Ben dug the spare key from his pocket and quickly locked the front door, sealing the second man inside the house. There. All safe. Ridiculous. He looked around in a panic. What was he looking for? He didn’t even know. He only knew they couldn’t go back in the house. Couldn’t go down the front steps.
‘Dad?’ Frightened, now.
The doorknob rattled behind them, then stopped. Ben heard the clunk of the deadbolt turning from inside. He looked at the granola bar in his hand and, on idiotic impulse, chucked it at the guy on the sidewalk. The guy took half a step to one side and watched the granola bar helicopter past him. Then he cocked his head, fists on hips.
‘Come on down now, Mr Middleton.’ His voice sounded like half a gallon of pure testosterone swirling down a drainpipe. ‘We’ll all behave like mature human beings.’
The house door opened behind them. Ben felt Charley jump and squeeze in close. He thought of the time he and Christine had taken him to his first big-person haunted house. Charley had surprised them both by being legitimately, sincerely terrified to tears. They’d felt horrible all the way out the side exit. Unqualified to be parents.
Side exit. Ben glanced toward the far side of the portico.
‘Easy does it,’ the second man said on his way through the door. He joined them outside, effectively blocking any hope of the quick escape scenario forming in Ben’s mind. He held his gun on them casually, at hip level, cleverly concealed from street view.
So Ben retreated instead, shoving Charley into the corner behind him, where the brick knee wall joined the house. He patted his pockets, desperately searching for Gordon’s prepaid phone, realizing he’d left it in the van with Anabeth.
But he wasn’t entirely empty-handed. He plunged one hand into the deep front pocket of his coat, finding the last thing he’d have expected to need on his ex-wife’s front porch at eight thirty on a Saturday morning, or any other time of any other day:
A forgotten quarter-inch Narex bench chisel from his shop in the barn.
Ben closed his fingers around the handle. His heart pounded so hard that it blurred his vision. He blinked his eyes, feeling suddenly lightheaded.
The man with the gun sighed heavily as he thumbed back the hammer. ‘Come on, man. Don’t make me sound like a TV show.’
‘That’s the last thing I’d want to do,’ Ben said.
Still, almost anybody would have conceded it: what happened next seemed exactly like a television show.
All at once, Ben heard honking. Then the roar of a big engine. He heard the bark and whine of oncoming tires, the clank and rattle of a heavy-duty suspension system under strain.
So much like a television show was the sudden appearance of Gordon Frerking’s own personal A-Team van, in fact, that Ben could almost hear a paramilitary fanfare swelling behind it. All attention turned toward the street as the Vandura bounced heroically up over the curb and aimed itself straight toward Sidewalk Guy, tearing parallel lines across Tony Montecito’s dormant front lawn.
From there, everything seemed to happen in the same instant. Anabeth Glass stayed on the horn as she crossed the empty driveway, picking up speed. Sidewalk Guy spun around to find a leering grille bearing down on him, its metal teeth glinting in the sunlight like a mouth full of chrome. Gun Guy shouted something unintelligible, springing instantly into a three-point shooting stance. Charley cried, ‘Dad!’
And Ben Middleton – thirty-nine, bankrupt, divorced, thirteen months sober, and suddenly enveloped in an inexplicable pocket of calm amidst the developing bedlam – tightened his grip on the handle of the chisel in his coat pocket, turned to his wide-eyed son, and shouted, ‘Run!’
In the dream Reuben Wasserman was having, it was Sunday morning. He and Claire were strolling along the lakeshore with the tourists, holding hands. It was warm out. The water was calm, and he could smell flowers on the normally fishy breeze. Bright morning sunlight made a blue mirror of the lake, glinting off the ripples and wavelets like an undulating net of jewels.
They stopped to look out at the Harbor Lighthouse for a minute. Reuben kissed Claire on the cheek and said, ‘How come we never do this?’
She smiled at him.
Then her eyes flew open. Her mouth dropped wide. She began to blare like a car horn.
Reuben sat up in a bolt of panic, head pounding, his body one big all-over ache.
He was in the back seat of a car.
The car was parked at a curb. In front of a house.
