by Harlan Coben
She held it up, so Heshy could see it. “Clever,” she said.
“Or we’re slipping.”
“We’ve never been perfect, Pooh Bear.”
Heshy did not reply. Lydia opened the car window. She stuck her hand out and signaled for Bacard to follow them. He waved back that he understood. When they slowed for the toll, Lydia quickly pecked Heshy’s cheek and got out of the car. She took the money with her. Heshy was now left alone with just the tracking device. If this Rachel woman still had any juice or if the police got wind of what was happening, they would pull Heshy over. He would toss the tracking device into the street. They would find the device, sure, but they wouldn’t be able to prove it had come from his car. And even if they could, so what? They would search Heshy and his car and find nothing. No kid, no ransom note, no ransom money. He was clean.
Lydia hurried over to Steven Bacard’s car and slipped into the passenger’s side. “You got Pavel on the line?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She took the phone. Pavel started screaming in whatever the hell language was native to him. She waited and then told him the meeting place. When Bacard heard the address, his head snapped toward her. She smiled. Pavel, of course, didn’t understand the significance of the location, but then again, why should he? He ranted a little more, but eventually Pavel calmed enough to say he’d be there. She hung up the phone.
“You can’t be serious,” Bacard said to her.
“Shh.”
Her plan was simple enough. Lydia and Bacard would race ahead to the meeting spot while Heshy, who had the tracker on him, would stall. When Lydia was set up and fully prepared, she would call Heshy on the cell phone. Then and only then would Heshy go to the meeting spot. He would have the tracking device with him. The woman, this Rachel Mills, would hopefully follow.
She and Bacard arrived in twenty minutes. Lydia spotted a car parked up the block. Pavel’s, she figured. A stolen Toyota Celica. Lydia didn’t like that. Strange cars parked on streets like these were noticed. She glanced over at Steven Bacard. His face was moon pale. It almost seemed detached, floating. The scent of fear came off him in waves. His fingers gripped the wheel, tense. Bacard didn’t have the stomach for this. That would be a liability.
“You can just drop me off,” she said.
“I want to know,” he began, “what you plan on doing here.”
She just looked at him.
“My God.”
“Spare me the indignant act.”
“No one was supposed to be hurt.”
“You mean like Monica Seidman?”
“We had nothing to do with that.”
Lydia shook her head. “And the sister, what was her name, Stacy Seidman?”
Bacard opened his mouth as though he might counter. Then he lowered his head. She knew what he had planned on saying. Stacy Seidman had been a drug addict. She was expendable, a waste, a danger, heading for death, whatever justification floated his boat. Men like Bacard needed justification. In his mind, he wasn’t selling babies. He really believed that he was helping. And if he made money—lots of money—from it and broke the law, well, he was taking tremendous risk to better lives. Shouldn’t he be well compensated?
But Lydia had no interest in digging into his psyche nor comforting it. She had counted the money in the car. He had hired her. Her take was a million dollars. Bacard got the other million. She shouldered the duffel bag with her—and Heshy’s—money. She stepped out of the car. Steven Bacard stared straight ahead. He did not refuse the money. He did not call her back and say that he wanted to wash his hands of this. There was a million dollars sitting in the seat next to him. Bacard wanted it. His family had a big house in Alpine now. His kids went to private school. So no, Bacard did not back off. He simply stared ahead and put the car in drive.
When he was gone, Lydia called Pavel with the two-way radio portion of the cell phone. Pavel was hiding behind some shrubs up the block. He still wore the flannel shirt. His walk was a labored lumber. His teeth had suffered under a lifetime of cigarettes and ill care. He had a squashed-from-too-many-fights nose. He was Balkan rough trade. He had seen a lot in his life. Didn’t matter, though. When you don’t know what’s happening, you are in over your head.
“You,” he said, spitting the word. “You no tell me.”
Pavel was right. She no tell him. In other words, he’d known nothing. His English was beyond broken, which was why he had been the perfect front man for this crime. He’d come over from Kosovo two years ago with a pregnant woman. During the first ransom drop, Pavel had been given specific instructions. He’d been told to wait for a certain car to pull into the lot, to approach the car without speaking to the man, to take a bag from him, to get into the van. Oh, and to confuse matters a little more, they told Pavel to keep a phone in front of his mouth and pretend to talk into it.
That was it.
Pavel had no idea who Marc Seidman was. He had no idea about what was in the bag, about a kidnapping, about a ransom, nothing. He didn’t wear his gloves—his fingerprints were not on file in the United States—and he didn’t carry ID.
They paid him two thousand dollars and sent him back to Kosovo. Based on Seidman’s rather specific description, the police circulated a sketch of a man who, for all practical purposes, was impossible to find. When they decided to rerun the ransom drop, Pavel was the natural go-to guy. He would dress the same, look the same, play with Seidman’s head in case he decided to fight back this time.
Still, Pavel was a realist. He would adapt. He had spent time selling women in Kosovo. White slavery in the guise of strip clubs was a big market over there, though Bacard had come up with another way of using those women. Pavel, no stranger to sudden change, would do what needed to be done. He gave Lydia some attitude, but once she handed him a wad of bills adding up to five thousand dollars, he grew quiet. The fight was out of him. It was only a question of how.
