WIN

by Coben, Harlan

  Another factor: The gun is back in my face.

  “Resist and I’ll kill you.”

  Through my murky haze, I can make out the back of the driver’s head. The two abductors—one straddling my back, the other pointing a gun at me—still wear their ski masks. I cling to this as a good sign. If they meant to kill me, there would be no reason to disguise their identity.

  The man on top of me starts a body search. I don’t move, hoping to use the time to get my bearings. The pain I can handle. The dizziness—I am undoubtedly concussed—is another matter.

  He finds my Wilson Combat 1911 in the holster, pulls it out, empties it so that even if I could somehow get it back, it would be useless.

  The other man, the one with the gun, says, “Check his lower legs.”

  He does so. It takes some time, but he finds my small gun, the Sig P365, in an ankle holster. He pulls it into my blurry view and again empties out the ammunition. Still on top of me, he leans down near my face, the wool of his mask against my cheek, and whispers harshly, “Anything else?”

  A move I could make if my head was clear: Bite him. He is that close. I could bite him through that flimsy mask, rip off a part of his cheek, turn my body, throw him toward the gunman so as to block what might be an incoming bullet.

  “Don’t think about it,” the gunman says.

  He says this matter-of-factly, shifting toward the side in order to prevent the sort of attack that has crossed my mind.

  Conclusion: The gunman, the one doing the talking, is good. Trained. Paramilitary perhaps. He stays far enough back, so that even if I was a hundred percent—right now I would guesstimate that I’m at best forty to fifty percent—I wouldn’t have a chance.

  The man on top of me is larger—bulkier, more muscled—but the bigger threat, I realize, is the trained man with the gun.

  I stay still. I try to clear some of the cobwebs, but it really isn’t happening. I feel lost, adrift.

  Then the big man on top of me surprises me with a kidney punch.

  The blow lands like an explosion, a bomb going off, shards of hot razors slicing through my internal organs. The pain paralyzes me for a moment. Every part of me hurts, wants to cover up and find relief.

  The big man hops off me and lets me writhe in pain. I roll up against the divider between the front seats and the back. I look back toward my two abductors.

  When they both take off their ski masks, two thoughts—both bad—hit me at once.

  First, if they are letting me see their faces, they don’t plan on letting me live.

  Second—no doubt because I can see the resemblance—these are the brothers of Teddy “Big T” Lyons.

  I try to stay put because every move is agony. I try not to breathe because, well, the same. I close my eyes and hope they think I’ve passed out. There is nothing to be done right now. What I need most is time. I need time without suffering further injury so as to recover enough to counter.

  What that counter might be, I have no idea.

  “End this,” the larger brother, the one who’d straddled my back, tells his well-trained sibling with the gun.

  The smaller brother nods and aims his gun at my head.

  “Wait,” I say.

  “No.”

  I flash back to another time, when Myron was in the back of a van, similar to this, when he too asked someone assaulting him to wait. That man had also said no. I, however, was following them in a car and listening in via Myron’s phone. When I heard that, when I heard the perpetrator say no and thus realized that Myron would not be able to talk his way out of it, I hit the accelerator and smashed my car into the back of the van.

  Odd what memories come to you under duress.

  “A million dollars for both of you,” I blurt out.

  That makes them pause.

  The larger brother says in a semi-whine, “You hurt our brother.”

  “And he hurt my sister,” I reply.

  They share a quick glance. I am lying, of course, unless you are one of those Kumbaya types who believe that in a larger sense, we humans are all brothers and sisters. But my lie, like my million-dollars offer, makes them hesitate. That’s all I want right now. To buy time.

  It’s the only option.

  The larger brother says, “Sharyn’s your sister?”

  “No, Bobby,” the gunman says with a sigh.

  “She’s in the hospital,” I say. “Your brother has hurt a lot of women.”

  “Bullshit. They’re just lying bitches.”

