The kid was alive.
His eyes were open and he was staring through the window frame at Dryden.
And holding his stomach, just below his diaphragm. There was blood seeping out between his fingers.
“You’re the guy,” the kid said. His tone was flat and matter-of-fact, the way people often talked when they were in shock. “You’re Dryden.”
Dryden was still staring at the bloodstain, expanding through the fabric of the kid’s shirt. Then his eyes picked out something on the passenger side floor, gleaming in the darkness there. A single brass shell casing.
“He got me,” the kid said. “Christ, he got me.”
Beneath the kid’s hands, the blood was running in rivulets down the front of his T-shirt. Pooling in the folds of his pants, and on the Tahoe’s leather seat cushion. A huge amount of blood.
Dryden knew human anatomy from training and from experience. He knew about the thoracic artery, running down through the abdomen and branching to form the two femoral arteries in the legs. A person stabbed or shot through just one femoral artery could bleed out and die inside of sixty seconds, if nobody was around to apply a tourniquet.
The thoracic artery carried twice that much blood, and no tourniquet could be applied to it.
The kid’s face had lost a bit of color even in the ten seconds Dryden had been standing there. He was going fast.
“Are you Curtis?” Dryden asked.
The kid’s eyes had begun to drift. Now they fixed on him again. He looked surprised to hear that name spoken, but only a little.
The kid nodded.
“Came to find Claire,” Curtis whispered. “I thought she might be with you. She told me all about you.”
A shiver went through Curtis’s body. The morning air was easily seventy-five degrees, but the kid reacted as if it were forty. To him, it was. He forced himself to keep talking. “I guess she found you, then.”
Instead of verifying the statement, Dryden leaned in through the empty window frame and spoke carefully.
“Curtis, the people who attacked Bayliss Labs have a place they call the interrogation site. Have you heard of that? Do you know where it is?”
Curtis’s eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head.
“Are you sure?” Dryden said. “Think as clearly as you can.”
Curtis nodded, and when he spoke again, his voice was only a whisper. “All their language is careful. All their e-mails, the stuff on the server. No locations. No names. I copied all of it, though. Took it with me. Figured a lot of it out…”
He was losing strength by the second. Fading.
“Curtis,” Dryden said.
“I’ve been hiding three days,” the kid said. “I printed it all, got it organized.” He nodded weakly toward the space behind the front seats. “It’s all in a bag back there, for Claire. I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.”
The shivering was getting worse.
“I tried to be careful,” Curtis said. “I made sure they couldn’t find me with their … system. Maybe they found me the old-fashioned way. Jesus, I went to my old coffee shop this morning. Maybe they were just watching…”
His eyes were wet now. The shock was losing ground to the pain, or else the fear.
Then something changed. Curtis blinked and exhaled hard and forced himself into a state of alertness. He turned and stared out through the shattered passenger window, then swept his gaze left in a slow arc, eyes darting everywhere.
Looking for some threat out there in the woods.
Like Claire had done in the desert.
Exactly like Claire.
Dryden’s scalp prickled. He turned fast and raised the Beretta, studying the surrounding trees.
Nothing there.
He pivoted slowly counterclockwise, his eyes and the pistol tracking around, a few degrees per second.
He ended up facing back the way they’d come from: toward the paved two-lane road, which was just hidden from view by the curve in the gravel lane through the forest.
A hand seized his arm. He spun toward it, reflexively.
Curtis had reached out through the driver’s-side window frame and taken hold of him. The kid’s eyes were intense, keenly aware.
“Hide our bodies,” Curtis said.
“What?”
“You can’t leave any record for anyone to pick up on. The people we’re up against … if there’s anything tying me to this place and time, then … they’ll send other killers here. They’ll have … already sent them. Hours ago. They’d already be here waiting.”
As crazed as the kid sounded, his words lined up eerily well with what had happened in the desert.
The gunmen there had already been in place. Claire had begun looking for the threat once it was clear the cop was going to stop and question the two of them.
Once it was clear there would be a record of their presence there.
At that place and time.
Dryden felt the dots trying to connect. In some sense they did, but only partly.