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“No to everything. No to us, no to this. Leave before I make you leave.”
(“You’re not going anywhere.”)
Neil walks, dazed, watching himself leave the club as if from a distance. The sounds merge together, intermingle, a single blur of white noise that filters to ringing in his ears. Andrew’s gaze is on him like a physical weight, like he’s wearing exy armor made of stone. He can feel it; the moment the stare breaks away, when Neil disappears into a crowd never to be gazed upon by piercing hazel ever again.
Worn sneakers take Neil outside. Cool air washes over his prickling skin as chills cascade down his body. His mouth tastes of blood and panic, and his legs twitch with the desire to run, He goes through the motions–unlocks his car, sits down, secures the seatbelt. And then, all at once, his fugue cracks apart.
Neil buries his face in his hands as an agonized howl rips its way out of his throat. He screams until his throat aches, until he’s squeezed every last trace of oxygen from his lungs. His hands grow wet from saliva as his screams morph into howling gales of laughter. It’s like every emotion he’s pent up for ten years has escaped, has come to ravage him from the inside out. And then, he is still. There’s nothing but the quiet of the parking lot and his heartbeat. A void grows inside of him, blanking out his mind. What does he do when everything falls apart?
He runs.
His mother’s voice, something he has not haunted his thoughts in years, speaks clearly in his ear: Drive. Stay under the radar. Get out of the area. Go to the safe house and assess the situation.
Neil throws the car into gear and drives.
In a way, he was waiting for this. Despite the sharp edges of a key pressed into his palm, the feeling of cat fur beneath his fingers and the steadiness of Andrew’s breathing, it was never to last. A pipe dream, Andrew called him once. An impossible drug-induced fantasy.
The highway stretches in front of him, horizon black. Shadows flicker around Neil’s vision, his lack of sleep catching up to him.
It happened on a Tuesday. Three days ago, Andrew left. Quit the team, removed his name from the lease, his clothes from the closet, his ice cream from the freezer. Neil called Aaron first, who explained everything to him. Andrew was gone, and Neil was supposed to let him go.
And so, Neil disregarded Andrew’s wishes. There’s a first time for everything, right? A combination of credit card receipts—Andrew had his credentials saved on their old tablet—and an airtag, he managed to track Andrew down. Five hundred miles away, at a nightclub.
The worst part, really, is how disappointed Andrew was to see him. Like Neil had failed some final test, by hunting him down against his wishes. A final betrayal, proof that not even Neil could take no for an answer. But, what did Andrew expect, dumping him via proxy, trusting that he would take Aaron’s words as the unbiased truth? The moment No came from Andrew’s lips, where it really mattered, Neil backed off. In an act more painful than a hundred cigarette lighters pressed to his skin, Neil turned and walked away.
Neil lowers the driver's side window, his foot pressing on the gas until freezing air buffets his face and the shadows of the trees smear together. One by one, he tears his armbands off and throws them off the window. Neil tries touching his scars, the old burns and cuts, wondering if they’ll ground him too.
In the elongated seconds between highway lights, Neil considers a life without Andrew. A small, empty apartment. A bank account drained each month by the deal with the Moriyamas. The warm embrace of the Foxes shattered by questions and sidelong glances. An end to the stress relief of easy intimacy, of never having to doubt the word of his partner. Would their family split along past fault lines, the scar between monsters and upperclassmen opening back up? Will they spit Andrew’s name with venom once again? Andrew, a black hole in the fabric of his reality, an absence as sudden as the moon falling out of the sky, the center of his gravity, the cornerstone of every aspect of his life. Gone. Just, gone.
The pointlessness of it all weighs on him as the speedometer ticks into the triple digits. His imagination spirals into his future. Tending his frequent injuries alone in a dark apartment. Sleek sedans with tinted windows trailing him down the street, the expensive suit and neatly trimmed beard of Ichirou watching him. Threats, demands, taking and taking from Neil until there is nothing left to survive on. Oh, he’ll be fine without Andrew. Fine in perpetuity, unchanged, desperate as a running rabbit. The tightening of the leash until one day either the leather snaps or he chokes himself on the chain.
