If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  Abby was hiding.

  Hank had practically begged his way into the Hammel College job when he learned about the girl in the coma. He thought this might be useful for Abby, if for no other reason than it would get her to open up a little, tell him what exactly was wrong so he could go about helping her. That hadn’t worked out, though, and so on the day when Hank arrived at his home to find an unfamiliar white Jeep in his driveway, he was thinking that he needed to get out of this case before it became a real mess.

  The white Jeep pushed those thoughts from his mind. Hank didn’t have many visitors.

  The rain splattered over the windshield made it look empty, but then the door opened and a kid in a black baseball cap stepped out and waited with a weird half smile. Hank got out of the car into the misting rain.

  “Can I help you, fella?”

  “Mr. Bauer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My name’s Matt Norris.”

  “Okay.” Hank waited, but the kid was quiet, hands still in his pockets, odd smile still on his face.

  “So you dropped by just to practice introducing yourself?” Hank said. “You did real well on the part with your name. The rest needs work.”

  Norris laughed softly. “No. Sorry, my mind wandered. I’m not real sure I should’ve come by at all.” He took one hand from his pockets and adjusted the black baseball cap. “I couldn’t get the cops to listen to me, though.”

  Hank straightened. “Cops?”

  Matt Norris nodded without changing expression, as if it were perfectly normal to be standing in the rain on a stranger’s property talking about the cops.

  “I go to Hammel College.”

  Aw, shit. “Yeah? That’s terrific. But Matt, buddy, I don’t step in front of police, okay?”

  “You’re a private investigator.”

  “No. I’m in the insurance business.”

  “You have a private investigator’s license.”

  Hank sighed and rubbed his face with a damp palm. “That’s marketing crap. I’m no detective, I don’t want to play one on TV or in my yard in the rain. You got something to say on that wreck, it should be to the cops, not me.”

  “Carlos Ramirez wasn’t driving the car,” the kid said. “How ’bout that?”

  I almost went bowling, Hank thought. It was a coin-toss decision back there at the office—head to the alley or head home. Why in the hell didn’t I go to the bowling alley?

  Something told him the kid would’ve waited, though.

  “Come on in out of the rain,” Hank said with a sigh. “You’re going to cause me enough trouble without giving me pneumonia too.”

  The kid laughed too loudly. As Hank unlocked his door and held it open for Matt Norris to pass through, he was frowning. It hadn’t been that funny of a line, but from that laugh, you’d have thought the kid was at a comedy club.

  Something’s off with him, Hank thought, and then he closed the door to shut out the rain and the darkening sky.

  20

  Abby was in the shower when her phone began to ring. She let it go, but then it rang again and again, and so she shut off the water, knotted a towel above her breasts, and went out to the living room, leaving wet footprints behind.

  It was Hank.

  “Can’t leave a message?” Abby said, the phone held against her damp cheek. “I was in the shower.”

  “Sorry, kid.” Hank’s voice was strained, as if he were calling in the middle of a workout. “Think you can stop by here?”

  Abby cocked her head, shedding a spray of water from her hair to the floor. “Now? What’s up?”

  “I, uh…I guess that Ramirez story might have some issues. You were right, I think. Anyhow, uh, Meredith is coming by with some cop from Brighton, and they want the phones.”

  “They’re coming by your house?”

  “Yeah.” There was a rustling sound, and Hank gave a quick, harsh intake of breath before he said, “And he’s going to want the phones.”

  “Sure thing,” Abby said. “Give me twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.”

  “Yeah. Faster the better. Thanks, Abs.” Hank hung up.

  Abby lowered the phone, frowning. Hank had sounded tense, worried. Cops coming to your house could do that, though, especially when one of them was from out of state and working on a murder case.

  She thought about that as she toweled off and dressed in jeans, a light base layer, and a fleece. She had the window cracked to let the steam bleed out of the bathroom, and she could hear the laughter of patrons at Run of the Mill, a brewery that shared a portion of her apartment building, all of it the reimagined and repurposed site of what had once been the Pepperell Mill, a textile mill that had at one time employed what seemed like half of Biddeford. Now it was a mixture of condos and businesses, and the roof was lined with solar panels—but the Saco River remained, and Abby enjoyed listening to the water as the town found new ways to thrive around it. The river was the constant, and the river ran steady. She appreciated that.

  As she tugged a brush through towel-dried hair, she thought of the police waiting at Hank’s, and when she picked up the decaying shoe box of phones and chargers, some of the cardboard flaked off in her hands. She didn’t relish the idea of explaining to police from Boston that she’d transported evidence in a homicide investigation back and forth through the rain in a shoe box. She found some plastic bags and separated the phones and chargers. Savage Sam had been nearly positive that what he’d taken out of the car was an iPhone, so she separated those too, then put the iPhone chargers in with the iPhones, figuring anything that made it look more official couldn’t hurt. For all of Hank’s jokes about his PI license, it carried legal liability, and Abby didn’t want to put him at risk.

  Should’ve just called Meredith to begin with, she thought. But it had been Hank’s idea for her to take the phones to Shannon Beckley, and back then there’d been no questions of guilt and no bullets in Carlos Ramirez’s brain. Or at least nobody had known about them.

  Abby found a Sharpie and wrote the date and her name and Beckley case on the three plastic bags. Hardly a proper evidence folder, but better than a soggy shoe box.

  She left her apartment and drove away from the mill toward Hank’s house, the bagged phones and chargers on the passenger seat. Usually she avoided the short stretch of turnpike that was the fastest route, but Hank had asked her to hurry, so tonight she took it. Driving was easier for her at night, regardless of traffic. She didn’t feel as crowded in the dark or as exposed. There was no horizon line, and your visual range in the mirrors was limited. The blackness obscured both where you’d been and where you were going. Somehow, that containment helped dull the anxiety brought on by visible obstacles ahead, and it eased the dread of traffic rising up behind.

  It was only seven miles on the turnpike before she exited onto the county roads, and she made it without incident, no dry mouth or racing pulse. Traffic was light, but it probably helped that she was distracted too. She didn’t like the idea of sitting down with police on this. David Meredith was fine; Abby knew him a bit, and Hank knew him well. But homicide detectives from Boston? That was different. That brought back memories too. The detectives in California hadn’t been homicide cops, but they’d felt close enough.

  Clean blood isn’t everything, Ms. Kaplan. We’re looking at that curve and that guardrail and trying to figure out how exactly you got airborne. And you’re a pretty good driver, we understand. Professional.

  She turned off the county road and onto the teeth-rattling gravel that wound through the pines and bone-colored birches that surrounded Hank’s place. It was beautiful country, but isolated. The deep woods were never far from you in Maine. Abby was a native Mainer, but she wasn’t completely comfortable here at night. Her childhood home had had sidewalks and streetlights; this place, deserted except for snowmobile trails and tree stands, had always seemed foreign to her.

  As she drove slowly through the ruts, a few untrimmed branches swiped her Chrysle
r, and even the high beams didn’t seem to cut the darkness. There was a single light on in Hank’s house, a glow from the kitchen. That was unusual, because Hank spent only as much time in the kitchen as it took him to microwave his dinner. He also didn’t use the blinds, but tonight they were closed.

  In the narrow driveway, Hank’s Tahoe was parked behind a white Jeep. There was no room to pull up alongside or even turn around without driving onto the lawn. Abby parked behind the Tahoe, and she was about to kill the engine and get out when she felt the familiar warm buzz in her veins that had been her early-warning system for so many years, that rapid pulse of adrenaline-laced instinct that was triggered when you were doing a hundred and fifty miles per hour and saw the cars in front of you shift and knew that something was about to go wrong. That silent alarm had been Abby’s gift on the track. She’d been able to tell when things were going bad just a fraction of a second ahead of most.

  They’re positioned wrong, she thought now.

