Three Harlan Coben Novels

by Harlan Coben

  The dream wouldn’t die. Rocky wouldn’t let it. He pumped iron nonstop. He began ’roiding big time. He had always taken some kind of anabolic supplement. Every athlete does. But desperation had made him less cautious. He didn’t worry about cycling or overdoing it. He just wanted mass. His mood darkened from either the drugs or the disappointment—or more likely, the potent blend of the two.

  To make ends meet, Rocky took up work with the Ultimate Fighting Federation. You may remember their octagon grudge matches. For a while, they were all the rage on pay-per-view—real, bloody, no-holds-barred brawls. Rocky was good at it. He was big and strong and a natural fighter. He had great endurance and knew how to wear down an opponent.

  Eventually the violence in the ring got to be too much for people’s sensibilities. States began to outlaw ultimate fighting. Some of the guys started battling in Japan where it was still legal—Rocky guessed that they had different sensibilities over there—but he didn’t go. Rocky still believed that the NFL was within his grasp. He just had to work harder. Get a little bigger, a little stronger, a little faster.

  Jack Lawson’s minivan pulled onto Route 17. Rocky’s instructions were clear. Follow Lawson. Write down where he went, who he talked to, every detail of his trip, but do not—repeat not—engage him. He was to observe. Nothing more.

  Right, easy cash.

  Two years ago, Rocky got into a bar fight. It was typical stuff. Some guy stared at Lorraine too long. Rocky had asked him what he was looking at, and the guy responded, “Not much.” You know the drill. Except Rocky was juiced up from the ’roids. He pulverized the guy—put him in traction—and got nailed on an assault beef. He spent three months in jail and was now on probation. That had been the final straw for Lorraine. She called him a loser and moved out.

  So now he was trying to make it up to her.

  Rocky had quit the junk. Dreams die hard, but he now realized that the NFL was not going to be. But Rocky had talents. He could be a good coach. He knew how to motivate. A friend of his had an in at his old alma mater, Westfield High. If Rocky could get his record cleared, he’d be made varsity defensive coordinator. Lorraine could get a job there as a guidance counselor. They’d be on their way.

  They just needed a little set-up cash.

  Rocky kept the Celica a decent distance back of the minivan. He was not too worried about being spotted. Jack Lawson was an amateur. He wouldn’t be looking for a tail. That was what his boss had told him.

  Lawson crossed the New York border and took the thruway north. The time was ten P.M. Rocky wondered if he should call it in, but no, not yet. There was nothing here to report. The man was taking a ride. Rocky was following him. That was his job.

  Rocky felt his calf start cramping. Man, he wished this piece of junk had more legroom.

  Half an hour later Lawson pulled off by the Woodbury Commons, one of those massive outdoor malls where all the stores were purportedly “outlets” for their more expensive counterparts. The Commons was closed. The minivan pulled down a quiet stretch of road on the side. Rocky hung back. If he followed now, he’d be spotted for sure.

  Rocky found a position on the right, shifted into park, turned off his headlights, and picked up his binoculars.

  Jack Lawson stopped the minivan, and Rocky watched him step out. There was another car not too far away. Must be Lawson’s girlfriend. Strange place for a romantic rendezvous, but there you go. Jack looked both ways and then headed toward the wooded area. Damn. Rocky would have to follow on foot.

  He put down the binoculars and slid out. He was still seventy, eighty yards away from Lawson. Rocky didn’t want to get any closer. He squatted down and peered through the binoculars again. Lawson stopped walking. He turned around and . . .

  What’s this?

  Rocky swung the binoculars to the right. A man was standing to Lawson’s left. Rocky took a closer look. The man wore fatigues. He was short and squat, built like a perfect square. Looked like he worked out, Rocky thought. The guy—he looked Chinese or something—stood perfectly still, stonelike.

  At least for a few seconds.

  Gently, almost like a lover’s touch, the Chinese guy reached up and put his hand on Lawson’s shoulder. For a fleeting moment Rocky thought that maybe he had stumbled across a gay tryst. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.

