Page 76 of Captured By the Pakhan

What I use is a church.

There's a place in Boyle Heights that does lunch on Tuesdays, and a woman named Rosa who asks me exactly nothing. I wash dishes for two hours and get a plate, and a phone number, and the phone number gets me a ride as far as Barstow with a man moving a horse trailer who talks about his daughter for four hours and never once asks my name.

After that it's freight.

I'm not proud of it, and I'm not going to pretend it was clever. It was a container yard outside Barstow, and I have spent nine years learning exactly how those places work, and it turns out the knowledge is transferable in a direction I never intended.

Forty-one hours in a trailer to Kansas City with a bottle of water and a coat that isn't mine.

I have a long time to think, in there.

He'll have gone straight to the terminals. That's the first thing. Grigor on the road, men at the hire counters, Union Station covered by seven at the latest, and everything they do will be correct, and none of it will find me, because they will be looking for a woman with a plan and I am a woman with forty-one dollars.

He'll have read the letter.

I know he will. I knew it when I wrote it, which is why the last paragraph is what it is, and I have forty-one hours in a shipping container to sit with the fact that I wrote a message to a man inside a letter to a child and told myself it was for the child.

And then, somewhere in Colorado, in the dark, with the whole thing rattling:

What if you're wrong?

I turn it over properly, because there's nothing else to do.

Clean for what? That was the whole of it. That was the sentence that turned it, and it's an inference — it's a good inference, it's the one I'd make about a subject, but it is an inference and not a fact.

And then I put the photographs back in front of myself, one at a time, the way you do with evidence you don't like.

My mother on her own front step. Day two. Week after week.

Would cross for, in his handwriting.

And whatever clean for what is or isn't, that folder isn't an inference. That folder is a document with a date on it, and the date is before he knew one single thing about me, and there is no version of the last six weeks in which it means something benign.

Right, in a container somewhere east of Denver. So you were right to go, and you may also have been wrong about why, and both of those can be true, and you don't get to sort it out from in here.

I get to Washington on the fourth day, and I do not go to my mother's house.

I want it on the record that this is the hardest thing I do all week. I get within four miles of Bethesda, and I stand at a bus stop for eleven minutes doing the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says: there are photographs of that house in a drawer in California, which means somebody has been standing across the street from it, and I have no way of knowing whose somebody it was.

So I don't go.

I sleep one night in the stairwell of a parking structure on New York Avenue, which is a detail I won't be sharing with anybody ever, and in the morning I wash in a fast-food bathroom, put my hair up, look at myself in a mirror, and think: okay.

Then I walk into the Washington Field Office with my hands out in front of me.

They see me at the atrium.

I go through the door and stop dead center in about eleven square meters of polished floor, and I put my hands up above my head where every camera in that lobby can see them, and I stand very, very still.

"Raven West," I say. Loudly, clearly, to nobody. "Supervisory Special Agent, badge four-one-one-nine, New York Field Office. I am unarmed. I am surrendering."

Then it's noise.

Somebody shouts. A weapon comes up on my left and another on my right, and I go down onto my knees on the marble before anybody tells me to, because there is a version of the next four seconds in which a nervous person makes a mistake. I would rather remove it from the table.

Hands on my shoulders—somebody's knee. My cheek on the floor and my arms behind me and a voice saying words I have said, myself, to other people, about eleven times.

And then, from somewhere above me and to the right, a voice I have known for nine years: