And froze.
Uniformed police officers were pouring up the steps, their rapid footfalls echoing in a disorganized tap dance.
“Cops!” gasped Meg.
Aiden fought to force his whirling mind to function rationally. Harris at the entrance — LAPD on the stairs —
They could jump out a window, but two broken ankles wouldn’t make for a speedy getaway.
We’re trapped!
His eyes fell on a line of folded wheelchairs leaning against the wall. The image came instantly — a slide show transmitted directly into his brain: A dark green book jacket bearing a picture of a wheelchair. Silver foil lettering declared: Medical Malpractice: A Mac Mulvey Mystery.
The climactic scene: Mulvey, trapped in the burning hospital, facing a fiery end. The only tool at his disposal — a wheelchair …
Can it work?
Aiden wasn’t sure. But one thing was obvious — staying here to be arrested wasn’t an option.
He looped his wrist under the armrests of two of the chairs. Then he threw open the heavy door and dragged his sister into the stairwell.
She gawked at him in utter disbelief. “No!” she hissed. “The cops — ”
There was no need for her to finish that sentence. A chorus of shouted Hey!s attested to the fact that they’d been spotted.
A short flight led up to where a sign declared ROOF ACCESS.
They ran for it, blasting through the fire door and out onto the flat tar-paper roof. Working with frantic haste, Aiden located the softest landing below — flower beds on high mounds of fresh topsoil. He set up the two wheelchairs eighteen inches from the edge.
Meg was beside herself. “That’s your plan? Jumping off the roof? Are you crazy?”
Aiden shoved her into one of the chairs. “There are shock absorbers in these things! Mac Mulvey — ”
“Mac Mulvey isn’t real!”
Aiden seated himself and rolled right to the edge. Looking down almost cost him his breakfast. The drop seemed enormous. Thirty feet, maybe thirty-five.
We’re only two stories up. Why is it so far to the ground?
To Meg, he said, “Stand up and take a good run at it! You’ve got to jump clear of the front of the building!”
“I don’t think I can do it,” Meg whimpered. “I’m too scared!”
There was a crash as the heavy door opened and slammed against a chimney. A uniformed policeman burst out and took in the sight of the Falconers at the edge of the roof.
“Don’t jump!”
Aiden and Meg lifted up the wheelchairs, took one running step, and flung themselves into thin air.
There wasn’t even enough time to scream. It was like planet Earth reached up and yanked them down with merciless violence. Aiden held on to the armrests for dear life, squeezing himself into the seat as his senses blurred and the flower bed hurtled up to meet him. The wind roared in his ears. He was picking up speed — too much speed —
I’ve killed both of us! Sorry, Meg —
The impact jarred every cell in his body. It knocked the air out of his lungs. The wheelchair collapsed under his weight, and he wound up flat on his back in soft black soil.
Meg hit the ground an instant later. Her chair lost a wheel, but otherwise held together. She bounced once and spilled out of it, rolling in the dirt.
Aiden scrambled up and hauled her to her feet. “Alive?”
“Barely,” she breathed.
There was a commotion on the roof above them. Six horrified LA cops peered down. At least three of them were shouting into walkie-talkies.
“Can you run?” asked Aiden.
Meg set her jaw. “Just watch me!”
The two sprinted down Cascadden Street. They were rounding the corner when Agent Harris came lumbering out the main entrance. “I see them!” he barked into his handset. “They just turned west on Hillmount!”
He loped down the drive and folded himself into a rented Ford Taurus.
At that moment, Bo staggered out of the building, holding a fistful of bloody paper towels to his forehead. With a two-fingered whistle and a hand gesture, he directed the El Camino out of its parking space. Teebs stomped on the gas and swung the big car around. It screeched to a halt at the end of the driveway, blocking the Taurus.
Harris leaned on the horn. “Move out! Police business!”
Teebs and Viv grinned and waved and pretended the engine wouldn’t start. Bo collapsed to the lawn, exhausted but triumphant.
