Liars' Paradox

by Taylor Stevens

  The first call, full of lies and pleas for help, had been the lure.

  This second had set the hook.

  Time itself would reel Jen and her brother in.

  He didn’t need the kid anymore.

  Robert glanced up, expression stuck somewhere between fear and confusion. “You told me you’d let me go if I made the call.”

  Holden pocketed the phone. “There was also a favor involved.” He nodded toward the bed. “Twenty-four hours is what I’m asking. Sit with the big guy, follow the dosing instructions on the pad over there, and if I don’t make it back—” Holden swiped a sealed envelope from off the bedside table and flicked his fingers against it. “If I’m not back in twenty-four hours, open this. It’s his mother. Call her. She’ll come.”

  Robert took the envelope. His focus stayed on the bed. “This is messed up,” he said. “You realize that, don’t you?”

  Holden nodded.

  Didn’t get more messed up than a kidnapper relying on the kidnapped to keep his best friend alive. Holden turned to leave. He paused at the door and looked back. He said, “That big guy right there is the best reason I have to keep you breathing. If I make it out and you’re not here, I will find you.”

  Robert sighed and sat in the bedside chair.

  Holden gave Baxter a final glance and stepped into the hall.

  If he’d predicted correctly, twenty-four hours was more than enough to get what he wanted. If he’d predicted wrongly, a widow who’d worked long days and hard nights to feed, clothe, and house six children, who’d kept them on the straight and narrow, in spite of hooliganism and brushes with the law, who’d always had room for him in her overcrowded apartment when Frank was away, would be forced to collect her youngest. And, through her howls of pain and protest and through her finger-pointing blame, Frank would learn that some promises would never be kept.

  CHAPTER 44

  JILL

  AGE: 26

  LOCATION: HOUSTON, TEXAS

  PASSPORT COUNTRY: USA

  NAMES: JULIA JANE SMITH

  HANDS TO THE WINDOWSILL, SHE BOOSTED UP, THREADED HER LEGS and torso between broken panes, and dropped ten feet to hard, empty floor on the other side. Diesel and metal and concrete aged by salt, humidity, and warmth rushed her brain, familiar with the chemical slick of Managua and Barranquilla and a dozen lightly polluted industrial zones before and since, comforting like homemade bread.

  Sun blindness turned the dim room dark, made her vulnerable.

  She skirted for cover behind a gouge-scarred slab that might have once topped a desk. Knee and fists to the floor, she listened and waited.

  A flurry of wings scattered off a roost somewhere upstairs.

  Rusted metal and broken switches stirred in the breeze, discordant wind chimes creaking to the distant rumble of shipping containers on flatbeds, warehoused goods in big rigs, and cars and smaller trucks shuttling the flow of day laborers and dockworkers during shift changes. All this, but no sound of Christopher.

  Her eyes adjusted to the limited light.

  Shadows and shapes morphed into broken shelves and tooling tables still lag bolted to the floor. Oil-slicked dust coated every surface the way it coated the transom windows. Soot stains and holes in the ceiling pointed to a fire. Best as she could tell, the machine shop had occupied over a quarter of the lower floor plan.

  She searched surfaces for recent disturbance.

  No sign of Christopher there, either.

  She wanted to move, wanted to eliminate this location and get the hell on with the rush of the hunt and the chase. Training told her to hold, to hold until she was certain, and then hold again for just as long, because patience was a weapon and waiting spawned curiosity and curiosity had a way of flushing even the best from hiding.

  She’d never had much use for patience.

  She slipped into the open, taunting fate in a double-dog dare, insides rebelling against the likelihood that her effort to steal in undetected had been a pointless time waste because the address Robert had called to give her had been misdirection, and Christopher had never been here, and Rob would call again last minute with another location, and Jack, the golden boy, would be the one to see action—again—while she was left to wait and wait and wonder.

  She crossed the room for the half-opened steel doors at the end.

