She shook her head again. The kid sighed and leveled the pistol so the muzzle was just inches away from Hank’s knee.
“We can drink,” the kid said, “or we can bleed.”
Abby took the glass. The kid nodded in approval and then spoke to Hank without turning to him. “You too, old-timer. We’re all celebrating.”
Hank took the glass. His hand was shaking, and some of the whiskey spilled over the top and dripped down the backs of his hairy fingers in golden beads. Abby saw for the first time that one of the cords binding him to the chair was actually an extension cord, and it had been cut and stripped so the bare wires glistened.
What in the hell had happened in here? What had Hank endured before making his call?
“Drink up,” the kid said, and both Abby and Hank took a swallow. The whiskey had a mellow burn, but nothing about it tasted unfamiliar or tainted. Abby drank a finger of whiskey and set the glass down. Hank got less of it in, his hand still shaking; some of the whiskey dribbled from the corner of his lip and down his chin.
“Good stuff, isn’t it?” the kid said. He was hardly more than a child. But Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had been children too.
“Take the phones,” Abby said. “Take them and go. We don’t know what it’s about. We can’t begin to send anyone after you. We don’t know enough to do that.”
“Who else knows about the phones?”
“Nobody.”
“No? Then who bagged them? They were in a shoe box before.” He smiled at Abby’s reaction. “Don’t like that I know that, do you?”
She shrugged. “Don’t care. I bagged them. I labeled them too.”
“If I need an assistant, I’ll keep you in mind. Now, again, who else has seen them?”
Abby almost answered honestly. She was afraid, both for herself and for Hank, and she had no stake in whatever insanity was transpiring around that car wreck and the lies Carlos Ramirez had told before he was murdered. So tell the truth, her brain commanded. But instead she said, “Nobody else has seen them.”
“And how many people know you have them?”
“One. The guy I took them from.”
The kid studied her intently. “You understand how imperative it is for us to be honest with each other? How badly this night might go if you make one poor decision?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s try that question again. You seem to struggle with even basic addition. I didn’t realize your academic record was as poor as your driving record.” Whatever he saw in Abby’s face then made him smile. “Yes, I’ve acquainted myself with your history. Mr. Bauer here has been helpful in that regard.”
Abby looked at Hank, who gazed back with apology, his face sickly white.
“One more time,” the kid said. “How many people know you have them?”
Again, Abby thought about telling the truth. Again, she decided against it. “Well, it would be two people, I guess,” she said. She nodded at Hank. “He makes two.”
“Will two become four if you think on it a little longer?”
“No. That’s all.”
“You sound convincing. And yet my friend Hank here said you took them to Boston. Which means you’re lying to me now.”
Hank’s exhale whistled between his teeth. “I didn’t say—”
The kid moved the gun to Hank’s temple without turning his head or body, the gun landing on its target point with the accuracy and fluid speed that came only with practice or natural talent. Or—far worse for Abby—both.
“Hank?” the kid said. “I’ve still got the floor.”
Hank was quiet. Abby tried to remember what exactly they’d said in the phone conversation they’d had when she was on the train. Did she tell him that Shannon Beckley had seen the phones? Did she say that she’d called Meredith? For that matter, had she called Meredith? No, Hank had called him. Right? Why couldn’t she remember something so simple? She was having more trouble thinking than she should have. Her mind felt foggy and slow.
She looked at the whiskey bottle. The kid followed her eyes.
“Let’s finish those drinks, shall we?” he said.
“No,” Abby said.
The kid lowered the muzzle of the revolver so it nestled in Hank’s eye socket.
“All right,” Hank said, and he reached for the glass. His one visible eye was wide and white with panic. “Come on, Abs,” he said. “Please. Just do as he says.”
“Those are the words of a man who wants to see the morning,” the kid said, and he smiled as Hank gulped the whiskey, sloshing more of it down his chin. “But this can’t be a one-man party. Abby? It will be that glass or this gun. You pick.”