  Jack Lawson dropped to the ground like a puppet with his strings cut.

  Rocky stifled a gasp. The Chinese guy looked down at the crumpled form. He bent down and picked Lawson up by . . . hell, it looked like the neck. Like you’d pick up a puppy or something. By the scruff of his neck.

  Oh damn, Rocky thought. I better call this in.

  Without breaking a sweat, the Chinese guy started carrying Lawson toward his car. With one hand. Like the guy was a briefcase or something. Rocky reached for his cell phone.

  Crap, he’d left it in the car.

  Okay, think, Rocky. The car the Chinese guy was driving. It was a Honda Accord. New Jersey plates. Rocky tried to memorize the number. He watched while the Chinese guy opened the trunk. He dumped Lawson in as if he were a load of laundry.

  Oh man, now what?

  Rocky’s orders were firm. Do not engage. How many times had he heard that? Whatever you do, just observe. Do not engage.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  Should he just follow?

  Uh-uh, no way. Jack Lawson was in the trunk. Look, Rocky did not know the man. He didn’t know why he was supposed to follow him. He’d figured that they’d been hired to follow Lawson for the usual reason—his wife suspected him of having an affair. That was one thing. Follow and prove infidelity. But this . . . ?

  Lawson had been assaulted. For crying out loud, he’d been locked in the trunk by this muscle-headed Jackie Chan. Could Rocky just sit back and let that happen?

  No.

  Whatever Rocky had done, whatever he had become, he was not about to let that stand. Suppose he lost the Chinese guy? Suppose there wasn’t enough air in the trunk? Suppose Lawson had been seriously injured already and was dying?

  Rocky had to do something.

  Should he call the police?

  The Chinese guy slammed the trunk closed. He started for the front seat.

  Too late to call anyone. He had to make his move now.

  Rocky remained six-four, two-sixty, and rock solid. He was a professional fighter. Not a show boxer. Not a phony, staged wrestler. A real fighter. He didn’t have a gun, but he knew how to take care of himself.

  Rocky started running toward the car.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, you! Stop right there!”

  The Chinese guy—as he got closer, Rocky could see he was more like a kid—looked up. His expression did not change. He just stared as Rocky ran toward him. He did not move. He did not try to get in the car and drive away. He waited patiently.

  “Hey!”

  The Chinese kid stayed still.

  Rocky stopped a yard in front of him. Their eyes met. Rocky did not like what he saw. He had played football against some true headcases. He’d fought pain-happy crazies in the Ultimate Fighting ring. He had stared into the eyes of pure psychos—guys who got off on hurting people. This was not like this. This was like staring into the eyes of . . . something not alive. A rock maybe. An inanimate object of some kind. There was no fear, no mercy, no reason.

  “May I help you?” the Chinese kid said.

  “I saw . . . Let that man out of the trunk.”

  The kid nodded. “Of course.”

  The kid glanced toward the trunk. So did Rocky. And that was when Eric Wu struck.

  Rocky never saw the blow. Wu ducked down, twisted his hips for power, and smashed his fist into Rocky’s kidney. Rocky had taken shots before. He had been punched in the kidney by men twice this size. But nothing had ever hit him like this. The blow landed like a sledgehammer.

  Rocky gasped but stayed on his feet. Wu moved in and jabbed something hard into Rocky’s liver. It felt like a barbecue s
kewer. The pain exploded through him.

  Rocky’s mouth opened, but the scream wouldn’t come out. He fell to the ground. Wu dropped down next to him. The last thing Rocky saw—the last thing he would ever see—was Eric Wu’s face, calm and serene, as he placed his hands under Rocky’s rib cage.

  Lorraine, Rocky thought. And then nothing more.

  chapter 5

  Grace caught herself mid-scream. She jerked upright. The light was still on in the hallway. A silhouette stood in her doorway. But it wasn’t Jack.

  She awoke, still gasping. A dream. She knew that. On some elusive level, she had known that midway through. She’d had this dream before, plenty of times, though not in a long time. Must be the upcoming anniversary, she thought.