  Whatever Christopher’s plans, he’d chosen the site well, she’d give him that: two lofted stories on the far end of a peninsula of sorts, a bulb of land that reached into the waterway and on which the only two roads—which threaded through acres of concrete and warehouses, railway yards and liquid bulk repositories, with their thousands upon thousands of gallons of crude—dead-ended just short of the water.

  The limited entry points ensured a direct line on incoming traffic, the industrial zone made noncommercial vehicles easy to spot, and the noise guaranteed that whatever happened here wouldn’t be heard. It was a perfect rendezvous for a close-up kill and a perfect lure for a shooter set up on a nearby tower or rooftop.

  The multiple possibilities had turned strategy into question marks and forced them to stretch resources in opposite directions.

  She’d had Jack drop her off at a truck stop on the Pasadena Freeway frontage, had hitched a ride with a long-haul trucker she’d sweet-talked into taking his eighteen-wheeler on a two-mile detour, and had rounded back on foot from the waterfront through a stretch of undeveloped land. Midmorning sun’s reflection had turned barren windows into watchful eyes, and the broken panes had winked, as if in on a private joke.

  There’d been no cars, no sign of Robert.

  She’d climbed the chain-link under the shield of the building’s windowless short end, skirting truck bays and warehouse doors secured by rusty padlocks on rustier chains. Knee-high thistle weed sprouting tall between cracks had decorated the bleached concrete.

  It’d been too easy.

  She’d seen what Christopher could do with a rifle.

  Careful as she’d been, there’d been moments of exposure, and he hadn’t even tried.

  He wasn’t out there. Didn’t seem to be in here.

  She reached the steel doors now, and stole a glance into the empty entrance hall.

  Her front pocket vibrated.

  Rebellion rose in response.

  She’d left the burner with Jack so Christopher could track it, if he cared to, and so Robert, who’d hinted at the possibility of another location change, could call again if needed. And Jack, searching for Christopher from a distance in the same way she was searching up close, would alert her to any change in plans.

  She pulled the pager free and read numbers off the screen.

  The sweet, sweet trickle of pleasure began a slow drip from brain to veins.

  Six-slash-two.

  Jack had spotted movement on the second floor, had gotten a visual on Christopher. Another vibration offered another numbered code. Jack was packing up, would leave his vantage and head her way. He wasn’t stupid enough to ask her to stand down and wait for him, but he’d certainly hurry to minimize the time gap.

  She tucked the pager away and stepped into the entrance hall, avoiding the wide stairwell and keeping far back, beneath the overhang. She was on her own for now, just she and Christopher, one-on-one in this big, bad, empty building, in which he had the advantage of knowing the layout and owning the high ground.

  She scoped the scarred industrial-green elevator doors and ruled them out.

  Footsteps, deliberate and taunting, thumped across the floor above.

  Her eyes tracked the movement. Her fingers released clasps, dropping a Czech-made CZ P-09 into each hand. Two weapons. Forty rounds. Of everything they’d found and taken from Clare’s stashes, this was all she’d brought. More would have bulked her up, weighed her down, turned dexterity into clumsiness, and she’d never liked firearms for close-up work, anyway. Loud and dirty, they inevitably left trace evidence behind.

  Garrotes, knives, and hands made for a quieter, cleane
r dispatch.

  She moved sideways, muzzles trained upward, feet taking her to the opposite doors, until her shoulder nudged them. They gave enough to indicate chains through the handles on the other side.

  A building this size had to have other ways up.

  The footsteps stopped just beyond the machine-shop doorway.

  A piece of cardboard dropped through a hole in the ceiling and fluttered to the floor. Christopher testing her twitchiness, she guessed, and giving away his position as a bonus. She side-stepped for the stairs.

  His voice, traveling in both directions, said, “Your brother should be here soon.”