Or, perhaps, he can do something else. Neil pulls off the highway to avoid a toll booth, tires rumbling as they speed along the cracked pavement of a feeder road. His fingers drum on the steering wheel and a plan forms in his head. Synapses long left sleeping fire back to life as Neil’s lizard brain, his survival brain, takes over. It feels like a long overdue return to something he thought he lost. If he cannot have a home with Andrew, then he will have a home with the person he was before Andrew. A fugitive, a runner, a man without a name. Abram.
(“I told Neil to stay. Leave Nathaniel buried in Baltimore with his father.”)
A thousand memories of that name flicker into his mind. Andrew, on the roof. In the hotel room, surrounded by the Foxes. Night after night in their apartments, in hotels, the athlete housing in London. Abram. Neil thinks, if he’s truly going to be free, he will need to leave that name behind as well.
Neil spots the yellow fluorescents of an open gas station and pulls over. The parking lot is silent as he steps out of his car, the shop door jingling incongruently loud in the night. He pays for his gas in cash. Cigarette boxes line the wall behind the sleepy cashier and Neil’s fingers twitch.
“Can you throw in a pack of Pall Malls?” Neil asks, adding an orange lighter as well. The cashier hands him change and a receipt and Neil steps outside. A gas station in the middle of nowhere—Ohio, he thinks, from the license plates on passing cars. Neil considers the people living in this town. Thousands he will never meet, who he will never know even existed. Each with rich internal lives, with friends and family and a home to return to each night. There are billions just like them. And, Neil thinks, he could be one of them if he wants. Anonymous, ordinary, a man whose actions never appear on the news or are photographed by fans. He lights a cigarette and lets it burn. Smoke tickles his nose and he rubs a hand over his scarred face. Without an anchor, a ship can drift to the edges of the earth.
And, just like that, he recalls a long forgotten plan. A plan he’s toyed with in the dark hours of the night, Andrew’s even breathing beside him. A plan he’s prepared for, just in case things ever went south with the Moriyamas. A plan that has become incredibly simple without the added baggage of all the people Andrew has sworn to protect.
Images flash in his head. The cash and passports he keeps hidden in his apartment that not even Andrew knows about. Renee’s criminal contacts in Detroit. The river separating Detroit from Canada and the many ways to clandestinely cross that border. How much kibble he can leave out for the cats before his disappearance is discovered. Bloodstains and bullet holes and drag marks. Blood in the trunk of a car. Highways like arteries and veins leading away from here, away from everyone.
If everything goes well, Neil thinks, he can be in Vancouver by Monday morning–the earliest anyone expects to see him—and Kamchatka by next Friday.
(“You aren’t going anywhere. You’re staying here.”)
Neil gets back in the car and pulls onto the road. At this rate, he will be home by 3:00am. That gives him about four hours to fake his own death.
A few miles from the Michigan border, Neil spots something on the shoulder of the highway and swerves to a stop. There, on the pavement, are an abandoned pair of sneakers. How long have they been here? Who did they once belong to? It doesn’t matter, because this time tomorrow they will be at the bottom of the Detroit river along with the rest of his identity.
Before long, the distant lights of the Detroit skyline come into view. Neil never expected to love this city in perpetual convalescence. The only reason he came here in the beginning was because they were the only team willing to shell over the salary for both Neil and Andrew at the time. Neil paid them back with three championship rings. Now, it was the last time he’d set foot on the soil. Last time in the United States, last time in Michigan, last time in the entire Western Hemisphere if he can pull off his grand plan.
Neil navigates to their neighborhood, to the parking garage attached to his apartment complex. He parks and pulls the keys out. For just a moment he keeps his eyes closed. He listens to the familiar creaks of the building, the distant ambiance of music drifting on the air. If he knew that the last time he touched Andrew, kissed him, felt the weight of his palm on the back of his neck would be the final time–would he have savored it like this? Even now, he can barely remember, the memories meshing together in his exhausted mind. No, he thinks. He would have fought tooth and nail to stay with Andrew until the end. It was how their relationship worked. The only thing in the world that could keep them apart was a single syllable uttered from Andrew’s lips.
“No.”