Abby took the glass and drank more of the whiskey. It put a high and tight feeling in the back of her skull. It would not have been an unpleasant sensation in other circumstances. But now it was terrifying.
It’s going to slow you down. Even if he didn’t put anything else in it, the booze alone will slow you down if you don’t do something in a hurry.
There was something else in it, though. She could feel that already. This was the steroid-injected version of the fear that haunted any woman who was handed a drink made by a stranger—the taste was just right, nothing there to warn you of what was on the way, of oncoming blackness and horrors that you might not remember even if you lived to see morning.
“Nothing like a little whiskey on a cool dark night,” the kid said. “Tell you what, though. Let’s do something about that chill in the air.”
Still keeping the gun in his right hand, he reached into his back pocket with his left and pulled out a length of coiled parachute cord. The same kind that bound Hank to his chair. Abby tensed, but the kid just smiled and tossed the cord onto the counter.
“We won’t need that, right? You’re not running?”
“No.”
“Good. It’s getting cold in here. I’m going to run the space heater if you don’t mind.” He walked behind Hank, knelt by the generator, and flicked the battery on. Red lights glowed. He switched the revolver from his right hand to his left and jerked the starter cord. The motor growled but choked out. The cord demanded more of his attention than he wanted to give, and when his eyes darted away, Abby slipped her right hand into the pocket of her fleece and closed it around the key fob to the Chrysler. Its surface was smooth, but she was familiar with the four buttons on its face and knew which one operated the remote start. All she had to do was press it twice. The car was parked facing the house, and it would throw its lights toward the door, but, more important, the engine would turn over. She thought that would make the kid look in that direction. It would probably be a very fast look, but it would happen.
That would likely be the last chance Abby would have to move.
The generator caught on the second pull and clattered to life, belching out a cloud of exhaust. The kid plugged in a space heater, and the ceramic coils inside glowed red.
“Damn power outages,” he said. “They’re a bitch out here in the woods.”
He straightened, reached in his back pocket, withdrew a plastic mask, and pulled it over his face. It looked like the masks the fire crews wore at the speedway when they knew the fumes and smoke might threaten their lungs.
Abby understood things then. The kid intended to get plenty of booze in their bloodstream and let exhaust fumes fill the room; when it was over, he’d untie them. They’d look like a couple of clueless dead drunks.
“It’s not worth this,” Abby said. “Whatever you think we understand…we don’t.”
“I agree,” the kid said, voice muffled by the mask. “Want to stop me? Tell me the truth about who has seen those phones.”
Abby said, “This was why he didn’t roll the van.”
“Pardon?”
“I wasn’t wrong. Ramirez was attempting to hit them the whole time.”
“Remarkable detective work,” the kid said. “Keep this one around, Hank. She’s brilliant. She walks into your house, sees you tied up by a man with a gun
, and suddenly realizes that there’s trouble afoot.”
He took a step closer to Abby and lowered himself so he was eye level with her. “Tell me who knows about the phones.”
“I already did.”
The kid shrugged and adjusted the generator’s choke until the engine was fighting between firing and flooding. The exhaust smoked blue in the white light of the lantern.
Her thumb tightened on the key fob, but she didn’t press it yet. If the kid intended to use the gun, he wouldn’t have gone through the effort of hauling the generator in here. The carbon monoxide from the generator wouldn’t knock them out for a while yet, even in a small space. Abby had time. Not much; it was going to be an awfully small window of opportunity and she’d have to move awfully fast, but she still had time.
“This is a stupid idea,” she said. “It won’t fool anyone. You want police to believe we just got drunk and passed out with the generator running? You’ll get caught. You’ll go to jail.”
The mask muffled his laugh. “You’d be surprised how many friends I’ve got around jails,” he said. “Some in cells, some in uniforms.”