Aiden and Meg pounded along the pavement, their minds blank of all thought except for escape. At this point, Aiden could not separate the pain of his burning chest from the injuries of his spectacular fall from the roof of the West Hollywood Rehabilitation Center.
You’re out. You’re alive. Keep moving.
He pictured the LA city map that he dared not slow down long enough to remove from his pocket. An endless grid of streets stretching scores of miles from the ocean to the desert. Hours of travel, even in a car. On foot, an impossible journey.
We have to stop sooner or later …
He thought of what was behind them — Agent Harris, the LA police force, Hairless Joe —
… but not yet.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I never saw any kids.”
Bo sat in a treatment room in the rehab center while a doctor placed seven stitches in the gash in his scalp. Agent Harris paced in front of him like a caged tiger, barking questions and getting no answers.
“Aiden and Margaret Falconer.” He jammed the crumpled flyer with their mug shots two inches in front of Bo’s nose. “Traveling as two brothers, Gary and Eric Graham.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
Harris was exasperated. “Does twenty-five grand jog your memory? That’s the reward if you can help bring these kids in.”
“I’m Amish.”
“Be smart, Boaz. Think what you could buy with that much money. Just tell me what you know.”
“I told you already — I was here visiting this old lady — ”
“Whose name you don’t remember,” Harris finished sourly.
Bo looked up as a Steri-strip was taped over his wound. “So now it’s a crime being forgetful? I’m the one with the busted head! Why don’t you go hassle that hard-core cue ball who pistol-whipped me?”
“What?” Harris stopped in his tracks. “A bald guy? Describe him!”
“The kind with no hair,” Bo snapped. “And a serious-looking gun with a silencer straight out of James Bond.”
The agent snatched up his walkie-talkie from the table. “Janza, I need the building sealed off — now! We’ve got a white male, bald, six feet tall — ”
Bo shook his head. “Don’t bother. He was long gone when I came to — probably miles from here by now, walking the streets while you’re rubber-hosing law-abiding citizens.”
Harris was shocked into speechlessness. So the bald man had eluded him once more. Who was this mysterious assassin who always seemed to be a step ahead of the FBI?
A silencer — that was the mark of a professional.
He took a closer look at Boaz, the street tough who definitely knew more than he let on. This delinquent is probably the only reason the Falconer kids aren’t lying dead at this crime scene.
“Tell me one thing — what would make a guy like you take on an armed man to save a couple of strangers?”
Bo shrugged impassively. “Don’t know any strangers. That’s what makes them strangers.” He paused to let his trademark grin bloom at the center of his goatee. “But maybe — just maybe — one of those strangers saved my life.”
* * *
The sign on the van read tour of stars’ homes. They had already viewed palatial estates owned by Danny DeVito and Henry Winkler and had passed by the gates of Steven Spielberg’s compound.
Aiden and Meg saw none of it. They had spent the first hour catching their breath and trying to calm the percussive pounding of their hearts. Their fellow passengers were blo
wn away by the fact that Gwyneth Paltrow’s pool cabana had been designed by Picasso’s great-grandniece. But it was impossible to care about things like that when you had just barely escaped with your life.
“I’ve got to hand it to you, bro,” Meg said fervently. “I thought you’d gone psycho with that wheelchair high-dive. Who knew it was going to work?”
“I asked Dad about it once,” Aiden admitted. “Back when the book first came out. He said: ‘How should I know? You think I’m crazy enough to try it?’ ”
Meg blanched. “You mean you weren’t sure?”
“I was sure we had to get off that roof.”
She regarded him with equal parts fury and admiration. Aiden the wimp, Aiden the nerd. Yet when the stakes were high — really high — he was as brave as a lion. She would probably never figure him out, but she was very glad to have him on her side.
“We should have known those posters were a trap,” Aiden mourned, rubbing a bruised elbow. “That picture of Lindenauer looks exactly like the one in my pocket. Like the guy hasn’t aged in nine years.”