  Hank had said the police were coming, not that the police were already there. But the Jeep was sitting in front of the Tahoe. Unless Hank had come and gone in the twenty minutes since he’d called Abby, whoever was driving the Jeep had been here first.

  She sat with the engine growling and the headlights on and stared at the cars and the house, and her hand drifted back to the gearshift. She almost put it in reverse. But what was she going to do, back out of here and call Hank from the road and say she was scared of the Jeep? Come on. She’d spent too much time thinking paranoid thoughts on the train after seeing Tara Beckley and hearing about Carlos Ramirez. Her mind was built for that now; the docs had told her this. Panic floated; panic drifted like dark smoke and found new places in the brain to call home.

  Screw that. Be tough, Abby. Be who you always were.

  She released the gearshift and killed the engine. While the headlights dimmed, she grabbed the three plastic bags of cell phones and chargers, and was reaching for the door when the strange fear rose again, and she found herself shoving the bag with the iPhones under the driver’s seat.

  I’ll say I dropped it. When I know that things are legit, I’ll come back and get it.

  No clean logic to the choice, just a response to that old pulse in the blood, to that fresh dark smoke drifting through her brain. People have died and someone wants those phones. You don’t just carry them through the door.

  She got out of the car with the two bags in hand, the Chrysler parked behind the two SUVs, forming a mini-caravan in the narrow driveway. She looked at the Jeep’s plate—Massachusetts. Good. That was as promised. But where was David Meredith?

  The rain had stopped but puddles littered the dirt driveway like land mines. Abby dodged them, crossed the yard, went up the front steps, and rapped her knuckles on the wall as she pulled open the screen door. Hank’s muted voice floated out from inside.

  “Yeah, Abs. Come in.”

  She pushed open the front door, stepped inside, looked toward the light, and saw Hank tied to a kitchen chair.

  It was an old wooden straight-backed chair, and he was bound to it with thin green cord. His right arm was wrapped tight against his side, but his left arm was free, and he lifted it with his palm out, signaling for Abby to stop.

  The gesture wasn’t required. Abby stood frozen in midstride, staring at the scene in front of her as the screen door slapped shut behind her with a bang.

  “Close the other one too,” a soft voice from behind her said, and as Abby whirled toward the voice there was the distinctive metallic snap of a cocking revolver.

  21

  For a moment it was still and silent. The only light was coming from a battery lantern that threw an eerie, too-white glow over the kitchen and couldn’t penetrate the shadows in the rest of the house. Whoever was speaking was standing in the hallway, no more than a silhouette against the darkness.

  A silhouette and a gun.

  “Abby?” the figure in the hall said. “Close the door.”

  Abby reached out and took the cold metal knob in her left hand and closed the door.

  “Good,” the man in the hall said. “Now lock it.”

  Abby moved faster to obey this instruction, turning the dead bolt and dropping her hand quickly to distract from the quarter turn she’d given the lock, enough to move the bolt but not enough to shoot it home. If she made it back to the door, it would open when she twisted the doorknob.

  “Go into the kitchen,” the man in the darkness said, and Abby obeyed again, shuffling backward, moving off the wooden floor and onto the tile of the kitchen. She glanced at the kitchen counter, expecting to see the block of knives that always sat beneath a years-old calendar that showed Abby being showered with cheap champagne by her father and Hank and Hank’s then-girlfriend after Abby had become the youngest driver—and the first woman—to win at the Bald Mountain Speedway.

  The calendar was there. The block of knives was gone.

  “Stop,” the man said, and Abby stopped and then the man walked out of the shadows and into the light and Abby saw him clearly.

  He was a child, almost. Eighteen or nineteen, maybe twenty—but probably not. His boyish face was shaded by a black baseball cap with chrome-colored stitching that matched the cylinders on his black revolver, as if he’d coordinated the outfit. The gun was offset by that almost friendly face. He wore the sort of perpetual but false half smile of someone whose job required him to feign interest in the troubles of strangers, like a hotel concierge.

  “Hello, Abby,” he said.