She handed Pavel a gun. He knew how to use it.
Pavel set up near the driveway, keeping his two-way radio channel open. Lydia called Heshy and told them they were ready. Fifteen minutes later, Heshy drove past them. He tossed the tracking device out the car window. Lydia caught it and threw back a kiss. Heshy kept driving. Lydia brought the tracking device into the backyard. She took out her gun and waited.
The night air was starting to give way to the morning dew. That tingle was there, lighting up her veins. Heshy, she knew, was not far away. He wanted to join in, but this was her game. The street was silent. It was 4:00A .M.
Five minutes later, she heard the car pull up.
chapter 33
Something was verywrong here.
The roads were becoming so familiar I barely noticed them. I was wired, jazzed, the pain in my ribs barely noticeable. Rachel was absorbed in her Palm Pilot. She’d click screens with her little wand, tilt her head, change viewing angles. She dug through the backseat and found Zia’s road atlas. With the cap of the Flair pen in her mouth, Rachel started marking up the route, trying to discern a pattern, I guess. Or maybe she was just stalling, so I wouldn’t ask the inevitable.
I called her name softly. She flicked her eyes at me and then back to the screen.
“Did you know about that CD-ROM before you got here?” I said.
“No.”
“There were photos of you in front of the hospital where I work.”
“So you told me.”
She clicked the screen again.
“Are the photos real?” I asked.
“Real?”
“I mean, were they digitally altered or something—or were you really in front of my office two years ago?”
Rachel kept her head down, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see her shoulders slump. “Make a right,” she said. “Up here.”
We were on Glen Avenue now. This was getting creepy. My old high school was up on the left. They’d refurbished it four years ago, adding a weight room, a swimming pool, and a second gymnasium. The fa
çade had been intentionally scuffed up and aged with ivy, giving the place a proper collegiate feel, reminding the youth of Kasselton what was expected of them.
“Rachel?”
“The pictures are real, Marc.”
I nodded to myself. I don’t know why. Maybe I was trying to buy myself some time. I was heading into something worse than unchartered waters here. I knew that the answers would alter everything again, make it all go topsy-turvy, just when I hoped to set the world right. “I think I’m owed an explanation,” I said.
“You are.” She kept her head down on the screen. “But not right now.”
“Yeah, right now.”
“We need to concentrate on what we’re doing.”
“Don’t hand me that crap. We’re just driving here. I can handle two things at the same time.”
“Maybe,” she said softly, “I can’t.”
“Rachel, what were you doing in front of that hospital?”
“Whoa.”
“Whoa what?”
We were approaching the traffic lights at Kasselton Avenue. Because of the hour, they were blinking yellow and red. I frowned and turned to her. “Which way?”
“Right.”
My heart iced. “I don’t understand.”
“The car has stopped again.”
“Where?”
“Unless I’m reading this wrong,” Rachel said, and finally she looked up and met my gaze, “they’re at your house.”
I made the right turn. Rachel no longer needed to direct me. She kept her eyes on the screen. We were less than a mile away now. My parents had taken this route to the hospital on the day I was born. I wondered how many times I’d been on this road since. Weird thought, but the mind goes where it must.
I made the right on Monroe. My parents’ house was on the left. The lights were off except, of course, for the lamp downstairs. We had it on a timer. It stayed on from 7:00P .M. to 5:00A .M. every day. I’d put in one of those long-life, energy-saving light bulbs that look like soft-ice-cream swirls. Mom bragged about how long it lasted. She’d read somewhere that keeping a radio on was also a good way to scare away burglars, so she had an old AM radio constantly tuned into a talk station. The problem was, the sound of the radio kept her up at night, so now Mom put the volume so low that a burglar would have to press his ear against it to be warded off.
I started making the turn onto my road, onto Darby Terrace, when Rachel said, “Slow down.”
“They moving?”
“No. The signal is still coming from your house.”
I looked up the block. I started thinking about it. “They didn’t exactly take a direct route here.”
She nodded. “I know.”
“Maybe they found your Q-Logger,” I said.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”
The car inched forward. We were in front of the Citrons’ house now, two away from mine. No lights were on—not even a timer lamp. Rachel chewed on her lower lip. We were at the Kadisons’ house now, nearing my driveway. It was one of those situations people describe as “too quiet,” as if the world had frozen, as if all you saw, even animate objects, were trying to stay still.
“This has to be a setup,” she said.
I was just about to ask her what we should do—pull back, park and walk, call the cops for help?—when the first bullet shattered the front windshield. Shards of glass smacked my face. I heard a short scream. Without conscious thought, I ducked my head and raised my forearm. I looked down and saw blood.
“Rachel!”
The second shot zinged so close to my head that I felt it in my hair. The impact hit my seat with a sound like a pillowy wallop. Instincts took over again. But this time it had a mission, a direction of sorts. I hit the accelerator. The car lurched forward.
The human brain is an amazing instrument. No computer can duplicate it. It can process millions of stimuli in hundredths of a second. That was, I guess, what was going on now. I was hunched over in the driver’s seat. Someone was taking shots at me. The base part of my brain wanted to flee, but something farther along the evolutionary path realized that there might be a better way.
