UnSouled

The officer is no longer kind to Grace. Instead he glares at her. “Where’s Lassiter?”

“Who?”

“Connor Lassiter!” Then he pulls out the picture of Argent with the Akron AWOL that he must have downloaded off the net.

“Oh, that? Argie made that up on the computer. It was a gag for his friends. Looks real, don’t it?”

The other officers look to one another. The lead man is not pleased in the least. “I’m supposed to believe that?”

Grace shakes her brother’s shoulder. “Argie, tell them.”

Grace waits. Argie might have a lot of faults, but he’s pretty good at self-preservation. Like Conner said, “aiding and debating”—or whatever it’s called—is a serious crime. But only if you get caught.

Argent glares at Grace through his blood-clouded eyes. He radiates a sibling hatred that could kill if it were set free. “It’s the truth,” he growls. “Gag photo. For my friends.”

It’s not what the officer wants to hear. The other men chuckle behind his back.

“All right,” he says, trying to seize what’s left of his authority. “Untie him and get him to a hospital—and go through the house anyway. Find the original file. I want that picture analyzed.”

Then they cut Argie’s ropes and haul him out. He doesn’t complain, doesn’t resist, and he doesn’t look at Grace.

After the others leave, one of the local deputies lingers, looking around at the stockpile of food. “He stole all this huh?”

“You still gonna arrest him?”

The deputy actually laughs. “Not today, Gracie.”

Now she recognizes him as a man she went to school with. She recalls he used to tease her, but he seems to have mellowed—or at least redirected his bad into good.

“Thank you, Joey,” she says, remembering his name, or at least hoping she remembered it right.

Grace thinks he’s going to leave, but he takes a second look around at the stockpiles of emergency supplies. “That’s an awful lot of potatoes.”

Gracie hesitates and shrugs. “So? Potatoes is potatoes.”

“Sometimes they are, and sometimes they’re not.” Then he pulls out his pistol, keeping his eyes trained on the large pile of potato sacks. “Out of the way, Gracie.”

8 • Connor

The deputy only suspects Connor’s presence, but doesn’t really believe it. Clearly he doesn’t give Grace credit enough to be harboring a fugitive. He thinks she’s too dim-witted to pull it off. Once he finds Connor, he’s just as likely to shoot him on the spot as not, because killing the Akron AWOL is just as good as capturing him. All Connor has in his favor now is the element of surprise, but that will be gone once he’s discovered—so the instant the deputy begins poking around the potato sacks, Connor makes his move, lunging out of the sack he’s hiding in, grabbing him by the ankles, and pulling his feet out from under him.

The man goes down, shouting in surprise, and his weapon, which he was not holding on to the way a deputy should, flies free. Grace goes for the weapon as the man lands in a stack of water bottles, sending them bouncing and rolling all over the ground.

Connor’s arms are still wrapped around the guy’s ankles, and he finds there’s only one thing he can say under the circumstances.

“Nice socks.”

Grace stands above them, aiming the gun at the deputy’s chest. “Don’t move and don’t call to the others or I swear I’ll shoot.”

“Hold on there, Gracie,” he says, trying to charm himself out this. “You don’t want to do this.”

“You shut up, Joey! I know what I do and don’t want to do, and right now I want to see you in your underwear.”

“What?”

Connor laughs, immediately getting what Grace has in mind. “You heard the lady. Strip down!” Connor wriggles the rest of the way out of the burlap sack and begins stripping down too, exchanging his clothes for the deputy’s. While Connor had thought he’d be in charge of his own escape, he lets Grace take the lead. He’s awed by what she’s managed to accomplish up till now, and as the Admiral once told him, “a true leader never puts his ego ahead of his assets.” And Grace Skinner is an asset of the highest order.

“What’s the game, Grace?” Connor asks, as he puts on the deputy’s pants.

“The kind we win,” she says simply. Then to the deputy, “Go on—the shirt too.”

“Grace . . .”

“No backtalk or I’ll fill ya full a’ lead!”

Connor chuckles at the silver-screen gangland cliché. “Technically bullets aren’t made of lead anymore—and let’s not even mention the ceramic ones they use on clappers.”

“Yeah, yeah—no backtalk from you, either.”

Joey the deputy, Connor notes, wears plain gray boxers that have seen better days, sitting limply under a pale belly that has probably gone from six-pack to kegger since his high school days. If Grace really did have an interest in seeing him in his skivvies, she must be disappointed.

“Where d’ya think you’re gonna run, Gracie? You’ve never been out of Heartsdale. This guy’ll dump you at the first rest stop, and then what?”

“Why should you care?”

“Put your back against the pole, please,” Connor says. Connor ties him as tightly as he can, but then Grace grabs a jagged piece of the broken bong from the floor and puts it into the deputy’s bound hands so that he can eventually cut himself free.