  The accent, years removed from its homeland and familiar in a way she could almost place, made her pause. Footfalls thumped from above the machine shop to the open area above her head. She retreated from the first step for the shelter of the landing, and shoulder to the doors, she tried again to budge them.

  Christopher said, “I’d hoped your mother would be with him.”

  Those eight little words made the hair on her arms stand on end.

  It made sense that he knew Clare had escaped. It stretched sense but wasn’t impossible that he knew Clare was her mother. But that he knew all that and that the three of them had been together? He’d have learned that from Robert, and Robert was the issue that ate her and that there’d been no time to discuss.

  Robert, Christopher, Robert, Robert, always back to Robert.

  She’d changed out his clothes and shoes. She’d made damn certain there was nothing on him that Christopher could use to track her. Robert wasn’t the link that would have led Christopher to them, it was the burner she’d refused to sacrifice. Rob had had nothing trackable on him when they cut him loose.

  She stopped there.

  Understanding hit with the awareness of spotting eyes peering into her bedroom window.

  Christopher had been at the motel.

  He’d been there when Jack and Clare arrived, he’d been watching when they sent Robert off, and this was his way of matching wits, telling her he could have fired blind into the motel room and taken them all, that he could have set this place up as a lure and used the safety of distance to score at least one kill, if not two, like he’d done to Ray. This was him telling her that just like with Jack at the preserve, he’d chosen life.

  Silence filled the building. No footsteps. No words.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw him, short dark hair and broad shoulders, T-shirt and cargo pants, seated with his back to the wall and rifle across his lap, content to wait her out, even knowing Jack was on his way and they’d soon be going two against one in a close-quarter conflict.

  Overconfidence or madness—she couldn’t tell which—and it didn’t matter, because she wasn’t content to wait for Jack to steal the mission out from beneath her and have Clare award him credit by virtue of his mere presence.

  To the ceiling, she said, “Where’s Robert?”

  “Safe, I assure you.”

  “The rental car?”

  “Returned.”

  The voice moved, but the footsteps didn’t. She crossed the entrance hall, following the sound. “I want to talk with Rob.”

  “Not possible right now.”

  “Proof of life, Chris. Can I call you Chris? You know how it works.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s how it would work if you cared about proof of life beyond its use in collecting intel and flipping control.”

  The words were harsh in their truthfulness, seductive in their lie, and stung just enough to make her defensive. She said, “You hurt him, I’ll kill you.”

  Laughter echoed from over the machine shop. “And if I don’t hurt him?”

  She tried not to smile. “I’ll kill you less painfully.”

  His voice reached out from the upper landing. “I don’t want to kill you.”

  She spun back in its direction.

  He said, “Contractually, I do need you dead, but a little acting, a little cooperation, and we could end this with me paid and you alive.”

  She calculated her position against the probability of one of her rounds reaching him before his found her. She said, “I admire your ballsy overconfidence.”

  “You don’t want to kill me, either.”

  She didn’t, not really, not on any personal or emotional level, not any more now than she had once Clare had come walking through the motel room door, but she’d be damned if she let Jack be the one who satisfied Clare’s order to get it done.

  She said, “How about you come down and we talk about it?”

  “Better view of the road up here. Come help me watch for your brother.”

  She crossed the entrance hall and peered through the crack between doors to get a bead on what kept them secured. “There’s a long plank between danger and death,” she said. “I’d prefer not to walk it.”

  “You already are.”

  She re-scanned the corners, searching for cameras she might have missed.

  He said, “I’m the one in danger, not you. Like I said, I don’t want to kill you.”

  He told the truth, she knew.

  She’d lied to enough men and been lied to by enough men to recognize one from the other, but Clare wanted him dead, so he’d have to die. Wasn’t personal or payback for the kidnapping or a matter of avenging Ray. Christopher had done a job, just as Clare had done jobs, and she’d done jobs—favors, as Clare had called them—and this was business, a self-preserving business in which Christopher knew too much and through which the big money would soon provide too big of a temptation to keep him from coming back.