The house looked familiar.
But Reuben understood that he was still dreaming. Dreaming within a dream. There would be no other way to explain why that van from The A-Team suddenly flew past his window, caromed up over the curb, and ran over some guy standing in the front yard.
It did explain the horn, though.
Ben had never stabbed anyone before. Up to this point in his life, it simply hadn’t made it on to his bucket list. He wasn’t very good at it, either, although probably there was something to be said for using the right tool for the job.
As it was, he stood dumbstruck for several beats too long, watching Sidewalk Guy attempt to leap out of the way of the oncoming Vandura …
As Abe actually swerved in perfect anticipation, catching him in mid-air with a sickening thud and plowing him under, into the turf.
The Vandura bounced and swayed as Sidewalk Guy passed beneath its wheels. The van skidded to a stop in the grass, leaving a pile of bent limbs in a black suit lying jumbled in its wake.
Then the reverse lights came on. Ben thought: she’s gone to the zoo. For one yawning, sickening moment, he stood in disbelief, certain that Anabeth Glass had not only run down a human stranger in a borrowed vehicle for a person she’d known only two days, but she was going to back over him a second time for good measure.
Instead, she rolled down her window and screamed, ‘Come on!’
Gun Guy fired a round that shattered the van’s sideview mirror, along with what little remained of this neighborhood’s peace and quiet. Abe ducked her head back inside. Charley, for once in his young teenage life, did exactly as he’d been told, slipping between Ben and Gun Guy in a silent flash of flannel.
He’d almost made it to the front steps when Gun Guy reached out a hand and grabbed him by the back of his collar, yanking him off his feet as easily as picking up a sack of laundry. Charley landed hard on his ass with a blurt of pain and fear, the unmistakable crunch of a smartphone shattering in his back pocket.
Ben lunged with extreme prejudice, raising the slender, tempered-steel chisel high above his head. He pulled down hard with both hands, aiming for the center of Gun Guy’s chest. He missed high and right instead, burying the blade somewhere in the thick trapezius muscle running between Gun Guy’s bull neck and shoulder.
Gun Guy reared back and bellowed like a wounded rhinoceros, dropping his weapon with a clatter, clawing at his neck.
Moving as if controlled by somebody who knew what they were doing, Ben scooped up the gun with one hand, grabbing Charley’s arm with the other. He pulled Charley to his feet, then along down the steps. They took a wide berth around Sidewalk Guy – still lying motionless in a freshly-chewed rut – as they raced toward the passenger side of the van. Ben wished he could screen Charley’s view of the poor mangled son of a bitch.
In the background, Gunless Guy wailed in rage. All up and down the street, people had emerged blinking from their houses in various states of dress. Ben heard a car door slam, then saw a familiar figure tumbling out the back of the Lincoln and running away down the street.
Well. Sort of running. Sort of stumbling.
Carrying no damned water at all.
Reuben Wasserman.
You filthy little garbage-sucking rat, Ben thought bitterly. A few minutes from now, he’d be glad he’d forgotten that he was holding Gun Guy’s gun in his hand. Because in that moment he might well have shot the fleeing coward in the back. The moment lasted just long enough for Ben to register the pale, strange-looking man sitt
ing in the Lincoln’s front passenger seat.
Then he was yanking open the panel door of the Vandura and shoving Charley inside. Ben piled in after him, barking the same shin bruises he’d already made. How many times was he going to have to dive into the back of this van today?
‘Hold tight!’ Abe shouted to them, already reversing as she wrenched the wheel hard to her left, sending them rolling around the back like two walnuts in a bucket.
The van skidded to a stop again. Ben grabbed on to a captain’s chair and hauled himself up to his knees. Through the windshield, he saw that they were aimed directly at the Lincoln’s broad side. He watched the pale man’s odd, scarred-up face screw into a hostile grimace as the man pressed his palms against his window from the inside. He saw Abe clench her jaw as she hunkered down over the wheel.
Then Ben went flying again, backward this time, as Abe mashed on the gas and the Vandura heaved forward.