“They’ll all be after you the second I get loose. You know that, don’t you?”

Grace shakes her head. “Nope. The second you get loose, you’re gonna scoot yourself upstairs and hide in the bushes.”

“What?”

“That’s right—you’ll hide there till everyone else is gone. Then you’re gonna stroll on over to the Publix parking lot and collect your car, because that’s where we’re gonna leave it, keys and all. Then you’re gonna go about the rest of your day like nothin’ ever happened, and when people ask where you were, you were out gettin’ lunch.”

“You’re crazy! Why would I do that?”

“Because,” says Grace, “if you don’t keep this a secret, everyone in Heartsdale is gonna know you were outsmarted by dumb old Grace Skinner, and you’ll be a laughingstock till the cows come home, and they ain’t comin’ home anytime soon!”

Connor just smiles, watching the deputy’s face get beet-red and his lips purse into angry slits. “You low-cortical bitch!” he growls.

“I should shoot you in the kneecap for that,” Grace says, “but I won’t because I’m not that kinda girl.”

Connor puts on the deputy’s hat. “Sorry, Joey,” he says. “It looks like you’ve been double-gammoned.”

9 • Lev

It’s only a hunch. And if he’s wrong, his actions will make things worse—but he foolishly acts on his gut, because he needs it to be true. Because if it’s not true, then Connor is done for.

There is a whole series of observations that are feeding into this hunch:

—The fact that the deputy comes from behind the house rather than walking out through the front door.

—The fact that he seems to intentionally avoid the other officers.

—The fact that his hat is pulled low on his forehead, shielding his face like a sombrero.

—The easy way he grips the arm of the woman he’s taking into custody—the same one who came to give Lev the message. The deputy escorts her to a police car by the curb, and Lev can tell that her behavior is off too. It’s as if she’s anxious to get to the car, rather than resistant.

And then there’s the way that officer walks—with one arm stiff and pressed to his side, as if he’s in pain. Maybe from a wound on his chest.

The two get in the police car and drive off—and although Lev can’t get a clear enough look at the deputy’s face, the hunch is pinging Lev’s brain on all frequencies. Only after the squad car has driven away does Lev convince himself that this is Connor in disguise, effecting a clever escape right beneath the noses of law enforcement.

Lev knows that when the car reaches the end of the street, it will have to turn right on Main, and now he’s thankful that he had spent most of the day searching the town, because he knows things he might not otherwise know. Such as the fact that Main is in the midst of heavy construction, and all traffic will be diverted down Cypress Street, two blocks away. If Lev can cut through a series of front and back yards, he can get there first. He takes off, knowing if he makes it there, it will only be by seconds.

The first yards have no fences. Nothing dividing one property from another except for the state of the grass—well tended in one yard, neglected in the next. In a moment, he’s tearing across an adjacent street to the second set of yards. There’s a picket fence in the front yard of the next house, but it’s a low one, and he’s quickly able to get over it, onto artificial turf of a weird aquamarine shade.

“Hey, whad’ya think you’re doing?” a man shouts from the porch, his toupee as artificial as his lawn. “This here’s private property!”

Lev ignores him and runs down the side yard to the back, coming to his only major obstacle: a wooden fence six feet high that divides one backyard from another. On the other side of that fence a dog begins barking as Lev climbs. He can tell it’s no small dog either.

Can’t think about that now. He reaches the top and drops down so close to a huge German shepherd mix, the dog is taken aback. It barks its head off, but its brief hesitation gives Lev the advantage. He bolts down the side yard, through an easy latched gate, and to a front yard, where the owner opted for low-maintenance river stones instead of grass. This is Cypress Street, where more traffic flows than would usually be the case when the main drag isn’t closed for construction. Lev can see the police car accelerating down the street toward him. The only thing between him and the street is a dense hedge, just high enough to be a problem, and he thinks how stupid if, after everything, he’s screwed because of some lousy bush. He hurdles the hedge, but all that adrenaline-pumped momentum takes him too far, and there are no sidewalks on these streets. He lands on the asphalt of Cypress Street, right in the path of the approaching police car.

10 • Connor

“Of all the freaking days to have roadwork!” Connor had been certain that they were going to be made. That one of the other drivers caught in the construction traffic was going to look into the car and see that he’s not deputy Joey at all.

“It’s not just today,” Grace tells him. “They been diggin’ up that sewer pipe for weeks. Stinks to high heaven too.”

Connor had been careful to avoid the traffic cones and any eye contact with the utility workers. Having followed the detour arrows, he now floors the accelerator down Cypress Street, speed limit be damned. Who’s gonna pull over a cop car for speeding?