Trust Me

by Jeff Abbott

  ‘They’re far away. They can’t help us.’

  ‘Where’s far away?’

  ‘Europe.’

  ‘Why are they taking Aubrey to Europe?’ Then he remembered Frankie Wu’s words back in Chicago, discussing their itinerary. New York. Paris.

  ‘Can you shoot this?’ Drummond pulled a Glock 9 from a kitchen cabinet, pressed it into Luke’s hand.

  ‘If I have lots of time to aim.’

  ‘Don’t be a perfectionist.’ They turned the corner into the entryway. The elevator doors were already open and Mouser leveled his semi-automatic and opened fire. Rounds exploded into the walnut paneling near Luke’s head. Drummond shoved him back around the corner, returning fire.

  They retreated toward the kitchen. The finery of the living room – the cleanly upholstered sofas, the glass table tops, the vivid photos of misspent suffering on the walls – all were splintered and dusted in the gunfire.

  Drummond and Luke went over the kitchen counter. A few more bullets thrummed into the granite-topped island.

  Then silence.

  Drummond pointed at the doorway at the end of the kitchen, gestured that it meant the roof. It would be a run of a dozen feet, uncovered.

  Luke shook his head.

  ‘Schoolboy.’ Luke heard Snow call to him. ‘You left marks on my throat with those chains, and a hole in my shoulder’ – and then she went silent. Luke knew what would happen to him if she got those pale, tender hands on him. She would pay him back with agony.

  He stared at Drummond and listened for the shuffle of feet on broken glass. But there was only silence. The quiet filled his chest with a crushing dread.

  The silence stretched.

  ‘No neighbors to call for help, Mr Drummond,’ Mouser called. ‘This is one empty building. We got people going floor to floor and nobody’s home. How can you afford that in New York?’

  ‘Family money.’ Drummond reached into a drawer and yanked out a large knife.

  ‘Luke, how you doing?’ Mouser called.

  ‘Better than Snow,’ Luke said. Did you kill my dad? He wanted to ask the question but the words wouldn’t form in his mouth.

  ‘You’re a nothing punk to me,’ Mouser said. ‘You cooperate, you get to go home to stepdaddy. You don’t, I’m giving you to my girl, and it’s not going to be sunshine and lollipops. Now shut up and let the big boys talk. Mr Drummond?’

  ‘What, asshole?’

  ‘Tell me who’s trying to screw the Night Road.’

  Drummond said nothing.

  ‘You help me, I help you.’ Mouser’s voice grew closer.

  ‘Fine. Here’s the deal,’ Drummond said. ‘You leave and I won’t kill you.’

  Snow was silent; Luke thought she might be drawing close, grinning at him under her bottle-white hair. He risked a glance around the counter’s edge but didn’t see her.

  ‘I’ll leave, but with Luke. You get to live.’

  Drummond said, ‘Eric stole your money. Not us. And I walk out with Luke.’

  ‘You’re outgunned. I got street gangbangers in the lobby. We’re over a dozen stories up. You got no place to fly.’

  ‘Except into my arms.’ Snow sounded like she was just on the other side of the counter.

  Mouser continued his negotiation. ‘Eric hid the goods and you were gonna fly his ass out here. I think Eric gave Luke and Aubrey our money.’

  ‘You want to know what Eric did with your money?’ Luke said. ‘I know exactly where he stashed it. You kill us, you’ll never ever find it.’ They had nothing left but a bluff. Luke’s fear rose in a tide inside his heart. But he would not let it control him.

  Drummond gestured again at the stairs. No way, Luke thought, no way. But they had no choice.

  ‘Luke. Aren’t you tired of running?’ Mouser said.

  Luke held up a hand to Drummond, five fingers spread and then pointed at the escape route to the rooftop garden. He opened his hands again to five. Then four fingers. A countdown.

  Luke wanted to shoot Mouser. He could feel the hate, the rage swelling in his chest.

  Three. Two.

  ‘Luke, don’t you want to see your stepdad again? You two got lots to discuss,’ Mouser said.

  ‘No,’ Luke said. ‘You talk to him. You’re both traitors.’

  One finger, upraised, holding. Drummond mouthed: you just run. There was no arguing with him. Luke couldn’t look back.

