Chapter 10: Target

"I can put you in a safe house by noon," Ellen said.

"No."

"There's a farmhouse in Virginia with two guards and a very bad couch."

"No."

"Caleb, the people watching that clip are not a cable network."

"I know who they are."

"Then you know why you should disappear."

I looked at Jo.

She stood beside me in the alley with her cap pulled low, and she did not say a word.

She was letting me choose.

"Morris hid me for nine years," I said. "It killed him."

"That is unfair."

"It's true. I'm done being a hiding place."

Ellen studied me with those sharp dark eyes.

Then she did something I had never seen her do.

She smiled, small and tired.

"He said you'd be difficult."

"Did he say it fondly?"

"Insufferably fondly."

She pulled a cheap gray phone from her pocket and pressed it into my hand.

"My number is the only one in it. Use it."

"What about Lyle?"

"Lyle is smart enough to disappear until next Friday. I'm having his office quietly watched."

"And Brant?"

"Brant is going to need a very long afternoon."

She left through the alley, and I watched her go.

"She likes you," Jo said.

"She snapped my badge in half."

"That's how she shows it."

Jo's shift at Frederick Memorial started at three.

I tried to talk her out of it, and she told me nurses do not call in sick when their patients are dying of strokes.

So I sat in the emergency waiting room with a magazine about boats and a plastic cup of vending machine coffee.

I watched the doors.

Around four, a man came in clutching his chest.

He was broad, gray-jacketed, about forty, with a short beard and clean shoes.

He said he had chest pain and gave the triage nurse a name that did not sound real.

I saw the nurse take his pulse and frown.

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