There wasn’t enough room to build appreciable ramming speed, but still they hit the opposing vehicle with enough force to slide Ben and Charley together in a pile. The Vandura shook with a hollow, steel-crumpling boom that seemed to fill the interior and echo back on itself. Ben flipped himself over and grabbed Charley’s face in both hands, shouting, ‘Are you OK?’
Charley’s eyes were wide as hubcaps, swimming with confusion, trauma, terror, and … excitement? Maybe just the faintest glimmer of a thrill, somewhere deep down in those gold-flecked irises he’d gotten from his mother?
Whatever he was feeling, he nodded his head yes. He was OK.
‘Is there insurance on my phone?’
Ben felt a warm wave of relief. Yes: gone was the little boy of nine who’d cried at the haunted house he’d wanted so badly to experience. But Charley was still here.
He was safe.
For now.
Meanwhile, Abe kept hard on the gas, plowing the Vandura forward like a passenger-class bulldozer, scraping the undercarriage loudly over the high curb. Ben heard wrenching metal and popping glass. He heard the bark of rubber as their tires found pavement. He untangled himself from Charley and pushed himself up and made his way unsteadily toward the rear windows, where he saw the Lincoln tipped on to its side in the middle of the street behind them, a rear wheel turning lazily in the air.
Then they were off.
Abe fishtailed, corrected, then drove Gordon’s van like she’d stolen it, leaving an upscale residential neighborhood full of bewildered property owners looking on. Ben counted among them the three jogging women he’d previously impressed so little. Still none of them was Christine.
But none of that mattered, now. At the moment, Ben was far more concerned with a) the pale man climbing up through his own sky-facing passenger window like the world’s ugliest gopher coming out of its burrow; b) the large man in a suit who may or may not have been dead in Christine’s front yard; and, c) the matching large man in a suit stumbling out into the street, still clutching at his neck, arm limp at his side, blood dripping from his fingers.
‘Everybody OK back there?’ Abe called over her shoulder.
‘I’m OK,’ Charley called back. ‘This van is insane.’
‘Thanks. It’s a loaner. You must be Charley?’
‘That’s me.’
‘So nice to meet you, Charley. I’m Anabeth – call me Abe. I work with your dad.’
Ben shuffled unsteadily over to his son. Charley had found his way into one of the captain’s chairs, looking mildly shell-shocked, but seemingly none the worse for wear. Physically, at least.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’
‘Dad. I’m fine. Who were those guys?’
‘Nobody you two want any part of,’ Abe answered. ‘Believe me.’
Ben checked Charley over one last time. Then he stood and duck-waddled up to the front of the van. He climbed into the passenger seat and stared at Anabeth Glass in profile for a long moment.
Finally, he said, ‘And who are you?’
FIFTEEN
Reuben cut right at the end of the street and made it almost all the way to the corner of the next block before he had to stop and cool his burning lungs. He’d never been particularly athletic, not like Eli, and rolling around with Claire was probably the most strenuous physical activity he’d engaged in since high school. After sprinting a block and a half his wind was gone, he was seeing spots, and his aching legs had turned to overstretched rubber bands. He would have cut through people’s yards, except that almost all these people had privacy fences. Some of the houses looked like they could just as well have had moats.
So there he was, stooped over in the middle of the sidewalk, wheezing, when that crazy van zoomed up and screeched to a halt beside him. Cute girl behind the wheel. Angry-looking dude in the passenger seat. Reuben felt like he’d seen both of them before, but he couldn’t think where. He couldn’t seem to get himself together. Meanwhile, the angry-looking guy rolled down his window.
‘Hi, Reuben,’ the girl said, leaning over the steering wheel so that she could see him better. ‘Hop in. Quick-quick-fast.’
‘Do … I … know you?’ Reuben panted. Somehow, she seemed to know him.
‘We met at Small’s. Night before last. Don’t you remember?’
‘I … don’t know?’
‘Hurt a girl’s feelings, why don’t you. Come on, you can apologize better in here.’
