If She Wakes

19

Hank Bauer lived in what had once been a hunting camp. He’d purchased the cabin intending to keep the property’s purpose intact, but then his wife learned of his affair with a waitress at Applebee’s, and the hunting camp rapidly became his home. He often told this story as a cautionary tale of the risks of marriage — but never of the risks of having an affair with a waitress, Applebee’s or otherwise.

Those hunting-camp days seemed long ago and far away. He felt some shame over the way his marriage had ended but no real regret for how his life had gone. He was good on his own, always had been, and the marriage and the mortgages had been the real mistakes, the steps out of character. That had been trying on a suit he knew he’d never care for even though it sure looked nice and comfortable on other men. Margaret had called him an arrested adolescent during the divorce, and he didn’t disagree. His life had been mostly games and gambling, drinking and storytelling, hard rock and hangovers. It wasn’t an adulthood anybody should really take pride in, but he’d learned to lose his shame over it all the same. At sixty-one, he was too old to be embarrassed. He’d had fun.

And he’d done well too. Not well enough for the mortgage in Cape Elizabeth that had scared him right into the welcoming arms of Applebee’s, but well enough that it had been a long time since he’d worried about money. He’d found himself in the insurance business by accident — didn’t everyone get there that way? — but the money was steady, you got to meet plenty of people, and sometimes you actually had the sense that you’d helped to ease a person’s mind.

On the day that he returned to his home on twenty-seven acres of woodland and trout-brook frontage and found the kid in the black baseball cap waiting on him, Hank was largely content with his life. The only thing nagging at him that afternoon was Abby Kaplan.

He’d met Abby when she was just thirteen. Her mother had bolted after determining that raising a child was less enjoyable than being one, and so it had been just Abby and her father, who was a good man with a bad booze habit. He was also the most talented natural mechanic Hank had ever seen, probably capable of building a functioning engine out of duct tape and toothpicks if you spotted him the gasoline. Hank’s first encounter with Jake Kaplan’s daughter didn’t have the makings of a lifelong friendship: she had stolen his car.

Hank had a ridiculous, souped-up ’85 Trans Am back then, and he’d trusted Jake Kaplan to retool it. Then one day the police called to tell him they’d recovered his stolen car and had the thirteen-year-old thief in custody. The cops said she’d been doing ninety-four when they clocked her, and Hank’s first question was “How was she handling it?”

He’d told the cops not to press charges, which hadn’t pleased them, as they believed he was aiding and abetting the development of a local delinquent. And maybe he had been. But Abby was honest and apologetic when they spoke, ready for consequences, and Hank was struck by both the sadness of her demeanor — a good kid expecting bad things, as if that were preordained for her — and her infatuation with his old muscle car.

Jake Kaplan, a good ol’ boy’s good ol’ boy with a worldview shaped by drunks and dropouts, didn’t often mention Abby’s missing mother, but that day he did.

“Abby wants to race,” Jake told Hank mournfully.

“So let her race. Don’t need to have a driver’s license on the oval. Ed Traylor’s boy was racing when he was no older than Abby.”

“I can’t let her do that. I’m supposed to raise a daughter to be a woman.”

“Ever heard of Sarah Fisher?” Hank asked.

And so it came to pass that Hank Bauer sponsored Abby Kaplan’s first foray into racing. It was curiosity and amusement at first, and it made for a damn good story; the boys at the poker games loved hearing about how Hank had become the sponsor for his own car thief.

Nobody chuckled after the first races, though. Hank watched her beat older men night after night, and then she went on to the bigger speedways, and when she lost, it was not to better drivers but to better cars. Hank saw that this game, like all of them, had a ceiling that could be cracked only with cash.

Coastal Claims and Investigations became a more serious sponsor then. It wasn’t just because Hank liked the girl and felt bad for her; it was also because he was damn curious to see what she could do with the right machine.

What she did was win. Early, often, and then always. She smoked the drag-racing circuit through northern New England and then got onto the oval and kicked even more ass, and everybody’s bet was on NASCAR or Indy when she’d fooled them all and gone into stunt driving instead. Hank had seen some version of that coming when Abby fell in love with the drift. Even winning a race didn’t put the same light in her eyes that a controlled drift did — a floating test of traction and throttle that looked wildly out of control to the average spectator. If you could control it, though... well, Hank supposed it was a special kind of high.

She’d gone to a couple stunt schools, caught the right people’s eyes, and ended up in Hollywood and then Europe. For a while she’d been shooting commercials in friggin’ Dubai or someplace, bouncing some bastardized supercar turned SUV around a desert. She’d been all over the world driving the finest cars known to man and making good money doing it, and Hank was awfully proud of her.

And now awfully worried about what was keeping her in Maine.

The crack-up she’d had out on the West Coast would have been bad enough if the boyfriend with her had been anonymous. But he was a rising star, his face was on magazine covers, and that crush of attention had made a bad deal worse for Abby. She’d come back to Maine to clear her head, she claimed, but Hank knew better.

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 Chrysler, 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, she 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.”

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...

Faster. Faster.

Sure thing. Abby could always go faster.

She remembered her father’s lullaby, the one from the old Robert Mitchum movie about an Appalachian bootlegger with a hot rod, the mountain boy who had G-men on his taillights and roadblocks up ahead. Being the motherless daughter of Jake Kaplan meant that such songs became lullabies. “The Ballad of Thunder Road” had been Abby’s favorite. Her father’s voice, off-key, his breath tinged with beer, singing, “Moonshine, moonshine, to quench the devil’s thirst...” had eased her to sleep many times, the two of them alone in the trailer.

All these years later, the song could resurface clearly when she edged toward sleep.

“He left the road at ninety,” her dead father crooned softly, “that’s all there is to say.”

When the Chrysler left the road, Abby had no idea if she’d missed a curve or simply driven right through a dead end. All she knew was that suddenly she was awake and the car was bouncing over uneven ground and now it wasn’t branches whipping at the windows but whole trees, saplings that cracked with whip-snap sounds. Before she could move her foot to the brake, she hit a tree that did the stopping for her, an oak that slammed the car sideways. The airbag caught her rising body at stomach level, a gut punch that stole her breath but kept her from striking the windshield.

She sat gasping for breath and trying to clear her vision, desperate for just a little time to get her bearings.

Headlights appeared in the rearview mirror.

There was no time.

Abby got the door open and hauled herself out of the car, but her legs were wobbly and uncooperative, her vision spinning. She stumbled forward, trying to fight through the branches with her hands held up to protect her face. Her feet hit wet soil and went out from under her and suddenly she was down on her ass in the muck.

She might’ve stayed there, disoriented and exhausted and near the point of collapse, but she could still see the glow from the headlights, and they triggered whatever primal impulses the brain stem held on to until the very end.

Run. Flee.

She fought ahead on hands and knees, and this was a blessing in disguise because she crawled faster than she could have run. The boggy soil yielded to actual water, cold and deep enough to cover her arms to the elbows. She’d splashed into a creek, and she couldn’t make sense of that. What creek? Where did it lead? She tried to remember and couldn’t. Hadn’t she hiked out here once with Hank and her father? Yes, absolutely. The winter before her father’s heart attack. There’d been snow that day and the iced-over creek had turned into a beautiful white boulevard through the pines and birches, leading down past an ancient stone wall and on toward...

Toward nothing. There was nothing out here but trees and rocks and water. That was the point; Hank had never wanted neighbors. Abby needed a neighbor now, though. She needed anyone who could help, because something was behind her. Who or what was no longer clear. Her flight was now instinctual, not logical. Her body was working better than her brain.

That’s fine, because all I need to do is keep running, she thought just before she slid over a moss-covered rock and bounced into the sinkhole below, where she lay covered in mud and decaying leaves and dampness. There, her body started to quit on her too.

She knew that she needed to get up and get moving, but this hole with its pillow of old leaves and cool moss felt comfortable, almost safe, except for the dampness. There was something about being tucked into the earth like this that felt right.

Like a grave. You are in your grave, Abby.

She thought she could still see the headlights, but it was hard to tell with the fog gliding through the trees. It was a low, crawling mist that seemed to be searching for her. She wasn’t sure if the lights behind the mist were moving or stationary or if they were even out there at all. Her eyelids were heavy and her blood felt thick and slow.

She wondered how long it would take the kid to find her.

The kid. Yes, that’s who you’re running from. He’s a killer.

And he was quick. The way he had ducked that punch? That was more than quick. So it would not take the kid long to find Abby now.

What was his name? Had he said a name? Sure, he had. Gentleman Jack.

Abby burrowed into the soft embrace of the leaves that smelled like death and waited on the arrival of Gentleman Jack.

23

Her first awareness was of the cold.

She opened her eyes and saw a moss-covered rock, beads of water working slowly but resolutely over it, following the terrain like bands of determined pioneers. Then they reached the edge and fell, manifest destiny gone awry.

Plink. Plink. Plink.

She stared at the rock and the puddle for a while without recognition of anything else. Except for the cold. That was still there, and it was intensifying. Uncomfortable but also necessary, because it was pounding clarity into her brain.

Get up. Get up and move before you freeze to death.

She struggled upright, and the motion made her dizzy and nauseated. She rested on her hands and knees, head hanging, waiting for the vomit to come, but the nausea passed and she didn’t get sick. She worked a wooden tongue around a mouth so dry and swollen, it felt carpeted.

What the hell happened?

The kid.

That was what had happened. The night chase came back to her, and she was suddenly convinced that she wasn’t alone here, that the kid had to be right behind her, the kid with his baby face and his grown-up gun.

There was nothing in sight but the woods, though. Abby was in a gully below a forested ridge; above, white birches and emerald pines were packed in tight, and a stream there split and ran down swales on either side of her. No sound but the running water.

She tried to walk up the hill but her feet tangled and she fell heavily and painfully onto her side. She rolled over and breathed for a while and then tried again, slower this time. Each motion required caution because her head spun and her stomach swirled. She tasted bitter bile and her throat was sore, as if she’d been retching. She didn’t remember doing that, though.

The sky was bright enough to show some of the world, but not much of it. Predawn light. That meant she’d been down here for hours.

What had happened to Hank in that time?

She hobbled up the slope. Her left side and left hip hurt the worst, and she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t remember much about the drive, the run through the woods, or her fall. She just remembered that she’d been trying to get out in front of the kid and of whatever the whiskey had put in her bloodstream. They’d both been closing in on her fast.

And Hank had been well behind them, tied to the chair. Had he gotten loose? He’d had some time alone while the kid pursued Abby. He’d had a window for escape, if he’d been able to free himself.

She got to the top of the hill, but even from there, the Chrysler wasn’t visible. Just the trees. In her running and crawling through the night woods, she’d made it farther than she’d thought. The smell of rain was heavy in the air. She could find no clear track to show her how to get back to where she’d started, and she decided that following the stream made as much sense as anything. She started along it, walking uphill, breathing hard and fighting for each step, thinking, Maybe when I got out, that evil kid got scared and ran, and Hank’s still back there, tied to the chair and hurt, maybe, but alive. Waiting for help. For me.

When she crested the next rise, struggling to keep her footing on the slick leaves, she finally saw her car.

It was punched into an oak’s trunk and wedged between pines, and she was bizarrely pleased by how far she’d made it into such dense trees before getting hung up. When she stepped closer, she could see the dangling airbag visible through the shattered glass. Everything about the car was as she remembered.

Then she saw Hank’s body in the passenger seat.

Abby froze, then took a wavering step forward, knees going weak, and cried, “Hank!” Her voice was broken and hoarse. “Hank!”

Hank Bauer wasn’t going to answer. His head lay unnaturally on his left shoulder, and the right side of his face was swollen and bruised, his eyes open but unseeing. Abby wrenched open the passenger door, and Hank’s head dropped bonelessly forward, chin down on his chest, eyes still open, his neck obviously broken.

Abby stepped back and sat down in the wet grass. She rubbed a filthy hand over her face. She breathed with her eyes closed, then opened them and looked at Hank once more.

“What happened?” she said aloud.

Hank offered no insight.

The way he sat there, slumped in the passenger seat with the wound on the right side of his head and the broken neck, made it look as if he’d been in the car when it hit the tree and died on impact, when in reality he’d been dead before he was brought here.

Or maybe not.

Maybe he’d been alive and trying to stay alive by obeying orders, the kid saying, Get in the car, holding a gun to his head. Abby could picture him climbing into the wrecked car, hoping for mercy, only to have his skull smacked off the windshield, his neck snapped.

Abby looked up the road then, searching for either help or threat, finding neither. It was peaceful and quiet and lonely. When the wind gusted, raindrops fell from the trees like a fresh shower. Hank’s house was the last one on the isolated camp road. Nobody would have heard the crash. The kid would have had time to go back and bring Hank down here and not be rushed, but still, it seemed a reckless choice because Abby had been out there in the darkness, free.

