Final Winter

For a while, the silence in the Wyoming desert was interrupted by the low hum of machinery as Vladimir and Imad worked to change what they had been driving. All exposed areas that weren’t part of the main body of the truck and the trailer — tires, mirrors, windshield, mudflaps, front bumper — had been covered by heavy-gauge brown paper and secured by equally heavy tape. It had been long, hot work, and both men had stripped off their shirts. When the paper had been secured and double-checked against guidelines from one of the black plastic cases that they had picked up in Idaho, they had continued their work. Portable spray-painting machinery and folding aluminum scaffolding had helped them to turn a bright yellow trailer with Seamarsk markings into something olive drab and military-looking.

Now Vladimir stood back, eyeing the truck and the trailer, matching it up with sample photos and schematics helpfully provided by their unseen bosses. Imad came up to him, clear plastic goggles pushed up over his head, respirator hanging around his neck. His chest was dark brown and scrawny, with a thick mat of black hair. Behind him was the scaffolding surrounding the truck, and the chugging air compressor that powered the spray gun, the compressor in turn powered by cables leading to the truck’s battery.

‘Well?’ he demanded. ‘Are we done with this darkie work?’

‘Soon,’ Vladimir said. ‘Very soon. We let this coat dry and then we can put on the new license plates and serial numbers, and other identifying marks. Another two hours, then we’ll be done.’

‘Good, because I’m about—’

There came the sound of an engine, overpowering the noise of the compressor. Vladimir turned and so did Imad. Vladimir said something in his own language — ‘Fuck your mother’ would have been the best English translation he could have come up with — and Imad said something in his own language as well.

Coming down the dirt road was a dark brown Jeep Wrangler with oversized tires, bounding its way towards them.

‘Don’t say anything, don’t do anything,’ Vladimir said. ‘If we’re lucky, they will pass us by. There must be something in here they want. They don’t want us.’

But God and luck were not with them. The Jeep Wrangler skidded to a halt about a dozen meters away. Hanging from the rear of the Jeep was a collection of sacks and ropes, and two young men and two young women got out, talking and laughing. They wore T-shirts and sunglasses and expensive-looking sport clothes and sport footwear. They talked among themselves for a moment, and then the two men started towards Vladimir and Imad, shaking their heads.

‘Not good,’ Imad said.

‘You are correct,’ Vladimir said. ‘Not good.’

~ * ~

In his rental GMC Pontiac — and why in God’s name were so many rental cars white? Was it a global rental-car rule somewhere? — Brian Doyle sat on a side street in the Mt Auburn neighborhood of Cincinnati, going over his notes for the day. The Princess had supposedly given him the day off, and he had taken the day off, but being the enterprising sort he had taken a commuter shuttle from Memphis to Cincinnati to see what he could find.

And so far, in the few hours he had been here, he had found a lot of nothing.

He scratched at the back of his head.

This part of Cincinnati was a large hill that years and years ago had been the home of the city’s best and brightest, including President William Howard Taft. But the years hadn’t played nice with Mt Auburn, and it had fallen into the urban cycle of poverty and decay. Now it appeared that it was coming back, as gentrification worked its magical market ways. The changeover in home ownership and such had no doubt led to Brian’s problems, for Adrianna Scott’s presence here was as thin as a piece of paper soaked in the rain. There had been almost nothing, nothing at all, save for two things. One came from a visit to her high school, known here as the Hughes Magnet School. The place had been a seemingly well-managed chaos of students and teachers and administrative staff, and a half-hour there had produced paper records that matched what had been in his file, save for one thing that he had been looking for. Adrianna had told him that she had come here after her parents had died, and neither the high school nor the earlier report had any record of her transfer. It was as if she had arrived out of nowhere and had slipped right into the classes without any problem.

And she had done well, scoring high honors in almost everything. But her previous life, before her parents had died in that car accident… gone.