Reaching under the seat, Neil lifts the latch to push the car seat back as far as it will go. Slowly, robotically, he pulls the scavenged shoes over his own sneakers and laces them up. They feel large and clumsy, like clown shoes, and he’s sure they look even more ridiculous. But, for what he needs to do, he can’t afford to leave tracks.
Neil locks the car and pads through the parking garage, up the stairs, and to the plain door leading into their apartment. He unlocks it and steps inside. A chorus of plaintive meows greet him, the cats agitated and hungry from the change Andrew’s departure did to their routine. Neil smiles a little sadly at them. They will love living with Dan and Matt, he thinks. They live in a ridiculous ugly McMansion with plenty of rooms and cubby holes and lofts. Neil is sure in a few years they won't even remember him at all.
Now, it’s time to get to work. The first step is faking a struggle. Neil must make it believable to both the lazy local cops as well as the FBI agents who will inevitably be sniffing around once word gets out. He wonders if it will be Agent Browning, standing in Neil’s former home, contemplating the pool of blood on the floor and thinking—I should have forced that kid into witness protection.
Neil looks at the door. There are a number of things he must gather before he begins. First, he opens the safe. It’s old and entirely mechanical. Andrew chose it because of how much it looked straight out of a western movie. Neil turns the dials until the door creaks open. Inside there is approximately five hundred thousand dollars in cash as well as a few other things. Their passports, their birth certificates, titles to their cars as well as the property in South Carolina. A pistol with the serial number filed off, tucked between stacks of cash. And, at the very back, a small canvas bag holding their Olympic gold medals and national championship rings. Neil ponders, ignoring the glaring absence of Andrew's belongings like missing teeth. If he were to go on the run, what would he bring? Neil pulls out his passport and the gun. He closes the safe. Let Andrew keep the rings, the medals, the money. He hopes he throws it all in the trash.
What he’s really looking for is his other stash. The one secret he kept from Andrew, from everybody. In the bathroom, Neil lifts the mirror off the wall. There’s a hole back there, a ragged tear in the drywall revealing (studs?) wall support beams and the end of a length of rope. Carefully, as not to knock anything over, Neil seizes the rope and tugs it out of the hole. Attached to the end, in a dry bag bought from the camping store, is his ticket out of here. Opening the bag reveals a stack of fake passports and documents, a handful of burner phones, and bundles of cash in different major currencies. There is also hair dye, contact lenses, and a bottle of foundation he stole from Allison. Neil slings the bag over his shoulder and then replaces the mirror. With a cloth, he wipes away the dust and dirt he dislodged with the retrieval until there is no sign at all.
In the very bottom of the bag is a flimsy plastic box. He opens it, revealing medical tubing, syringe needles, and two empty blood bags. In order to appear truly dead he’s going to have to leave a lot of blood behind. Neil sits on the lip of the bathtub, fastening elastic around his bicep and finding one of the prominent veins on his forearm. He plunges the needle in. Blood flows down the tubing at an alarming rate, filling the bag with a steady trickle
While the bag fills, he thinks about his plan. The first step of faking his own death, he’s decided, is to sow the seeds. Neil finds a notepad mixed in with the passports. On it are half a dozen names and numbers. Renee’s Detroit contacts, the one she told him and Andrew to call if anything ever went wrong. If they needed to escape, to hide, or to procure anything illegal. Neil dials each of them in turn. Halfway through, he pauses to swap out the blood bags. It’s odd how much of their body is just liquid waiting to spill. The bag is warm under his fingers as he leaves a frantic voicemail begging for help.
The thing is, he has no intention of actually utilizing the services of the criminal contacts. However, as he begs them with panicking breaths to help him get out of town, he sets up the assumption that he was planning on going on the run. An assumption that will be vital to the eventual story of his death.
After hanging up on the final contact, Neil takes the battery out of the burner phone and stows it in his bag. The second blood bag is ready. He feels a little strange, lightheaded, but it’s nowhere as bad as the previous times he’s lost so much blood. It’s time to move. Before the contacts start to blab, before word makes it back to Renee. Neil looks at his smartphone one last time and powers it off. He tosses it on the sofa. There’s no time left for regrets or hesitation, only moving forward.
