Page 78 of You Can Run

“I'll explain everything tonight. There's a motel outside of Beaumont. We'll stop there.” She returned her eyes to the road. “But first I need to make this stop.”

Ahead of them, a storage facility had appeared on the right side of the road. It was low and anonymous, the kind of place that existed in the margins of every mid-sized American town. Chain-link topped with razor wire. A keypad at the gate. Unit doors in long identical rows, orange and corrugated.

Sofia turned in without slowing.

Dante watched her enter the gate code from memory, five digits, no hesitation.

She parked in front of unit thirty-one and turned off the engine and sat for a moment with her hands in her lap, not moving.

“You can wait here,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. He didn't move either.

She got out of the car. He watched her in the side mirror as she walked to the unit. She lifted the door and went inside, but he couldn't see what was in there from the angle of the mirror.

The unit was eight by ten feet. Sofia had rented it under a name she'd used once before, paid eighteen months in advance in cash, and visited it four times in two years. Each time she'd added something.

She pulled the chain on the single overhead bulb and stood in the yellow light and looked at what she'd built.

Along the left wall, a metal shelving unit she'd assembled herself on the second visit. On it: three external hard drives in padded cases, labeled in a shorthand only she could read. Two laptops, a dozen USB drives in a Ziplock bag, each one numbered. Printed documents in labeled folders— financial records, wire transfer logs, incorporation papers for shell companies in Cyprus and the Cayman Islands and Delaware, the American state that asked the fewest questions. Photographs. Not the kind Borya made—the other kind. The kind that documented the movement of money and the faces of the men it moved between and the dates and amounts and the unbroken chain of evidence that connected a strip club in South Philadelphia to an adult entertainment production company in Bucharest to the men who sat in government offices in three countries and believed themselves untouchable because they had always been untouchable.

She'd been building this for four years. The early material was the most dangerous to have acquired and the most valuable to possess. The later material was more comprehensive.

She began transferring the drives and the folders to the hard-sided case she'd brought from the car. She worked methodically, checking each item against the list she kept in her head, the list she'd memorized years ago and updated mentally each time she added something new. She didn't rush. Rushing was how things got missed, and she had not come this far to miss something now.

When the shelving unit was clear she broke it down—four bolts, the whole thing flat in ninety seconds—and leaned it against the wall. She wasn't coming back here. Whatever happened in Philadelphia, this unit would stay rented until thelease ran out and then become someone else's problem, empty and anonymous and leaving no trace of what it had held.

She closed the case and set it by the door and stood for a moment in the middle of the cleared unit.

The overhead bulb threw its yellow light across the bare concrete floor. In the silence she could hear the faint mechanical breath of the climate control and, distantly, a car on the county road outside.

She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket. The medal was small—Orthodox, silver, worn to a smoothness that had erased most of the detail from the front. A saint's face, barely visible. A thin chain she'd replaced twice over the years because chains broke but she'd always transferred it, always. From Odessa to the container ship. From the container ship to the first room. From one room to the next and the next, through every city and every name and every version of herself she'd had to build and then discard. It had outlasted all of them.

She closed her fingers around it and squeezed. Then she put it back in her pocket.

She thought about tonight. She'd been carrying the weight of what she was going to tell him for so long. She knew the words, knew the sequence, knew the specific facts that needed to be conveyed and the order in which to convey them. What she didn't know was what it would feel like to say them out loud to someone who would actually hear them.

Tonight she was going to have to open the file.

She picked up the case. She turned off the overhead bulb and stood for a moment in the dark of the empty unit, and then she pulled the door down behind her and locked it and walked back to the car.

Cruz was looking at his hands when she got in. He looked up.

She put the case in the back seat and started the engine.

“Beaumont,” he said.

“Beaumont,” she confirmed.

She pulled out onto the county road and drove north and didn't look in the mirror at the storage facility receding behind her, because she'd never looked back and she wasn't going to start now.

THIRTY-ONE

The Greyhoundto Philadelphia left Galveston at 4:45 in the afternoon. Jessica took a window seat two rows from the back, put the bag she'd bought at a Walgreens between her feet—a change of clothes, water, a prepaid phone—and watched the island disappear behind her as they crossed the causeway for the second time that day.

The first time she'd crossed it she'd been in a cab heading toward Miller. Now she was heading toward a bus station in Houston where she'd have a two-hour layover before the overnight connection north. Thirty-one hours, the ticket said. Galveston to Philadelphia, one transfer, no frills.

Houston took forty minutes to get through in evening traffic. Jessica sat in a plastic chair at the bus terminal on Main Street with her bag between her feet, ate a vending machine sandwich and watched the departures board…and waited.