He knew you were going to be down for a while, though. He was sure of that. He wasn’t rushing because he knew he didn’t need to.

Thanks to whatever was in the whiskey, the kid knew he had time. Maybe he even thought Abby was dead. Plenty of time, then.

Why move Hank’s body, though? Why bring him down here and put him in the passenger seat? Even if he’d thought Abby was dead, that arrangement didn’t make any sense, because there was no driver.

Abby looked at the empty driver’s seat, and suddenly she understood.

I didn’t realize your academic record was as poor as your driving record, the kid had said.

It was Abby’s car, and Abby had wrecked it. The physical evidence would say that, because it was the truth.

Hank hadn’t been riding shotgun when the Chrysler went into the trees, and he hadn’t broken his neck in the crash, but if the police found this scene and then found Abby dead in the woods, uninjured but with drugs and alcohol in her bloodstream, what would they think?

The kid was panicked and tried to rig the scene. A bad plan, but he needed something.

Was it that bad, though? When Abby called this in, she was going to have to tell the police that she’d been poisoned and that while she was sleeping it off in the woods, a teenager with a gun had killed Hank Bauer and belted him into the passenger seat. That was the truth, but it was going to be an awfully strange story to tell and an awfully hard story for a detective to believe. And if the detectives who heard it happened to know that Abby had ended up back in Maine working for Hank Bauer because of another night that went a lot like this one...

Just call them. Let them figure it out.

The man had been murdered, and Abby knew who’d killed him. In that case, you called the police. Period.

When she stood up and reached for her phone, she realized it was gone, and only then did she remember the kid taking it and tossing it onto the kitchen counter after he’d looked at the photograph of Luke on the home screen.

He’d known Luke was dead. He’d known what had happened. So this scenario, this scene he’d built with Hank, was maybe a little bit better than Abby wanted to imagine.

I can tell the police the truth. They’ll need time to verify it, but they’ll believe it.

Hank’s dead eyes stared through the shattered windshield. California isn’t the only problem, those eyes seemed to say.

True. Police would learn quickly that Abby had also been arrested in Maine, and for stealing a car from Hank Bauer, no less. Never mind that Hank hadn’t pressed charges; whatever police records still existed from that, either on paper or in memory, would show yet another night very similar to this one — Hank Bauer had a fast car, Abby Kaplan had a thirst for speed, and it had ended badly.

It’s easier to believe than the truth, she realized. Either Abby Kaplan fucked up for the third time behind the wheel or a hit man disguised as a Boy Scout killed an insurance investigator in rural Maine. Which would you pick?

She needed evidence. At least one shot had connected with the car, and it went through the driver’s window. That would prove she wasn’t crazy, maybe even indicate the caliber of the bullet and the distance of the shot.

She walked around the front of the car, stepping over a torn tree with white-pulped flesh protruding from shredded bark like an open fracture.

The driver’s window was gone. Not just cracked with a clean hole through the center, but completely shattered. The sunroof was also demolished. So was the passenger window. Wherever the bullet might have left its mark, the kid had seen it and taken care of it.

That doesn’t matter. It’s a weak-ass attempt to cover things up, but it won’t stick, and the faster you get the police out here, the faster you’ll be done.

But she could imagine the cops’ faces as she told them about the kid with the gun and the bottle of Gentleman Jack. What would they look like when she got to the part about how she’d started the Chrysler with the remote and Hank had fallen on the gun, still tied to the chair, and from there it was all question marks and darkness...

That was the truth, yes. And the truth should always be enough, yes.

But she wasn’t so sure that it would be.

What does the house look like? she wondered. If it looks like the place I left, then my story is fine. If he took the time to clean it up, though...

She looked back at Hank. There was no need to rush for him. They didn’t use sirens and flashers when they were taking you to the morgue.

Abby closed the door on her friend’s corpse and walked up the road. She followed the rain-filled ruts left by her own tires until Hank’s house came into view, and then she stopped and stared.

The kitchen blinds were open again. The way they always were, or always had been until last night.

Bad sign. If he took that much time to set things right...

She crossed the yard like an inmate walking to her execution. Went to the window and looked in at the kitchen.

The chairs were tucked under the table, which was bare except for a newspaper, open to the sports section. No whiskey, no tumbler glasses, no lantern. The generator was gone, and so was the space heater. The block of knives was back on the counter.

You’ll have to tell them that this sociopath did all this while you were passed out in the woods. You will have to convince them of that, and you don’t even know anything about him.

No, that wasn’t true. Looking in at the kitchen, all traces of chaos eradicated from it, Abby felt like she knew plenty about that kid.

And all of it was terrifying.

Could she describe him? Not in much more than general terms. And the kid did not fit the story, because the story seemed to be a professional killing, and baby-faced teenagers did not carry out professional hits.

I’ll need to be able to tell them who he is, but I don’t know who he is. All I know is that he’s fucking scary, and he wanted the phone.

He’d wanted it, yes. But did he have it? The bags of phones Abby had carried in were gone, but what about the one she’d jammed under the driver’s seat? Had the kid searched the car?

Abby left the house and started back down the road, moving at a jog this time, but it was a long distance and she was hurting, so she quickly fell back to a labored walk. She opened the driver’s door, avoided staring at Hank’s face, and reached below the seat.

The bag was there. Three iPhones inside.

She took it out and stepped away from the car and looked up at the lightening sky — the day was moving along, and she needed to do the same. One way or the other, she had to make a decision.

It was a memory that sealed the choice. When she’d been sitting at that table trying to reason her way out of the situation, she’d told the kid that he would end up in jail. The response had been immediate, and chilling: You’d be surprised how many friends I’ve got around jails. Some in cells, some in uniforms.

Abby didn’t think he’d been lying.

She looked at the dead man who’d backed her time and again throughout her life. “I’m sorry, Hank,” she said. She wanted to remember some other version of Hank’s face, not this death pallor and endless stare, not the broken-stem look of his neck. All she could see was that, though — that and the image of Hank’s face, sweaty and scared in the lantern light, as he screamed at Abby to run.

Backing her one last time.

“Thank you,” Abby told the dead man, and then she closed the door. She walked back up the lonely road to Hank’s house and up the steps. The screen was damaged from where she’d blasted through it — the only physical evidence that supported her story. The knob turned freely. Once inside, she didn’t waste much time looking for things the kid might’ve missed in his cleanup effort. She had a feeling there wouldn’t be any, and she needed to move quickly.

Hank’s guns were stored in a glass-doored cabinet in the living room, impossible to miss. Some people were proud of guns and wanted them as conversation pieces. The cabinet had a lock, which was better than nothing, but a lock didn’t mean much when it secured thin glass doors. Abby wrapped her fist in a blanket that was draped over the back of the couch and then punched each door once, without much force. The glass shattered and she swept it away with the blanket. She took one shotgun, a black Remington over/under; one rifle, a scoped.308; and both handguns, a Glock .45 and a SIG Sauer nine-millimeter. The ammunition was stored on a shelf below the guns. She took all of it, boxes and boxes of shells and bullets, and wrapped them in the blanket with the guns.

She stepped back and looked at what she’d done and tried to find the voice in her head that would say this was a mistake. Before it could so much as whisper, though, she glanced into the kitchen and saw the tidy arrangement of chairs and tables, no trace of violence.

Friends in cells and friends in uniforms, the kid had said.

Abby picked up the blanket with the guns and the ammunition and walked out of the living room. She crossed to the kitchen counter and picked up her phone. It had a charge and a signal, but she put it in her pocket without pause. She’d make the call to police, but not from here.

She carried the guns to the door, found the basket where Hank kept odds and ends, and fished out his car keys. She was moving quickly and purposefully now, not wanting to slow down long enough to consider the reality of what she was doing. Driving away in a murdered man’s car was obviously a dangerous choice.

Staying, though, seemed worse.

24

In another life, Gerry Connors had been a bomb maker, but that was long ago. For the past two decades, he’d been a networker, a middleman. He was not a fixer, although people often thought of him as one. In reality, he put the players together, and he kept silent when silence needed to be kept. He asked only the necessary questions, and he shared only the minimum of information. He handled contacts and he handled money. For the German, he’d handled the hiring of Carlos Ramirez, but he had not told the German of the hiring of Dax Blackwell. That had been his own decision.

This now had the potential to cause real problems for Gerry.

The kid sat across from him in the dark-paneled office with his customary slouch, eyes alert but body loose, and if he was at all aware of the trouble that he’d caused, he didn’t show it. If he was at all concerned about what this trouble meant to him, he certainly didn’t show that. If not for the kid’s lineage, Gerry might’ve had to view this as stone-cold stupidity, but Dax’s bearing was so similar to his father’s that in the midst of the frustration, there was a strange reassurance. Gerry dearly missed the kid’s dad and uncle. Right now, Jack and Patrick Blackwell would have kept his pulse down. He needed Dax to do the same. Because the German had paid a lot of money for killing Oltamu and recovering the phone and doing it all quietly. Efficiently. Gerry had managed to accomplish only a third of that.

Now it was growing exponentially worse, Dax Blackwell seemed indifferent to the problem, and the German was due in town in forty-eight hours.

“There was no iPhone except her own,” Dax said. “You’ve got what she brought in. I checked her phone. I chose to leave it behind because if she manages to make it out of those woods alive, it’s going to hurt her story when they find the house clean and her phone inside. But it was not Oltamu’s phone.”

“Then where is Oltamu’s phone?”

“That question would be easier for me to answer if I knew something about the situation. Like who wants it, why they want it, and who else might want it.”

“That’s not your fucking role!”

A shrug. “Then it’ll be harder.”

“You’re not even sure she’s dead! She saw you, and she might be able to talk!”

“Correct.”

Gerry took blood pressure medication daily, and he thought that was the only thing saving him now. He breathed through his teeth and said, “You want to tell me how you’re going to deal with that? If she walks out of those woods, we’ll have some sketch artist’s rendering of your face on every news broadcast in North America.”

The kid said, “I don’t think so.”

“Pardon? You poisoned her, shot at her, and killed her boss, but you expect her to go quietly into the night?”

Dax nodded calmly. Gerry was incredulous. Every time he wanted to kill the kid, he found himself asking questions instead. He did that again now.

“Want to explain why she’d stay quiet?”

“Her personal history. She’s been involved in a car wreck that left a movie star in a coma and, eventually, dead. People hate her for that. It’s always amusing to me just how much people care about some asshole in a movie, but they do. Her boss, Bauer, thought the Tara Beckley case might make Abby confront those demons.” He smiled at that, then said, “Sorry. That one kind of broke me up. I mean, how’s it going to help? But Hank Bauer, may he rest in peace, didn’t strike me as a particularly skilled psychotherapist. It was an effort, though. You have to appreciate friends who make an effort.”

Gerry could hardly speak. The kid’s attitude was that astonishing. “You talked through all this with them?” he managed finally. “You got their life stories but no phone?”

“I really only had the chance to speak with Mr. Bauer at length.”

Gerry needed a drink. Needed to lie down. Hell, both. Lying down and drinking at the same time, that was what this called for. “Abby Kaplan is going to bring cops down all over this.”

“I disagree. You’ve got to think about the story she has to tell them. You really think the police are going to buy that? I had this same conversation with her, and my guess is that it lingered. She’ll think about it before she calls, at least. I’m sure of that.”

He hadn’t gotten the phone, he’d killed a man, and he’d left a witness alive, and if any of this bothered him in the slightest, it didn’t show.

“The phone, however, remains a concern,” he said.

“No shit, it remains a concern!” Gerry shouted. “That’s what I need. I didn’t ask you to kill some hick in Maine, I asked you to get the phone!”

“Well, things come up.”

Things come up. Holy shit, this kid. Gerry rubbed his temples and forced himself not to shout. “You said Abby Kaplan had the phone.”

“That’s what I was told. She showed up in good faith for the boss with phones and chargers, like the salvage guy said she should have. They weren’t in a box. When I broke into her apartment, I found the box. Empty. There were no phones in the apartment either. But it’s not a lost cause. You can help me with that.”

Gerry lowered his hands and stared. “I can help you with that.”

Another nod.

“How might I be of service to you, Dax?”

The kid ignored the sarcasm and said, “I could talk to your client.”

You didn’t ask to speak to the client. Ever. You pretended there wasn’t a client.

Gerry said, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“I understand it’s not protocol, but—”

“You understand it’s not protocol. Well, that’s reassuring. Why would you possibly need to speak to—”

“But I think it’s time to consider that someone else has the phone,” Dax finished. “It’s difficult for me to locate that person if I don’t understand the value of the phone, do you see? I’ve come up with an alternative, though, if you don’t want me to have an open dialogue with your client.”

“I do not want you to have an open dialogue.”

“Then in lieu of that, we’ll have to settle for a lesser option. Suggest to your client that he give me the phone that Carlos grabbed by mistake. Let me work off that. Oltamu’s personal phone gives me a starting point.”

The client did not have Oltamu’s personal phone. Gerry still did. It was in the drawer just below his right hand.

“Could you do that much?” Dax asked, and there was something about his eyes that gave Gerry the uncomfortable sense that the kid knew Gerry had the phone. He was sniffing around the edges, asking questions that he shouldn’t, questions that he knew better than to ask.

“You’re not your father or your uncle,” Gerry said.

Dax’s face darkened. Barely perceptibly, but it was the first anger Gerry had ever seen him display.

“No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m better than them.”

Gerry snorted. “You think?”

“Unquestionably,” Dax said. “They’re dead.”

He was giving Gerry that flat stare again, the one that sent spiders crawling into your brain.

“Think it over,” he said. “I’ll get back to work regardless. I will get the right phone, and I will kill Abby Kaplan if she’s still alive. These things will happen, but they’ll go slower if I don’t have some insight into the situation. And speed’s important at the moment.”

He stood up, and Gerry almost told him to sit his ass back down, but what was the point? He wasn’t wrong; speed was important now.

The German was coming.

25

Abby made the call from a service plaza off the turnpike where there was always plenty of traffic. She was in Hank’s car, and she knew she’d have to dump that soon, but for now it was the best of bad options. She thought about calling 911, decided against it, and called David Meredith directly.

“What’s up, Abby? I gather you heard about our boy Carlos. Neat twist, eh?” He was cheerful, and the disconnect was so jarring that for a moment Abby couldn’t speak. David had to prompt her. “Hello? Did I lose you?”

“No, sorry. Yes, I heard about Carlos Ramirez. I’ve also got a lot more detail on that than you can imagine, and it’s all bad. I’m going to tell it to you once, so you’re going to want to take notes or record it. Recording it would be better. I won’t be able to call back and go through it again, at least not right away.”

Silence. Then: “Abby, what in the hell are you talking about?”

“Can you record me?”

“No. Not here. But I can call you back from—”

“Take notes, then.”

“Abby—”

“Hank is dead,” Abby said, and her throat tightened, but she swallowed and kept talking. “He’s in the passenger seat of my car, which is wrecked in the trees at the end of his road. It looks like he died in the wreck, but he didn’t. He was murdered, and I nearly was, and it’s all got something to do with that accident at Hammel College. I don’t know what, but it—”

“Abby, whoa, slow down here. He was murdered? You need to—”

“I need to talk, and you need to listen and write it down,” Abby said. “I’d love to trust you, but I’m not sure that I can right now. I was pretty well set up. The story I’m about to tell you sounds crazy, but it’s the truth. You need to hear it. Can you just listen?”

Another pause, and then Meredith, sounding dazed, said, “I’ll listen.”

“Write it down too.”

She told him about the call from Hank, and her arrival at the house, and the way things had gone from there. Told him about the generator and the Gentleman Jack and how she’d started the car and, with an assist from Hank, made it out the door. Told him how many hours had passed while she lay unconscious in the woods and what she’d found upon waking.

Meredith didn’t interrupt, which was a relief. Abby wasn’t sure how she’d respond if the man started asking questions, if his voice held any doubt or disbelief.

“You’ll find him there, and you’ll think that I’m out of my mind, but do me the favor of taking a good, hard look for physical evidence that shows I’m wrong,” she said. “Maybe it’ll be in Hank’s blood. Maybe you’ll find a bullet. Maybe the kid screwed up something at the house... but I kind of doubt that. Just promise me you’ll look.”

“Of course we will,” David said, the first time he’d spoken in several minutes. “But you’ve got to come in. You know that, Abby. Running from this thing... it’s the worst choice. Nobody will believe you if you run, no matter what we find.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Abby said. “Hank’s dead, and I sound like a lunatic, telling this story. Today you’ll tell me that it will all work out, but tomorrow? Then the charges come. And you’ll promise me that it’s still not a threat because a good attorney will work it out, but I’m not sure. Hank Bauer of Coastal Claims and Investigations was murdered over a car accident involving a girl from Hammel College and a guy from Brighton who is already dead? That’s going to keep me out of jail?”

“If it’s the truth, it will,” Meredith said, and Abby smiled grimly. She was watching the side-view mirror, looking for police cars; her scratched and bruised face stared back at her. She reached up and pulled a pine needle from her hair.

“Get started on proving it,” she said, “and then I’ll consider coming in. Talk to Shannon Beckley, talk to Sam at that salvage yard, and you can verify my movements through the day. That’s worth something. Then work that scene right. Look for bullets, look for damage to the generator, get them to run toxicology tests on Hank’s blood that will find anything unusual. Get some forensics expert to see if he can tell whether he was tied up. Most important? Find out whose phone matters so much that people will kill over it.”

She didn’t say that she had the phone. All Abby understood so far about the phone was that if she’d given it to the kid last night, she’d certainly be dead by now. She wasn’t inclined to hand it off to anyone else just yet.

“When I call you next,” Abby said, “you can tell me what progress you’ve made. Then we’ll talk about me coming in.”

“This is a suicide move, Abby,” Meredith said, and he was angry now. Fine. Let him be angry. Abby just needed him to do the work.

“Two people have been murdered over that accident already,” Abby said. “I was supposed to be the third. I’m not inclined to make my location known to the world right now.”

“Even if you did get charged, which shouldn’t happen if you’re telling me a legit story, then you’re safer with us than on the run, hiding from killers and cops.”

“He said he has friends in jail.”

“We’ll have you in protective custody.”

“He said some of those friends are in uniforms.”

“This is insane. If there is anything to what you’re saying, then we’ll find plenty of evidence to support it, and we’ll do that fast.”

“See, I don’t like the way you phrased that. If there’s anything to what I’m saying. Already, you’re skeptical.”

“That’s my job.”

“And that’s why I called you,” Abby said. “To give you a head start doing your job. I’ll be in touch.”

“Abby, damn it, if you—”

She disconnected, powered down her phone, and stepped out of the Tahoe. She put the phone just beneath the front tire, backed up over it, pulled out of the service plaza, and got back onto the Maine turnpike. She drove north, toward where the towns were smaller and the woods were darker.

26

Blinks are coming.

They’re not all the way there yet, but not far off either. Not impossible, certainly. Tara has worked on them with ferocious intensity, and while she hasn’t succeeded, something about her eye motion feels different. It’s promising, at least, a sensation like a door being forced open, just like when she was in the basement of that house on London Street.

She thinks it’s an upward motion. She tries to blink, she demands that her eyelids lower... and while they do not obey, her focus seems to shift. A small difference, and a dizzying sensation, but she’s almost certain she’s looking upward. Her eyes are so damn dry that it’s hard to tell, though. They’re dry even though they constantly leak with tears at the corners. People dab the tears away from time to time, but people also avoid the kind of direct, hard stare that could tell her if indeed she’s making any progress here. The motion she thinks she’s achieving is so slight that thorough scrutiny would be required to observe it. In the early hours, people would look hard into her eyes, searching for her as if she were submerged in dark water. Shannon. Dr. Pine. The strange boy in the black baseball cap — his scrutiny might have been the most intense of all, actually.

Those deep stares are rare now, though. Everyone has become more evasive, as if they’re fearful of Tara’s gaze, as if a coma is contagious. Or embarrassed by it, as if her eyes are a mirror offering an unflattering image.

If anyone would look hard now, though, they would see that she is close to blinking. As close as you can be without succeeding, and she feels like that should be noticeable. If Shannon would just pay attention, she would notice. Tara is almost certain of this. But Shannon is immersed in a phone call, and she seems concerned.

She’s holding her cell phone to her ear with her left hand and a ballpoint pen hovering above a notepad in her right, and her all-business attitude just crumbled with whatever has been said. Tara watches her face and feels a cold and certain assurance that this is the inevitable call that means the decision has been made. They are going to end her life. If life was what you called this frozen purgatory. Then Shannon speaks, and Tara realizes that it has nothing to do with her at all.

“She might have killed someone? The same woman I spoke to? Abby Kaplan, yes, that was her name, but what in the world...” She stops, clearly interrupted.

Tara is trying to follow the conversation, but it’s confusing — Abby Kaplan was one of the two strangers who’d visited her. Older than the second one, the one who pretended to be Justin Loveless and stared into Tara’s eyes like a hunter looking through a scope. That man seems right for a murderer; Abby Kaplan does not. Abby Kaplan is supposed to be part of her team, someone to help. The college hired her.

Top-notch recruiting, Hammel, Tara thinks, put that one in your brochures. She wants to laugh, and even though she can’t, it is still a pleasant sensation. Terror is often present, and frustration is constant, but humor is beginning to appear now and then to leaven these, as if her brain has tired of the relentless sorrow. She sometimes thinks that if she could simply communicate her mere existence, the rest could be endured. She could learn to have a life with some pleasure, then. Not the life she’d imagined, of course, but still one worth living. If they just knew that she was in here. But without that...

“Her own boss?” Shannon says into the phone. “Are you kidding me? I just... no, listen, I don’t give a damn about how Hammel is going to find a better firm, what does that even mean? Your first hire just killed her boss, and now you’ll admit that you could have done better?”

Bless you, Shannon, Tara thinks.

The pen descends to the notepad, but no words are written, and Shannon’s mouth screws tight. Then she says, “I know I’m not a police officer, that’s not a revelatory bit of information, but I still possess common sense, and maybe I should talk to the police, don’t you think?”

Shannon lifts the ballpoint pen away from the pad and clicks it rapidly while she listens. The sound seems large to Tara; something about that small click embeds in her brain in a different way than other, louder things. Why was that?

Suddenly, Tara’s thumb twitches.

Stunned, she tries to do it again, without success. But... it just moved. She is positive of that. Now that her attention is on it and she can’t replicate the feat, though, the sensation begins to feel false, a phantom movement, a cruel illusion. And yet, for an instant, she’d been certain. It came from the sound, almost, from watching Shannon click that pen and hearing the accompanying sound and then it was as if her muscle memory had fired and Tara had mimicked the gesture.

But she tries again and again, and her thumb rests limply against her index finger.

She’s lost track of Shannon’s words, but now hears her say, “Listen, I might have been one of the last people to talk to her. I sure think it would be useful if I could talk directly to the police instead of through a handler from the college.”

Pause, and Tara hopes she’ll begin clicking the pen again, but the pause is brief and then Shannon says, “Fine, just please give me a call back so I can explain this to my family.”

Shannon disconnects, lowers the phone, and stares at the wall with an expression that Tara hasn’t seen many times on her sister’s face: helplessness. The only memories Tara has of this look come from early childhood, in the days after her father’s death, when her mother’s depression was the darkest, the battle with medications the worst; even big sister Shannon had no idea what to do.

Put down that phone, Shannon had told Tara one terrible day after Tara had picked up the phone to call 911 for their unconscious mother. Shannon’s helplessness was gone from her face, replaced by fury. If you call, they’ll take us away, don’t you understand that?

Tara had put down the phone. Shannon sat with their mother until dawn, washing her face with a damp cloth and making sure that her head was tilted to the side so she couldn’t choke on her own vomit. Then she made Tara breakfast and sent her to school with instructions to keep her mouth shut about the situation at home; Shannon was handling it.

She had, too. Somehow, she had handled it.

Shannon turns to her, one eyebrow cocked, and Tara could swear that they’ve bridged the void somehow. This happens with people occasionally, with Shannon more than anyone else and most frequently when they are alone in the room. Now Shannon looks at her and says, “I think you should have gone to a state school, mi hermana. You could’ve saved a lot of money in student loans for the same level of incompetence.”

Tara laughs. She doesn’t move or make a sound, of course, but she laughs, and some part of her believes that Shannon knows it.

“The college hired an investigator for your case,” Shannon says, “who then apparently killed her boss and ran away. Talk about bringing in the best and the brightest.”

She’s smiling; she always seems happiest when she’s being sarcastic or cutting, a trait that makes relationships a struggle for her. Then the smile fades, her focus shifts away from Tara, and it is evident that she feels like she is alone in the room again.

Which breaks Tara’s heart.

“Abby seemed like she cared,” Shannon says softly, clearly speaking to herself now. Then she gives a little snap-out-of-it head shake, pulls a chair to the side of the bed, sits, and looks hard at Tara’s face.

“Regardless, she gave me a good idea, T. I did some reading last night, and I made some calls this morning, and I have good news — you get to watch a movie.”

Watch a movie? The television is always on. Mostly, Tara hates that. If she were able to change the channel, it wouldn’t be so bad, but when they leave it on just for background noise, like she’s a nervous puppy, it’s infuriating.

“Dr. Pine himself approved it,” Shannon says. “Even Rick and Mom say it’s worth a try. Not just a movie, though, T. — you get a field trip.” She takes Tara’s limp hand. Her touch is warm and wonderful. So few people are willing to let their touches linger.

My thumb can move, Tara thinks. Do it again, damn it, do it now, you stupid thumb, while someone has the chance to notice.

But her thumb lies motionless against Shannon’s palm.

“They’re going to put you in an ambulance and take you to a lab about an hour away, at a university hospital where there’s a coma research program, and then they’ll hook you up to even more of these...” She lifts one of the many wires that lead from Tara’s body to the monitors beside the bed. “And then they’re going to show you a movie and wait to see if the computers can tell whether you respond to it. Whether you can track it, whether you feel anything watching it.” Shannon’s voice wavers, and she bites her lower lip and looks away.

Tara realizes just how important this test must be. If she doesn’t pass this one, if she can’t somehow let these computers know that she is in here... big decisions are going to be made soon.

This may be her last chance to have a voice in them.

“I did win one battle,” Shannon says, turning back to her with a sniff and that forced smile. “They usually use some crappy black-and-white film. I told them that my sister hates black-and-white. They didn’t like the idea of changing, but I can be persuasive.”

An understatement for the ages. She could still sell tickets for the Titanic, Rick had once said of Shannon.

“So I got to pick the film,” she continues, squeezing Tara’s hand. “And I’ll give you one guess what I picked.”

Something scary, Tara thinks. Shannon loves Tara’s fear of horror movies, the way even the cheesy ones can make her jump, how she covers her eyes and watches them through her fingers.

“That’s right,” Shannon says, “your test will be a familiar one. You get to watch Jaws.”

Well, now. Tara has long proclaimed Jaws to be the most re-watchable movie in history. She hasn’t anticipated that being put to a coma test, though.

“You’ll respond,” Shannon whispers. “I know you will. When Quint starts talking about the Indianapolis sinking or when Chief Brody realizes his own son is on the sailboat by the shark, you’ll respond. Just to the dumb music, you’ll respond.” She’s imploring now, a hint of desperation to her words that scares Tara. This test is going to be very important.

“The people at the lab were encouraging,” Shannon says, seemingly more to reassure herself than anything else. “They’ve had good results.” She pauses. “Maybe I won’t mention where I got the idea.”

27

As Abby drove Hank’s Tahoe along the turnpike, she remembered that she’d already spent some time considering life as a fugitive, thanks to Luke. One of his first leads in anything that wasn’t a purely over-the-top action film where spiders fought robots was in a movie about a husband-and-wife team on the run, a Hitchcock knockoff that bombed at the box office. While he was reading the script and rehearsing, though, he enjoyed pondering the scenario.

“It’s so much harder now than it would have been fifty years ago,” he’d said, stretched out on the chaise longue on their cramped balcony during one of the rare hours that sunlight fell on it. “Think about it — you could pay cash for hotel rooms and rental cars and plane tickets, there were pay phones everywhere and no surveillance cameras, and you could hot-wire a car with a screwdriver.”

Abby interrupted and asked him to explain that process, to tell her just how he’d go about hot-wiring a car with a screwdriver in the good old days. Luke smiled. “That was the golden age of hot-wiring! Simple! But the newer cars are tougher.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” He’d nodded emphatically. “Just trust me on this.”

“Certainly.”

“The first thing you’d have to do if you were running from the law or people who were trying to kill you is ditch the cell phone, obviously,” he went on. “They can always track those. But it’s easy to get a burner phone — if you have cash. Credit cards are no good, right? And how many people have enough cash to go on the run? How much cash do you have in your wallet right now?”

Abby had four bills crumpled in her purse — and she was pleasantly surprised to discover one of them was a ten. She’d thought they were all singles.

“So there you go, thirteen dollars,” Luke said. “I couldn’t get far on that. They’d find me before I hit the state line. I’d run out of gas—”

“Is this in the car you hot-wired with a screwdriver?” Abby asked, and he grinned. For all of his physical beauty — and he was stunning, no question about that — he had a kid’s smile, awkward and shy, and his off-the-set laugh was the same, a little too big, too high, far too likely to end with a helpless snort. Abby loved that about him. All the surprising touches that turned the movie star into a human being were reassuring. The more human he became, the more she loved him. That first day, when he’d joked to her about the grief his friends were giving him for having a woman perform his stunt driving, she’d thought he was exactly what she’d expected: good-looking and charming and arrogant and false. The first date, she’d asked herself why she was wasting her time. But soon she realized that her initial wariness about him was understandable, but it was not the truth. The truth was complicated, as it usually is, and the truth of Luke London made him easier to love than Abby wanted. Her truth was that she wanted to stay far away from actors. Her truth was that she was breaking rules for him.

“Sure it’s the car I hot-wired,” he said of his escape vehicle. “Because I’d have found an old car, right? As we discussed.”

“Ah, of course.”

“But then I run out of gas, and I’ve got no cash. What then? Pretend to be a homeless person?”

“It doesn’t sound like it would be pretending by then.”

Her pointed at her, sculpted triceps flexing under his T-shirt. “Good point! It would be method acting at its finest.”

“And you suck at that.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “Indeed. I’d stand out, and they’d find me.”

“Who?”

“The people who are trying to kill me! So what do I do?”

“You steal,” she said.

“I’d get caught. I guarantee it. I have a naturally guilty disposition when it comes to crime. One try at shoplifting, and I’m getting caught and going to jail. Which means, obviously, another inmate will be paid to kill me. Or maybe a guard. But going to jail is not hiding.”

“You steal carefully, then,” Abby had said. “Maybe break into a house. Just a matter of finding the right place.”

Now, two years after that conversation and months after they’d taken Luke off life support, Abby drove along the turnpike and wondered where the right place was.

She had some cash — a hundred and thirty bucks, enough for a hotel room somewhere, but hotels were dangerous. Her face was going to be on the news, and this was off-season in Maine, which meant that the employees of hotels that took cash were going to have time to pay attention to their guests, learn their faces.

That was when she got it.

Off-season. The right places, she realized, were plentiful. They didn’t call the state Vacationland for nothing — most people who owned property in Maine didn’t stay there year-round. There were thousands of vacant houses, cabins, and cottages out there for her, and plenty of them were isolated.

She left the interstate in Augusta and moved on to the back roads. She realized only after taking the exit that the other cars hadn’t made her uneasy, nor had the speed. Her mind was too busy with a real crisis to let the imaginary threats creep in. When you were fleeing a murder scene and a murderer, a traffic accident suddenly didn’t seem too bad.

As she followed one of the winding country roads east toward the coast, it began to rain again. That felt good, like protective cover. She was driving east because most of the summer people clung to the coast. There were exceptions at every lake and pond, of course, but nowhere was the population of seasonal houses higher than the Midcoast. When the patio furniture was moved into storage and the lobster shacks folded up their bright umbrellas, the population of those towns fell by at least half.

How to pick the right house, though? Driving around some little coastal village and staring at houses would allow her to identify a few vacant ones, but it would also get her noticed by a year-round resident.

She stopped at a gas station with a lunch counter, a place busy enough for her to feel like she wouldn’t stand out and big enough for her to suspect they’d have what she needed. Her clothes had dried but were still covered with mud, and she didn’t want many people to get a look at her. She waited until an older couple got out of their car and headed toward the door, and then she got out of the Tahoe, crossed the parking lot swiftly, and walked in on their heels. They turned toward the deli counter, and Abby stepped behind one of the merchandise racks and pretended to be looking at candy while she looked around the store. Just beside the door, she saw what she wanted — a rack of real estate guides, free of charge.

She grabbed one, exited, and tried to keep her pace slow while her heart thundered and her every impulse screamed at her to run.

Nobody gave her so much as a passing glance.

She drove to Rockland and pulled off the road at a busy Dunkin’ Donuts where the Tahoe wasn’t likely to stand out. She’d have to change plates if she intended to keep the car, but right now her priority was finding a place where she could buy some time.

The real estate guide offered plenty of them. Abby knew what she was looking for; the keywords were seasonal, which meant they’d likely be empty now, and motivated, which meant they’d been on the market for a long time, and the neighbors were used to seeing strange cars pull in for a look.

She found both of those packaged with an even more golden word: isolated.

There was a seasonal property in St. George, a rural stretch of peninsula about twenty minutes from Rockland, that boasted a reduced price, motivated seller, and fifteen isolated acres.

A private oasis, perfect for artists, nature lovers, or anyone seeking beauty and seclusion!

The Realtor didn’t spell it out, but the place certainly appealed to fugitives too.

Abby drove south on Route 1, then turned in South Thomaston and followed 131 through winding curves that led out of the hills and down the peninsula, the sea on one side and the St. George River on the other. Past an old dairy truck that stood on the top of a hill like it was waiting to be used for a calendar photograph, past a few houses with tall stacks of lobster traps in the yard, and then through the little fishing and tourist town of Tenants Harbor. More fishing town than tourist spot now; this was far enough out of the woods to be unappealing to the leaf peepers, so it probably ran on a short season, Memorial Day to Labor Day, for most everyone but the locals. Just before Port Clyde, the road to the private oasis appeared. She followed it into an expanse of ever-thickening pines and then spotted a FOR SALE sign beside a stone post onto which the house number had been carved: 117.

She followed a dirt driveway up a slope and around a curve and then the house came into view, a tall structure of shake shingles and glass that made her think of a lighthouse, everything designed vertically, with each floor a little smaller than the one below it, so it looked as if the levels had been stacked on one another. On one side of the home was a garage and on the other a small outbuilding that had probably been a studio.

She got out of the Tahoe and stood in the silent yard. A light breeze carried the smell of the nearby sea, and the scent mingled with the pines. The place did feel like an oasis, and that was good, because her adrenaline was fading and exhaustion was creeping in. She needed rest. Hopefully, David Meredith was making good on his pledge to do righteous work down at Hank’s house, and when Abby woke, it would all be done, nothing left to endure but a lecture from the cops for running and then listening to news of the kid’s arrest and identifying him in a photo lineup, maybe.

Sure. It would be that easy.

She tried the garage door first, and it was locked. The house was the same, but there was a Realtor’s lockbox on each door. She left the one on the front door intact and hammered the cover off the one on the side door with the butt of the SIG Sauer. There was a Red Sox key ring with three keys — house, garage, and studio, all helpfully labeled.

Abby put the Tahoe in the garage, lowered the door, sealing it out of sight, and went in the house. It was a beautiful place, with gleaming wood floors and fresh white paint on the walls, so even on a gray day it seemed filled with light. There wasn’t any furniture. It had been a long time since anyone lived here. From the third-floor master bedroom, you had a view of overgrown gardens that would once have been spectacular, and, just visible over the treetops, a glimmer of blue ocean. You could also see almost the entire length of the road. There were only four other homes on it, and trees screened them out.

The house was mostly empty, but in a closet she found some old drapes and a throw pillow that featured Snoopy flying a biplane. She picked a second-floor bedroom that faced away from the road and offered easy access to a porch roof. She opened the window, removed the screen, then closed it again, leaving it unlocked. If anyone showed up, at least she’d have a chance to run.

Run where?

Abby didn’t have the answer to that. She was out of answers and needed sleep in the worst way. She went back out to the garage and got the bag with the phones and carried that into the house and tucked it in one of the bathroom cabinets. Then she returned to the Tahoe and got the guns. She put the shotgun in the closet near the front door, brought the scoped rifle up to the third-floor master bedroom, and kept the handguns with her as she walked back down to the second floor. She felt nauseated and dizzy and weary. Adrenaline was an amazing thing. There was a certain gift to panic, to terror. As long as you could control it and channel it, there were fuel reserves in fear that most people didn’t know existed.

She’d burned through the last of hers, though.

She lay down on the cold hardwood floor, set the guns near her hand, put her head on the Snoopy pillow, covered herself with the old drapes, and slept.

28

For as long as Tara has been awake, the hospital has seemed horrible, and yet as soon as they begin to move her, she’s afraid to leave. Fortunately, she has Shannon in her ear, Shannon who, bless her, would talk to a mannequin if that was the only audience she had.

“Dr. Pine says there’s no risk in moving you because your spine is stable and your heart and breathing are good, but if there’s trouble, have no fear, we’ll handle it — that’s the best part about traveling by ambulance.”

Mom shuffles numbly alongside, and now Tara is certain that they’ve given her mother tranquilizers. She’s surprised — and angry — that Rick has agreed to it. Or does he not know? Is Tara the only one who’s picking up on this because everyone else’s attention is on her, not Mom? Possible.

A few people give her kind smiles as they pass, and it’s both interesting and overwhelming to see the sheer size of the hospital. It occurs to her that she has no idea where this hospital is or how she got here. Ambulance, helicopter? She’s always wanted to fly in a helicopter. If you’re going to be airlifted to a hospital, you might as well get the view.

They descend in an oversize elevator, big enough to accommodate the gurney, and exit out onto a loading dock, and, sure enough, there’s the ambulance, ready and waiting.