Neil examines the front door. He imagines what would have happened if it had been broken in at an ungodly hour of the night. Neil pictures himself listless on the sofa, staring at exy games on the television as he waits for news from the contacts. When the door crashed open, he would rush to his feet to confront the invader. Neil grabs the remote and tunes the TV to ESPNX, the channel that shows non-stop Exy reruns. Kevin’s face grins up at him, and Neil turns away. In a single, brutal throw, he overhands the remote at the wall next to the door. It smashes into the plaster, leaving a dark scuff and exploding into bits of circuitry and flying batteries.
(The victim, up late watching TV, was startled by the perpetrators as they forced entry into the apartment. He stood up, likely threatening and warning the perpetrators. When they did not leave, he threw his remote at them and attempted to fight them off.)
Neil walks over to the front door. To the left is the kitchen and dining room, to the right is the living room. The cat’s food dishes are in the dining room, the bulk of their food stored in a plastic tub with latch handles. Neil inhales and then throws his entire body into the tub and wall as hard as he can. With a crash, he upends the kibble, his shoulder slamming into the wall hard enough to leave a hole in the plaster. Neil flops to the floor, breathing heavily, as pain radiates up his shoulder and down his back. Kibble crunches all around him, a veritable feast. Good. That will keep them fed until someone comes to check on him. He coughs and rubs his arm. His hand comes away wet with blood. Grinning, he gets the blood all over his fingers and then crawls across the floor. Smears of fingermarks and crushed kibble carve a gruesome path across the floor.
(The perpetrator shoved the victim into the dining room. He tripped over the cat food, spilling it everywhere. Evidence shows he tried to crawl away but was grabbed before he could get very far.)
It’s hard not to laugh as he struggles to his feet. There’s something invigorating about the pain, electrifying, like removing the final layer of clothing before jumping into freezing water. For the first time in years he feels awake. He feels like his true self again. The one that never stopped running, only stopped to rest for a while. Neil stumbles into the office, making sure to leave a smeared blood trail on the wall marking his path. He crouches down in front of the safe and rubs blood all over the dials.
(The assailant dragged the victim to a safe in the other room. At gunpoint, they forced him to open it. However, either because he refused or because he was too disoriented, the victim was unable to open the safe. )
Neil stands up and pulls out the gun. He’s absorbed enough criminal justice content by osmosis to know that bullets are tested for blood and tissue. This is one of the hardest parts of the plan, but he must pull it off perfectly. With his right hand, Neil presses the gun to his left arm. All he needs is a graze. Enough so the bullet has his DNA on it. If he breaks a bone the whole plan will need to be scrapped. Neil inhales and pulls the trigger.
Pain explodes in his arm. The shot is loud, too loud, in his ears and for a moment he’s back in a basement watching his father’s corpse fall to the ground. Terror paralyzes him, his vision blackening around the edges.
A steady drip, drip, drip snaps him out of it. Blood pools on the ground. A deep furrow is shot through the side of his arm. Even with his extensive scarring, it still feels like someone beat the hell out of his nerve endings with an exy racket. The skin around where the barrel pressed his skin is shiny with a fresh burn. His hand shakes. The bullet went into the floor. Neil lines up the shot and determines, yes, the angle is plausible for an execution shot if he were crouched in front of the safe. Perfect. He quickly wraps the wound with a washcloth. He’ll clean and dress it properly later.
(The perpetrators grew frustrated with the victim when he did not open the safe and fired a single shot.)
Neil slices the first bag of blood open and drips it over and around the bullet hole in the floor. His arm oozes a lazy trickle of blood as pain turns the entire limb into a lit-up nerve ending. Then, he crouches in front of the safe and leans to the side until he falls into the puddle of blood on the floor. It sticks to his skin and hair, stinking of metal. In the other room, a recorded announcer whoops with joy as Day makes yet another impossible trick shot.
(It is believed the bullet hit the victim in the head or neck, incapacitating the victim. Whether he was killed at this time or later is unknown.)
The bleeding of his arm is slowing down. That’s good. Neil forces himself to lay there, counting to one hundred in three different languages. He wants the blood to be a little dried, a little tacky, before he moves. Then, carefully, he uses his strong calves to pull his torso and head through the pool of blood to leave a single, long drag mark. Once his feet reach the threshold of the office he bends his legs and pushes himself to his feet without using his arms.
