Son of the Morning

"Got her," Paglione reported. "I thought I spotted her walking down the street, but then I lost sight and all of a sudden she popped up in a grocery store parking lot. She’s in there now."

"Give me the directions," Conrad said calmly. By this time, he and Paglione knew Eau Claire fairly well, having spent more than a day simply driving the streets, studying maps, memorizing the layout of the city. As he listened to Pallone’s voice in his ear, he realized he was less than a minute from the grocery store.

He smiled.

Grace moved swiftly through the brightly lit aisles, focused on two things and two things only: bread and peanut butter. Her appetite was nonexistent, and none of the calculated displays caught her attention. She would buy food because she had to eat, but that was the only reason.

The peanut butter was, as always, on the same aisle with the ketchup and mustard. She grabbed the biggest jar available, then set out for the bakery section, only to be sidetracked by a sudden realization that she needed a knife to spread the peanut butter. A box of plastic utensils sprang to mind; that’s what she would have bought before, but fragile plastic, designed to be disposable, would soon break and she would have to buy more. It would be cheaper simply to buy a real knife. She backtracked to the previous aisle, where she found the kitchen supplies. There was a row of plastic-sealed knives hanging from hooks. She took the first one she came to that wasn’t serrated, because cleaning peanut butter from all the little teeth would be a pain. Her choice was a paring knife with a four-inch blade, and the print on the cardboard backing guaranteed its sharpness.

Knife and peanut butter in hand, she hurried to the bakery section and grabbed a giant-size loaf of bread.

Looking at her watch, she saw that she had been in the store for one minute and twenty seconds, a personal record for her, but that was eighty seconds her computer had been left unguarded.

There were two checkout counters open. At one, a bachelor was unloading a couple of microwave dinners, a six-pack of beer, and an economy-size bag of potato chips, standard fare for the unclaimed male. At the other, a bent old gent was carefully counting out his money for a bottle of aspirin. Grace chose the second counter, placing her items on the belt just as the clerk gave the receipt to the old guy, who smiled sweetly.

"Wife’s got a headache," he explained, a product of an earlier age when friendliness to strangers was something to be expected, not feared. "Not an aspirin in the house. Can’t understand it, she’s usually got a bottle for this and a bottle for that, something for any ailment a body could produce, but tonight there’s not a single aspirin." He turned his head and winked at Grace, his eyes twinkling cheerfully. He didn’t mind the errand, the usefulness.

The swift-moving clerk rang up Grace’s three items while the old man fumbled his wallet into his pocket. "Twelve thirty-seven. Kill a tree or choke a bird?"

Grace blinked. "I-what?" She handed over thirteen dollars.

"Paper or plastic?" the clerk translated, grinning a little, and the old man chuckled as he toddled off.

"Plastic," Grace said. The night shift was definitely a little off kilter. She felt a tiny spurt of amusement, a hint of life in the desolation of her heart and mind like a faint, fragile heartbeat to show she still lived, after a fashion. Her lips curved involuntarily, the elusive smile fading almost as soon as it had formed, but for a moment the life had been there. She turned her head to watch the old gentleman as he approached the automatic doors, and through the big plate glass windows she saw two men getting out of a beige Dodge sedan parked in the center of the lot.

The man nearest the store paused and waited for the other to come around the car, then they walked together toward the store. One was dark, powerfully built, vaguely simian in the shape of his head; the other was of medium height and build, ordinary brown hair, just… ordinary. Slacks and jackets, neither natty nor threadbare. Neither of them would stand out in a crowd, not even the ape-man. He was just another guy who was a little too hairy, a little too bulky, nothing unusual.

But they were walking together in a subtle sort of lockstep, as if they had a definite goal, a mission.

"Your change is sixty-three cents." Absently Grace took the change and slid it into her pocket. Archaeologists picked up a lot of anthropology stuff, because the two went hand-in-hand in understanding how people had lived, and Grace had lived with two archaeologists, brother and husband, absorbing a lot of their conversations over the years.

Two men, walking together in a purposeful manner. Men didn’t do that unless they were working together as a team, to some definite end. This was different from the more casual, walking-in-company-but-not-together gait of males who didn’t want to send the wrong signal to any watching females.

She grabbed the bag from the startled clerk and darted back into the store. The clerk said "Hey!" but Grace didn’t hesitate, merely took a quick glance not at the clerk but at the two men, who must have been watching her, because they broke into a run.

She dropped to the floor and scrambled down an aisle, knowing the two men couldn’t see directly down it from their angle of approach. Her heart rate increased, but oddly she didn’t feel panic, only an elevated state of urgency. She was caught in an enclosed area, stalked by two men who could catch her in a pincers movement unless she moved fast. Her chances of outrunning them were small, because they had to be Parrish’s men, and Parrish wouldn’t hesitate at giving the order to shoot her in the back.

A woman pushed a shopping cart into the aisle at the far end, her attention focused on the stacks of soft drinks. Her purse was unguarded in the cart’s child seat, a red sweater draped over it.