  Gun Brother says, “Bobby…”

  “No, man, before he dies, he should know. It’s bullshit. All these bitches, they come on to Teddy. He’s a good-looking guy. They want to close the deal with him, you know what I’m saying? Lock him down, get married. But Teddy, he is—or he was before you blindsided him like a chickenshit—he’s a player with the ladies. He doesn’t want to settle down. When the bitches don’t get the ring, suddenly they’re all complaining about him. How come they don’t complain right up front? How come they go out with him voluntarily?”

  “I didn’t blindside him,” I say.

  “What?”

  “You said that I—and I quote—‘blindsided him like a chickenshit.’ I didn’t. We went man-to-man. And he lost.”

  Big Bobby makes a scoffing sound. “Yeah, right. Look at you.”

  “We could settle it that way,” I say.

  “What?”

  “We stop this van somewhere private. You know I’m unarmed. You and I go at it, Bobby. If I win, I go free. If you win, well, I die.”

  Muscled Bobby turns to Gun Brother. “Trey?”

  “No.”

  “Aw, come on, Trey. Let me rip his head off and shit down his neck.”

  Trey’s eyes stay on mine. He isn’t fooled. He knows what I am. “No.”

  “Then how about that million dollars?” Bobby asks.

  My vision is still blurry. I am dizzy and hurting. I am no better off than I was a few seconds ago.

  “He’s lying to us, Bobby. The million dollars isn’t real.”

  “But—”

  “He can’t let us live,” Trey says, “just as we can’t let him live. Once he’s free, he will hunt us down. Forget the police—we would have to spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulder for him. He’ll come after us, with all his resources.”

  “We can still try to get the money, can’t we? Let him wire or some shit. Then we shoot him in the head?”

  When Trey shakes his head, I realize that I am out of time and options.

  “This was all decided the moment we grabbed him, Bobby. It’s us or him.”

  Trey is, of course, correct. There is no way we can let the other side live. It is too much of an unknown. I will never trust that they won’t come back for me. The same, Trey has realized, is true for them.

  Someone has to die here.

  We cross the George Washington Bridge and are now picking up speed where Route 80 meets up with Route 95.

  I truly wish I had a better plan, something less guttural and primitive and ugly. The odds of this working are, I admit, slim, but I am seconds from death.

  It’s now or never.

  I slump my shoulders as though defeated.

  “Then let me just confess this to you,” I say.

  They relax just the slightest bit. I don’t know whether that will help. But at this stage I have but one option.

  If I go for Bobby, Trey will shoot me.

  If I go for Trey, Trey will shoot me.

  If I surprise them and go for the driver, I just may have a chance.

  Out of nowhere, I let loose a bloodcurdling scream. It sends hot jolts of agony all through my skull.

  I don’t care.

  They both, as I anticipated, startle back, expecting me to jump toward them.

  But I don’t.

  I spin toward the driver.

  My plan is crude and base and not very good. I am going to get hurt badly no matter what. I could bring out the
broken-eggs-omelet metaphor again, but really, is there a point?

  Trey still has the gun. It hasn’t magically vanished. He’s startled, yes, but he recovers fast. He pulls the trigger.

  My hope is that the suddenness of my move will throw off his aim.

  It does. But not enough.

  The bullet hits me in the upper back below the shoulder.

  I don’t stop my spin. My momentum carries me through. I keep a thin razor blade in the cuff of my right sleeve. Bobby didn’t notice it as he searched me. Almost no one does. It shoots out now at the wrist and into my palm. I have the razor blade in my right hand, and while the driver is going at seventy-one miles per hour—yes, I see the numbers lit up large on the dashboard—I slice his throat to the point of near decapitation.

  The van lurches hard to the side. Blood sprays from his artery, coating the inside of the windshield. I feel the warm contents of his neck—tissue, cartilage, more blood—empty out onto my hand. My left arm snakes through his seat belt harness so I can be somewhat braced for the upcoming collision.

  I hear the gun go off again.