(Hair belonging to the victim was found stuck in the blood, and drag marks indicate the body was moved anywhere from five to ten minutes after the shot. The apartment complex is heavily soundproofed and no neighbors reported any gunshots or strange noises, so investigators were unable to narrow down the approximate time of the attack.)
Ragged breaths tear out of Neil’s throat. He walks back into the office, making sure his scavenged shoes leave distinct marks in the blood, taking absurdly long steps to imitate the gait of a much taller man. Then, he walks a trail from the office to the bedroom. He grabs his duffel bag, filled with exy gear, and returns to the kitchen area.
(Nothing was taken from the house except for the victim’s sports equipment, passport, and the keys to his vehicle. His cellular device was found powered off on the sofa.)
Neil digs in his Exy bag. He extracts a black hoodie and crowbar. Neil keeps a number of tools in his game bag just in case he needs them–whether it is to fight off a rowdy crowd or break into his own apartment. Neil returns to the front door. He looks over his shoulder, eyes taking in the scene. Blood in the other room, the lights all left on, curious cats investigating the smells.
“Goodbye,” Neil whispers. He takes the sneakers off and steps out of the apartment in his own shoes. Turning, he examines the lock. With a single, decisive movement, he jams the crowbar into the crack between door and frame and prizes it. Wood splinters and, in moments, the locked door is open. Neil shuts it, turns, and leaves.
(The front door appeared to be broken in with a crowbar. The bloody footsteps stop there, and the cameras facing the street did not pick up any traffic going in or out of the building at this time. The property manager says the cameras at the back of the building were offline pending repair. Residents indicate this repair has been pending for several years now.)
Within minutes, he is in his car. He throws the borrowed shoes and his legitimate passport into the exy bag. He won’t be needing the name Neil Abram Josten ever again. He finds his game gloves and pulls them on. Everything will be ruined if he starts leaving his own fingerprints everywhere if he’s meant to be dead. He mentally flips through possible neighborhoods to ditch his car in. Neil can’t count on the car being stolen, as savvy as certain Detroiters are at carjacking, they are just as likely to notice the blood and steer clear of an obvious headache. Neil remembers a food packing company close to the river. There are a row of abandoned houses across the street, a short walk from well–off riverside homes likely to have some form of watercraft. That will just have to work. He shifts the car into gear and drives.
Ten minutes later, he parks and pops the trunk. Neil takes off his hoodie and gloves and stows them in his duffel bag. He grabs the second blood bag and climbs out of the car. The trunk is empty and clean–he rarely uses it. Now comes the riskiest part of his plan.
Neil slices open the second bag of blood. He splashes it on his head and neck and curls up in the trunk of the car. Once he’s situated, he drains the remaining blood so it drips down his face and soaks into the soft fabric interior. He opens up his second burner phone and sets a timer for thirty minutes.
The rest of the plan repeats in his head. Ditch car, clean up, cross river. Ditch car, clean up, cross river. His phone buzzes–the thirty minutes are up. The fabric on the floor of the trunk sticks to his face when he tries to sit up. He braces one hand on the floor and pushes. With a ripping sound the fabric comes free.
Nausea and horror wash through Neil. He stumbles to the side of the alley and vomits bile and acid onto the ground. He sees his mother next to him, skin yellowed and pale. Her mouth is open, teeth and tongue still, her eyelids only covering a part of her dull irises. Dead, dead, dead. Neil is dead now, too. He laughs, the sound startling in the cool darkness. There’s a crashing sound as a fat little opossum startles at his laugh and races off into the bushes. Neil laughs louder.
(The vehicle was found Monday morning, illegally parked behind a factory. No camera security footage was available. The seat was moved all the way back and the trunk was ajar. Blood was found in the trunk. The victim appears to have lain there long enough for the blood to dry. Using luminol, the outline of a face and shoulders can be discerned from the pattern of the blood. No more evidence was located at the scene, it appears the vehicle was abandoned there after the victim’s body was already removed. )
Neil pulls his hoodie and gloves back on. He tosses the keys into the car and turns to leave.