  Go, Drummond mouthed. He had the knife in one hand, the gun in the other.

  ‘You’re the one who’s a traitor,’ Mouser said in a snarl and Luke bolted for the stairs. He expected the rip of bullets. He ducked low, hiking fast up the stairs and he heard gunfire, a cry of fury from Mouser and a scream from Snow.

  The roof. He ran through the door and Drummond was seconds behind him, his shoulder bloodied. Luke slammed the door closed and engaged the bolt. Weird that there was a lock on the outside of the door – it meant that this really was Drummond’s escape route. ‘We have nowhere to go.’

  ‘Wrong. Down.’ Drummond gritted his teeth against the pain.

  ‘It’s suicide.’

  Bullets began to pan hard against the metal of the door around the lock.

  Drummond grabbed Luke, shoved him away from the door. Over the pounding of blows against the reinforced door Luke could hear, hundreds of feet below, the hum of traffic, the whisper of endless shuffles of feet against the pavement.

  ‘Never let yourself get cornered,’ Drummond said.

  ‘We are cornered.’

  Drummond kicked the layer of gravel away near the slightly raised box of metal that looked like a maintenance access point. It was secured by a digital keypad lock. ‘We have only a window of fifteen seconds.’

  ‘What the hell are we doing?’

  ‘If they have gunmen below, you are going to have to shoot. You can be scared, but don’t think about it. It’s time to be your father’s son.’

  The hatchway opened and Drummond gestured to Luke to crawl inside. Behind them the roof door began to creak free from its hinges. ‘Be quiet. Not a sound.’

  Luke wriggled into the darkness. The narrow crawlway led into the elevator housing. Below him, eight feet or so, he could see the top of the elevator car. With a hatch.

  Drummond must’ve intended to go through the elevator and attack Snow and Mouser from behind. They’d surprise them with bullets in the back. But as soon as Mouser and Snow broke through the door and saw the roof was empty – in a matter of seconds – then Mouser would figure they’d re-entered the building. And then he would alert the other gunmen inside.

  Drummond closed the access hatch behind him and raised a grimy finger to his lips. In the dim light given off by the controls and from the glow of the elevator cabin below, Luke thought Drummond looked like a tired old lion. Blood soaked his shoulder.

  They’d shot him. Luke had to get him to a doctor.

  Wincing with pain, Drummond punched in a key command on the elevator’s roof and the soft click sounded of a lock released. He punched other buttons, presumably disabling the weapons scanner so it wouldn’t refuse to lower the car. They slid open the hatch to the elevator, but only an inch. Luke started to shift the hatch open more and Drummond stopped him with a firm grip on his arm. Drummond pointed.

  In the narrow gap, looking down into the elevator, Luke saw a handheld computer dangling from a card feeder at the bottom of the elevator keys. Luke guessed Snow and Mouser had used a digital lock pick to bypass the security in the elevator.

  He heard the roof door at the top of the stairs smash open, Mouser warning Snow to stay back.

  Luke slid the rest of the hatch open, eased himself down into the elevator. If they heard him…

  Snow and Mouser were soon going to see the roof was empty and figure out they were back inside. Within seconds, they would charge back into the building and head for the elevator.

  Luke pressed the ground floor button.

  Nothing happened. The doors stayed open; the elevator
did not move.

  In the distance, he could hear Mouser calling an all-clear to Snow.

  He jabbed at the button again. Nothing. He slid the electronic passkey from the card reader. Tested the button. Nothing. An elevator that wouldn’t move.

  They’d reset the code for the elevator. To keep Drummond and Luke trapped. There was no escape route.

  Luke studied the card reader. He spent way too much time on computers cobbling together the Night Road research; couldn’t he figure out this one? If the passcard had broken the original code – he slid the passkey back into the card reader. The PDA, tied to the card by a thin strip of plastic, blinked to life. A series of numbers raced across the screen.

  He heard the sound of footsteps returning down the stairs. Fevered breathing.

  Combinations of numbers flashed across the readout.

  Luke put himself flat against the door, out of sight from the hallway. They couldn’t see him, and he couldn’t see them. He heard voices barely ten feet away.