  She tried to settle back. It wouldn’t happen. The dream always started and ended the same. The variations occurred in the middle.

  In the dream Grace was back at the old Boston Garden. The stage was directly in front of her. There was a steel blockade, short, maybe waist-high, like something you might use to lock your bike. She leaned against it.

  The loudspeaker played “Pale Ink,” but that was impossible because the concert hadn’t even started yet. “Pale Ink” was the big hit from the Jimmy X Band, the best-selling single of the year. You still hear it on the radio all the time. It would be played live, not on some waiting-time recording. But if this dream was like some movie, “Pale Ink” was, if you will, the soundtrack.

  Was Todd Woodcroft, her boyfriend at the time, standing next to her? She sometimes imagined holding his hand—though they were never the hand-holding kind of couple—and then, when it went wrong, the stomach-dropping feel of his hand slipping away from hers. In reality, Todd was probably right next to her. In the dream, only sometimes. This time, no, he was not there. Todd had escaped that night unscathed. She never blamed him for what happened to her. There was nothing he could have done. Todd had never even visited her in the hospital. She didn’t blame him for that either. Theirs was a college romance already on the skids, not a soul-mate situation. Who needed a scene at this stage of the game? Who’d want to break up with a girl in the hospital? Better for both, she thought, to let it just sort of drift away.

  In the dream, Grace knows that tragedy is about to strike, but she does nothing about it. Her dream self does not call out a warning or try to make for the exit. She often wondered why, but wasn’t that how dreams worked? You are powerless even with foreknowledge, a slave to some advanced hardwiring in your subconscious. Or perhaps the answer is simpler: There was no time. In the dream, the tragedy begins in seconds. In reality, according to witnesses, Grace and the others had stood in front of that stage for more than four hours.

  The crowd’s mood had slid from excited to antsy to restless before stopping at hostile. Jimmy X, real name James Xavier Farmington, the gorgeous rocker with the glorious hair, was supposed to take the stage at 8:30 P.M., though no one really expected him before nine. Now it was closing in on midnight. At first the crowd had been chanting Jimmy’s name. Now a chorus of boos had started up. Sixteen thousand people, including those, like Grace, who had been lucky enough to get standing seats in the pit, rose as one, demanding their performance. Ten minutes passed before the loudspeaker finally offered up some feedback. The crowd, having reverted to their earlier state of fevered excitement, went wild.

  But the voice that came over the loudspeaker did not introduce the band. In a straight monotone, it announced that tonight’s performance had been delayed again for at least an hour. No explanation. For a moment nobody moved. Silence filled the arena.

  This was where the dream began, during that lull before the devastation. Grace was there again. How old was she? She had been twenty-one, but in the dream she seemed to be older. It was a different, parallel Grace, one who was married to Jack and mother to Emma and Max and yet was still at that concert during her senior year of college. Again that was how it worked in dreams, a dual reality, your parallel self overlapping with your actual one.

  Was all this, these dream moments, coming from her subconscious or from what she had read about the tragedy after the fact? Grace did not know. It was, she’d long surmised, probably a combination of both. Dreams open up memories, don’t they? When she was awake, she couldn’t recall that night at all—or for that matter, the few days before. The last thing she remembered was studying for a political science final she’d taken five days earlier. That was normal, the doctors assured, with her type of head trauma. But the subconscious was a strange terrain. Perhaps the dreams were actual memories. Perhaps imagination. Most likely, as with most dreams or even memories, both.

  Either way, be it from memory or press reports, it was at this very moment when someone fired a shot. Then another. And another.

  This was before the days of metal detector sweeps when you entered an arena. Anyone could carry in a gun. For a while, there had been much debate over the origins of those shots. Conspiracy nuts still argued over the point, as if the arena had a grassy knoll in the upper tier. Either way, the young crowd, already in a frenzy, snapped. They screamed. They broke. They rushed for exits.

  They rushed toward the stage.