Something stops him. A throb in his heart. His mother’s voice whispers in his ear–we cannot afford to be sentimental. Sentimentality will get you killed. Neil sets his jaw. He fishes the keys out one last time. On the keyring, there is a single bronze house key. It’s dusty, and worn, and scratched, as if it has been to hell and back. Perhaps it has. Neil shoves his nail into the keyring and, carefully, works the key loose. He ties it around his neck with the drawstring from the hoodie. When it falls, it rests over his breastbone.
A reminder, he thinks. A reminder of all that he gained and lost. A reminder that, no matter how complacent he gets, no matter how much he believes a good thing can last, he’s wrong. Everything is mutable, transient, temporary. As much as he wanted, and still desperately wants, the key around his neck to mean forever, he can’t cling to false hopes and nostalgia if he wants to be free. He can’t think about Andrew, because Andrew knew exactly what it meant to tell Neil to go, to say all their deals were done. He wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t one to make a decision lightly.
How long had Andrew been planning this? At what point did he decide, clinically and mathematically, that it was better to live his life without Neil? He remembers the worst days with his mother, the way her eyes grew cold and calculating while looking at him. Maybe she, too, thought about leaving him behind. It would be easy. A decoy, while she fled to England and returned to the embrace of her family. All genetic material related to her monster of a husband left behind; her hands washed clean.
Neil’s face is wet as he walks. For a moment, he thinks he’s bleeding again, but when he raises a hand to his face, the wetness is transparent. His eyes burn. How strange, he thinks. When was the last time he cried?
He keeps walking until he finds a row of houses along a canal with high fences and dark windows. Cars line the street, and a few homes have chairs and toys in the backyard. Neil hops a fence and creeps up to the side of the house. He finds the outside hose and cranks it on, listening to make sure the pipes do not make too much noise.
Quickly, he cleans himself. Washes the blood from his face, removes his sodden clothes. He pulls a pair of flat-bottomed converse he uses for weightlifting from his duffel bag and pulls them on with a sweater and a pair of shorts. The bloody clothing is jammed back into the bag. Neil shivers, teeth chattering. He’s sure his lips are blue. When they first moved up here, Andrew was totally unprepared for the winters. California, and then South Carolina, had nothing like the howling freeze that descended upon this city between November and March. Their first winter here, without fail, Andrew would turn to Neil and ask–Yes or no? And when Neil said yes, Andrew would jam his freezing fingers between Neil’s thighs until they warmed back up to body temperature.
The memory tears at him, now, ripping away the impossible joy those moments brought him and replacing it with an empty nothingness. He should have listened to Andrew, all those years ago, when he said that there was nothing between them. Then maybe he could have died when he was supposed to and all of this could have been avoided.
The walk, gradually, warms him up. He can hear the river now, water lapping against the steel seawall. There’s still a handful of things to be done, but that must wait until he crosses the river. If he puts on the contacts now, with his luck, some waterborne bacteria will get in between the lens and his eyeball and end up blinding him.
Neil follows the waterline towards downtown. His eyes scan each dwelling and business. Someone, somewhere, will have a watercraft he can use. After hopping yet another fence, a glimmer of gunmetal catches his gaze. A small inflatable dinghy with a gas engine sits on the back lawn of a large Victorian house. Carefully, he drags it to the water. Neil steps inside, his balance wobbling as he loads up his duffel and dry bags. Before setting off, he re-seals the dry bag tightly closed. Neil pushes away from the seawall with his exy racket and, silent and near invisible, they drift down the river.
It’s funny how, of all the things he’s pulling off tonight, an illegal border crossing isn’t even the most difficult. Once out of range of the Victorian house, he starts the engine of the dinghy and quietly navigates it across the water. His eyes flit over the shimmering surface. There are no freighters or pleasure craft in the river at this time, and he doesn’t spot any sign of the Coast Guard. Neil pauses in the center of the river, drifting gently in the current, and turns to his exy bag.
