Runaway. Part 4

"I know. It wasn't the first political thing I've ever heard her say, but this time she was really hot. She went on a rant about not being truly free and government regulation and stuff like that."

"Like a conservative?"

"I'm a conservative, but I'd say it was more like a paranoid. Then she started going on about Ayn Rand's books and Atlas Shrugged and that whole Objectivist spiel. I tried to discuss it with her, but she wasn't interested in a debate. She talked right over me. I finally just got up and left."

Jan didn't know the Objectivist spiel or who Ayn Rand was, but it sounded like something she could look up on the Internet.

"Justin, do you know if your sister was doing drugs or running with a crowd, or anything that could help us track her down?"

"No, she didn't do drugs. At least she didn't the one time I offered to share a joint with her. She called me an idiot and a degenerate." Jan could hear him taking another drag on his cigarette. "As you can see, we aren't close."

"Sounds like Maddy may be hard to be close to."

"I feel sorry for her in a way. I mean, she's always been so alone that she just doesn't know how to act with people. If she's out there on her own, she could get in trouble pretty quick."

Jan thought the same thing.

The CarMax manager handed Maddy a cas.h.i.+er's check for $20,000.

"I'd feel better if one of your parents were here," he said. He was a pudgy, sweaty old man. Maddy couldn't wait to get away from him.

"I owned the car, not them. It doesn't really matter how you feel."

She tucked the check in a pocket of her backpack, hunched it onto one shoulder, and strapped a heavy computer bag across the other. She left without thanking him or saying good-bye. f.u.c.k him, anyway. He'd made the whole process of selling the car an exercise in patience, and she had little of that to spare.

Once on the Metra train into Chicago, she pulled out a pay-as-you-go cell phone, one of several she'd bought. She planned to use them and toss them, not giving anyone the opportunity to track her down through a signal. She sent a text to David. He was already downtown, waiting for her at the train station. She pulled her ball cap lower over her eyes and relaxed into her seat, watching the familiar suburban landscape flash by. It would be all new scenery after this.

David. She would recognize him, though they'd never met in person. They'd started video chatting a few months ago after discovering each other in the comments section of a conservative political blog. Both were too radical in their ideas for the forum, so they took their conversations private. Now she was running away with him. She wasn't nervous, but she'd be p.i.s.sed off if he turned out to be another All Talk, No Action sort of guy. It was easy for people to talk about going off-grid, but few had the guts to do it.

She found him outside of Union Station, leaning against an old pickup truck parked in a tow away zone. It was early evening and getting dark, the fall air cooler every day. He was dressed in flannel s.h.i.+rt and jeans, no jacket, and she was surprised at how tall and thin he was. She'd only ever seen him from the neck up. He looked more like a boy her age than a man of twenty-five. He stepped toward her and shook her hand.

"You definitely do not look eighteen," he said. "Have you been lying to me?"

"I'm eighteen. I can't help it if I look young. Dude, you look about twelve."

David grinned. "I'll show you my ID if you show me yours."

Maddy reached for her backpack and pulled out the check. "Here's what I'll show you."

He took the check and looked it over. "Cool. This is going to help a lot."

"Do we have to get that cashed here?"

David slipped the check in his s.h.i.+rt pocket. "Nah. It's made out to cash. They'll take it at my bank in Michigan."

"We're all set then. Let's get the h.e.l.l out of here. Where are we going first?"

David put her bags behind the seats in the truck.

"First we go back up to my house. You can stay in my bas.e.m.e.nt while we're getting all our s.h.i.+t together."

"When will we leave for Idaho?"

He glanced at her as he entered the ramp to the expressway. "No cold feet for you, I see."

"h.e.l.l no. The sooner the better."

"We still have some things to do here. We'll lay it all out for you, but most of it you already know. We'll close on the land this week and then we're there."

Maddy sat back and took a deep breath. It was all happening fast, but it felt exactly right. She wanted something real. David thought like she did; tired of all the endless bulls.h.i.+t all around them, in everything they heard on the news or read in the media or listened to spewing out of the mouths of idiotic, corrupt politicians. To live in a meaningful way, they were going to have to leave a meaningless society.

David pulled into traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway for the five-hour drive to southeastern Michigan. "We'll be out there before you know it."

"G.o.d, this is so great," she said. "I feel free."

Jan and Peet parked three houses down from where Ron and Paula Wilson lived in the eastern part of Lincoln Park, one of the city's priciest neighborhoods. Jan thought she was spending entirely too much of her s.h.i.+ft in neighborhoods she never had a prayer of living in. The wood cabin she grew up in was smaller than the tree house she'd seen in the backyard of the Harrington house. A nice tree house would suit her just fine. She could hang a "Keep Out" sign at the entrance, flipping it around on occasion to say "Girls Only," then flipping it back again. That would feel about right.

