A few seconds in a dark tunnel. For Clay, it felt considerably longer.
"You can't teleport?!" He was keeping his voice down, but only barely. "Right now, of all times, you can't—"
"I can teleport," Shawna said. "I need to be able to see where I'm going. There are no lights in this tunnel. I'm sorry."
"Damn it—"
The sirens were getting louder. The blue-red strobe from the far end of the tunnel was close enough now to make shapes out of the dark. Time had essentially run out.
"Okay." Clay moved fast. He yanked the money bag open, grabbed several stacks, shoved them into his jacket. Then he looked at her. "You go — take the car, drive out. I'll draw them off."
Before she could respond, he was out of the car and running — back the way they'd come, into the dark, footsteps disappearing quickly.
Shawna sat in the driver's seat and looked at the empty passenger side for a moment.
"I'll distract them. You drive away."
She started the car.
The police unit at the tunnel exit had the car on tracker — they followed the car, not the man on foot. Clay pressed himself into a maintenance alcove and listened to the engine getting farther away, and felt the particular joy of a man who has just successfully transferred his problems to someone else.
If she gets out, I'll find her later. If she doesn't — if the police have some way to handle her ability — then she's not useful anyway. I've still got what's in my jacket. New city, lay low, start fresh.
The car stopped.
Right next to him.
How—
He felt cold before he could finish the thought. He couldn't see her. He couldn't see anything. But the car was there, engine idling, and a beam of white light was cutting through the tunnel from the far end — someone's flashlight, sweeping the walls.
Then the car door opened and closed, and something landed in his hand.
The key fob. And the nylon bag, heavy with what remained.
Shawna was gone.
The police lights reached him a second later.
"Clay Parker! On the ground! Now!"
He was already assessing. Handguns drawn, at least three units. His jacket full of marked bills with his fingerprints on them, and an inexplicable bag of additional money in his hand.
He lay down.
"It wasn't me!" he said, cheek against the tunnel floor. "Shawna was driving — she stole everything — I was just a passenger, I didn't touch anything—"
Nobody wrote it down.
That night, Clay returned to prison. His cell. His bunk. His view of the corridor through iron bars.
He stared at it and ran the numbers. Shawna had been angry with him before — genuinely furious, more than once — and she had always come around. She needed time. A day, maybe three. Then she'd be back, and they'd figure out the next move.
He just had to wait.
The guards' footsteps came down the corridor and stopped outside his cell.
"Someone's here to see you."
He was on his feet before the sentence finished.
The visitation cubicle. The glass partition. The phone on both sides.
Clay sat down, picked up the receiver, and looked at Shawna on the other side of the glass. He was already composing the opening — something apologetic, something warm, something that would give her the emotional landing she needed before he pivoted to what came next.
Then he looked at her face.
He put the composing on hold.
"Clay," she said. "How are you finding it? Being back?"
"Shawna, this is a nightmare, I can't stay here another—"
"That's great." Her voice was pleasant. Conversational. "But actually, here's the interesting part."
He waited.
"Your original sentence was two years." She tilted her head slightly. "But you escaped. That adds ten years. So now we're at twelve." She paused. "Except — after the escape, you committed two additional robberies. The armored truck: witnesses, on record. My friend's money and car: your fingerprints on the bag, your fingerprints on the bills, physical evidence at the scene." She counted on her fingers. "Add fifteen years. That's twenty-seven total."
Clay's face had gone a particular shade of gray.
"And then there's Marcus." Shawna rested her chin in her hand. "He was arrested last night — I called it in, quietly, while you were busy celebrating in the car. Marcus will figure out, eventually, that someone tipped the police to his location. And the first person he's going to look at is the person who showed up that evening to pay off a debt with money that appeared out of nowhere." She smiled. "He'll have a lot of years to sit with that."
"You—" Clay's voice dropped to something thin and precise. "You absolute—you're going to be right there with me. The escape, the truck, the money — that was your doing—"
"Was it?" She sounded genuinely curious. "You escaped. We don't know how — nobody saw. Nothing to connect me to it." She ticked through the list. "The armored truck robbery — you were driving. The witnesses saw the driver. The money in your jacket was handled by you. I wasn't in the front of the vehicle at any point." She moved to the next item. "My friend's apartment — you handled the money. You packed the bag. You counted it. I didn't touch the bills."
Clay opened his mouth.
"The car," he said.
"My friend lent it to me." She shrugged lightly. "My fingerprints on the steering wheel make complete sense. Yours on the dashboard and the passenger door, on the other hand—" She let the implication hang. "There's really only one explanation for that."
"Nobody saw me, Clay," she said. Her voice had gone very soft. "So as far as anyone can determine — you did all of it."
Clay Parker stared through the scratched plexiglass at the woman he'd been certain, an hour ago, would come around.
He didn't say anything else.
There wasn't anything left to say.
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