Meg nodded grudgingly. “But whose trap? The FBI’s or Hairless Joe’s?”
“I wish I knew,” her brother said moodily. “The FBI could have gotten that picture, but when you think about it, so could Hairless Joe. He was at the house in Vermont. That’s what really burns me up. After all we’ve been through, we know nothing more than we did when we first arrived in LA.”
“That decorative wrought-iron gate guards the magnificent estate that once belonged to screen legend Charlie Chaplin,” came the commentary over the van’s PA system. “It’s been said that, on nights with a full moon, you could see Mr. Chaplin out here in his underwear, polishing the brass.”
Meg snickered at her brother. “And you thought we didn’t learn anything.”
He smiled, but both of them knew that, at this moment, nothing was very funny. Nothing had been since the battering ram had annihilated their front door, a million years ago in another lifetime.
The laughs are few and far between when your family is in tatters and you’re a fugitive, Meg thought dismally.
“I wonder,” Aiden said with a sigh, “if Mom and Dad were right when they went on TV and told us to give it up. I mean, we’re wanted by every cop in the country. And now even the people who don’t hate us because we’re Falconers can make a pile of money by ratting us out. It’s us against the world, Meg. Six billion against two. We’re totally alone.”
“Not totally,” Meg pointed out. “What about Bo? Whatever you think about the IC, he sure proved he’s on our side.”
Aiden was still depressed. “He’s only one person.”
“Today,” she reminded him, “one person on our side turned out to be enough. If it wasn’t for him, we’d be dead.” She turned melancholy. “And look how we repay him. We’re going to blow town without even warning him that Zapp is selling him out.”
Aiden looked thoughtful. “Maybe there’s something we can do….”
* * *
The Taurus’s cup holder was broken, so the coffee teetered precariously on the seat. Agent Emmanuel Harris maneuvered through Venice Beach traffic, wondering exactly what he was doing here.
It had been pure luck that his assistant back in Washington had been checking up on Harris’s voice mail.
“This is Aiden Falconer,” said a shaky but determined young voice. “We’re ready to turn ourselves in. Meet us at five o’clock in Venice Beach. There’s an alley about five hundred feet east of the corner of Washington and Taggart. We’ll be there, waiting.”
Harris had listened to the message over his cell phone at least a dozen times. His hopes were not high. He doubted that two kids who had just jumped off a roof to avoid capture would be inclined to throw in the towel and surrender themselves that very afternoon. But whatever the reason, the Falconers seemed to want him there and he had to check it out. At this point, it was his only lead, and as good a place to look for them as any.
He pulled the Taurus up to a fire hydrant — one advantage of working for the federal government was that all tickets could be fixed.
There was Taggart Street. He could see the opening to the alley up ahead. “Come on, kids,” he mumbled under his breath. “Be smart.” Harris knew he would never sleep soundly until Aiden and Margaret were off the street. Cutting down on the caffeine would probably also help.
The instant he stepped into the alley, he knew two things: One, that the Falconers were not going to be there. And two, that they had directed him here for a specific purpose. For there, handing over a bundle of crisp freshly printed fifty-dollar bills and accepting a handful of regular cash in return, was the unsavory teenager who had sold the Falconers out for the reward — Maurice Zapp. No FBI agent could mistake what was going on here — the passing of counterfeit money, a federal crime.
Spying the big cop, Zapp tried to run. But Harris, who looked clumsy, was not. He threw Zapp up against the brick wall and cuffed him on the rebound. To the cowed customer, he said, “This is your lucky day. Scram.”
Zapp was outraged. “What are you arresting me for? I gave you two runaways!”
Harris nodded, half in wonder. “And they gave me a counterfeiter.”
Not bad on a fugitive’s busy schedule. You had to admire those Falconer kids.
Five stories straight up, a pair of expensive opera glasses that had once belonged to Frank Lindenauer peered over the roof edge of an apartment building.
