The Chemist

“Ouch.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

She shrugged. “We should find a place to pause. I’m not going to be able to eat in a restaurant without someone calling the cops on you two. We’ll have to get a motel somewhere, and then somebody’s going to have to go out for groceries.”

“Room service not an option?” Daniel wondered.

“Those types of hotels notice when you pay cash,” Kevin explained before she could. “Sorry, bro. We’ll have to rough it for a night.”

“Have you been driving all day?” she asked.

“No, Kev and I switched out a couple of times.”

“I can’t believe I slept through all of that.”

“I think you needed it.”

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for too long.”

“So little time,” Kevin muttered, “so many people to torture.”

“True story,” she agreed lightly, just to annoy him.

Daniel laughed.

Daniel seemed so kind and gentle – more so than anyone she’d ever known – but he was definitely weird. Possibly unstable.

They found a small place on the outskirts of Little Rock. Alex thought she ought to recognize the city just a bit, but nothing reminded her of her childhood visits to the grandparents. Maybe the city had grown too much in the years since she’d been here. Maybe she was just in the wrong part. Somewhere nearby, her mother and her grandparents were buried. She wondered if that should make her feel something. But the place didn’t really matter. She was no closer to them for being closer to the remains of their genetic material.

Kevin insisted on making the arrangements at the front desk. It was probably for the best that Kevin took the lead now; Alex was out of commission, thanks to her face, and even if she had looked fine, he was still the expert. She knew only what she’d learned through theoretical research and a couple of years of trial and error. Kevin had been taught so much more, and he’d proved it all in the field. Daniel wasn’t even an option. Oh, his face was fine, but his instincts were all wrong.

Case in point, the way he argued when he saw that Kevin had gotten them only one room. It hadn’t occurred to him that a hotel clerk would be more likely to remember a man who came in alone yet paid cash for two rooms. And when Kevin parked three doors down from their actual room, Daniel didn’t understand why. Misdirection, they explained, but it was foreign to everything Daniel had ever known, every habit he’d formed. He thought like a normal person who’d never had anything to hide. There was a lot he was going to have to learn.

He even asked if they should get permission before they brought the dog into the room.

It had only one bed, but Alex had been asleep for twelve hours straight, so she was happy to be the lookout. Kevin went out for a half hour and came back with cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, sodas, and a large bag of dog food. Alex scarfed her sandwich down, and then chased it with a handful of Motrin. Einstein ate just as enthusiastically as she had, straight from the bag, but Daniel and Kevin were more relaxed about the food. Apparently, she’d missed a couple of stops at the drive-through, too.

A quick assessment of herself in the scratched bathroom mirror was not encouraging. Her nose was swollen to twice its normal size, red and bulbous. On the plus side, odds were it would heal up differently than it began, thus changing her appearance a little. Maybe not as aesthetically pleasing a result as she would get from plastic surgery, but probably less painful on the whole, or at least faster. Her black eyes were an impressive contradiction to their name, boasting a rainbow of colors from jaundice yellow to bilious green to sickly purple. Her split lip puffed out from either side of the scabby fissure like flesh balloons, and she hadn’t even known you could develop bruises inside your mouth. There was one stroke of luck: she still had all her teeth. Getting a bridge would have been tricky.

It was going to be a while before she could do anything. She really hoped Kevin’s safe house lived up to the name. It worried her to be headed into the unknown. She hadn’t prepared anything, and that was 100 percent unnerving.

She showered and brushed her teeth – a more painful ordeal than usual – and slipped into her black leggings and a clean white tee. She’d reached the limits of her wardrobe. Hopefully the safe house had a washing machine.

Daniel was asleep when she came back out, stretched out on his stomach with one hand under the pillow and one arm falling over the edge of the bed, long fingers brushing the faded carpet. His sleeping face was really something else – like before, when he was unconscious, his innocence and serenity didn’t seem to belong in the same world that she did.

Kevin wasn’t in the room and neither was the dog. Though she assumed the dog had needs, she couldn’t bring her alert level down from orange-red until they’d returned.

Kevin didn’t acknowledge her, but the dog sniffed her once as it passed. Kevin lay down flat on his back, his arms at his sides, and immediately closed his eyes. He didn’t move again for six hours. The dog jumped onto the end of the bed and curled up with its tail over Daniel’s legs and its head pillowed on Kevin’s feet.

Alex sat in the only chair – the carpet was just too questionable for her to lie on the floor – and bent over her laptop, surfing the news. She wasn’t sure when Daniel’s disappearance would be noticed or if it would be broadcast when it was. Probably not. Grown men wandered off all the time. For example, her father. That sort of thing was too common to make waves unless there was some sensational detail – like dismembered body parts in his apartment.