  This bullet only grazes my shoulder before shattering the windshield. I grab the steering wheel and spin it. The van jerks off the road and teeters onto two wheels.

  I close my eyes and hold on as the van flips, then flips again, then crashes hard into a pole.

  And then, for me, there is only darkness.

  CHAPTER 20

  All superheroes have an origin story. All people do, when you think about it. So here is the abridged version of mine.

  I grew up in privilege. You know that already. What you may consider relevant is that every human being is snap-judged by their looks. That’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation and no, I’m not comparing or saying I had it worse than others. That would be what we call a “false equivalency.” But the fact is, many people detest me on sight. They see the towheaded blond locks, the ruddy complexion, the porcelain features, my haughty resting face—they smell the inescapable stink of old money that comes off me in relentless waves—and they think smug, snob, elitist, lazy, judgmental, undeservedly wealthy ne’er-do-good who was born not only with a silver spoon in his mouth but with a forty-eight-piece silver place setting with a side of titanium steak knives.

  I understand this. I, too, sometimes feel that way about those who inhabit my socioeconomic sphere.

  You see me, and you think I look down on you. You feel resentment and envy toward me. All your own failures, both real and perceived, rise up and want to target me.

  Even worse, I appear to be a soft, easy, pampered target.

  Today’s teenagers might dub my face “punch-worthy.”

  Inevitably, all of the above led to ugly incidents in my childhood. For the sake of brevity, I will talk about one. During a visit to the Philadelphia Zoo when I was ten years old, decked out in a blue blazer with my school crest sewn onto the chest pocket, I wandered away from my well-heeled pack. A group of inner-city students—yes, you can read into that as you might—surrounded me, mocked me, and then beat me. I ended up hospitalized, in a coma for a short time, and in a suddenly interesting life cycle, I nearly lost the same kidney Bobby Lyons had so recently pummeled.

  The physical pain of that beating was bad. The shame that ten-year-old boy felt from cowering, from feeling helpless and terrified, was far worse.

  In short, I never wanted to experience that again.

  I had a choice then. I could, as my father urged, “stay amongst my own”—hide behind those wrought-iron gates and well-manicured hedges—or I could do something about it.

  You know the rest. Or at least you think you do. Human beings, as Sadie noted, are complex. I had the financial means, the motivation, the past trauma, the innate skills, the disposition, and perhaps, when I am most honest with myself, some sort of loose screw (or primitive survival mechanism?) that allows me to not only thrive but take some pleasure from acts of violence.

  Take all those components, puree them in a blender, and voilà. Here I am.

  In a hospital bed. Unconscious.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I don’t know whether I dreamed this or not, but I may have opened my eyes and seen Myron sitting bedside. I did that for him when we scraped him off the pavement after our own government tortured him. Other times I hear voices—my father’s, my biological daughter’s, my deceased mother’s—but since I know for certain that at least one of those voices cannot be real, perhaps I am imagining the rest.

  I am, however, alive.

  Per my “plan”—I use that word in the loosest sense possible—I’d managed to fold enough of my body across the driver’s seat belt harness before the crash. It kept me strapped in during impact. I don’t know the fate of Teddy’s two brothers. I don’t know what the authorities believed happened. I don’t know how many hours or days it has been since the crash.

  As I begin to swim up to the surface of awareness, I let my mind wander. I have begun piecing some of this case together, or at least it feels that way. Hard to know for certain. I am still mostly unconscious, if that’s what you call this cusp, and thus many of my purported solutions—about the LLC, about the bank robbery, about the murder of Ry Strauss—seem plausible now but may, like many a dream, turn into utter nonsense when I awake.

  I reach a stage where I can sense consciousness, yet I hesitate. I’m not sure why. Part is exhaustion, a weariness so heavy that even the act of opening my eyes would seem a task far too rigorous in my current condition. I feel as though I’m strapped down in one of the dreams where you’re running through deep snow and thus moving too slowly. I’m also trying to listen and gather intel, but the voices are unintelligible, muffled, like Charlie Brown’s parents or the audial equivalent of a shower curtain.