Reuben felt like he was going crazy. He did remember, sort of. But everything seemed fuzzy, not quite real. And he still didn’t know what in all God’s creation was going on. He felt like he’d woken up with the most prehistoric, godawful punishment of a hangover imaginable, gotten out of bed to take a leak, and walked straight into the Twilight Zone. He had no idea where he was or what he was doing there.
And, holy shit, that guy. The one back there in that car he’d woken up in, just minutes before this crazy chick with the nose ring had turned said car into scrap metal; pale as a grubworm, face like an acid-bath survivor. Frost? That was the name that popped into Reuben’s head. Which seemed appropriate. Just thinking of him gave Reuben a shiver.
The van’s engine revved. The girl said, ‘Tick tock, sweetie. We really do need to move.’
‘Um, yeah,’ Reuben straightened himself gingerly in hopes of relieving the stitch in his side. ‘I think I’m OK. Thanks anyway.’
Then the angry-looking guy pointed a gun right out the window at him. ‘Get in the van, numbnuts.’
Middleton. That was his name.
Ben wanted answers. But considering the more pressing fact that they were running from a crime scene in a vehicle fit for a comic book convention – garish, conspicuous, instantly recognizable – he found himself in agreement with their rescuer about priority one:
Get somewhere safe.
They further agreed that ‘safe’ meant putting some distance between them, the bad guys, the creature, and the general population until they could figure out what the hell to do next, preferably without the strictures of incarceration due to homicide.
So they took the long way out of town, sticking to residential neighborhoods and steering clear of major streets as much as they could. If the Vandura didn’t draw enough attention already, it had now developed a loud rattle in back, and a caterwauling squeal of metal grating on metal somewhere underneath. But they worked their way successfully north to the interstate spur that looped around the top of the city, then east toward the river, the morning silhouette of the Loess Hills rising up from the horizon line to meet them.
Thirty minutes had passed by the time they crossed the Mormon Bridge into Iowa, fulfilling the sum total of Ben’s plan so far: a new law enforcement jurisdiction. Reuben Wasserman sat in one of the rear jump seats with his head in his hands. Aside from the occasional low moan, he hadn’t uttered a syllable since he’d climbed in.
Charley, who seemed to take it on faith that questions would be answered by present adults in due course, occupied himself with an audit of Gordon Frerking’s movie and video game collection,
which he’d found in a set of built-in drawers beneath the rear bench. Ben marveled at his son’s apparent ability to roll with all of this. Part of him wondered if it was healthy.
‘Two things,’ he said.
Anabeth smiled faintly, keeping her eyes on the road ahead. ‘Only two, huh?’
‘First: thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’ She sighed. ‘I’m sorry this is happening to you.’
‘Yeah, that’s the second thing.’
‘I can only imagine.’
‘And you still haven’t answered my question.’
‘Did you ask one?’
Ben wasn’t in the mood for banter. At long last, the tub of adrenaline he’d been bathing in since just after sunrise had drained empty, leaving him naked and aching all over. He was officially on the lam, and all he’d done was wake up and make coffee. Along the way, he’d once again trashed his adolescent son’s life simply by being part of it, and he had no idea how to stop making it worse, let alone how to fix it. And ‘Anabeth Glass,’ the new girl from marketing, knew damned well what he wanted to know.
‘OK,’ Abe finally said. ‘Explanations are in order. I get it.’ She glanced down at the speedometer, backed off a touch on the gas. ‘For what it’s worth, I’ve never actually lied to you.’
‘How can that possibly be true?’
‘My name is Anabeth Glass. My friends call me Abe. You’re my friend.’ She flashed a quick glance over her shoulder. ‘You too, Charley.’
‘Cool,’ Charley said.
‘I remember you now,’ came a weak voice from way back in the jump seats.
‘I’m so glad, Reuben – I had a feeling we might see each other again. I was just hoping it would be under nicer circumstances. We have a lot of catching up to do, you and I.’
‘We do?’
‘Up ahead,’ Ben said, pointing out the ramp to I-29 North.
Abe took the exit without question, looping around to merge smoothly with northbound traffic, which was predictably light this autumn football Saturday. The nearest big home game would be held in Lincoln, or in Ames, or in Iowa City – in other words, every direction except the one Ben had chosen.
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