  Grace was in the wrong spot. Her waist was crushed against the top of the steel girder. It dug into her belly. She could not pry herself free. The crowd cried out and surged as one. The boy next to her—she would later learn that he was nineteen years old and named Ryan Vespa—didn’t get his hands up in time. He smacked the girder at a bad angle.

  Grace saw—again was it just in the dream or in reality too?—the blood shoot from Ryan Vespa’s mouth. The girder finally gave way. It tilted over. She fell to the floor. Grace tried to get her footing, tried to stand, but the current of screaming humans drove her back down.

  This part, she knew, was real. This part, being buried under a mass of people, haunted more than just her dreams.

  The stampede continued. People stomped on her. Trampled her arms and legs. Tripped and fell, slamming down on her like stone tablets. The weight grew. Crushing her. Dozens of desperate, struggling, slithering bodies rushed over her.

  Screams filled the air. Grace was underneath it now. Buried. There was no light anymore. Too many bodies on top of her. It was impossible to move. Impossible to breathe. She was suffocating. Like someone had buried her in concrete. Like she was being dragged underwater.

  There was too much weight on her. It felt as if a giant hand was pressing down on her head, squashing her skull like it was a Styro-foam cup.

  There was no escape.

  And that, mercifully, was when the dream ended. Grace woke up, still gulping for air.

  In reality, Grace had woken up four days later and remembered almost nothing. At first she thought it was the morning of her political science final. The doctors took their time explaining the situation. She had been seriously injured. She had, for one, a skull fracture. That, the doctors surmised, explained the headaches and memory loss. This was not a case of amnesia or repressed memory or even anything psychological. The brain was damaged, which is not infrequent with this kind of severe head trauma and loss of consciousness. Losing hours, even days, was not unusual. Grace also shattered her femur, her tibia, and three ribs. Her knee had split in two. Her hip had been ripped out of its joint.

  Through a haze of painkillers, she eventually learned that she had been “lucky.” Eighteen people, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-six, had been killed in the stampede that the media dubbed the Boston Massacre.

  The silhouette in the doorway said, “Mom?”

  It was Emma. “Hi, sweetheart.”

  “You were screaming.”

  “I’m okay. Even moms have bad dreams sometimes.”

  Emma stayed in the shadows. “Where’s Daddy?”

  Grace checked the bedside clock. It was nearly 4:45 A.M. How long had she been asleep? No more than ten, fifteen minutes. “He’ll be home soon.”

  Emma did not move.

  “You okay?” Grace asked.
>
  “Can I sleep with you?”

  Plenty of bad dreams tonight, Grace thought. She pulled back the blanket. “Sure, honey.”

  Emma crawled onto Jack’s side of the bed. Grace threw the blanket back over her and held tight. She kept her eyes on the bedside clock. At exactly 7 A.M.—she watched the digital clock switch from 6:59 A.M.—she let panic in.

  Jack had never done anything like this before. If it had been a normal night, if he had come up and told her that he was going grocery shopping, if he had made some clumsy double entendre before leaving, something about melons or bananas, something funny and stupid like that, she’d have been on the phone with the police already.

  But last night had not been normal. There had been that photograph. There had been his reaction. And there had been no kiss good-bye.

  Emma stirred beside her. Max entered in mid–eye rub a few minutes later. Jack was usually the one who made breakfast. He was more the early riser. Grace managed to whip up the morning meal—Cap’n Crunch with sliced banana—and deflected their questions about their father’s absence. While they were busy wolfing down breakfast, she slid into the den and tried Jack’s office, but nobody picked up the line. Still too early.

  She threw on a pair of Jack’s Adidas sweats and walked them to the bus stop. Emma used to hug her before she boarded, but she was too old for that. She hurried aboard, before Grace could mumble something idiotically parental about Emma being too old for hugs but not too old to visit Mom when she was scared at night. Max still gave her a hug but it was quick and with a serious lack of enthusiasm. They both stepped inside, the bus door swooshing to a close as though swallowing them whole.