Day Four
July 24, 1952
Thursday Morning
River exercised outside with his shirt off, occasionally pulling in the industrial area with his peripheral vision to verify that the woman with the binoculars was still in place. January ought to be getting close. In hindsight River should never have let her go. She was armed but the other woman might be too.
He worked through the pain of one final set of seventy-five pushups, then wiped his brow with the back of his hand and headed inside.
Thunder rolled through his veins.
He pulled the roof in with the binoculars.
The woman wasn’t visible.
She was in her down position.
He kept the scene in sight, ready to dart to the side at the first sign of a head popping up.
“Whoever you are, you’re going down.”
Suddenly there was movement. Two figures were fighting, standing chest to chest and pounding each other in the face.
They dropped.
Seconds passed.
River ran outside and took the ladder to the top of the boxcar, hoping to get a line of sight over the parapet. It didn’t work. Whatever was happening was out of view.
Come on.
Come on.
Come on.
Then a partial silhouette of a figure appeared, not frantic, not fighting, but visibly shaking. Then the figure stood upright and turned around.
It was January.
She looked directly at the boxcars and waved her arms.
That was it.
That was the signal.
River dropped the binoculars and ran that way, cutting across abandoned tracks and knee-high weeds, trying to not step on anything that would jack-up his foot.
When he got to the building, January was waiting for him at street level. Her face was a mess, her hair was disheveled, her shirt was ripped, her arm was scraped.
“Where’s the woman?”
“She’s up on the roof,” January said. “She’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah, dead. We ended up in a fight. It was her fault. She’s the one who started it.” A beat then, “So what do we do now, just leave her there or dump her somewhere?”
River weighed it both ways.
“We’ll dump her. Go get the car, I’ll bring her down.”
Up on the roof, River recognized the body. It was that woman who worked with Bryson Wilde. He picked her up, flung her over his shoulder and carried her down to street level. January was already there, waiting for him with the car.
River looked around.
No one was in sight.
He dumped the body in the trunk and slammed the lid.
Then they got the hell out of there.