hi, baby.”

  Landon hugged the little animal closer to her, if that was possible. She said, “Mommy, look. Uncle Carl brought his dog.”

  CARL WATCHED ME pull on my bra. I didn’t glance his way to see if he was looking, but I could feel his eyes. I didn’t care. I had a thousand questions to ask, a million things to remember.

  I said, “I’m not sure what to tell her. When she gets up, she’ll see the busted door and the broken glass.”

  “There’s some blood in the kitchen, too. The guy was like hiding in the pantry. I heard him cough.”

  “Jesus. Me, too. He told me I couldn’t hide.”

  Carl said, “He said that? I wonder what the hell that meant. Tell your kid you scared a bad guy away. Maybe that’ll be enough. With kids, sometimes less is more.”

  I was surprised at his perspicacity. “With her, I’ve always called him the ‘bad man.’ The man who killed her father and chased us from Louisiana.”

  “Fine. Tell her you scared the bad man away. And that Anvil and I came over to help.”

  I tugged a T-shirt over my head. I couldn’t see Carl’s face as I said, “I can’t figure out who it was, Carl.”

  “I can’t either,” he said. “He looked like a damn marine. I think maybe a cop.”

  “A marshal?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Didn’t say that. You want to go see him?”

  “Did he say he was a marshal?”

  “By the time I was done making introductions he wasn’t doing much talking. No ID on him. You want to go take a look, see if you recognize him?”

  I took a deep breath and asked, “Is he … dead, Carl?”

  “Nah. Unconscious though. I hit him on the side of the head with the vase you had in the living room.”

  I shivered. The vase was crystal. Cheap crystal. But crystal. Ouch. “What was he going to …?” Finishing the sentence meant imagining a sequence of things that was too horrible to imagine. Instead, I asked, “He was hiding when you came in?”

  “Maybe he heard me out front trying to get in. Temporarily hid in the pantry and was planning to run when I went upstairs. But I didn’t go upstairs.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. But I was puzzling out the bigger question, wondering why whoever it was was hiding under my bed. If he was already in my house long enough to hide in my bedroom, then he would already have had plenty of time to hurt Landon, or grab her. Or to go through the house and steal something.

  “Carl, do you think the police are on the way?”

  He shrugged his shrug. “Maybe. You can never tell about neighbors. Sometimes they hear things. Sometimes their TVs are on and they don’t hear jack. Sometimes they call the cops. Sometimes they don’t want to get involved. In my experience, there’s no telling what the general public’s gonna do. One of the great mysteries of my business. My former business.”

  I turned my back to him before I pulled on some jeans. I don’t know why I did that. It felt less like modesty, more like something else.

  “Carl?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you give us a ride somewhere tonight?”

  He digested my request and answered with a question of his own. “You going on the run?”

  “Do you really want to know? It could be complicated for you.”

  His eyes twinkled. “I’ve been thinking that my life’s way too simple. Yeah, I want to know.”

  His sarcasm made me smile. “Then yes, we’re going on the run.” It felt odd saying it out loud.

  He asked, “You never called Ron Kriciak?”

  “Nope.”

  His eyes narrowed. I could almost watch him think. “It’s not easy, you know. Disappearing. Especially on your own.”

  The phone rang. I listened as the machine picked up and as whoever was calling hung up without leaving a message.

  I said to Carl, “Too many people are after me. I don’t trust the marshals. I don’t feel we have much choice left.” He didn’t respond. I added, “I bought some books, you know, on how to disappear. I’ve been preparing since the minute we got to Boulder.” I wanted to appear thoughtful, not impulsive.

  “You’ll need money.”

  “I have money.”

  “Cash. I mean cash.”

  “I have cash. Quite a bit.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  I felt that he meant the gesture in a grand way. I was unwilling to commit to that since it required trust I knew I couldn’t muster and reliance I didn’t think I could risk. I said, “You’ve done so much already, thanks. But maybe a few more little things. The closet downstairs, the one by the front door? There’re two duffel bags in it. Grab them for me, okay? Put them by the door. Oh, and get the cooler out of the pantry in the kitchen. Put it by the sink. Throw some ice cubes into the bottom.”

