Free The Zone by RW Krpoun Page A

woman who was a hundred pounds soaking wet with a voice you would associate with a big gal who drove long-haul rigs and smoked two packs of unfiltered Camels a day. “Martin, have you heard from your wife?”
    “ Ex wife, and no, just voicemail.”
    “She is in the Exclusion Zone.”
    “So am I. Why didn’t she leave?”
    “We did. We are in a nasty little hotel FEMA is using north of the city. She took my truck and went back after your daughter and grandson.”
    Shit. “When and where?
    “Yesterday around noon. It’s a beige F150 regular cab with a Cowboys back window cover. She was heading to Trellwood Housing Project.”
    “Hold on.” I got a map from my patrol gear box and found it. “Shit, right in the middle of a bad neighborhood. Was she armed?”
    “Yes, a little .38. What are you going to do about it?”
    “Nothing effective, probably.” It was all the way across town. “Do you know if she made it? Did she call at any point after she left?”
    “Nope.”
    “She say what route she was taking?”
    “Uh-uh.”
    “You’re a massive help. Why didn’t you call me earlier? It’s a big frigging city.”
    “I figured you wouldn’t care.”
    I counted to ten. “Keep trying her phone. If you hear from her, call me. I’m going to see what I can do.”
    “Probably nothing you can do.”
    “I can get killed trying, which ought to make your friggin’ day. Isn’t that the purpose of this call?”
    “Bite me.”
    “Somebody ought to. Call if you hear from her.” I hung up.
    What a mess. Things were very unsettled-the radio, CB, and the call to 911 made that very clear, and my first instinct was to sit tight until I had a handle on what was going on. I had no vehicle, and on foot the urban sprawl is an impossibly huge area. Add in the fact that there was likely nothing I could do, and it was pretty much a no-brainer.
    Pacing restlessly, I cursed my ex-in-laws, my ex-wife, and my idiot daughter. This was a problem I did not need at this time-wasn’t that the whole point of a divorce, after all? The elimination of a whole seething mass of problems? We were quits-that’s what the legal papers said.
    I didn’t want to do anything. It was extremely ill-advised to try to do anything under the circumstances. My whole life I had taken on unnecessary personal risks because John Wayne and my father had pounded it into my thick head that you have to walk the chalk, shoulder the load, and I was just bright enough to know I was being programmed like Pavlov’s dogs but never bright enough to throw it off.
    A week ago I could probably have gotten away with ignoring the whole problem, but things had changed-I was less the zombie lately. Too bad getting my act a little bit back together involved the same tired old act that had dropped my life into the shit in the first place.
    I was going to try, knowing perfectly well it was stupid. All the mental posturing was just pointless melodrama to ease my ego-the fact was I had no choice: the truth at the heart of it was that my father and the Army and police work had made me into something and I wasn’t smart enough to change-having a sense of duty is a royal pain. It was yet another choice that wasn’t a real choice.
    Decision made, I turned to the facts: I didn’t know if she had reached the location, or if she was in that area, or had been on her way back. She had started from the north, but she could have gone any other direction on her way out, if she had gotten to my daughter. One thing I was sure of was that she wouldn’t have left under her own power without having found her kid; for all her other shortcomings she never once gave up on the kids. You would have to kill her to stop her. Unfortunately, in these circumstances, that wasn’t impossible. Unbidden the image of the woman running down the street came to mind.
    So, what to do? They could be literally anywhere.
    Except she was a travel agent, a very good agent. She would have approached this