Aiden lay on his stomach, following the drama below. He watched with satisfaction as Agent Harris slapped handcuffs on Zapp and led him back to the Taurus.
Meg crouched beside him. “Is it finished?” she whispered, refusing to look for herself. Being close to the hated J. Edgar Giraffe, even for the right reasons, felt like playing with fire.
“Stay down,” Aiden advised. In his opinion, the coast wouldn’t be clear until Harris and Zapp were in the Taurus and the rental car was well out of the opera glasses’ considerable range.
He kept the lenses trained on the sedan as it turned left on Taggart and stopped at a light. Aiden was surprised at the power of the dainty mother-of-pearl glasses. He could clearly see the rattail in Zapp’s greasy hair through the back window. He could even read the license plate and make out the Avis sticker. Also the street signs at that intersection — the corner of Taggart and Harvey. And what did it say in smaller letters under Harvey? He fine-tuned the focus, and there it was:
FORMERLY WESTERN AVENUE
The notion that struck Aiden was so shocking that he nearly fumbled the glasses off the roof and came close to following them down.
Meg pulled him back from the edge. “What’s wrong?”
“That street down there — ” he managed, “it used to be Western Avenue!”
“So?”
He unfolded the crumpled flyer from Frank Lindenauer’s locker at the Santa Monica Racquet Club — the one advertising the East Asian Children’s Charitable Fund. The address was printed at the bottom:
47 DERSINGHAM ROAD
Meg was confused. “But there is no Dersingham Road, remember?”
“Not now. But what if it was like Western Avenue? Street names get changed all the time. What if it’s something else now?”
The Falconers exited the roof the way they’d come up — by way of a dingy freight elevator that deposited them in the building’s basement laundry room. A narrow hallway clogged with garbage cans led to the alley that had once been Zapp’s place of business.
“Slow down!” Meg hissed. “You want to catch up to Harris?”
But Aiden was a man on a mission. Their destination was @leaves.net, the cyber tea shop. This time, they skipped the order counter and marched straight to a computer monitor.
It took exactly ten seconds. A Google search for keywords “Dersingham Road” led to a news release from the Los Angeles city council dated six months before:
Dersingham Road to Be Renamed
in Memory of Actor Marlon B
rando
The discovery filled their sails like a blast of wind at the stern of an ocean schooner. Yes, it was only an address. But if being a fugitive had taught Aiden one thing, it was this: The difference between no clues and one clue was the difference between despair and hope.
As long as there’s a lead to follow, there’s still a chance to save Mom and Dad.
The taxi ride to 47 Marlon Brando Way ate up nearly all of their money. Aiden didn’t have the heart to pay the driver with Zapp’s counterfeit fifty.
The street was an endless row of small businesses — tattoo parlors, juice bars, joke shops, and tiny ethnic restaurants. Number 47 was —
“Glatt Kosher Persian Cuisine?” Meg read off the sign announcing their grand opening. “It’s supposed to be a children’s charity!”
Right next door, the proprietor of Glen’s Comics and Collectibles was sweeping his front steps. “You remember that, huh?” he said to Meg. “What a nightmare! Crime-scene tape all over the place, the whole building locked up by the Department of Homeland Security. They had to rename the street to get rid of the rubberneckers. Ruined my business for months!”
Meg was amazed. “Why would Homeland Security shut down a charity?”
The man shrugged. “Who knows? I’m just glad it’s over. Hope those glatt kosher Persians like comic books.” He disappeared inside his shop.
“Homeland Security?” Aiden repeated. It made no sense. And yet a feeling of deep uneasiness was working its way up his spine. Homeland Security was the arm of the government that had prosecuted the case against their parents.
And then Meg pinched him so hard, he cried out.
“Aiden — look!”
The front window had just recently been scraped of its previous lettering. Not much of the gold paint remained. But where the writing had once been, the glass was cleaner. From the right angle the words were as clear as if they had still been there:
THE EAST ASIAN CHILDREN’S CHARITABLE FUND
A PROJECT OF H.G.G.