  ‘Not over the roof, goddamn it, no broken windows, nothing to lower themselves,’ Mouser said, as if speaking to someone not there. ‘So they’re back in, Sweet Bird.’

  The elevator gave a soft, traitorous ping and the doors began to slide, slowly, closed.

  He heard running footsteps and then the end of a gun jammed into the closing door. The door began, like an obliging devil, to open.

  The only thought that seared into Luke’s head was that hesitation meant death. He seized the gun’s barrel before it could pivot the rest of the way toward him.

  Snow stumbled into the elevator. She swung toward him, trying to wrench back control of the gun and aim it into his stomach. Over her bloodied shoulder, in the gunfire-sprayed hallways, Mouser ran toward them, full sprint, gun up.

  Snow was crazy-strong and she sank her teeth into Luke’s wrist, still trying to turn the gun into his flesh. She crouched between Luke and Mouser.

  Mouser, running full-tilt down the hall, gun raised, screamed at Snow: ‘ Move out of the way!’

  Luke kicked the buttons as he fought with Snow, hitting the door-close button. The doors whooshed shut and the car began to descend.

  Luke tangled with Snow, her mouth smeared with his blood. He saw her gun swing free of his grip. She pivoted the gun toward him. No place to retreat. He pushed her away, yanking the gun back from her, stumbling, falling into a corner of the elevator.

  Then a sudden stop, a screech of metal against metal. Snow collapsed onto him, her hands clawing for the gun, and he barely felt the soft phut of the gun’s discharge.

  She doubled over, spat blood onto his foot. He couldn’t tell if it was his or hers. Her eyes widened as she sank to her knees.

  Drummond dropped through the opening and went to one knee.

  Luke could see the fear in her eyes and her hand went to her shot chest, fist clenched, as though she could hold her life in with her fingers.

  She spat in his face as he leaned close and she died.

  ‘I… I…’ Luke could hardly speak.

  ‘She would have killed you and laughed about it later,’ Drummond said. ‘Let it go. Let’s see what floor we’re on.’

  Above, he heard Mouser screaming Snow’s name.

  41

  It took Mouser only seconds to reason it out. The two bastards – the old man and the nine-lives punk – had entered the elevator shaft from the roof.

  He forced the doors open with a mighty shove. It took all his strength but he peered down into the darkness of the elevator shaft.

  He heard the crack of a shot, saw Drummond, sliding from the roof of the cabin sliding into its interior. The hatch clanged shut.

  ‘Snow!’ He screamed down the shaft. It made an echo: No. No.

  He could see the support rails inside the shaft. He leapt inside, landed on metal, and grabbed hold. He began a mad, spidery scramble downwards.

  Seventh floor. They ran for the stairwell. The floor was a huge, empty open space. Soft light made squares on the concrete floor. There was no place to take cover.

  They moved quietly but quickly down the stairs. Several floors below them, they heard the clang of a door.

  ‘Hell,’ Drummond whispered, leaning against Luke. The injuries to his head and his shoulder made his voice thick, his walk shaky. ‘Don’t let your heart guide you. Stay cool. Remote. Always.’

  ‘Shut up with the advice,’ Luke said.

  ‘By the way, my gun is empty.’

  ‘I have the one you gave me.’

  They reached the third floor. Storage space, empty of tenants. Crates and boxes everywhere. Plastic-wrapped office furniture – chairs, desks.

  Drummond listened. ‘I hear them coming. I think they’re in the stairwell.’

  ‘Then we go out the window.’ Luke hurried along the windows, peering down. One side of the building was scarce of foot traffic.

  He stripped plastic from a heavy desk, he braided the fire hose through the drawer’s opening and he rammed the desk through the window. Glass exploded and the desk plummeted, unfurling the heavy hose. The desk stopped ten feet above the pavement, dangling like a broken pendulum against the building.

  ‘Come on!’ Luke yelled. ‘On my back.’ No time for them both to climb down the rope. Luke felt Drummond’s solid weight go on his back and he threw himself out onto the makeshift rope.

