August 21, 2018
8
Andy felt numb as she drove through Alabama in her mother’s secret Reliant K station wagon filled with secret money toward a destination that Laura had seemed to pull from thin air. Or maybe she hadn’t. Maybe her mother knew exactly what she was doing, because you didn’t have a covert storage facility filled with everything you needed to completely restart your life unless you had a hell of a lot of things to hide.
The fake IDs. The revolver with the serial number shaved off. The photos of Andy in snow that she could not ever recall seeing, holding the hand of a person she could not remember.
The Polaroids.
Andy had shoved them into the beach tote in the back of the Reliant. She could’ve spent the rest of her day staring at them, trying to pick apart the terrible things that had happened to the young woman in the pictures. Beaten. Punched. Bitten—that was what the gash on her leg looked like, as if an animal had taken a bite of her flesh.
That young woman had been her mother.
Who had done all of those awful things to Laura? Was it the they who had sent Hoodie? Was it the they who were probably tracking Andy?
Andy wasn’t doing a great job of eluding them. She had made it as far as Birmingham before she remembered that she hadn’t unhooked the battery cables in the dead man’s truck. Laura had told her that she had to make sure the GPS wasn’t working. Did GPS work without the engine running? Coordinating with a satellite seemed like something the on-board computer would do, which meant the computer had to be awake, which meant the car had to be on.
Right?
The LoJack vehicle recovery system had its own battery. Andy knew this from working stolen car reports through dispatch. She also knew Ford had a Sync system, but you had to register for the real-time monitoring service, and Andy didn’t think that a guy who went to the trouble of blocking out all the lights on his vehicle would give up his anonymity just so he could use voice commands to locate the nearest Mexican restaurant.
Right?
What would happen if the truck was found? Andy played out the investigation in her mind, the same as she had while running away from her mother’s house.
First up, the police would have to ID Hoodie, aka Samuel Godfrey Beckett. Considering the guy’s vocation, he was more than likely in the system, so a fingerprint scan was all it would take to get his name. Once they had his name, they would find the truck registration, then they would put out an APB on the wire, which would create an alert that would show up on the screen of every squad car in the tri-state area.
Of course, this assumed that what was supposed to happen was what actually happened. There were tons of APBs all the time. Even the high-priority ones were missed by a lot of the patrol officers, who had maybe a billion things to do on their shifts, including trying not to get shot, and stopping to read an alert was often not a high priority.
That did not necessarily mean Andy was in the clear. If the cops didn’t find the truck, the librarians, or more likely the grumpy old guy with the political rants, would probably report the abandoned vehicle. Then the cops would roll up. The officer would run the plates and VIN, see there was an APB, notify Savannah, then the forensic techs would find Andy’s shoes and work shirt and her fingerprints and DNA all over the interior.
Andy felt her stomach pitch.
Her fingerprints on the frying pan could be explained away—Andy cooked eggs in her mother’s kitchen all of the time—but stealing the dead man’s truck and crossing state lines put her squarely in special circumstances territory, meaning if Palazzolo charged Andy with the murder of Hoodie, the prosecutor could seek the death penalty.
The death penalty.
She opened her mouth to breathe as a wave of dizziness took hold. Her hands were shaking again. Big, fat tears rolled down her face. The trees blurred outside the car windows. Andy should turn herself in. She shouldn’t be running away. She had dropped her mother in a pile of shit. It didn’t matter that Laura had told Andy to leave. She should’ve stayed. At least that way Andy wouldn’t be so alone right now.
The truth brought a sob to her mouth.
“Get it together,” she coaxed herself. “Stop this.”
Andy gripped the steering wheel. She blinked away her tears. Laura had told her to go to Idaho. She needed to go to Idaho. Once Andy was there, once she crossed the state line, she could break down and cry every single day until the phone rang and Laura told her it was safe to come home. Following Laura’s orders was the only way she would get through this.
Laura had also told her to unhook the Ford’s battery.
“Fuck,” Andy muttered, then, channeling Gordon, Andy told herself, “What’s done is done.” The finality of the proclamation loosened the tight bands around Andy’s chest. There was also the benefit of it being true. Whether or not the Ford was found or what the cops did with it was completely out of Andy’s control.
This was the question she needed to worry about: during her computer searches at the library, at what point exactly had she turned on the Google Incognito Mode? Because once the cops found the truck, they would talk to the librarians, and the librarians would tell them that Andy had used the computer. While she felt certain that the librarians would put up a fight—as a group, they were mostly First Amendment badasses—a warrant to search the computer would take maybe an hour and then a tech would need five seconds to find Andy’s search history.
She was certain the Incognito Mode was on before she looked up Paula Kunde of Austin, Texas, but was it on before or after she searched for directions to Idaho?
Andy could not recall.
Second worrisome thing: what if it wasn’t the cops who asked the librarians these questions? What if Laura’s omniscient they found someone to look for Hoodie’s truck, and they talked to the librarians, and they searched the computer?
Andy wiped her nose with her arm. She backed down on the speed because the Reliant started to shake like a bag of cat treats if she went over fifty-five.