Who the hell is this kid? “They’ll be able to tell that Hank had been tied up,” Abby said. “It’ll be obvious.” Her words came slowly and thickly, but the kid seemed to give them careful consideration. Then he spoke in a gentle voice, as if breaking news that it pained him to share.
“I don’t think you two are important enough to warrant intense scrutiny from a medical examiner.” He lifted his free hand, palm out, to make it clear that he’d meant no offense. “Now, I might be wrong. But…two hill-jack insurance investigators sitting in a shitty cabin, power out, heater cooking, and their blood full of alcohol? No, I don’t think it’s going to get the level of forensic study that you’re hoping for.”
“There’s a generator plug on the back deck,” Abby said. “Hank installed it. Nobody will believe we sat here with it inside.”
The mask nodded up and down. The voice from behind it said: “Your critique is duly noted.”
“It won’t work,” Abby said. Her tongue felt thick against the roof of her mouth. Too thick for just the whiskey.
Time’s running out. The window’s closing, your fuel is low, your tires are bad, and all these other assholes have more money under the hoods, but that doesn’t matter because you’ve got reflexes, you’ve got instinct, you’ve got…
She came back to awareness with a jerk, her subconscious kicking her awake.
The kid smiled. “Getting tired, Abby?”
“No.” And she wasn’t anymore; that last jolt of adrenaline had cleared some of the fog, but she knew she was running out of time fast. “I’m just telling you that this won’t work.”
“It seems I’ll have to try it simply to settle this debate.”
The foggy feeling from the whiskey was blending with the acrid fumes. She stared at the bottle and wondered whether she could grab it and slam it into the kid’s skull without getting shot. Wondered whether her motor skills were deteriorating as fast as her speech.
Going to have to try soon.
“How much did you already have, Hank?” Abby said, and Hank blinked sleepily at her and then refocused.
“It’s a bad deal,” Hank said thickly. “Shouldn’t have called you. Knew better. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t give up yet, champ,” the kid said, and his eyes flicked toward Hank.
Abby thought it was the best chance she’d get.
She punched the remote start on the key fob twice, taking care not to move the rest of her body. There was a slight lag, and then the motor growled and the running lights blinked on.
When it happened, Abby turned toward the sound with surprise, even though she’d been counting on it. It was this that sold the trick. The kid originally turned toward her, but when he saw Abby’s surprise, he, too, looked toward the yard. Then he leaned across the table to push back the window blinds.
Abby rose and grabbed the neck of the whiskey bottle. She didn’t pause to draw the bottle back or change its position, knowing that time was short; she simply swung it up in one continuous motion, aiming for the kid’s face. She moved well despite the fogginess in her brain, and she was sure the strike was going to work.
The kid’s speed was incredible.
Where his head had offered a clear shot, nothing but air waited.
Abby’s momentum carried her forward. The bottle flew from her hand and shattered off the wall in a cloud of glass and whiskey, and then she fell to the floor beside Hank’s chair. The kid had somehow pivoted and leaped in a single fluid motion, avoiding the contact and also maintaining his balance. He pointed the gun at Abby’s face. Above the mask, his eyes were bright with amusement.
“You’re quick,” he said. “Better than I’d have guessed.”
All of their attention was on each other, so when Hank moved, it surprised Abby as much as the kid. Hank’s chair lurched sideways and the hand that had been left untied so he could drink suddenly locked over the kid’s forearm.
The revolver fired; the shot went wide, the bullet sparking off the generator’s engine block. Hank overbalanced and fell, but he kept his hand on the kid’s arm and so they both went down while Abby tried to rise. Hank hit the floor with a splintering crack that Abby hoped was the chair and not his arm. The kid landed on the other side of Abby, twisting while he fell, composed and nimble. He would’ve made a clean landing if Abby hadn’t gotten in the way by sheer accident.
Her rising shoulder caught the kid’s knee and knocked him off balance, and when he fell, his gun hand landed squarely on the glowing grill of the space heater.