  He said, “Sure. I’ll be a few extra minutes. There’s some things I have to wipe first, in case anybody shows up to dust for prints.” He headed out the door toward the stairs, stopped. “You should take a look at this guy, see if you can make him.”

  “Yeah. I’ll be down.”

  Some damsel I am.

  Think, Peyton, think! Duffel bags—check. Money—check. Food—check. Purse—check.

  Landon—check.

  I called to her down the hall. “We’re out of here in two minutes, baby. You’re dressed?”

  Despite the hour, Landon was wide-awake, cooperative, and energetic. She loved commotion and intensity when it was right in her face. It focused her. It was her goal-keeper mentality. “I’m all set, Mommy. Can we bring Anvil?”

  “Anvil will need to stay with Uncle Carl. We really can’t take a dog with us tonight.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “On another adventure, baby. On another adventure.”

  “Back to Louisiana?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  When she asked, “Do I have to keep my old name, Mommy. Or do I get to pick a new one?” I heard excitement in her voice but also something else, something unexpected, some wariness.

  Give her a little control. “We’ll decide together, you and I. How’s that?”

  “Cool.”

  “What about Uncle Carl?”

  Yes, I thought, what about Uncle Carl?

  “I have to check something in the garage for a minute with Uncle Carl. Will you take care of Anvil?”

  “Sure!”

  chapter

  seven

  RUNNING IN PLACE

  1

  I didn’t have to think about what to do next. I’d already carefully choreographed the next few steps, although Carl’s willingness to help with the plan gave me some unexpected flexibility.

  Of course, if the police showed up befo
re we were out the door of the town house, everything would go to hell. I hadn’t counted on broken front windows and men trying to bust down my door.

  WHAT WAS NEXT? I called Yellow Cab and ordered a car.

  When the dispatcher asked me for a destination, I said DIA, Denver’s airport. The driver arrived about five minutes later. I loaded the duffels and the cooler into the trunk and hustled Landon into the backseat. I kept my face down as I told the driver to take me to the Boulder bus station, the one downtown between Canyon and Walnut near the Pearl Street Mall.

  “I thought we were going to the airport?” He sounded indignant and disappointed. The fare he would earn had just dropped by about fifty dollars.

  “No, I told your dispatcher I was taking a bus to the airport. We just need to get to the bus station.” The ruse was a small misdirection that I hoped might cause the marshals a few moments of confusion as they tried to determine whether Landon and I actually took a bus or a plane to get out of town.

  The driver muttered “Shit” under his breath, and I watched Landon roll her eyes. She was still at a stage in her life where she was amused at the inappropriate behavior of grown-ups.

  The drive across town took a little more than ten minutes. I think we missed every light, and I think I imagined that every car next to us had at least one passenger who peered into the backseat of the cab.

  I lugged our stuff into the deserted waiting room on the Fourteenth Street side of the bus station and five minutes later, exactly as I’d requested, Carl and Anvil drove up to the curb. Carl stayed in the car as I transferred my daughter and our belongings into the backseat.

  Anvil was happy to see us.

  At my direction, Carl drove into a residential area behind the University of Colorado—an area the locals call The Hill—and backtracked down some small streets west of Sixth. It’s an old neighborhood with mature trees and houses that look like their eyes are always half-closed. I asked Carl to pull over to the curb right on the curve where Sixth runs into Euclid. We watched the road in both directions for over a minute. While he spied the macadam for tails, I joined him in the front seat, pulled a floppy hat over my hair, and tugged a black cotton cardigan sweater over my T-shirt. I threw a baseball cap and a polyester soccer jersey at Landon. The baseball cap read “AF” and the jersey read “Scurry” on the back. Ever since the ’99 World Cup, she had been Landon’s favorite goalkeeper.