Paula Wilson was a trader, the kind whose income zoomed up and down, but mostly up. Her moods seemed to do the same. The idea that her husband of five years was cheating on her made her especially volatile, and she was determined to catch him out. It was the most common and the most boring work they did as investigators.

Jan sipped her coffee and read from the Wikipedia entry she'd printed out on Objectivism. "Okay, Ayn Rand wrote some books and people went all cultish about them."

"What books?"

"Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead."

"Oh, yeah. I think Kevin Junior read The Fountainhead. Why do we care about this?"

"Maddy's brother said she got very excited talking about Rand's philosophy. Objectivism. Maybe it will help explain why she left."

"You're not around teenagers much," Peet said. "They are totally into something one minute, and just as you start understanding what they're talking about, they're on to the next thing."

"Still." Jan read on. "Says here that Rand's philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his n.o.blest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

"It sounds lonely," Peet said.

Jan thought it sounded like her father. He pursued his own vision and sense of moral purpose. No question about that. And he insisted to all those in his camp that their thinking be in line with his. In fact, he preferred they not do much thinking at all. Those that openly questioned him were punished. He'd built a set of stocks that he rolled out into the center of camp whenever he felt the need to remind people of how things worked.

Jan kept reading. "'The only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez-faire capitalism.' Now that sounds pretty conservative, if you ask me. Justin said she was ranting about the government."

Peet touched Jan on her arm. "Put the philosophy away. Looks like Ron Wilson is in search of earthier pleasures."

Jan looked up to see Wilson's BMW pull out of his side drive. Peet waited until he got to the end of the street and turned before she put the car in gear and sped up to follow him. They hung well behind as he led them right into Boystown.

Peet said, "I wonder if Paula Wilson will be relieved if the other woman is a man?"

"Ten dollars says he's going to Steamy," Jan said.

"Nah. I think he's going to Hydrate. Doesn't look like the type who'd go to the baths."

"Like you'd know," Jan said. "Do you think you can line up The Village People and pick out the steam bath type?"

Peet stuck her tongue out at her, which made Jan laugh.

"The point is that this is the fastest way to get what he wants. If he only has an hour or so, the baths are a surefire place to get s.e.x," Jan said.

Wilson slowed down as he neared Steamy, an old, nondescript brick building with no signage on the front other than its address. It could have been anything. Wilson was looking for parking, so Peet pulled to the curb across the street from the place, into a hydrant spot. Jan got out her camera and climbed into the backseat. She took several shots as he approached the building.

She knew she wouldn't get any successful photos of Wilson inside the bathhouse. They might not throw her out, but neither her camera nor her female body would be welcome. She tried to guess how long a bathhouse for women would stay open. She might appreciate the convenience of one. When she felt the need for some companions.h.i.+p, she found picking up women annoyingly time-consuming, even tedious.

"I think he'll be less than an hour. It's unlikely he'll have a man hanging on him when he walks out," Jan said.

"If he doesn't, we'll still have the time stamps on the photos to show he was in there a while," Peet said. "How do you think Paula is going to take it?"

"I don't know. Why doesn't he tell her, for Christ sake? It's a s.h.i.+tty thing to do to the wife, and a worse thing to do to himself."

Jan grabbed her laptop from the front seat and uploaded the first photos. She e-mailed them to Paula, who always had her BlackBerry in her hand. Jan knew she'd get the message almost as soon as it was sent.

Then they waited. Jan watched the parade of gay men walk up and down the street, the beautiful fall weather bringing more out than perhaps there would normally be on a Tuesday night. But there was always action on Halsted Street. Men knew exactly where to come to find the bars, the restaurants, the steam baths, all the places that threw them together and spit them out in different combinations every night. The mayor had installed tall metal pylons decorated with rainbow colors that marked this stretch of Halsted as Boystown, as if to contain the energy within geographical boundaries.

She thought of the time she lived on the streets in LA, the land of the runaway teen. She was more naive by far than any of the others she met there. They talked of their s.h.i.+tty homes and schools and the parents they fought with and their pain in the a.s.s little brothers and sisters. Many were running from abuse. But they all knew a h.e.l.l of a lot more than Jan did about living on the streets. She was taken in by f.a.gin-like dealers and thieves who taught her skills unusual even for her unorthodox education. Among the many things she learned about from scratch was s.e.xhow to have it, who she wanted to have it with (girls), and how to steer clear of the predators. There were plenty of girls willing to show her the ropes, sometimes literally. But no part of those experiences had the quality of freedom and celebration she saw in the way the boys walked around Boystown.