The thought process took—and this is just a rough estimate—less than a tenth of a second. I had my foot on the accelerator. The tires shrieked. I thought about my house, the familiar setup of it, the direction the bullets had come from. Yes, I know how that sounds. Maybe panic speeds up those brain functions, I don’t know, but I realized that if I were the one doing the shooting, if I had been lying in wait for this car to approach, I’d have hidden behind the three shrubs that divide my property from the Christies’ next door. The shrubs were big and bushy and right on our driveway. If I had pulled all the way in, bam, you could have blown us away from the passenger side. When I hesitated, when the shooter had seen that we might back away, he was still in position, though not as good, to take us from the front.
So I looked up, turned the wheel, and aimed the car for those bushes.
A third bullet rang out. It hit something metal, probably the front grill, with aka-ping . I sneaked a glance at Rachel long enough to take a visual snapshot: her head was down, her hand pressed against the side of her head, blood seeping through the fingers. My stomach fell, but my foot stayed on the pedal. I moved my head back and forth, as if that might throw off the shooter’s aim.
My headlights illuminated the bushes.
I saw flannel.
Something happened to me. I talked before about sanity being a thin string and that mine had snapped. In that case, I went quiet. This time, a mix of rage and dread roared through my body. I pressed the pedal harder, almost through the floor. I heard a yell of surprise. The man in the flannel shirt tried to leap to the right.
But I was ready.
I turned the steering wheel toward him like we were playing bumper cars. There was a crash, a dull thud. I heard a scream. The bushes were caught up in the bumper. I looked for the man in the flannel. Nothing. I had my hand on the door handle, about to open it and go after him, when Rachel said, “No!”
I stopped. She was alive!
Her hand reached up and shifted the car into reverse. “Go back!”
I listened. I don’t know what I’d been thinking. The man was armed. I wasn’t. Despite the impact, I didn’t know if he was dead or injured or what.
I started back. I noticed that my dark suburban street was lit up now. Shots and shrieking tires are not common noises here on Darby Terrace. People had woken up and turned on the lights. They’d be dialing 911.
Rachel sat up. Relief flooded me. She had a gun in one hand. The other was still over her wound. “It’s my ear,” she said, and again, the mind working in funny ways, I had already started thinking about what procedure I would use to repair the damage.
“There!” she shouted.
I turned. The man in the flannel was hobbling down the driveway. I turned the wheel and aimed the car lights in his direction. He disappeared around back. I looked over at Rachel.
“Back up,” she said. “I’m not sure he’s alone.”
I did. “Now what?”
Rachel had her gun out, her free hand on the door handle. “You stay.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“You keep revving the engine and moving a little. Let them think we’re still in the car. I’ll sneak up on them.”
Before I could protest any further, she rolled out. With blood still flowing down her side, she darted away. I, per her instructions, revving the engine and feeling like a total dweeb, shifted the car into drive, moved forward, shifted the car into reverse, went back.
A few seconds later, I lost sight of Rachel.
A few seconds after that, I heard two more shots.
Lydia had watched it all from her spot in the backyard.
Pavel had shot too early. It was a mistake on his part. From her vantage point behind a wall of firewood, Lydia could not see who was in the car. But she’d been impressed. The driver had not only
flushed Pavel out but wounded him as well.
Pavel limped into view. Lydia’s eyes adjusted enough to see the blood on his face. She raised her arm and waved him toward her. Pavel fell and then started crawling. Lydia kept her eyes on the routes to the backyard. They would have to come from the front. There was a fence behind her. She was near the back neighbor’s gate in case she needed to escape.
Pavel kept crawling. Lydia urged him on while keeping watch. She wondered how this ex-fed would play it. The neighbors were awake now. Lights were going on. The cops would be on their way.
Lydia would have to hurry.
Pavel made it to the pile of firewood and rolled next to her. For a moment, he stayed on his back. His breathing was wheezy and wet. Then he forced himself up. He knelt next to Lydia and looked out into the yard. He winced and said, “Leg broken.”
“We’ll take care of it,” she said. “Where’s your gun?”
“Dropped.”
Untraceable, she thought. Not a problem. “I have another weapon you can use,” she told him. “Keep a lookout.”
Pavel nodded. He squinted into the dark.
“What?” Lydia said. She moved a little closer to him.
“Not sure.”
As Pavel stared out, Lydia pressed the barrel of her gun against the hollow spot behind his left ear. She squeezed the trigger, firing two shots into his head. Pavel dropped to the ground like a marionette with his strings cut.
Lydia looked down at him. In the end, this might be best. Plan B was probably better than Plan A anyway. Had Pavel killed the woman—an ex–FBI agent—that would not have ended it. They’d probably search even harder for the mysterious man in flannel. The investigation would have continued. There wouldn’t be closure. This way, with Pavel dead—dead by the gun used at the original Seidman crime scene—the police would conclude that either Seidman or this Rachel (or both) was behind it. They’d be arrested. The charges might not stick, but no matter. The police would stop looking for anyone else. They could disappear with the money now.