  When I finally do blink my eyes open, it is not a family member nor Myron sitting bedside. It’s Sadie Fisher. She bends toward me—close enough that I can smell her lilac shampoo—and whispers in my ear.

  “Not a word to the police until we talk.”

  Then Sadie calls out, “I think he’s awake,” and moves to the side. Medical professionals—doctors and nurses, I assume—descend. They take vitals and give me ice chips for the thirst. It takes a minute or two, but I’m able to answer their simple, medically related questions. They tell me that I suffered head trauma, that the bullet missed my vital organs, that I will be fine. After some time passes, they ask me if I have any questions. I catch Sadie’s eye. She gives the smallest shake of the head. I, in turn, shake mine.

  Perhaps an hour later—time is hard to judge—I am upright in the bed. Sadie works hard to clear the room. The staff grudgingly obey. Once they are gone, Sadie takes a small speaker out of her purse, fiddles with her phone, and starts blasting music.

  “In case someone is listening in,” Sadie tells me when she moves closer.

  “How long have I been here?” I ask.

  “Four days.” Sadie pulls a chair toward the bed. “Tell me what happened. All of it.”

  I do, though the pain medication is making me loopy. She listens without interrupting. I ask for more ice chips while I tell the tale. She pours them into my mouth.

  When I finish, Sadie says, “The driver, as you already know, is dead. So is one of the two assailants, Robert Lyons. He flew through the windshield on impact. The other brother—he goes by Trey—suffered broken bones, but since there wasn’t enough to hold him on, he’s gone home to ‘convalesce’ in western Pennsylvania.”

  “What did Trey claim?”

  “Mr. Lyons is choosing not to speak to the authorities at this time.”

  “What do the police think happened?”

  “They aren’t saying, except for the fact that they’ve pieced together that the driver had his throat slit by you. They have some forensics—the position of your body behind the corpse, the way the blade fit into your sleeve, the blood on your hands, stuff like that. It probably isn’t court conclusive, but it’s enough so that the c
ops know.”

  “Did you tell them about the brothers threatening you?” I ask.

  “Not yet. I can always do that later. If I tell them now, they will want to know why they threatened me. Do you understand?”

  I do.

  “The cops are already connecting the dots between what happened to Teddy Lyons in Indiana and what happened in that van. For your sake, as my client, I don’t want to help them.”

  Logical. “Advice?” I ask.

  “The police are here. They want you to make a statement. I say we don’t give them one.”

  “I already forget what happened anyway,” I say. “Head trauma, you know.”

  “And you’re still too weak to question,” Sadie adds.

  “I am, yes, though I still want to be released as soon as possible. I can recuperate better at home.”

  “I’ll see whether I can arrange it.”

  Sadie rises.

  “We kept this quiet, Win. Out of the papers.”

  “Thank you.”

  “There were other people who wanted to stay bedside. I advised against it because I wanted to make certain you spoke to me first. They all understood.”

  I nod. I don’t ask who. It doesn’t matter.

  “Thank you,” I say. “Now get me out of here.”

  * * *

  But it isn’t that easy.

  Two days later I am moved out of the ICU into a private room. It is there, at three in the morning, while I am still blessedly riding the edge between the morphine highway and full slumber, that I sense more than hear my hospital room door open.

  This is not uncommon, of course. Anyone who has endured a prolonged stay in a medical facility knows that you are prodded and probed at the strangest hours of the night, almost as though the intent is to keep you from any true REM sleep. Perhaps, to again use a superhero analogy, my Spidey senses were tingling, but I somehow know that whoever was broaching was not a nurse or physician or a member of the custodial crew.

  I stay very still. I do not have a weapon on me, which is foolish. I also do not have my customary reflexes or strength or timing. I carefully open my eyes just a smidge, but between the drugs and the late hour, my vision is that of a man looking through gauze.