Four Thrillers by Lisa Unger

by Lisa Unger

  The desk light behind the screen that separated my “office” from my bedroom was on and we could hear the sound of someone shuffling through papers. A bulky shadow moved there. We didn’t enter the room but stayed behind the cover of the wall.

  “Put your hands where I can see them and step out from behind the screen,” said Jake. His voice boomed; he was downright terrifying. Something clattered hard to the floor and I hoped it wasn’t my laptop. The shadow stood frozen.

  “Put your hands where I can see them or I’m just going to unload, asshole.” His voice was flat and hard and I had to look at him to be sure it was actually coming from his mouth. He sounded like a stone-cold killer. We waited a moment and then I watched as Jake’s finger started to tense around the trigger. I have no doubt he would have opened fire, but then two hands reached above the screen.

  “Don’t shoot,” said a voice I recognized. The shadow stepped out where we could see him. The tension of the moment drained. Fear, anger, and relief vied for their positions in my chest.

  “What are you doing here, Zack?” I asked from behind Jake, surprised that my voice sounded so steady.

  “I’m trying to save your life, Ridley.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There are people looking for you…people who are very curious about what you know. I’m trying to figure it out before they do.”

  “The same people who killed Alexander Harriman?” I asked.

  He nodded. “You’re in real trouble. Both of you. But I can make it all go away. I can make it so both of you walk away from this safely.”

  His face was a mask of earnest benevolence. I wanted to believe that he was trying to help us, but I was having a hard time trusting people. Imagine that.

  He moved closer to us. Jake and I backed up. “Stay where you are,” said Jake, and Zack froze.

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “Just hear me out.”

  “We’re listening,” I said.

  “All Jake has to do is disappear. No one will look for him if he stops digging around, if he stops making inquiries. There’s money for him to set up somewhere and start over, anywhere in the world. Just not here.”

  He nodded over to a duffel bag that lay on my bed. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take a look.” I walked over to the bag and pulled the zipper. It was packed with bricks of cash. I couldn’t even guess how much. A lot, seriously.

  “Unmarked. Untraceable,” said Zack.

  I saw Jake’s eyes rest on the cash for a second. I tried to read his face but it was hard and expressionless. He kept the gun on Zack, who still had his hands in the air.

  “And what about Ridley?” Jake asked. I felt my stomach flip at the question. Was he considering the offer?

  “They just want my word that she’s not going to pursue the matter, that she’s going to come back into the fold of the people who have loved and cared about her, and as long as it stays that way, she has nothing to worry about. She’ll be fine. Her family will be fine.”

  “So why will they take your word?” Jake wanted to know.

  He laughed a little. “Because I’m in this so deep, they know they own me. And my mom, too. She’s been in this since the beginning. You’ve probably figured out as much.”

  “So it still exists. Children are still being abducted and sold.”

  “Don’t make it sound so sinister, Ridley,” said Zack defensively. “We’re saving children that are being neglected and abused. Turn on the fucking television—every day you’ll hear about some animal who killed his girlfriend’s baby because it was crying too much, or some crazy bitch who thinks God wants her to save her children from sin by drowning them in a bathtub. We’re not the criminals.”

  “You don’t have the right to make these choices,” said Jake. His voice was shaking. “We only get to make the choices for one life, our own.”

  “Wrong,” said Zack. “If everyone thought like you, Ridley might be dead right now. Killed by her mother’s boyfriend. Even you, Jake, even you might not have survived your childhood.”

  “My mother loved me,” said Jake. “I was loved.”

  “That’s not enough,” said Zack. “Lots of people love their children and fail to protect them from harm. Lots of people claim to love their children and hurt them, neglect them, or murder them, anyway.”

  There was a logic to the argument and I think we all heard it, even Jake. But it didn’t make any of it right. It didn’t make the fact that children had been abducted from their homes and sold to wealthy families the right thing. All the children who may have been helped didn’t make what happened to Teresa Stone or what had happened to Jake okay. Life’s not like that. We don’t get to make those kinds of bargains. No one has that right.

  We stood in an awkward triangle. Jake looked at me and I was sad to see that he was wondering what my choice was going to be. I could see that if I chose to return to “the fold,” he would let me go and wouldn’t judge me. He would let me be safe if that’s what I wanted. Even though he’d said it last night, I knew in my heart at that moment that he loved me. I walked back over to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I told Zack. “I can’t live with this.”

  He looked surprised and sad.

  “What about your family, Ridley? What about my mother? She’s always treated you like her own daughter. What do you think will happen to them if people find out about Project Rescue? Do you think anyone will believe your father wasn’t involved?”

  I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t be concerned with the consequences of choices other people had made. Right now I could worry only about the consequences of my own choices. And the way I saw it, I was in a lose-lose situation. I couldn’t go back into the fold. It wasn’t an option for me; I’d seen everyone and everything too clearly. We’ve already talked about how you can’t go dark again. If I left with Jake, the consequences were impossible to predict. I could hurt a lot of people I loved. I could be hurt myself. I walked over to the closet and got a pair of sneakers, sat down on the bed next to that pile of cash, and laced them up.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Jake, rising.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “It’s not safe. I don’t know what we’re up against and if I can protect us.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  “If you leave here, Ridley, I can’t be responsible for what happens to you,” said Zack. All the concern had left his voice and there was just a petulant anger there. I wondered if he realized that it was the second time he’d said that to me in two days. “Even if you’re not interested in protecting your family, I’ll do what I have to do to protect my mother.”

