The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

what else … ?” she whispered.
    She saw the killers turning toward her now, drawn by her voice, and a second later they were running, their footsteps slapping the wet pavement.
    What the hell was she forgetting?
    The other party began to speak, asking if she was okay.
    She remembered.
    She composed it into the simplest form she could think of and screamed it into the phone, and even as she finished she felt hands reaching through the window and grabbing her. Getting her by the calves, pulling her from the vehicle. She gripped the phone with both hands and snapped it in half. Heard the circuit boards inside break like stale crackers.
    Then she was out on the pavement, turned over, pinned, the pistol aimed down at her. The PDA’s glow on the killers’ faces strobed through the photo sequence again. She looked past them and saw the body they’d pulled from the third SUV. She saw why they’d discarded it after all: one of its legs had been nearly severed by a bullet impact just above the knee. It hung on by only skin and a bit of muscle. The open femoral artery had already pumped a thick sheet of blood onto the pavement. Very little was still coming out. Very little was left to come out.
    The killer with the PDA continued cycling through his pictures. Paige heard other men somewhere behind her, at the back of her own vehicle. Heard them kicking aside the crumbs of glass there, kneeling, cursing softly as they rummaged inside. Then came the clatter of the entity’s plastic case, scraping over concrete as they pulled it free. She heard their footsteps as they sprinted away with the thing, back toward where the shooting had come from.
    Above her, the PDA’s flashing stopped. The man holding it looked down. His eyes went back and forth between the screen and her face.
    “Keeper?”
    “Oh yeah.”

Chapter Two
    Travis Chase took his lunch break alone on Loading Dock Four. He sat with his feet hanging over the edge. Night fog drifted in across the parking lot, saturated with the smells of vehicle exhaust, wet pavement, fast food. Out past the edge of the lot, past the shallow embankment that bordered it, the sound of intermittent traffic on I–285 rose and fell like breaking waves. Beyond I–285 was Atlanta, broad and diffused in orange sodium light, the city humming at idle at two in the morning.
    Behind Travis the warehouse was silent. The only sounds came from the break room at the far south end. Low voices, the microwave opening and closing, the occasional scrape of a chair. Travis only ever went in there to put his lunch in the refrigerator and to take it back out.
    Something moved at the edge of the parking lot. Dark and low slung, almost flat to the ground. A cat, hunting. It slipped forward in starts and stops, then bolted for the foot of a dumpster. The kill reached Travis as no more than a squeal and a muffled struggle, a few thumps of soft limbs against steel. Then nothing but the swell and crest of the traffic again.
    Travis finished his lunch, wadded the brown bag and arced it into the trash bin next to the box compactor.
    He turned where he sat, brought his legs up and rested them sideways across the edge of the dock. He leaned back against the concrete-filled steel pole beside the doorway. He closed his eyes. Some nights he caught a few minutes’ sleep like this, but most nights it was enough just to relax. To shut down for a while and try not to think. Try not to remember.
    His shift ended at four thirty. The streets were empty in the last hour of the August night. He got his mail on the way into his apartment. Two credit-card offers, a gas bill, and a grocery flyer, all addressed to the name Rob Pullman. The sight of it no longer gave him any pause—the name was his as much as the address was his. He hadn’t been called Travis Chase, aloud or in writing, in over two years.
    He’d seen the name just once in that time. Not written. Carved. He’d driven fourteen hours up to Minneapolis on a Tuesday night, a year and a half ago, timing his arrival for the middle of the night, and stood on his own grave. The marker was more elaborate than he’d expected. A big marble pedestal on a base, the whole thing four feet tall. Below his name and the dates was an inscribed verse: Matthew 5:6. He wondered what the hell his brother had spent on all of it. He stared at it for five minutes and then he left, and an hour later he pulled off the freeway into a rest area and cried like a little kid. He’d hardly