The Goodbye Man

Eli muttered, “Well, you can’t use that as evidence. It’s stolen. Illegal!”

Shaw looked him over, thinking of a rule of his own, one hardly up to the level of Ashton, who was, after all, the King of Never. Shaw’s was:

Never be dramatic.

But sometimes you needed to indulge yourself. Shaw made a grand show of upending the bag and pouring the contents on the ground. In the light of the headlamps, Eli stared at the newspapers, menus and promotional flyers from the motel room: The Canadian Pacific Railway Museum. Visit the Hogworth Maple Syrup Company! The Untold Story of Moody, British Columbia.

Not a single piece of paper that the men had carted away from the Osiris Foundation camp with them — presumably what remained of the incriminating evidence; the rest would have been dumped. It would in fact have been illegal for Shaw to steal the documents.

“We don’t need anything more for the prosecution,” Detective Etoile said.

From Slay: “All we needed was your asses back in the U. S. of A.”

“Oh, fuck,” Hugh snarled.

The case might have gone a bit easier if they had some of the evidence, but in fact the authorities had plenty to put Hugh and Eli away for a long, long time. Witnesses like Anja, betrayed Inner Circle personnel, Assistance Unit men willing to spill. Steve’s notebook was a bombshell.

“How did you find us?” Eli asked Slay.

The agent nodded toward Shaw. “Him.”

Shaw shrugged, saying nothing, though thinking it really was a team effort. Shaw’s partner had, improbably, been Dalton Crowe.

The search for Eli had started before the cult leader and Hugh had left the Osiris Foundation camp. While the men waited for their luggage in Sheriff Calhoun’s SUV, Shaw had dug into his backpack for a notebook to write his name and number on a sheet for the sheriff. But that was just a cover. What he’d actually done was find the GPS tracker that Crowe had hidden on Shaw’s Kia, during the pursuit of Erick and Adam. He’d turned it on and stuck the unit in the bottom of Eli’s go-bag, sitting in the back of the SUV.

He’d told Slay about it, and the agent had called Crowe to find the log-in details of the unit. But the reward seeker was still pissed off about losing the Erick/Adam rewards and hung up on him. The agent tried to get a warrant to present to the tracking company but no magistrate was willing to issue one, since Crowe had no connection to Eli.

So Shaw had texted Crowe himself and, after some negotiation, he said he’d rent out the tracker codes for ten K — his text agreeing to the final terms was the one Shaw had received while sitting beside Victoria in the Compound earlier.

See you at dinner?

Probably not...

The big man would only do the deal, however, if Shaw showed up with the check in person. (To make sure he got the money, of course, though Shaw was sure there was that element of gloat in the demand too, about which Shaw could not have cared less.)

The tracking app had located the men across the border in Moody, British Columbia, where they were undoubtedly staging for a more sophisticated getaway to a location both farther away and far more exotic.

Shaw and Slay were concerned that going through the proper channels with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would have taken too long, giving the two fugitives a chance to vanish. So they’d hacked together this plan, to lure the men back across the border, as they chased Shaw.

Shaw himself had entered Canada legally at a crossing a few miles away and a man in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection uniform now approached. “Colter Shaw?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll stamp your passport. Unless you’d want to spend the night back up at the inn in Moody. I hear it’s pretty nice.”

“No, I’ll find someplace here.” Handing over the blue booklet to the CBP officer.

The odds were probably ninety percent that no one had seen him shoot Hugh, though if the ten percent came to pass, the consequences would be inconvenient, if not dire. Better to stay stateside.

Which was a shame.

Shaw had never toured a maple syrup factory before.