  Jake and I left Zack standing there with his arms outspread. In the hallway, Jake took me in his arms and kissed me hard on the mouth. I clung to him for a moment, and when I pulled back I could see the relief in his eyes. He wasn’t alone anymore and he knew it. We ran down the remaining flights of stairs and Jake headed toward the front door. I pulled at his arm.

  “There’s another way out of this building,” I told him, and showed him the way to Zelda’s tunnel.

  thirty-four

  I was clever but not clever enough. We had made it east to Avenue C before we sensed rather than saw that we were being followed. The silent street around us seemed to darken with menace as we passed an abandoned lot filled with garbage, a burned-out car, some junkies huddled in a corner with a pipe glowing between them. I think we felt rather than heard the low rumble of the engine of a car that was following us without headlights. Jake took my hand and we started to run. We ran hard, expecting at any second to hear the sound of gunfire, but there was nothing. The only sound I heard was our footfalls and our breathing. The city seemed to draw a breath and hold it.

  On Avenue D we turned the corner. We looked around and there was no one in sight. We ran up the front steps of a condemned apartment building and slipped through the triangle of space where someone had pushed back the piece of plywood that acted as the door. Inside, we peered through the window that
was black with soot from some long-ago fire and saw a Lincoln Town Car come to a stop on the avenue. Men wearing ski masks emerged from the vehicle and I swear my heart almost stopped. I felt as if the city was an alien world where all the rules had changed. It was like Escape from New York or something, only there was no escape. Jake put his hand over my mouth against the cry of panic he must have sensed coming.

  “Stay with me, Ridley. Stay calm, girl.”

  I nodded and together we made our way through a ruined foyer that reeked of smoke. I pulled my shirt up over my nose to keep myself from breathing in the filthy air so I wouldn’t cough or sneeze. We passed a mustard couch that lay on its back beside a rusted file cabinet with no drawers. We started to climb a crumbling staircase that groaned in protest beneath our weight. On the next level, we again looked out the window and saw the men, four of them, walking the street looking for us, climbing front stoops, peering in windows.

  The building was only three stories high, and at the top we could see that something from the roof had fallen through all the way to the bottom, leaving a gaping hole in the ceiling above us and in each floor below, so that we could clearly see the ground-floor entrance to the building from our perch on the third. We sat on the floor and Jake took out his gun, lay on his belly, and trained it on the door below us. We sat listening to the men call to one another on the street below us, and then everything went quiet. We waited. Then it started to rain. We were unprotected in the downpour.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered after a few minutes. He looked up at me.

  I shook my head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “I did this to your life, Ridley.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Yes. If I hadn’t left that second note…if I had let this all go away for you, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

  I shook my head. There was no point in thinking like this; it was way too late. There was only moving forward now, hoping to survive this night.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “It was my choice to be here with you tonight. I chose.” And that was the truth. He nodded and I leaned in to kiss him. But then he was firing his gun at something behind me. The night fractured in a gale of light and thunder and we were falling.

  I fell only one floor, but Jake went all the way down to the ground level. I heard his body hit the floor so hard, I felt it in my own bones. I think I had a split second of unconsciousness before the sound of voices brought me around.

  “What the fuck? Where did they go?”

  They’d come from the roof of another building, I realized.

  “Watch out, you fucking moron, the floor’s not solid.” I heard a heavy thump and watched as more debris fell through the hole. I couldn’t see the men above me and hoped it meant that they couldn’t see me.

  “Don’t fire until you see one of them, for Christ’s sake. This building is going to crumble like a pile of shit.”

  I looked down to see Jake lying below me. He wasn’t moving and I felt a shock of fear and dread like I’d never felt before. I began to crawl when a white-hot pain in my leg rocketed through me, so intense, I held back vomit. I couldn’t see what was in my leg, only the tear in my pants and the sticky, hot, wet feeling of blood. There was something lodged in there and any movement made me want to scream. But my desire to get to Jake was greater than my physical pain and I dragged myself to the staircase, pulled myself up on the banister, and managed to make it to the bottom before they rained bullets on me again.

  I pushed myself against the wall and watched the bullets shred the floor and walls around me. Jake lay still on the floor, unresponsive to the noise and the danger. I heard a heavy thud and a sudden crashing followed by a groan.

  “Angelo! Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” a voice with a thick New York accent responded. “I fell through the fucking floor.”

  I used this distraction to make it to Jake before the bullets started to rain again.

  thirty-five

  “Six,” he whispers.

  “What?”

  “You have six bullets left.”