The fifty feet between the hospital and the ambulance are the most terrifying part of the journey. Open air isn’t a relief to Tara; it’s shocking and intimidating, and she misses the confines of the hospital room. Just leave me in there and I’ll get better! But then they have her up and into the back of the ambulance and Shannon is at her side, Rick and Mom apparently driving separately. There’s a young paramedic in the ambulance, an impossibly good-looking guy, and Tara would love to exchange a glance with Shannon over this.

“Tara, I’m Ron,” he says as he pats her leg, and now she likes him even more — an introduction and a kind touch. She listens to Shannon and Ron talk for the remainder of the ride. Ron is encouraging; he’s heard of the lab they’re headed for, and he knows they’ve had great results. Dr. Carlisle is the best. Tara is in great hands with Dr. Pine and Dr. Carlisle. Shannon agrees, but mostly she’s just proud of the way she convinced them to use Jaws for the test.

“She hates black-and-white film,” Shannon tells Ron. “Even the classics. If they show her anything in black-and-white, she’s not going to be more alert, trust me. She fell asleep in the first five minutes of Casablanca.”

Not entirely true — Tara closed her eyes during the first five minutes of Casablanca. She didn’t fall asleep until at least fifteen minutes in.

She’s grateful for the conversation swirling around her, since it helps distract her from the swaying motion of the ambulance. Being inside a moving vehicle is a memory trigger — she can see Dr. Oltamu’s face in the rearview mirror again and hear the urgent tension in his voice when he insisted that he needed to get out and walk.

Transition from ambulance to the university lab is quick and smooth and everyone here is friendly and smiling, far more eye contact than what she’s used to at the hospital. Dr. Michelle Carlisle is leading the way. She’s a tall, striking woman. She kneels to Tara’s level, looks her in the eye, and introduces herself politely but formally, as if this is just a standard doctor-patient interaction.

Tara is instantly a fan of Dr. Carlisle.

“What we’re going to do,” the doctor explains, “is both cutting-edge and quite simple, Tara. We’re going to give you the chance to watch your beloved Jaws” — she looks at Shannon when she says this with an expression that isn’t entirely pleased — “and while you watch it, we watch you. You’ll be inside an MRI scanner. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an MRI before, but it might feel a little claustrophobic at first. Just be patient and let that pass.”

Speaking as if Tara has a choice in that matter is absurd, and yet it is deeply appreciated.

“The movie plays on a scanner above you and is reflected on a mirror that you can see comfortably. While you watch, the MRI will be recording your responses in various brain areas — auditory cortex, visual cortex, parahippocampal, frontal, and parietal lobes. We’ll compare your activation results to that of baseline tests, which will help us say definitively that you’re alert and aware, that you’re watching and engaging with the film and the story.” All of this is for the benefit of Shannon, Mom, and Rick, of course, but Dr. Carlisle addresses Tara. “Well... are we ready?”

I don’t know, Tara thinks. Because there’s one big question nobody has answered yet: What if your tests don’t show any activation?

Dr. Carlisle smiles as if Tara has given consent and stands. “Then let’s get to it.”

The doctor lied about the MRI scanner. It doesn’t make Tara feel merely a little claustrophobic. It’s petrifying.

The machine looks big enough from a distance, but when they slide Tara into it and the rest of the room vanishes from view, the rounded walls close in on her, and it’s like being in a coffin. When the hatch behind her is sealed, she’s instantly convinced that there’s not enough air in this thing, and the panic that overtakes her is the worst since her return to awareness. Maybe worse. What if she can’t breathe in here, what if she begins to hyperventilate? She can’t bang on the walls or scream or thrash; she can’t do anything to let them know that she needs out.

She’s Twitchy Tara again, worthy of her big sister’s snarky nickname, anxiety swelling to panic when she knows it’s irrational.

She’s certain each inhalation is using up her oxygen supply in this coffin-like enclosure, and now she’s worse than paralyzed — she’s paralyzed and entombed.

Be brave, damn it!

She tries to think of 1804 London Street again, of the long journey down dark halls. She can’t conjure up the image, though. And that was so long ago; that happened to a child! She doesn’t need a child’s courage, she needs a woman’s warrior heart.

The Allagash.

The name rises unbidden in her mind, and suddenly she sees the Allagash River, the big, beautiful, dangerous river that bisects northern Maine’s roadless, townless wilderness. The river flows south to north, an unusual path in North America. In her freshman year at Hammel, when she was afraid she couldn’t hack it at school, couldn’t make friends, couldn’t survive so far away from home, Tara went alone to kayak on the Allagash. Imprudent; reckless, even. But necessary. She would make her decision there — whether to stay through the semester or go back to Cleveland and enroll somewhere local, somewhere familiar. Or maybe head west, find a school near Stanford, near Shannon.

But first, she wanted to see this river.

She was afraid that day. She saw no one. She was alone in the wilderness. But gradually, the fear faded enough that she found the beauty of the place. She paddled south against the current and then rode it back to the north, and she took the kayak out of the river as the day faded and the last of the sunlight was filtered through the pines and cast a gorgeous green-gold sparkle over the water. She knew in that moment, bone-weary but renewed, that she could take whatever challenges Hammel sent her way.

She thinks of the river now, remembering the fragrance of pine needles and the feel of the cool water and the soft cry of a loon. Remembering the green and gold light on the bejeweled surface of the river, the river that flowed north instead of south. This river that she had conquered alone.

She blinks. Not a full blink, but a Tara blink, a flick of the eyes.

The tube fills with blue light. The MRI chamber darkens, and this actually helps, because she’s less aware of the squeeze of the tight space now, and she can see the movie playing on the screen.

The scene shifts to a woman running across sand dunes and alongside a battered wooden fence. A young man behind her, breathless, calling out, “What’s your name again?”

Chrissie, Tara thinks before the answer comes.

She knows it all. The most re-watchable movie of all time — all due respect to Shawshank, but the prize has to go to Jaws — and the only thing Tara has to do now is watch it once more while lighting up the correct areas of her brain.

No pressure.

Chrissie and the boy keep up their stumbling run along the darkened ocean, peeling their clothes off awkwardly, and he yells at her to slow down, then tumbles drunkenly onto the dune as Chrissie dives into the lapping sea and swims out into the dark water.

Tara tracks the action, but her mind is on the first time she saw the movie, at their house in Shaker Heights back when Dad was still alive. They’d sent her to bed, saying she was too young, but Shannon had crept in and told her she could see the screen from the back of the hallway.

Just don’t make any noise, Shannon had commanded. If you make any noise, they’ll know you’re here.

They hadn’t known. Tara had passed that test. Now it’s the same test, and she needs to fail it. Make some noise, T., she tells herself. Let them know you’re here.

Chrissie is swimming toward the buoy, alone in the sea. Smiling, tossing her blond hair. Then the camera angle changes and shows her from below. Legs dangling.

And the music starts.

The first soft notes, growing louder as the camera closes in, Chrissie floating in graceful, blissful ignorance and then—

Tara’s heart thumps with Chrissie’s first scream.

She’s seen the damn movie a hundred times, and still she cringes, no different than that night back in the dark hallway when she was seven years old.

Chrissie thrashes, screams, cries for help. Her drunk boyfriend is passed out on the shore, waves teasing the soles of his bare feet. Out in the blue-black sea, Chrissie grabs the buoy and clings to it, a moment’s safety, a last desperate chance.

Then the unseen attacker has her again, tugging her toward deep, dark water, while the only one who can save her is sprawled on his back in the sand, oblivious.

“Please help!” Chrissie screams. Her last words before she vanishes from the screen, pulled into the depths.

Good-bye, Chrissie, Tara thinks. I heard you.

But did her auditory cortex activate? Did Tara put out a glimmer of light for poor Chrissie?

She will know soon.

29

Abby woke before dawn, stiff and aching but rested. Reality crept back, terrible memories of the previous day, and when she sat up, her hand brushed the stock of the SIG Sauer. The touch of the gun removed the last vestiges of hope that this might have been a vivid nightmare.

A nightmare, yes. But not the kind you woke up from.

She rose and stretched, the sound of her popping joints loud in the empty house. Her throat throbbed and there was pressure behind her eyes and under her jaw that promised the arrival of a cold. Hardly a surprise; she’d spent one night bedded down in wet leaves and the next on the wood floor of an empty house. She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with water, then cupped her hands and drank. The water had a mineral taste to it, but that was fine, and the cold of it soothed her throat. She walked back out and stood on the second-floor landing. Moonlight filtered down from above, and she followed it up the stairs and into the third-floor master suite. She sat on the floor there and stared at the shadowed trees as the moonlight gave way to gray and then to rose hues and then the world was back, though it didn’t feel like the world she knew. Abby was alone in a strange house in a strange town, sitting in a bedroom that contained absolutely nothing but a scoped rifle she’d stolen from a murdered friend.

How many hours had it been since she’d grudgingly boarded the train to Boston to meet with Shannon Beckley?

A different lifetime. But she’d been in this situation before, in a way. More than a few times.

The first time she’d flipped a car, it had been in New Hampshire. She’d known her tires were thin, but there were seven laps left and she was sitting in third and although her engine was overmatched by the two cars in front, she was sure she could beat them. She’d gotten outside on turn two and the car in front moved to block her while the leader shifted inside to attack the straightaway, and Abby saw a gap opening like a mistake in a chess game. It was going to be tight, and it was going to test what was left of her tires, but she could do it.

She’d made the cut to the inside and then the back wheels drifted and she knew it was trouble but she tried to ride it out, punching the accelerator, eyes locked on that closing gap. When the contact came from the back of the driver’s side, she wasn’t ready for it. It knocked her car to the right and then the tires were shrieking as they tried to hold on to the asphalt like clawing fingernails. Then she was airborne. And dead.

Or that’s how it had felt. A detached sense of foolishness — You had third, and third was fine — paired with the certainty of death.

The car had flipped twice before it hit the wall, but somehow she was upright when it was done, and people were reaching for her and shouting and a stream of fire extinguisher foam was pounding against her.

She was sitting on the gurney in the back of the ambulance, the doors still open, offering a view of the track, when she thought: This was my last race.

She’d been wrong about that too.

Either you quit or you picked yourself up and moved on. For a long time, Abby’s greatest asset had been her ability to get back behind the wheel after a wreck and feel right at home. You wrecked again; of course you did. You expected death again; of course you did.

But you kept on moving. Up until Luke, she’d always been able to do that.

Up until Luke, she’d also always been alone in the car.

She was alone again now, and there was wreckage behind her, but she knew these feelings. There were similarities between what had happened to her yesterday and what had happened to her on the track; anyone who said otherwise had never flipped a car at 187 miles per hour, never walked out of a cloud of flame.

You survived only when you kept moving. Yesterday, Abby had done that. She’d been all instinct and motion. That had felt right to her. She’d felt more right, in fact, than she had in a long time, which was a damned unsettling realization.

Today she did not feel right. She was frozen and indecisive. Did she call David Meredith to learn what they’d made of the scene, see if she could trust him? Maybe they’d found enough to back up her story already. Maybe she’d slept on the floor in a vacant house for no reason. She needed the internet, but she’d crushed her phone back at the service plaza. She’d have to risk taking the Tahoe out so she could find a Walmart and pick up a burner phone with cash.

“You’re an idiot,” she said aloud, voice echoing off the hardwood floors and empty walls. She shook her head, got to her feet, and went down the steps to the bathroom where she’d stowed the bag of iPhones from Savage Sam. She took them back upstairs, where she figured the signal would be best, sat down in front of a wall outlet, separated the phones and paired them with chargers. Three phones and only two chargers. She plugged two in and waited for them to power on. Only one was protected by a PIN code, but it had no signal, as if it were old and forgotten or maybe its owner had suspended service on it. It would still work if connected to Wi-Fi, though, and the PIN code would be easy enough to defeat; you just reset the phone to factory settings.

One problem there — people were being murdered over whatever was on these phones, and deleting that material didn’t seem wise.

The other phone was functional but had absolutely no personal data. Maybe Savage Sam had wiped it clean in preparation for selling it? Or maybe Oltamu had wiped it clean for other reasons?

She picked up the third phone, and something felt wrong about it immediately. The weight was off. It was in a simple black case with a screen protector, and it looked for all the world like the others, but it was too heavy.

She brought the charger to the base of the phone but couldn’t find the port. She turned it over, looking to see how she’d missed the charging port on a phone that looked like a twin of her own.

It wasn’t there.

An electric tingle rode up her spine.

The top of the phone had a power button that looked standard. When she pressed it, the screen lit up, and the display filled with what appeared to be the factory-setting background of a new iPhone. She hit the home button, expecting to be denied access, but she was greeted with a close-up image of Tara Beckley’s face. Tara was smiling uncertainly, almost warily, into the camera, and behind her was a dark sky broken by a few lights from distant buildings.

Below the photo were the words Access authentication: Enter the name of the individual pictured above.