In a way, it’s like a funeral. Neil drops the gun in the water first. It plops in and is out of sight in half a second, joining the museum of disposed weapons that have lined the bottom of the Detroit River since this place was just a French trading post. Next, his duffel bag. Neil separates the items in his bag. The things he used to stage his death—clown shoes, medical tubing, his pry bar, bloody clothes—these go into the water first. Neil tosses them in, one at a time, waiting a moment for everything to sink beneath the wine-dark currents.
What remains is everything left of himself—his legitimate passport, his wallet, exy equipment, running sneakers, burner phone parts, notebook of contacts. Neil’s fingers trace over the expensive rackets with worn handles. He can still feel the excitement of his last game, the vibration each throw sent up his arm, the satisfaction of a red goal light. A memory, now. Just like everything else. He zips up the bag and drops it into the water.
It will sink, or not. Either way, the only thing it will tell investigators is that Neil Abram Josten is dead.
Dry bag tucked under his arm, Neil navigates the dinghy to the Canadian side of the riverbank. He finds an area tangled with brambles and branches and hops off there. He pushes the dinghy back into the river, where it will presumably drift until someone picks it up. There’s no evidence left on it, he thinks, as he tosses his exy gloves into the water.
A quick hike through a small, wooded area has him on a sidewalk in Windsor, Canada. It doesn’t feel any different, not really. Just different street signs and license plates. He walks until he finds an open McDonald's and ducks inside. He locks the bathroom door. Quickly, he pulls out the scissors and chops his hair off. Red strands fall into the sink. An electric razor clicks to life, and he buzzes the rest of his hair down to the roots. In the mirror, he dabs dye on his forefinger and applies it to his eyebrows and fuzzy buzzcut. As the dye sinks in, he puts in dark contacts and uses the foundation to cover up his scars.
When he finishes rinsing his head and looks up, another face stares back at him. Neil Josten as he was a long time ago, when he’d run from Kevin Day only to get an Exy racket smashed into his stomach. He touches his stomach now and thinks, maybe he wishes Andrew had never caught him.
Neil pulls a beanie over his head and straightens his clothes. He finds the Canadian passport among the pile and squints at the name. Jean-Yves. Very funny. There are a few hundred dollars in Canadian cash as well–just enough. He exits the bathroom and orders a McDonald's breakfast. He licks his greasy fingers clean. Outside, he shoves his shorn hair and the used dye box into the McDonald's bag and pushes it into a trash can.
The 401 starts nearby. There’s a truck stop there, where maybe he can find a ride. After a three-hour walk, his feet are killing him, but he steps beneath the buzzing lights. Now, to find a mark. He singles out a middle-aged woman with a leather vest and short-cropped hair. There’s a rainbow sticker on her windshield, faded and peeling. Neil approaches, shyly, and asks for a ride.
“What’s your name, honey?” She looks him up and down, lips pressed together in muted concern, like how Abby would look at him sometimes.
“Andrew,” Neil responds, putting on his best charming smile. “Trying to get over to Vancouver to see my boyfriend.”
“Right, then, Andrew. I’m Linda,” the woman glances around, frowning at all the other truckers. “You stay put right here, and after I take care of my business inside, we can get going. Any of these fellas bother you, come and get me, okay?”
“Yes, Ma’am.” Neil smiles as sunny as he can. Lying is so much easier than the truth. Linda returns, and Neil climbs into the truck next to her. He folds up his arms and leans on the door, pretending to fall asleep. But, in a severe miscalculation, he actually does. Sleep is fathomless, quiet, his exhaustion lending no space for dreams.
Around noon on Monday, Linda drops Neil off at a truck stop just outside of Vancouver. By now, they’ll know he’s missing. They’ll call him, then his emergency number, moving down the list until they reach Matt or Wymack or Nicky. From there, everyone will know. Someone will come to investigate. They’ll see the broken door. The blood. The meowing cats, neglected. Aaron or Nicky will call Andrew and—
Neil shakes away the thoughts. He burns a cigarette at a picnic table at the truck stop, watching semis roll in and out of the parking lot, looking for his next mark. Eventually, he finds her, a tall woman with a grey braid and crystals covering the dashboard of her truck. And, just his luck, she’s heading north.
Yukon, Alaska, the Bering Strait. Then on, and on, and on, always running, a brass key around his neck, the only reminder of a past, discarded.
He is nothing. He is free.