  I nod to him and keep my eyes on the staircase. I’ve heard Zack’s voice, so I know he’s one of the men coming after us, and I just can’t get my head around this. He would kill us to keep his secret, then pretend to grieve at my funeral. This is the man my father wanted me to marry. My hands are shaking with pain and fear and rage. White lights have started to dance in front of my vision.

  “We can make this right,” he calls, though I still can’t see him. I know they’re close; I can hear the stairs groaning. At the instant I see a leg, I fire and miss. The sound is so loud and the kickback so powerful that I let out a little scream of terror. My ears are ringing. When I look back, the leg is gone. Maybe I can hold them at bay for a while like this. Now there are five bullets and four men.

  “Don’t waste the bullets on impossible shots,” Jake whispers. “Wait until you can shoot center mass. You’ll never hit otherwise.” I look over at him. He’s lying so still it seems as if he can’t move, and I can see he’s in so much pain.

  “Ridley, please,” calls Zack. “It doesn’t have to end this way. My offer stands. You loved me once. Can’t you trust me now?”

  I look at Jake and he looks at me. Jake puts a finger to his lips and points up. I can see the men above us with their guns pointed down. Zack is just trying to get me to talk so that the men know where to fire. I smile grimly and stay silent.

  “Fuck it,” Zack says finally.

  When they start shooting, I fire back. Their shots spit and bounce off the walls around us and one even hits the couch, but it doesn’t come through the frame. I keep waiting to feel metal pierce my skin. I can feel Jake trying to protect my body with his. The smell of gunpowder fills my nose, and my ears are ringing so loudly, everything else seems muffled. The situation takes on a nonreality and I am not as afraid as I should be. I think this must be what combat feels like, surreal, so terrifying that your mind’s ability to perceive danger and your capacity for fear diminish. With one of my shots, a man falls heavily to the floor with a groan, but there are three more and the shooting doesn’t seem to end. I aim with each remaining bullet as best I can, but soon the gun is empty and the other men are still firing on us. In the movies, I would have hit them all with my few bullets, but I learn that I’m not a very good shot. When the gun is empty, I drop it to the floor and cling to Jake, thinking we are going to die here tonight. And the one thing I can say for sure is that I don’t have any regrets. I’m glad he didn’t have to face this alone.

  I close my eyes and think I’m dreaming when I hear the chopping blades of a helicopter and see the room flood with light.

  “Drop your weapons!” roars the voice of God. “Get down on the ground and put your hands behind your heads.”

  In the chaos of light and sound, the gunfire ceases. I can feel Jake’s arms strong around me, holding me.

  “Ridley,” I hear God calling me. “Ridley Jones, are you okay? Are you down there?”

  And from fear or pain or sheer relief everything goes black.

  thirty-six

  It’s like I said before. The universe doesn’t like secrets. It conspires to reveal the truth, to lead you to it. As easy as it might have been for me to accept Alexander Harriman’s deal and walk away, the universe just didn’t allow it. Harriman had said Project Rescue had grown into something Max couldn’t control. Turned out it had grown into something Alexander Harriman couldn’t control, either.

  Closure. We all seek it. We seek the end of things and also the beginning of new things. Those things we can’t find closure on, they haunt us. They pop up in our dreams, they creep into our thoughts in idle moments, like a mind-bender that’s beyond our mental capacity, a mystery that just won’t be solved. I think about Teresa Stone, my biological mother, fighting to save her child and losing her life in the process. I think about Christian Luna with his thousand regrets and failed atte
mpt at redemption. I think about Max, my father, and all the crimes he committed in his quest to heal himself through “helping” others. I think about all the rest of those parents, their children’s faces on the back of mailers and milk cartons. Those awful age-graduated composites, what they’d look like five, six, ten years after they’d gone missing, showing up in mailboxes, in cafeterias. Maybe some of those people deserved to lose their children, maybe some of them didn’t. But I’m willing to bet that for every Project Rescue baby out there, there’s a haunted soul. For Jessie, it was Christian Luna. For Charlie, it was Linda McNaughton.

  If I had done as Harriman asked, the people responsible for that pain would have continued on with their days; people like Zack and Esme would continue making judgments and playing God with strangers’ lives, never having a moment of guilt or pain. But my life would have been populated with the ghosts of the people I’d failed to help, Jake chief among them.

  Speaking of helping people, it was Gus Salvo who saved us that night in the condemned building. He’d had a tail on Angelo Numbruzio because of the shell casings they found at the scene of Christian Luna’s murder. When the cop watching Numbruzio discovered that he had contacted Zack and was headed for my building, Detective Salvo put the pieces together…a little on the slow side maybe, but just in time at least.

  In the fall, Jake had broken his right leg and left arm and punctured his lung. He’d severely strained his back but all the vertebrae were intact. The bullet that had pierced my thigh had missed the major artery. It’s the little things, remember? A fraction of an inch and I wouldn’t be here to tell you what happened to us.

  When I regained consciousness at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Gus Salvo was the first thing I saw. Not pretty, but better than a lot of things I’d seen recently.

  “Where’s Jake?” I asked, my heart filling with panic, remembering the last moments we were together.

  “He’s fine,” he said kindly. “Well, he’ll be fine.”