When Abby tapped the screen, a keyboard appeared. She moved her thumb toward the T on it, then stopped. She wasn’t sure what she was opening here. If this phone actually belonged to Tara Beckley, it was a strange and poor security feature — a selfie asking for your own name? Then there was the question of the weight, which was decidedly different from a standard iPhone’s. She pulled off the case and checked the back and found no Apple logo and no serial number. If it was a phone, it was a clone, a knockoff. But if it wasn’t a phone... what did it do?

It had one hell of a battery, that was for sure. It had been at the salvage yard for a week and had no charging port, and still it ran without trouble. Definitely not the iPhone of Abby’s experience. But it looked like one. Would it act like one? Would it ring?

She picked up the phone that actually functioned and plugged it back into the charger. Then she went downstairs, out of the house, and into the crisp autumn day. The wind was coming in off the sea, and the smell of salt was heavy in the air. She could hear waves breaking on rocks. Down there, beyond the trees, it would be violent, but up here it sounded soothing.

She found the Hammel College case file in the backseat of the Tahoe and scanned through the loose pages and old photographs, all of it feeling surreal and distant — the idea that this had once been merely a job for Hank and her seemed impossible, laughable. It was the whole world to her now.

College administrators had provided the paperwork that had been given to the conference coordinator; it included two phone numbers for Oltamu, helpfully labeled office and mobile, and a note saying that the doctor preferred to be called before nine or after three.

Abby didn’t think Oltamu would mind the disturbance anymore.

She took the contact sheet, went back upstairs, punched the mobile number into her one working phone, and called, staring at the bizarre clone phone with Tara Beckley’s face on the display.

It won’t ring, she thought, but then she heard ringing.

She was so surprised that it took her a moment to realize it was from the phone at her ear.

She was about to disconnect the call when the voice came on.

“Hello?” A man, speaking softly and with a trace of confusion. Or fear.

Abby looked at the phone as if she’d imagined the voice. The call was connected. She had someone on the line.

“Hello?” the man said again.

Abby brought the phone back to her ear and said, “I was looking for Dr. Oltamu.”

There was a pause, and then the voice said, “Dr. Oltamu is unavailable. May I ask who’s calling?”

Abby hesitated and then decided to test him. “My name is Hank Bauer.”

Pause.

“Hank Bauer,” the man echoed finally, and Abby thought, He knows. The name means something to him.

“That’s right,” she said.

“And what can I do for you, Hank?” A bad impression of friendly and casual.

“Dr. Oltamu is dead,” Abby said. “So who are you and why are you answering a dead man’s phone?”

The silence went on so long that Abby checked to see whether the call was still connected. It was. As she started to speak again, the man finally answered.

“Would this be Abby Kaplan?”

“Good guess. Now, what’s your name?”

“That’s not important.”

“Of course not.” Abby got to her feet and started pacing the empty bedroom, the phone held tightly. “Give me another name, then — give me the kid’s name.”

“The kid.”

“That’s right. Tell me who he was and I won’t need your name. I want him.”

Another silence. Abby glanced at the display again — she’d been on the phone for thirty-seven seconds. How long was too long to stay connected?

“Do it fast,” she said.

“I’ve got no idea what kid you’re asking about. Or why you called this number.”

“Then why did you answer?” Abby knelt and punched the home button on the clone phone, which brought up the picture of Tara Beckley. She was ready to tell the man on the other end of the line what she had, ready to try a bargain, but she stopped herself.

She thought she understood now, understood the whole damn thing — or at least a much larger portion than she had before.

I’ve been there, she thought, looking at the photo. The background over Tara’s shoulder showed spindled shadows looming just past her pensive, awkward smile. Shadows from an old bridge. Abby had paced that same spot with a camera. That place was where this photo had been taken. Hammel College’s campus was just across the river.

“You got the wrong phone,” Abby said.

“What does that mean?” the man said, but his voice had changed, and he hadn’t asked the question out of confusion — he was intrigued. Wary, maybe, but intrigued.

“The one you just answered doesn’t matter,” Abby said. “The one I’ve got does. It might not even be a phone, but it’s what you wanted. It’s what you need now.”

When the man didn’t speak, Abby felt a cold smile slide over her face. “You took two of them,” she said. “You took Tara Beckley’s phone and Oltamu’s. That was the job. Other than killing him, of course. The job was to kill him and take the phones. I don’t know why, but I know that’s what you were trying to do. But there were three phones, and you didn’t know that. That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

“Why don’t you explain—”

“You missed one,” Abby said. “And if you want it, you’re going to need to give me the kid who killed Hank. Think we can make that trade?”

“I bet if we meet in person, we can work this out. Quickly. How about that, Abby? You’re in some trouble, and I can ensure that it ends. You need some serious help.”

“And you need that phone. So make a gesture of good faith. Tell me his name.”

Pause. “I’d be lying if I told it to you. There’s my gesture of good faith. Whatever name he’s going by now, I don’t know it.”

For the first time, Abby believed him. “I need to come out of this alive,” she said.

“You will.”

“I’ll believe that when you tell me where to find him.”

No response. Abby looked at the phone again. What if the call was being traced? How long was too long? “Make a choice,” she said.

“Okay. All right. But it will take me some time. And I’ll need to know you’ve got the phone and where you are. You tell me that, I’ll put him in the same place. How you handle it then is up to you.”

“What do you call him?” Abby said.

“Huh?”

“Forget his real name. What do you call him?”

Another pause, and then: “Dax.”

“Dax.”

“Yes. But it won’t help you. Trust me, he’s not going to be located under that name.”

“That’s fine. You want the phone, you’ll put him where I can find him. Agreed?”

“Tell me something about the phone.”

“It’s a fake, for one.”

She could hear the man on the other end of the line exhale. “A fake?”

“Yes. It’s built to look like an iPhone, but it’s not one. Now — ready to make a deal on giving me your boy Dax?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Then I’ll call back. From a different number.”

“Hang on. Tell me where you—”

Abby cut him off. “End of round one. Answer when I call again.”

“Hang on, hang on, don’t—”

Abby disconnected and stood looking at the phone. Her hand was trembling. She powered the phone down. She didn’t want it putting out any sort of signal.

Who the hell was that? Who answered Oltamu’s phone?

Not Oltamu, that was for sure. And not a cop.

The options left weren’t good.

She sat beside Hank Bauer’s rifle and picked up the fake phone, trying to imagine what had made it worth killing for and what Tara Beckley had understood about it when her photo was taken. The smile was uncomfortable, forced, and the man she’d been with had been killed a few minutes — seconds? — later. Tara had been sent spinning into the river below and then rushed to the hospital, where she now lay in a coma. But there was a difference between uncomfortable and afraid, and as Abby looked at her face, she was sure Tara hadn’t been scared. Not yet, at least. Maybe after, maybe soon after, but not in the moment of that photograph.

She hesitated, then typed Tara and hit Enter.

The display blinked, refreshed, and said Access denied, two tries remaining.

“Shit,” Abby whispered, and she set the phone down as if she were afraid of it.

As if? No. You are afraid of it.

People were being killed over this thing, and for what? Something stored on it made sense, but wasn’t everything cloud-based now? What would be on the phone that couldn’t be accessed by a hacker? Hacking it seemed easier than leaving a bloody trail of victims up the Atlantic coast. She stared at the device as if it would offer an answer. It couldn’t. But who could?

Oltamu.

Right. A dead man.

“Why’d they kill you, Doc?” she whispered.

She couldn’t begin to guess because she didn’t know the first thing about Oltamu. That was a problem. Abby was out in front, but she didn’t know what was coming for her.

Look in the rearview mirror, then. Pause and look in the rearview.

To get answers, she would have to start with the first of the dead men.

30

Whenever the concealed microphones in Gerry Connors’s office were activated, Dax Blackwell received an alert on his phone. Generally, he chose not to listen unless Gerry was in the midst of a deal. He was always curious to determine how Gerry valued his efforts, since in Dax’s business, it was difficult to get a sense of the going professional rates. There weren’t many Glassdoor.com reviews for what he did.

Today he listened, tucking in earbuds. He sat in the car with an energy drink in hand and listened to Gerry Connors give his name to Abby Kaplan.

He was surprised by how disappointed he felt. He’d known Gerry was a risk, because anyone who knew how to find you was a risk, and yet he’d had as much trust in Gerry as anyone on earth since his father and uncle had been killed.

Time to put that away, though. Disappointment wasn’t a useful emotion; it did nothing to help your next steps.

And why be surprised? He remembered a day at the shooting range with his uncle and father, Patrick putting round after round into the bull’s-eye from two hundred yards, totally focused, eye to the scope, and Dax’s father looking on with the sort of pride that Dax wanted to inspire in him. Something about watching that shooting display had made his father reflective. Jack Blackwell tended to be philosophical when guns were in hand.

But that day, as Patrick racked the bolt and breathed and fired and hit, over and over, Jack Blackwell had watched his brother with fierce pride and then looked at his son and said, “Dax, if you find one person on this earth who would never fuck you over for money or women, you’ll be a fortunate man. People like that are rare.”

There you had it, then. Why feel disappointment in Gerry Connors when he was doing exactly what you’d expect him to? The only question was how to respond.

Dax sipped his energy drink and played the recording once more, then sat in silence, thinking, his eyes straight ahead. At length, he picked up his phone and called Gerry.

“It’s me,” he said. “I’m struggling here. Our girl Abby has done a good job of hiding. Any ideas?”

31

Gerry Connors had a decision to make, and he needed to make it fast. Abby Kaplan was out there doing exactly what Dax Blackwell had predicted — avoiding police and trying to make a play on her own. The German was out there, inbound and impatient, and he didn’t even know what a mess this had turned into yet. And now there was Dax Blackwell on the phone asking for guidance, and Gerry had to decide whether to set him up or give him a chance.

It seemed impossible that he’d been put in this situation by some disgraced stunt-car-driving chick turned insurance adjuster.

The most intriguing part of the whole thing was that the kid had been right. Kaplan hadn’t gone straight to the cops; she’d gotten scared and run. Gerry couldn’t imagine how the kid had been so damned sure of this.

Yes, you can. You have always imagined it. He’s one of them.

“Gerry?” Dax said. “Are you there?”

“Yeah. I’m here. And she’s not hiding. She’s calling people.”

“Calling who?” Dax said, and he seemed pleased by the news.

Gerry looked at Amandi Oltamu’s silent phone on his desk and wondered how long it would be before it rang again... and what Abby Kaplan would have done in the meantime. Beside the phone was a notepad on which Gerry had scribbled the number she had used to call him. He looked from the phone to the notepad, drumming a pen on the desk.

Trade Dax or trust him?

“Gerry?” Dax prompted.

“She’s trying to make her own way out of this,” Gerry said. “She might already be with the cops, but it didn’t feel like it. She says she’s got the phone, although she might be bluffing. But she understands the way it went, at least. She understands what Ramirez did wrong.”

Dax was quiet for a moment, then said, “How do you know this?”

There he went again, pushing, fishing.

“My client,” Gerry said tightly.

“How did Abby Kaplan reach your client?”

If he’d been in the room, Gerry might’ve shot him. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut, took a breath, and said, “She’s calling Oltamu’s phone.”

“And your client was dumb enough to answer it?”

“Listen, shut the fuck up and let me talk, all right? She called the phone and spun some bullshit about trading for... safety. I don’t know what that means to her exactly and probably neither does she — she just knows she’s in trouble.”

Dax didn’t say anything this time.

“I want to know where she’s calling from,” Gerry said.

“I’d imagine.”

Gerry would have shot him twice for that.

Trade him, then. Give him up.

“How’d you know she’d go this route?” he asked, and the kid must have heard the sincerity in his voice, because for once he wasn’t a wiseass when he responded.

“A lot of factors. She likes to be on the move. Has her whole life. From the cradle until I finally put her in the grave, Abby’s been about motion and speed. She doesn’t have a good history with police either. There are still people in California who are pushing for her to be charged in the wreck that killed the pretty-boy actor. And...” He hesitated, that brief hitch that his father had never shown, or at least had never shown to Gerry, before he said, “I guess you could call it my own instinct. Abby’s not dumb, and I saw that, but I also made sure she knew that I wasn’t dumb. Everything that’s happened since is a reaction to our understanding of each other. That seems simple, but it’s not. If someone is close to a mirror, you see it.”

“Close to a mirror? What the hell does that mean?”

The kid gave it a few beats before he said, “I understand her. That’s all it means.”

“She’s an insurance investigator. If you feel like she could work with you, then I’ve sorely underestimated your talents.”

With no trace of annoyance, the kid said, “Oh, you haven’t underestimated my talents, Gerry. Abby Kaplan’s, though? She’s something more than we’d have expected.”

“Because she got away from you. That’s all you mean. You don’t want to admit that you screwed up with her. Because she got away, we need to pretend she’s something special.”