  He said, “You joining me up here?”

  She shoved the handguns back into place. “Need to think about it.”

  “Take your time. You’ve got, oh, maybe another minute and a half till your brother gets here.”

  She pushed back through the doors to the machine shop.

  He said, “Entryway stairs are the only way up.”

  That made her smile. For someone with dexterity and years of hard training, stairs were merely a convenience. She crossed the floor, walk turning to run, picking up speed, hitting full stride, and leapt from concrete to table slab to wall, moving fast to keep up momentum, utilizing each step as a spring board. She jumped for the transom-window ledge, hefted herself up, twisted, and threaded her head and torso back through the open panes.

  Her fingers found purchase against the brick. She dragged herself upward, pulling and pushing from crack to crack to crack, free-climbing the distance as if it were a ten-foot rock face, and she punched through picture-frame glass.

  Silence crept out of the room in which Christopher had been.

  Heart pounding, lungs burning, she scanned the space.

  Fire had eaten framing and devoured a third of the gypsum ceiling, exposing a metal roof through which heat vents, spinning in the breeze, pulsed sunlight across the footprints and smudges and the trail of a laden bag that had been dragged across the floor. Where double doors stood on the bottom floor, here a gaping hole opened to the stairwell landing. She balanced on the window ledge, grabbed the nearest joist, and pulled herself up into what had once been crawl space.

  From the stairwell, Christopher’s voice said, “I know where you are.”

  She studied the dark recesses where ventilation ducts snaked between bracing and collar ties, and where what had once been insulation now played house to insects and rodents and bird nests, grabbed hold of a brace and moved, one joist to the next, toward solid footing. She never heard him, never saw him, all in black, hidden in the dark and angled with the roof pitch, never saw him until she nearly faced him, and his eyes, white against the darkness, met hers. Adrenaline jolted through her system. A lifetime of microsecond calculations and practice erupted into simultaneous movement.

  Her body shifted. Left hand went up for attack, right hand lunged for the bowie strapped to her thigh. She was fast. He was faster. The rifle stock hit her square on the side of her head, hit with the unexpected
force of disbelief, and knocked her off balance.

  Pain seared into her brain, blurring vision.

  Her footing slipped, and she fell.

  Time rolled into weightlessness, and for a dizzy, disoriented second, she knew what it was to fall in love. Instinct sent her rotating in self-preservation against the danger of an uncontrolled crash onto the weakened, fire-burned floor below.

  Her left arm hit a joist. Her hand caught hold.

  She hung, arm straining, palm slipping, head cocked back, seeking her target while her free hand searched for, and found, a pistol grip.

  Christopher waited her out, waited until gravity took hold and her fingers gave.

  She fell again. Her feet hit hard. Her legs buckled.

  The floor shook and splintered in a cough of termite dust, and she rolled from rotted wood to solid flooring, and up to her feet, and was running, running for the gaping hole at the end of the room before she had time to think, running to reach the stairwell and the ladder that led to the crawl space access hatch before Christopher could reach it, running to block his way. She raced the ladder rungs, hand over hand, popped back into the dark, and rolled away from the opening.

  On her back, knife gripped tight, she fought to control ragged breathing.

  Far to the right, Christopher said, “We have the same enemy.”

  She shifted her mouth toward the metal roof to distort sound direction. “That doesn’t make you my friend.”

  “I’m not sure you’ve ever had a friend in your life.”

  The words pricked in their truthfulness. She kept quiet and rolled to a crouch.

  Metal touching metal echoed through the shadows.

  She paused, waiting, measuring.

  From somewhere along the roof beams, his voice said, “I could be your friend, I think. We have a lot in common. We’ve both seen the world.”

  “We both kill for a living,” she said.

  “We both hate the Broker.”

  She honed in on the voice, couldn’t see him, but knew where he was.