“There’s nowhere you can go where he can’t find you.”
“We,” I said. “Say it. We.”
“We,” she said.
“A friend of mine is in trouble. I’ve got to save him before some very bad people do a very bad thing to him or his family. So I’m leaving, and you’re going to let me.”
“I can’t let you, Alfred.”
I gently pried the box from her fingers.
“You’re not going to wake up Sam. You’re not going to come after me. You’re going to sit here and wait for your boyfriend and when he gets here you’re going to say I took the box and bopped you over the head with it. I’ll bop you right now, if you think that’ll make it more believable.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t make me do something I don’t want to do.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said. “That it’s something you really don’t want to do.”
I stepped around her and unlatched the door. I heard a clicking sound behind me. Turning around, I saw the gun in her hands, and the gun was pointed at the center of my thick forehead.
“Were you lying?” I asked.
“You know I was.”
“Not about Nueve,” I said. “Not about your assignment. About the right thing still mattering. Were you lying? Does it still matter? I think it does. Sometimes I get confused about what the right thing is, but in all this, in everything that happened since I found Excalibur, I always tried to do the right thing. Like now my right thing is trying to save my friend. Your right thing is giving me the chance to save him. That’s the right thing, Ashley. The thing-that-must-be-done. Sometimes the thing-that-must-be-done and the right thing are the same thing for both people. Sometimes they’re not, like Samuel putting a bomb in my skull. Right for him. Wrong for me. But just because something like that happens doesn’t mean you stop trying to do the right thing.”
I was feeling a little dizzy and a lot tired. I needed to leave. I said, “So you do your thing and I’ll do my thing and maybe in the end everything will turn out just fine.”
I opened the door and cold air poured into the room. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. Maybe from the cold, maybe from the fact that Ashley was pointing a semiautomatic at my face.
“At least tell me where you’re going,” she said.
“Where it began,” I said, and then I stepped into the night and the door swung closed behind me.
I walked across the parking lot, and the muscles between my shoulder blades twitched, expecting the bullet. I knew she had to be watching me through the window, but I didn’t care. The only thing that mattered to me at that moment was Mr. Needlemier. The world wasn’t in jeopardy this time, just one person in it, and that’s just as important.
I walked a half mile down the road to the gas station where I bought the corn dogs. I asked the clerk if I could use her phone.
“Why?” she asked.
“My car broke down. I need to call my dad.”
“You don’t have a cell phone?”
“It’s dead.” So was my dad, but I didn’t want to overload her with too much information.
She clearly didn’t believe me. Maybe if I bought something she’d let me use the phone. I bought a Big Gulp and asked again if I could use the phone.
“There’s a pay phone outside—or don’t you have any money either?”
“I just bought a Big Gulp,” I pointed out. I went back outside. I hadn’t seen the pay phone: it was on the far side of the property, out of the bright lights of the station. I walked into the shadows and got the number from the operator. How many hours was England ahead of us? Or was it behind us? On the twelfth ring, a lady came on the line and thanked me for calling Tintagel International World Headquarters.
“Jourdain Garmot,” I said.
The line popped with static.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Mr. Garmot is not in at the present. May I take a message or direct you to his voice mail?”