Still no inflection change when Dax said, “Didn’t you tell me I was right in my prediction about how she’d choose to move, Gerry?”

“Maybe you were.”

“She’s on the run and she’s calling you — sorry, calling your client. Give me the benefit of the doubt on this one. I was right about Abby.”

“After you lost her.”

“Once. Yes. After I lost her once.” He was unfazed. “It won’t happen twice.”

Gerry said, “I’ve got the number she called from, and that’s all I’ve got.”

“It’s a start.”

“You need to work fast. This is going to go in one direction or the other very quickly.”

“An object in motion tends to stay in motion,” Dax Blackwell said cheerfully, “unless an external force is applied to it. Let’s see if we can apply a little force. What’s the number?”

Gerry read it off. “See what you can do with that, and let me know in a hurry.”

“If Abby calls back, is your client going to answer that phone again?”

“How the fuck do I know?” Gerry snapped.

“I suppose you don’t.”

“Of course I don’t. Just do your job.”

“Right,” the kid said, and he disconnected.

Gerry looked from his own phone to Oltamu’s and found himself wishing Oltamu’s would ring. I’ll make that trade, Kaplan. I had high hopes for this kid, but they’re vanishing fast. You call back, and I will absolutely make that trade.

But for now...

He couldn’t make the trade until Kaplan called back. In the meantime, he could give the kid a chance to clean up the mess. Keep two plays alive until the right one announced itself and then act decisively. That was how you won.

Gerry would win this yet.

32

When both doctors enter the room together, Tara knows it’s bad news. They’ve decided on an alliance, neither wanting to make the other crush a family’s hope. Teamwork, then; they’ll break hearts together. At the sight of the doctors, Mom and Rick and Shannon all rise to their feet, their voices loud and chaotic and too cheerful, as if pleasantries can change the outcome. Dr. Carlisle is all warm smiles and soft tones; Dr. Pine looks like a Zen shark, a good-natured predator swimming past potential victims, not yet sure if he’ll turn and devour them. He eludes Rick’s awful bro-hug-handshake hybrid with grace, then walks to Tara’s side and looks her in the eyes.

“When this is all over,” he says, “I want you to tell me everything that was said about me behind my back.”

The room goes silent, and Dr. Carlisle appears vaguely annoyed. In that expression, Tara sees the results of the test — she passed, and Dr. Carlisle wanted to make the announcement.

She passed. Tara is positive. They know that—

“She’s alert,” Dr. Carlisle says, the annoyed expression gone and a radiant smile in its place. “Not just alert — fully and completely aware, cognitively and emotionally. Her results are extraordinary. Not unprecedented, but close. Every lobe reacted as it should have; her visual, auditory, and processing responses to the movie were perfect.” She turns to Shannon and says, “And she certainly had an emotional response to the girl at the beginning of the movie. You weren’t wrong about that.”

Chrissie, Tara thinks. Why can’t anyone ever remember her name?

That’s when Mom falls on her knees beside the bed and presses Tara’s hand to her face, her tears soaking Tara’s palm, and then Shannon is there, saying how she always knew it, but her quavering voice gives her away, and Rick is the only one who holds back, but Tara can’t blame him for that, and she’s grateful that he’s actually pausing to thank the doctors and is touched by the emotion in his voice.

“She’s hearing us?” Mom says, staring at Tara with wonder. “You’re sure? Right now, she’s hearing me?”

“Every word,” Dr. Carlisle promises, pulling a chair up beside the bed. Dr. Pine stays on his feet, smiling but pacing. Like any shark, he must keep moving or he will die.

“And she’s always heard us?” Shannon asks, and Tara wants to laugh at the poorly suppressed guilt in her voice. Shannon is probably conducting an inventory of everything she let slip in moments when she thought she was alone. No matter what confidence they all professed, none of them were sure that Tara could hear a word. Now they are getting an awareness of that ghost in the room.

“I can’t tell you when she came back or whether she’s been alert the entire time; all I can tell you is that she is now,” Dr. Carlisle says.

“What does that mean for her prognosis?” Shannon asks. Mom looks wounded by the question, as if it’s in some way undermining the joy of what they’ve just been told, but it is also the question Tara would ask if she had a voice.

“Entirely unknown,” Dr. Pine says. “But it only helps. One of the greatest challenges in rehabilitating the brain is the constant testing and guessing it requires from the medical team, from the family, everyone. Based on Dr. Carlisle’s results, Tara is going to be able to help us enormously there. She may not have her voice, but she should be able to communicate. If we know what she’s experiencing, feeling, and requiring, that is a tremendous advantage in treating her successfully.” His eyes are locked on Tara with excitement.

I’m an opportunity to him, she realizes. Something he’s been waiting for for maybe his whole career. It’s an odd sensation but not a bad one — he wants to see if he can bring her all the way back. That’s a goal Tara can get behind.

“There may be even more reason for celebration,” Dr. Carlisle says. “When reviewing the video of Tara’s face during the test, Dr. Pine noticed what seems to be some oculomotor progress.”

“Oculomotor?” Mom echoes tentatively.

“She can blink?” Rick asks.

“Not quite... or at least not quite yet,” Dr. Pine says. “But the progress she’s demonstrating since our initial tests may be more useful than even Tara knows.”

He’s studying Tara’s eyes while moving his hand in the air like a conductor. The longer he does it, the more delighted he seems.

“Vertical eye motion,” he says. He sits and perches with perfect posture on a stool beside her bed; he looks like a bird of prey. “She’s regained that. Consistent with locked-in syndrome.”

“Locked-in syndrome?” Rick asks, and he looks at Tara with something between concern and horror. The name seems self-explanatory, and terrifying. They’re all learning now what Tara has been living with for days.

“Charming name, isn’t it?” Dr. Pine says. “But it’s clear, at least. Tara is with us, but Tara is trapped.”

Mom murmurs something inaudible and puts her head in her hands.

“Not all bad, though,” Dr. Pine continues. “Locked-in syndrome prevents outbound communication, yes, but it also, perhaps, provides some protection. And now that we know she’s in there, we can work to bridge the void.” He studies her with a slight incline of his head, then smiles. “Excellent.”

Tara tracked the motion with her eyes, and he saw it. The rush of euphoria this realization brings is almost overwhelming, and if she could cry, she would. He sees me. He sees me!

“Locked-in syndrome is caused by an insult to the ventral pons,” he says. “But with vertical eye motion, she’s not as trapped as she was before. She should be able to communicate.”

An insult to the ventral pons, Tara thinks. That’s the term for having your brain knocked around your skull and leaving you unable to move or speak — an insult? The word seems woefully insufficient.

“Essentially, her condition has caused paralysis with preservation of consciousness and retention of vertical eye movement. She has some voluntary eyelid motion, but her response to the blink requests, as you saw, showed a lack of control.” He leans forward and lifts a pencil with his thumb and index finger. “But there’s progress. I think Tara is in control of her vertical eye motion now. Aren’t you, Tara? Show them.”

He lifts the pencil slowly, then lowers it. Mom gasps; Rick puts a hand on her shoulder that seems designed to steady himself as much as her, and Shannon stares at Tara, enthralled.

“Oh, honey,” Mom says. “Oh, baby.” She’s squeezing Tara’s hand and blinking away tears. Dr. Pine tolerates the interruption. Behind them, Dr. Carlisle paces and smiles.

Competitive, Tara thinks. She found me in here first. He wants me now. That is just fine with her. The more the merrier when it comes to people invested in her return, but she wonders if they’ll remember who suggested she watch Jaws.

Mom releases her hand, rises, gets her iPad, then rushes back, holding it with the camera lens trained on Tara. She’s shaking so badly it seems unlikely she’ll be able to keep it in her hands, let alone in focus. Tara wants to laugh. For years, she and Shannon made fun of Mom’s insistence on capturing every family moment on film, but even now?

Dr. Pine says, “Tara, let’s try for yes and no. When you want to indicate a yes response, look up once. When you want to say no, do it twice.” He pauses and wets his lips, and for the first time Tara sees that behind the clinical demeanor, he’s nervous. “Okay,” he says. “Tara, do you understand what I just said?”

She looks up. Once.

“Tara, does two plus two equal ten?”

She looks up twice.

Dr. Pine lets out a long breath. “We’re batting a thousand,” he says. “Tara, is Shannon your sister?”

Up once.

“Am I your father?”

Up twice.

Mom is crying now, tears streaming down her face, over those purple rings below her eyes that have darkened with each day in here; her iPad shakes in her hands like a highway sign in hurricane winds.

Shannon pushes in beside Dr. Pine, kneels, and looks at Tara with a trembling smile. “Tara,” she says, “did you ever quit?”

Dr. Pine looks annoyed at the intrusion, but when Tara moves her eyes upward twice and they all burst into a clumsy hybrid of tears and laughter, he smiles charitably and lets them have their moment. He keeps watching Tara, though, his focus unbroken.

“Tara,” he says, “would you like to try the alphabet board?”

Up once.

He stands. “Okay,” he says, “let’s see what she can do.”

Yes, Tara thinks. Let’s see. It’s the first time she’s been given an active role — even the crucial fMRI was passive; she was shoved into a tube and shown a movie — and the opportunity is both exhilarating and exhausting. The joy that comes with being known, with being breathed back into existence in the room, is an injection of adrenaline, but the eye tests were oddly fatiguing, as if simple willpower drains her. Perhaps it does. But she’s got willpower reserves they haven’t seen yet, and she’ll figure out how to replenish them, locked-in or not.

“This is all just a starting point,” Dr. Carlisle says. “Yes/no communication is, obviously, an enormous step. But we’ve got an open road ahead of us now.”

Dr. Carlisle begins to talk about a combination of rudimentary alphabet boards and sophisticated computer software, and Dr. Pine chimes in with a discussion of tongue-strengthening exercises — those sound like fun. Mom returns to her chair and focuses on her iPad. Tara watches in astonishment as she taps away, seemingly oblivious to the conversation around her. Are you bored, Mom? I’m back from the dead, but you’ve got e-mail to check? Then Mom rises with a smile and brings the iPad to Tara and turns it to face her.

“You have no idea how badly I’ve wanted to be able to post this,” she says, starting to cry again.

On the screen is the Team Tara Facebook page. Mom has pinned the video of Tara’s eye-motion test with a caption: We have blessed news! Tara is awake!

33

Back when he’d been rehearsing for the fugitive role, asking Abby countless questions about how she’d handle herself on the run, Luke had given her a simple but memorable piece of advice: “Never underestimate the helpfulness of your local library.”

On her first day as a fugitive, Abby headed for the library in Rockland. In Luke’s script, there’d been dialogue about big cities being better to hide in than small towns, because nobody paused to look at a stranger in a place where everyone was a stranger. She believed that, but big cities were hard to come by in Maine, and so she settled for Rockland, the county seat, home to the courthouse and the jail and the BMV. A regular metropolis by Maine standards, with maybe twenty thousand residents.

She parked several blocks from the library, near the harbor in a busy parking lot that was shared by two seafood restaurants and a YMCA, and she walked along the water for twenty minutes, watching her back, before she moved toward town. No one followed. In the library, she found a computer where she could sit with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door.

When she logged on to the internet, her first instinct was to read about herself. Pragmatic fugitive behavior or clinical narcissism? She wasn’t sure, but a cursory review of news sites was reassuring to her invisibility, if not her ego — the reports were that Hank Bauer had died in a car accident whose cause was currently under investigation. Police in Maine were keeping Abby’s story quiet for a reason, or possibly they didn’t believe it, but in any case, they weren’t making a big deal out of her call to David Meredith.

Not yet.

She moved on to Amandi Oltamu. There was plenty to read here, because Amandi Oltamu had been an important man, but Abby was going to need a translator to help her understand half of it.

The obituaries were helpful but vague, capturing his childhood escape from a war-torn Sudan and his education history (Carnegie Mellon and MIT) and revealing that his marriage had ended in divorce and he had no children. He was described as “renowned in his field.” Okay, Abby thought, let’s find out some more about that field. A few searches later she landed on a paper written by Oltamu. The title was “Improving the Coupling of Redox Cycles in Sulfur and 2,6-Polyanthraquinone and Impacts on Galvanostatic Cycling.”

It wasn’t a good sign that Abby was tentative on the pronunciation of two of the words in the title.

She didn’t waste time attempting to wade through the entire paper. If there was a clue in that paper, Abby wasn’t going to be able to identify it. Instead, she went to the Hammel College site and found a short press release on Dr. Oltamu’s scheduled talk. This one was at least a bit more civilian-friendly: He was going to speak on how batteries could combat climate change. The press release didn’t mention anything about teenage assassins, though. Less helpful.

Oltamu’s bio on the site said that he’d consulted with the International Society for Energy Storage Research. The ISESR page noted that his work was focused on a new paradigm for battery energy storage at atomic and molecular levels.