She heard a text message come in. It was from Paula Wilson, releasing them from duty. She understood the situation and the photo and wasn't that surprised. She was just relieved to finally know. Jan called her to make sure she didn't need anything else and moved back into the front seat of the car while she listened to Paula talk. And talk. When she was finally able to hang up, Peet was just pulling up to Jan's building.

"Is she pretty upset?" Peet asked.

"It sounds like she's trying to decide which is more humiliatinglosing him to a man or to a woman." Jan got out of the car with the camera. "I'll write the report. You going straight home?"

"I've got to tell Kev about this job thing."

"Try not to worry about it, Peet. There's nothing that's going to be helped by you worrying."

"Thank you, o wise one. I have a feeling tomorrow will be an interesting day at t.i.tan Security and Investigations."

"Yeah, I'll see you there." Jan slapped the top of the car as Peet pulled away. She headed for her building's garage, and a few minutes later she was in her Jeep on Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive. It was one in the morning, still plenty of time to see if anyone on the West Side of the city might recognize a photo of Maddy Harrington.

Jan knew that if you were white and needed to get hold of some heroin, the easiest place to find it was west on Augusta or Division or the streets in between. When you slowed down as you drove by the corner stores, you'd be recognized for what you wereone of society's privileged who had willingly given up every advantage for the rush of smack. You would not be well respected.

Jan didn't know Maddy Harrington. Her instincts told her it was unlikely she was a heroin addict, but it was always possible. She drove slowly, looking for the dealers, the retailers on the streets, some of whom she would recognize from past searches for teenagers. She never had any trouble here. In fact, she found them to be pretty cooperative. The last thing they wanted was underage runaway white kids hanging around their corners or in their bas.e.m.e.nts. It only brought the heat on. If Maddy had been hanging around there, someone would give her up.

Along Augusta Boulevard the streetlights glowed in between the piercing blue lights perched high on steel poles that marked the area as a police watch zone. The police lights provided no added security for the citizens of the neighborhood, but they did manage to make it really difficult to sell property there. Jan came to a familiar corner and parked in front of a liquor store. The surrounding area was residential, mainly brick two and three unit buildings and small houses. Neighborhood Watch signs were on the front windows of nearly every house, and most intersections held a large sign announcing that the area was drug and violence free. Talk about your misleading advertising. If Jan stood at one of those signs for an hour, she'd see countless drug deals and probably at least one act of violence.

A group of young men stood around the store entrance. They parted just enough to give her a narrow path to the door. She knew at least one of them would be holding, carrying out the retail heroin business that was the lowest rung in whatever gang they were with. One of them stopped her with a pull on her jacket sleeve.

"You were here last year looking for some chick. Ain't that right?"

"That's right. Now I'm looking for another. Same thing. Suburban girl, high school age."

"You got a picture?"

The group huddled around as Jan showed them the photo of Maddy.

"I can't tell one white chick from another," one of them said. They all laughed, but she thought it might be true. They only saw these girls for a moment, unless they became regular customers. And by then they didn't look very much like Maddy.

"No, I ain't seen her," said one. The others agreed.

Jan went into the store and turned to the caged cash register to her left. A Middle Eastern man sat at the counter, part of a trend throughout the West Side of Korean shop owners selling out of the neighborhoods. Jan didn't know what that was all about. Maybe the Koreans were fed up. Maybe the Middle Easterners were from the war zone and a West Side corner shop felt like a peaceful place. She put the photo of Maddy on the carousel and the man twirled it around.

"You seen her?" she asked.

"No."

"At least pretend like you're looking at the photo."

"Haven't seen her."

She took the photo and returned to the group of boys.

"Any luck, lady?" It was the one that had recognized her.

"Nope. Does he speak much English?"

"Oh yeah. He's always saying, 'I call police!'"

"Yeah. Or 'I got gun!'"

"Right. But if you ask him for change for a twenty, he don't know what you're talking about."

Jan grinned at them. She handed her card around. "If any of you see my girl, be sure to give me a call. I pay for information."

She left them on the corner, keeping their eyes peeled for business.

Chapter Three.

Jan was pouring her first cup of coffee in the break room when Peet walked in. She normally looked like she'd just woken from a particularly refres.h.i.+ng nap, but today she seemed tired. Jan could count on one hand the number of times she'd taken a nap herself. They'd all been frightening experiences. When she'd wake up, it felt as if she'd just fought her way to the surface of deep water with rocks in every pocket. When her eyes finally opened from these "death naps," the feeling that she'd just escaped something dire would shroud her. She didn't need therapy to figure out what that was all about.