  42

  The cameras in Drummond’s kitchen had been destroyed in the hail of Snow and Mouser’s gunfire, so the watchers – the boss, the scarred Frenchman and Aubrey – had to settle for a satellite view of the Quicksilver building. They’d seen Luke and Drummond retreat to the roof, vanish into the hatch, then saw Mouser and Snow come onto the roof and disappear back into the building moments later.

  Aubrey made a horrified noise in her throat.

  The computer screens were set up in a corner of the hold, and Aubrey could hardly hear what was said over the drone of the engines. They’d given her drugs, first to make her sleep, then to make her talk, or so she suspected. She’d been laying on a cot, staring at the gray ceiling, when the boss had come and pulled her up and made her speak to Luke on the phone.

  Luke was alive. But the boss told her what to say and she said it. Then she saw and heard the tat-tat-tat of the bullets in the kitchen, then nothing.

  The boss pushed Aubrey away from the black screen.

  ‘You have to help Luke,’ she said. ‘Please.’ She felt hazy from the drugs.

  The boss ignored her. ‘Response from the security team?’

  ‘None,’ the scarred Frenchman said. ‘We have to assume the ground floor gunmen killed them.’

  ‘Drummond?’

  ‘Not answering. I imagine he’s busy.’

  ‘Access the building’s computer systems. Wipe everything clean. What can you install in its place to soften the police inquiry?’

  ‘We have a backup story: the building is a prototype, being built to test security technologies for sale. We will wipe and then reinstall data to that effect.’

  ‘Fine. Keep it simple.’ The Frenchman began his work.

  ‘That’s not helping them!’ Aubrey yelled.

  The boss looked at her. ‘I know. Go back and lay down. We’ll be landing soon.’ The old cargo plane creaked and Aubrey looked past the man’s shoulder. On the satellite feed that monitored the building, glass shimmered as a large desk burst through a third-story window.

  ‘Luke?’ Aubrey said.

  43

  The hose held, the desk dangling a good ten feet above the pavement.

  Luke held hard to the fabric of the hose, slid down to the desk’s surface. Drummond was wiry, all muscle, and he weighed a ton.

  Luke looked up and saw a sparrow-thin man staring down at them from the broken window.

  The thin man raised a sleek rifle, aimed it with confidence in his eyes. He let five seconds pass, saying, ‘You made it easy now.’

  Against his back, Drummond twisted. The weight of Luke’s gun, jammed in the ba
ck of his pants, came free and a thundering boom went off near Luke’s head.

  The thin man ducked back or fell dead, Luke didn’t know. He lost his grip on the hose and he and Drummond hit the canted desk, slid, hit air again. He felt Drummond’s arms wrapping around him to cocoon him, to drink the impact of the concrete.

  And it hurt. Luke felt all the air drive out of him. Drummond lay beneath him, breathing in short sharp pants. Luke’s vision swam – he saw the desk, swinging above him.

  Move.

  Luke scrambled to his feet – muscles feeling like they’d been pulled from his body and hastily stuffed back inside his skin – and tried to lift Drummond from the sidewalk.

  ‘Can’t – leg broken – go.’ His voice was a hiss.

  No way he was leaving Drummond behind. Luke hiked the older man up. Supported him on his shoulders. The hard shrill knife of a police siren sliced the afternoon, cutting through the Manhattan hum.

  He pulled Drummond into his arms and carried him, heading for the cross street. He wanted to put buildings between him and the killers.

  ‘My keys,’ Drummond patted at his pocket.

  ‘You have a car?’

  ‘My keys,’ he repeated and then the shot rang out, piercing him in the back, near where Luke’s hand held him. The bullet tumbled through spine and organs and the impact nearly knocked him loose from Luke’s grip.

  The crowd that had been starting to close around them scattered, a woman shrieking, students bolting.

  But Luke did not stop. A tea shop was a few yards away and he stumbled through its door as the proprietor opened it to see what fresh hell had erupted in the Village. At tables people with laptops looked up from their web-induced isolation and gasped; the counter person erupted with a series of short screams.

  ‘Call 9-1-1,’ Luke said. ‘Please.’

  Drummond opened his eyes with visible effort. ‘My keys. Run. No police.’ His eyes focused on Luke’s face. He clutched at Luke’s Saint Michael medal, which dangled above his face as Luke knelt by him. Then his hand went to his pocket and he died.