Terrific. And tragic. He’d been doing vital work, and then he was killed. Maybe the vital work was why he’d been killed. If so, that was going to require more understanding of the topic than Abby could glean from web searches. There was a better chance of her figuring out how to jailbreak the security on that cloned iPhone than of her determining the breakthrough Amandi Oltamu had made with regard to the new paradigm of galvanostatic coupling. Or cycling. Whatever. Understanding the importance of Oltamu’s work required an advanced degree, or at least the ability to pronounce polyanthraquinone without sounding like Forrest Gump.

Jailbreaking the device Oltamu had left behind seemed like the better option, but Abby had failed once already. She’d tried Tara and not Tara Beckley, but if Tara Beckley was wrong, she was down to one swing of the bat. She still didn’t understand the security approach either; shouldn’t it be more advanced, a fingerprint or a retina scan or facial recognition?

Maybe it was. Maybe the prompt asking for Tara’s name was a ruse, and the only way the device unlocked was with Oltamu’s retina. That would be a problem, considering that by now he’d been buried or cremated.

Had Oltamu been trying to protect himself at the end, adding Tara Beckley’s photograph as a lock just before Carlos Ramirez drove into him? Or was Abby’s instinct wrong, and Oltamu hadn’t taken the picture? Even if Abby was right about the location, and she was pretty sure that she was, it didn’t mean that she was right about when it had been taken. For all she knew, it was Tara Beckley’s Facebook profile picture.

Bullshit it is. Not with that smile. Something was wrong when that picture was taken. She wasn’t sure what yet, but she knew something was wrong.

Tara’s Facebook profile was private, but Abby found an open Facebook page called Team Tara, the one Shannon Beckley had said kept her mother occupied and away from tranquilizers. Abby opened it without much hope, then froze.

The first post was a video with a caption claiming Tara was awake.

She moved the cursor to the video and clicked Play. The camera was shaking, but Tara was clear, and so were her eyes. As a doctor asked her questions, she looked up. Once for yes, twice for no. The motion was unmistakable.

Her mother wasn’t being optimistic; Tara was awake and responsive.

Abby whispered, “Oh, shit,” loudly enough to earn an irritated glance from an old man reading a newspaper a few feet away.

Abby lifted a hand in apology and returned her attention to the screen. The video had been posted only a few hours earlier but already it had hundreds of shares, people eager to distribute this good news far and wide.

A blessing, yes. And maybe a terrible invitation.

She logged off the computer, picked up the case file, and left the library, then walked back down to the harbor and stood about five hundred yards from the Tahoe. She pretended to stare at the sea, but she was really looking for people watching the car. There was no obvious sign of interest in the vehicle, but right now everyone felt like a watcher. Paranoia was growing. She forced her eyes away from the parking lot and looked out across the water. The wind was rising, northeasterly breezes throwing up nickel-colored clouds, as if the morning’s sunshine had been a mistake and now the wind was working hastily to conceal evidence of the error.

Abby knew that making contact with Tara Beckley’s family would be a suicidal move. They’d rush to the police, bring more attention, and, quite possibly, kill whatever faint hope she had of trading the phone in her pocket for evidence that exonerated her in Hank’s death and for the chance to send his murderer to prison. It was too early to reach out; she’d be better off walking into the police station.

Unless the family believes you.

Unless that, yes.

She watched the ferry head out from Rockland toward Vinalhaven, and she thought of the way Tara’s eyes had flicked up at the doctor’s questions, the responsive motion so clear, so undeniable, and then she thought of the countless tests Luke had failed. Then she withdrew the working cell phone from her pocket, the one she’d promised herself she wouldn’t use again. Just by turning it on, she was broadcasting her location.

But she had to try.

She opened the case file she’d taken into the library and flipped through it in search of another number. Not Oltamu’s this time. Shannon Beckley’s. She dialed.

Shannon answered immediately. “Hello?” A single word that conveyed both her confidence in herself and her distrust of others. She wouldn’t have recognized the number, so she was probably already suspicious.

“This is Abby Kaplan and it is very important that you do not hang up. You need to listen to me, please. You’ve got to listen to me for Tara’s sake.”

She got the words out in a hurry. She had to keep the conversation short on this phone.

“Sure,” Shannon said. “Sure, I remember you.” Her voice was strained, and Abby heard people talking in the background and then the sound of a door opening and she understood that Shannon was leaving a crowded room. She was at least giving Abby the chance to speak.

“Have they told you I killed Hank Bauer yet?” Abby asked.

“They have.” She spoke lightly, as if trying not to draw concern or attention, and Abby heard her footsteps loud on the tiled floor of the hospital. She was walking away from listeners.

“It’s a lie. We were both supposed to die and I made it out.”

“That’s different than what I’ve heard.”

“I’m sure it is. If I could explain it, I’d have gone right to the police. But Hank is dead because whoever killed Oltamu — and Ramirez, there are three of them now, all of them dead...” Her words were running away from her and she stopped and took a breath, forcing herself to slow down. “Whoever did that wants a phone. Not your sister’s, and not Oltamu’s real phone. One that he had with him, maybe. I’m not sure it’s actually a phone; it might just be a camera designed to look like one. But I’ve got it.”

“What does—”

“Hang on, listen to me. I just read a post from your mother’s Facebook page that claims Tara is alert. I saw the video. That needs to come down.”

“What? Why?”

Abby looked at how long she’d been on the call — twenty-five seconds. “I’ve got to hurry,” she said, “and I don’t have all the answers you’re going to want, but you have to limit access to Tara. And you have to limit the questions she’s asked. Because if she remembers what happened that night, then she’s a threat to somebody. Three people are already dead, and that’s just the ones I know of. I was supposed to be the fourth.”

Shannon Beckley didn’t speak. Abby wanted to be patient, but she couldn’t. Not on this line.

“If you think I’m crazy, fine, but I’m trying to give you a chance,” she said. “Trying to give her a chance.”

Shannon’s voice was low when she said, “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Thank you.”

“But I can’t limit access to her,” she said. “There are too many doctors involved, and they’re not going to let me call the shots. If you think she’s at risk of being... killed, then who am I supposed to tell? Who do I call?”

The wind gusted off the water, peeled leaves off the trees, and scattered them over the pavement, plastering one to Abby’s leg. She stared at the bloodred leaf, then looked over to where the Tahoe was parked. A man in an L. L. Bean windbreaker walked by it without giving it so much as a passing glance, but still Abby scrutinized him.

“I don’t know who you call,” she said finally. “If I knew, I’d call them myself. Maybe you can trust the police.”

“You’re not sure of that, though?”

“I’m...” She’d started to say she was sure, but she couldn’t. All she could think of was the way the kid had smiled when he’d spoken of friends in cells and friends in uniforms. “I’m not sure,” Abby finished. “Sorry. There has to be someone to call, but I don’t know who the right person is, because I don’t know who I’m dealing with. I don’t know what Tara saw, what she heard.”

She faced the hard, cutting wind and paused again, aware that she was letting the call go on too long but no longer caring as much because an idea was forming.

“Can you ask her the first round of questions?” she said. “Without doctors around, or at least without many of them. Can you handle that?”

“Questions about what happened that night?”

“Yes. You need to do that. But they have to be the right questions. They have to... they need to be my questions.”

“What are those?”

“I’m not positive yet. I mean, I know some, but... let me think.”

“You have to tell me what to ask!”

Abby squinted into the cold wind and watched the ferry churn toward the island, its wake foaming white against the gray sea, and then she said, “Ask her if he took a picture of her. I definitely need to know that. And if he did, then ask if she gave him another name.”

“Another name? What do you mean, another name?”

“I’m not sure. If she called herself Tara or Miss Beckley or whatever. Ask what he knew her by. That’s really important. What would he have called her?”

“She would have been just Tara. That’s it,” Shannon said, her voice rising, but then she lowered it abruptly, as if she’d realized she might be overheard, and said, “Why does this matter? What do you know?”

“People are killing each other to get to a phone that was in her car,” Abby said. “I have it now. It was in the box I brought down to you. I don’t know what in the hell is on it, but it looks like he took her picture. It’s on the lock screen now, and it wants her name. But her name doesn’t—”

The phone beeped in her ear then, and her first thought was the battery was low, but when she glanced at the display, she saw an incoming call, the number blocked.

The wind off the water died down, but the chill within her spread.

“Hang on,” she told Shannon Beckley, and then she ignored her objection and switched over to answer the incoming call. “Hello?”

“Hello, Abby.”

It was the kid.

34

Abby didn’t speak.

She stood with the phone to her ear and her head bowed, eyes focused on the single red leaf fluttering against her dirt-streaked jeans.

The kid seemed amused when he said, “You do recognize my voice, right? I’m usually memorable. Apologies for the arrogance of that statement.”

Abby reached down and flicked the leaf free from her jeans and watched it ride away on the wind. Finally, she found her voice.

“You didn’t have to kill him.”

“Kill who?”

“Fuck you.”

“Exactly. This is how we can go for as long as you’d like, or you can make progress. The way I understand it, you’re in a bit of a bind.”

He talks like an imitation of a human, Abby thought. Like he’s not entirely sure how to walk among us, but he’s studied it enough to fake his way. He’s got the exterior down just enough to pass. What evil is on the inside, though?

“I’ll be needing that phone, Abby,” the kid said, and right then someone down on the pier shook the remains from a bag of fast food into the water, and a handful of seagulls rose in wing and full-throated voice. They danced and dived and fought for French fries and the kid said, “On the coast, are we?”

Abby paced away from the water, a pointless effort given the piercing chorus of gulls, and wished death upon the indifferent diner who’d scattered his French fries to the wind.

“Yeah,” she said. “Miami. Come south.”

The kid’s laugh was the only genuine thing about him.

“I like you, Abby,” he said. “I mean that. But we really should get down to business.”

Abby looked at the phone display. Twenty seconds and running. Shannon Beckley still on the other line. But the kid wasn’t wrong. Abby had to get down to business or get to a police station, one or the other, and in a hurry.

“You want the phone, and I want you in jail,” she said.

“There’s not much to entice me in that scenario.”

“I want you in jail,” Abby repeated, “but I know I might not get that.”

“Wise. So what do you need instead?”

“To keep myself alive and out of jail.”

“Typical millennial. One thing is never enough. You want free shipping too?”

“The phone keeps me alive,” Abby said. “The police will too. The right ones, at least.”

“Be very cautious about that. Finding the right ones isn’t impossible, but it won’t be easy. Not for you. That’s not a bluff. That’s a promise.”

He said it with calm, earned confidence. If Abby weren’t already scared of his reach, she’d be with the police now, and they both knew that.

“Give me a number where I can call you back,” Abby said.

“Call the German. He’ll get me.”

The German? The guy who’d answered Oltamu’s phone had sounded anything but German. A trace of Boston accent, maybe, or a hint of Irish, but not German.

“You don’t know him,” the kid said. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Interesting. Let me ask you something, Abby — do you need me to go to jail or do you just need somebody other than you to go?”

“I need the right person to go.”

“Then you don’t need me. Not if you care about the food chain.”

“You killed him.”

“Think I won’t be replaced, Abby? You’re smarter than that. I know you are.”

Abby hesitated. “Hold the line a minute.”

“What?”

Abby switched calls and spoke without preamble to Shannon Beckley. “I’m going to be in touch from a different number. Keep people away from Tara. If you see a kid, somebody who looks like he walked out of the high-school yearbook, call the police.”

“What are you—”

“I won’t blame you if you don’t trust me. But you need to.” She switched calls again. “Still there?”

“Yes,” the kid said. “You have a recorder going now or a helpful witness listening, maybe?”

“No. I’m going to tell you where to find me.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Listen real close so you don’t miss it.”

Abby left the call connected when she tossed the phone into the sea.

Before it reached the bottom of the harbor, she was running for her car, keys in hand. Even if she’d stayed on the phone long enough for them to trace it already, she’d be gone when they got here. It was time to get moving. Instinct told her to go farther north, to seek ever-smaller towns and more isolation, but she wanted to see Shannon Beckley. There was risk in that, of course, but maybe less than she thought. And Boston was a city filled with strangers. It would be easier to blend in there. They also had an FBI headquarters, probably even CIA. She could pick her police agency instead of relying on the locals. That’s what she would do. Get to Boston, get to Shannon Beckley, and then get to the FBI. When she called Oltamu’s phone again, she would be with the professionals. A day ago, she’d had nothing to tell them but the wild story about Hank’s house, but now she had the phone that wasn’t a phone, evidence of what all this killing was about, and that changed everything. They would believe her now.

She unlocked the Tahoe, slid behind the wheel, and cranked the engine to life. Her hand was on the gearshift when she felt the cold muzzle of a revolver press the base of her neck.

She moved her eyes to the mirror, and from the backseat, the kid in the black baseball cap smiled congenially.

“Found you,” he said.