Vanish: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

to wipe his dirty windshield. “What do you two fellows want to talk to me about?” he asks, scraping water from the glass.
    The blond man leans in closer to our driver and speaks in a muted voice. I hear the words
female fugitives
and
dangerous.
    “So why are you talking to me?” the driver says.
    “This is your car, right?”
    “Yeah.” Our driver suddenly laughs. “Oh, now I get it. In case you’re wondering, that’s my wife and her cousin sitting in the car. They look real dangerous, don’t they?”
    The blond man glances at his partner. A look of surprise. They don’t know what to say.
    Our driver drops the squeegee back in the bucket, throwing up a splash. “Good luck, guys,” he says, and opens his car door. As he climbs in behind the wheel, he says loudly to Olena: “Sorry, honey. They didn’t have any Advil. We’ll have to try the next gas station.”
    As we drive away, I glance back and see that the men are still staring after us. One of them is writing down the license number.
    For a moment, no one in the car speaks. I am still too paralyzed by fear to say a word. I can only stare at the back of our driver’s head. The man who has just saved our lives.
    Finally he says: “Are you going to tell me what that was all about?”
    “They lied to you,” says Olena. “We are not dangerous!”
    “And they’re not FBI.”
    “You already know this?”
    The man looks at her. “Look, I’m not stupid. I know the real deal when I see it. And I know when I’m getting bullshitted. So how about telling me the truth?”
    Olena releases a weary sigh. In a whisper she says: “They want to kill us.”
    “That much I figured out.” He shakes his head and laughs, but there is no humor in it. It’s the laugh of a man who cannot believe his bad luck. “Man, when it rains on me, it just fucking pours,” he says. “So who are they and why do they want to kill you?”
    “Because of what we have seen tonight.”
    “What did you see?”
    She looks out the window. “Too much,” she murmurs. “We have seen too much.”
    For the moment he lets that answer suffice, because we have just turned off the road. Our tires bump over a dirt track that takes us deep into woods. He stops the car in front of a ramshackle house surrounded by trees. It is little more than a rough-hewn cabin, something that only a poor man would live in. But on the roof is a giant satellite dish.
    “This is your home?” Olena asks.
    “It’s where I live,” is his odd answer.
    He uses three different keys to open the front door. Standing on the porch, waiting for him to open his various locks, I notice that his windows all have bars. For a moment I hesitate to step inside because I think of the other house that we have just escaped. But these bars, I realize, are different; these are not to trap people in; they are meant to keep people out.
    Inside I smell wood smoke and damp wool. He does not turn on any lights, but navigates across the dark room as though he knows every square inch of it blind. “It gets a little musty in here when I go away for a few days,” he says. He strikes a match, and I see that he is kneeling at a hearth. The bundle of kindling and logs are already waiting to be lit, and flames soon dance to life. The glow illuminates his face, which seems even more gaunt, more somber in this shadowy room. Once, I think, it might have been a handsome face, but the eyes are now too hollow, and his lean jaw has several days’ growth of dark stubble. As the fire brightens, I glance around at a small room made even smaller by tall piles of newspapers and magazines, by the dozens and dozens of news clippings he has tacked to the walls. They are everywhere, like yellowing scales, and I imagine him shut up in this lonely cabin, day after day, month after month, feverishly cutting out articles whose significance only he understands. I look around at the barred windows and remember the three locks on the front door. And I think: This is the home of a frightened man.
    He goes to a cabinet and unlocks it. I am startled to see half a dozen rifles racked inside. He removes one and locks the cabinet again. At the sight of that gun in his hand, I retreat a step.
    “It’s okay. Nothing to be scared of,” he says, seeing my alarmed face. “Tonight, I’d just like to keep a gun close at hand.”
    We hear a bell-like chime.
    The man’s head jerks up at the sound. Carrying his rifle, he moves to the window and peers out at the