  “Who are you?”

  “You think I’m going to give my name in this situation? Come on. Be better than that.”

  Abby looked at Hank. He seemed unharmed—no blood, no bruises—but absolutely terrified. He searched Abby’s eyes but didn’t speak and Abby saw something beyond fear in his face—apology.

  “Put the bags on the counter,” the kid said.

  Abby did.

  “You have a weapon?” the kid asked.

  “No.”

  “You don’t mind if I verify that?”

  “No.”

  “Very gracious, thanks.” The kid pressed the muzzle of the revolver to Abby’s head as he patted her down with his free hand. He was wearing thin black gloves, and his touch made her skin crawl and her stomach knot, but she tried not to give him the satisfaction of a visible reaction. He took her phone and felt over her car keys but left them in her pocket.

  The gun moved away from Abby’s skull and then the kid stepped back, looked down at her phone, and tapped the screen. The display filled with the image on the lock screen: Luke sitting on a rock overlooking the Pacific, a smile on his face, his tousled hair blown wild by the wind.

  “He was handsome, wasn’t he?” the kid said, and then he tossed the phone onto the counter. “A shame what happened to him. I know the expression is ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,’ but he didn’t really earn that live-fast idea. I mean, at least James Dean was driving, right?”

  Abby’s slap came without premeditation. She simply swung.

  The kid sidestepped it with ease—damn, he was fast—and laughed.

  “I seem to have touched a nerve,” he said. “Apologies.” He nodded at a chair that was pulled back from the table. “Take a seat.”

  “What do you want?” Abby asked.

  “More original material, for one. You’re asking such obvious questions: Who are you? What do you want? It gets tedious to be the guy with the gun. Redundant.”

  The kid looked so unthreatening despite the gun that Abby found herself measuring the distance between them and wondering if she should attack. She just needed to sweep that gun hand away. As long as the bullet went wide when he pulled the trigger, Abby didn’t think it would be hard to take the gun from him. He was looking at her and seeing a small woman who couldn’t throw a punch. She’d blackened the eyes and bloodied the noses of a few guys who’d thought that same thing.

  If he tries to tie you, then do it, s
he told herself. Punch, kick, bite—do anything and everything if he tries to tie you up. But not until then. As long as you can move, then just talk through whatever this is.

  “I asked you to sit,” the kid said.

  Abby sat. The battery lantern was on the table next to two tumbler glasses filled with whiskey, a bottle standing between them. Gentleman Jack.

  She was now facing Hank, and her back was to the door. Hank’s jowly face was drained of color, and he was breathing in short, audible pants. His eyes flicked away from Abby’s, down and to the left, as if he were trying to see behind himself. Abby followed the look and saw that Hank’s portable generator was on the floor behind his chair.

  What in the hell is that doing in here? It was a gasoline-fueled backup generator, capable of producing enough electricity to run the lights, TV, and a space heater or two for a few days. The rural road wasn’t a high priority for the Central Maine Power repair crews. Abby had never seen the generator inside the house, though.

  Battery lantern on, generator inside? The power’s out, and the kid doesn’t know enough to leave the generator outdoors. But if he wants it, then he thinks we’re going to be here for a while. He’s not just going to take the phones and go. We’re waiting on someone else.

  “Get comfortable,” the kid said, as if confirming Abby’s thoughts. “Let’s have a drink.”

  Abby looked at the full whiskey glass, then back at Hank’s face, and shook her head. “What’s in it?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” the kid said. “That’s a fine-quality whiskey. Not cool enough for the hipsters, you know, it’s not small-batch stuff, but it’s awfully smooth. And the name is nice. The name is…meaningful to me.”

  He gave Abby a smile that looked positively warm and kind.

  “Gentleman Jack,” he said, and his voice went a little wistful at the end, as if they were all sharing in this strange reverie. “And double-mellowed, it says. That’s a funny joke if you knew my family. But you don’t, unfortunately. Nevertheless, please have a drink, Abby.”