The burn achieved what neither Abby nor Hank had been able to—it made the kid finally drop the gun. Even as he howled in pain, though, he was already reaching for the weapon with the other hand, absolutely relentless.
Hank just beat him, managing to roll onto his side and over the gun. He was still bound to the chair, his free arm dangling uselessly now, clearly broken. He couldn’t have picked the gun up and fired it even if it had landed in his fingers. But he’d covered it with his body, and he looked up at Abby, his eyes wide and white, and said, “Run.”
Abby scrambled to her feet and started toward Hank, but he repeated his command, and this time it was a scream.
“Run!”
Abby ran.
22
She reached the front door and turned the knob and then the door was open and she fell onto the screen door and tore it half off the hinges as she surged through it and into the cold night air.
If she’d been thinking clearly, she would have left the driveway and angled toward the trees, seeking cover immediately, but she wasn’t thinking, just moving, and so she ran ten yards straight out of the door and down the wide-open drive, and it was only the sound of the growling engine on the Chrysler that brought her out of the fog.
Don’t run. Drive, dummy. Driving is faster.
She had her hand on the door when a gunshot cracked and the driver’s window exploded. Glass needled across her hands, and a thin line of blood ran down her index finger as she slid into the driver’s seat, jammed her foot on the brake, and punched the starter button to engage the transmission of the idling car. She kept her head under the dash as she shifted into reverse and pounded the gas, focused on two things—she had to stay down to avoid a bullet, and she had to keep the wheel steady and the accelerator pinned to the floor. Hank’s driveway was a straight shot through the pines and back to the rutted road; she didn’t need to lift her head to drive, not yet.
She kept her foot on the gas and her bloody hands tight on the wheel, driving blind but straight.
You’ll know when you hit the road. And then you’d better get your foot on the brake fast.
It seemed to take longer than it should have—driving blind ruined distance perception—but finally she felt a thunk under the back wheels as the Chrysler left the driveway. She slammed on the brake, sending the tires slaloming through the
wet dirt and gravel of the camp road, and managed to bring the car to a stop without sliding into the trees. Now she had to risk looking up.
No bullets came for her, and she didn’t wait to give them a chance, just cut the wheel hard to the left, shifted into drive, and hit the gas again. The decision to go left was simple—the trees were thick to that side, and the right was wide open, making her an easy target. She was expecting more shots. No one fired, though. Even when she passed through a gap between the pines, no bullets came.
She should have understood that the lack of gunfire meant she’d made a mistake.
Instead, all she felt was relief. She was free. Out of sight of the house, out of pistol range, and moving under her own power.
Or the car was moving under its own power at least. Abby, maybe less so. The adrenaline was losing the battle with whatever was in her bloodstream—That’s not just whiskey; what else was in there?—and the windshield was a mess of milky cracks that blurred the road in front of her. The combination was disorienting, and she wanted to stop, get out of the car, and put her feet on the ground.
An engine roared to life behind her.
That sound kept her foot away from the brake.
Just keep going fast, she told herself, go far and go fast, that’s all you need to do.
But she didn’t know where she was going. She’d been on the road to Hank’s a thousand times, but she’d never turned this way coming out of the driveway. What was ahead of her? An intersection? There had to be. She needed a paved road; please, please, let there be a paved road. Give her pavement and nobody would catch her; the devil himself would not catch Abby Kaplan if she had four good tires and a paved surface.
No pavement appeared. The hard-packed dirt road got tighter and rougher. The Chrysler shimmied and shook like it was crossing cobblestones. The trees crept in, branches slapping off both sides of the car. Abby wanted to slow down. Wanted to stop.
No. Hank said to run. You’ve got to run.
But she couldn’t remember what she was running from anymore. Her brain spun, out of sync with her eyes and her hands, and all she could hear was Hank’s voice—or was that Luke’s? Was that Luke telling her to go…
If She Wakes Page 14