Page 13 of Exit Strategy

“Mister Worthington?” the taller of the two women spoke.

“Yes, Esme?” I asked.

“Are you taking her somewhere safe?” she inquired. I nodded in agreement. “Far away from here?”

“Yes, I am,” I said. “She’s not safe here.”

“We’ll clean up the mess,” the shorter woman said. It looked like she was on the verge of tears. Concern for Callie? Concern for themselves? I didn’t know.

“When someone from security comes, tell them to send me an email, my phone is broken,” I said. They both nodded. “And be careful. It’s easier to find a new job than it is to wake up in the hospital.”

For a moment I could see, I could understand. They had their own world, where it was them on one side, and the wealthy and powerful on the other, and people like me, the security people and the guards, we were a foot in both. But right now, blood on my hands, I was firmly one of them. I had turned on the man that had hired me. The very best thing I could expect was to be fired and blacklisted from the industry. Worst case, bounty hunters?Who knew what a man like Arik was capable of doing?There were hired killers, I knew several personally. The last thing I wanted was for one of them to come after me, to recover her.

To haul her back into that golden cage of misery and brutal beatings.

I drove us out of the Hollywood Hills, down into the thick of Los Angeles. It was a mess of traffic, snarled roads, and the persistent stink of the city, of the smog. While driving, I took my phone, powered it down, and popped the back off to pull out the SIM card. The card was easy to snap, and then discard the two tiny pieces of silicone out the window onto the side of the freeway.

The next stop was a storage facility a few miles from the apartment where I occasionally slept. Old habits die hard, and there were several exceedingly important things kept in the double-locked unit. The largest and most important was my truck. The short bed ‘68 was patina red, with a rollbar, lift kit, and was romantically American. It was the first vehicle I had bought that hadn’t been a rolling piece of trash, or German. I had bug-out bags in the back, and several locked cases in the bed. Those were highly questionable in California, as they contained a sizeable arsenal of firearms. I was sure most of the guns were illegal in this state, but it was California, and it was only a matter of time before the legislature started passing measures limiting the number of knives a steakhouse could have or limiting the size of tools for being too dangerous.

I moved Callie from the back of the car to the passenger seat of the truck and secured her in with the seatbelt. Her pulse was steady, and she didn’t seem to be in any sort of life-threatening distress. Lord knew I had seen enough of that in my life. I swapped the vehicles out, backing the sedan into the unit. I took my travel bag from the trunk of the car, tossed it in the back of the truck and winced. He must have really nailed my shoulder with that fucking award.

Last thing before dropping and locking the door was popping the hood of the car and disconnecting the battery. Power killed, and parked inside a metal shell, it might take them days to find the car, if ever. I locked the unit and got into the truck.

This was mental, just fucking mental.

I put the truck into drive and pulled out of the storage facility. An hour later, we were heading toward Las Vegas, and there was nothing on the scanner other than the usual dystopian chaos that was Los Angeles and Southern California – gangland shootings, a few police high-speed chases, helicopter chatter about traffic problems, a pair of Amber alerts ongoing, but nothing close to us. We might be in the clear.

We cleared Pomona, then through San Bernardino, and Callie came to as we were heading north, finally on I-15, aiming for Barstow, and passing between the forests that hemmed in the urban sprawl. She sat up slowly, pressing a hand against the window, and then the side of her head.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“Safe,” I said. “You’re safe.”

“Arik?”

“Nowhere near you, and you never have to see him again,” I said. “I’m working on putting distance between you and him.”

“Kurt?” she asked.

“Yes, Callie?”

“Did you kidnap me?” she asked.

“I would like to thinkrescueis more of what I had in mind,” I said. The thought had occurred to me, but it was less pressing than getting away from Hollywood, from Arik, from the security people who technically worked for me, and that I helped hire. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go if you have somewhere you want me to take you. You are very specifically not a prisoner, captive, or anything like that.”

“Oh, okay,” she said, almost sounding let down.

“Is there somewhere you want me to take you? What about your family?” I asked. Callie shook her head, and immediately put her hand to her temple. I could see the instant regret.

“No, no.” Her voice was soft. “I don’t have anything, nor anywhere to go.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not what you think. They’re not dead… they’re on his side,” she said. “If I went to my family, they would give me back to him, and he’s furious.”

“Can I ask what happened?” I asked.

“Arik found out I’ve been receiving birth control at the fertility clinic,” she said, her voice soft and ragged. “And then, well, you know.”

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