You're Next

Chapter 21

Kneeling on the frilly bed, Mike finished nailing Kat’s window closed and used his shirt to blot the sweat from his forehead. The dirt at the base of the window was hard packed and, as before, yielded no footprints. He pulled the curtains closed and sat on the mattress. In the master bedroom, Annabel was trying to settle Kat down, lying beside her, petting her to sleep.

Across on the bookshelf, Kat’s treasure chest caught his eye. A shoe box she’d wrapped in cloth and bedecked with stickers in preschool, it held her most cherished items. He retrieved it, placed it on his knees, and lifted the fabric-padded lid. Annabel’s plastic bracelet from the maternity ward. A sterling-silver baby cup with a lamb imprinted on the side. That missized butterfly onesie that Shep had brought over the last time Mike had seen him. He picked it up and unfolded it, remembering how Shep had pulled it from his pocket and offered it unwrapped at the door. It was so big then, sized for a three-year-old, not a newborn, and yet now it looked so tiny. Those first months they’d used it as a burp cloth, and then Kat had attached to it the way she did and dragged it around as a blankie. She’d never worn it, even when she’d grown enough that she could have.

He poked through the relics of pale yellow and baby-girl pink. There was a sanctity here in this sloppily decorated shoe box, in this room, in this house.

He set the treasure chest back and walked down the hall. Kat was sprawled on the tousled sheets, asleep, Annabel curled beside her, gazing down, a drape of dark hair framing both their profiles.

Annabel got up, pushed herself back against the headboard. ‘They want us to be scared, right? Well, I’m scared. And if we can’t go to the cops right now, we need to be creative and figure something out. I can call my folks, have them come here.’

‘With your mom’s new hip, she’s gonna jump on an Airbus?’

‘There are a ton of flights every day from Tampa. My dad knows the law. He can-’

‘Your father is a retired bankruptcy attorney. And I can only imagine their take on this. They have never trusted me-’

‘We don’t need to get off onto that. I’m just saying there are still some legitimate channels to-’

‘There is no legitimate anymore. Guys like this, they don’t listen to reason. They listen to force.’

They listen when you wake them up with your fists after they steal your shirt from under your pillow. They listen when you stand within the reach of an uppercut and tell them to quit knocking a kid to the dirt.

‘Or they respond with more force,’ she said.

‘What do you propose, then? Our hands are tied. We can’t go to the cops until we know which agencies are gunning for me and why.’

‘I’m just saying, this thing could spin out of control.’

‘Annabel. Are you watching what’s going on here?’

‘Yes. And I’m doing my best to figure out what it is.’

‘What does that mean?’

She pulled the blanket up over Kat, gestured that they should keep their voices down. ‘“We know who you are.” That’s what he said, right? Through the monitor?’

‘And?’

‘I know you pulled some stuff back in the day. With Shepherd. Is there anything you did that might be coming back to haunt us now? Anyone you stole money from, hurt, whatever?’

The question struck him deep, in a place he’d kept insulated for so long he’d forgotten that it was vulnerable. He squeezed his eyes shut and pictured that moment he’d frozen in time decades ago, the view out the bay window through the arcade of yellow-orange leaves to the end of the street, to the station wagon that never appeared. The snapshot was his and his alone, and he retreated now into the safety of it. It had shown him that he would be okay if that station wagon never appeared, because he could have something that no one could take from him, and as long as he had that, he wouldn’t need anyone ever again.

But he was no longer seven. He had a wife and a daughter, and he needed them as much as they did him. He opened his eyes, fighting to keep his anger on low simmer.

‘No,’ he answered. ‘We were petty hoods, not pulling off bank heists.’

‘Are you sure there was nothing?’

‘You don’t believe me. All these years I’m still some street kid underneath everything.’

‘Of course not.’

‘How could you ask me that? I’ve never lied to you about anything.’ He turned, his gaze sticking on that award plaque leaning against the wall.

She blew out a breath and refocused. ‘Because these men are coming after our family, Mike. Given that, nothing is off-limits, not between us. And if there’s anything-’

‘You don’t think I’ve been racking my brain? There’s nothing. Nothing. It was shoplifting, spray-painting shit on walls. Nothing that men like this would grudge-hold this long.’

Kat mumbled a sleepy complaint, and Annabel came off the bed, gripped his arm, and pulled him a few steps into the bathroom. Having Kat out of sight, even this close, made him nervous, and he knuckled the door open a few more inches so he could see her.

Annabel’s voice was low but intense, pushed through clenched teeth. ‘When you wrong someone, you don’t get to say which grudges people may or may not hold.’

She was coming at him, her head canted forward on her neck. He realized that his posture was the same. ‘Some threat arises, and all of a sudden you married Scarface? I never did anything that damaged people. I made some dumb choices, sure, but that’s it. We didn’t all grow up in the fucking Cleaver household.’

Her arm swung out and smashed a perfume bottle off the counter. It skipped once and shattered against the base of the tub, and a moment later the bathroom filled with the sickly-sweet aroma. Her stare, her face – inches from his – never moved.

The sound of the exploding bottle continued to reverberate around the bathroom.

Annabel took a deep breath. Held it. When she exhaled, her voice was perfectly calm. ‘Okay, let’s try this again. The office break-in today, the file they looked at, pretty much shows that this doesn’t involve Green Valley. Whatever it is, it’s centered on you and your past. If it’s got nothing to do with your so-called petty-hood years, then there’s only one option left.’

His throat was scratchy. ‘You don’t think I know that?’

‘What happened when you were four-’

‘For once,’ Mike said, ‘let’s just call it what it was. My father killed my mother.’ He had never said it so bluntly, and it caused a shift in the muscles beneath his face. The skin hung on like a mask, but the words had set the real him beneath on fire.

Had he known all along? That the trail of red flags would lead back, eventually, to that spot of crimson on his father’s shirt cuff? He pictured his father’s ghost hands tensing and shifting on the station wagon’s steering wheel. Nothing that happened is your fault. Nothing that happened. What the hell had his father done?

Annabel swallowed, wet her lips. She had one hand up, fingers slightly spread. ‘We don’t know the whole story.’

‘I know enough of it. I know that whatever he did is coming back on us.’

‘Maybe it was something else. Maybe something happened that made him-’

‘Made him? Nothing could have made him do something like that. There is no excuse-’ He caught himself. It was all up, piling on top of him, a barrage of words and images: Morning Again in America. Shithead still thinks Daddy’s comin’ back. You wreck my stuff because you don’t have anything and you’ll never be anything. Look at that slice o’ pie there. Your records look like Swiss cheese. We know who you are.

On the bed Kat mumbled something and rolled over.

Mike fought his voice level: ‘What kind of a man leaves his kid? Just leaves him somewhere? There is no forgiving a parent who could do that to a child.’

Annabel kissed him. Long and tender, mouth closed, on the lips. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Breathe.’

He did.

She said, ‘You get whatever resources here that you need to face this thing.’

He kissed her on the forehead, and she wrapped his waist tightly in a hug.

In the kitchen he paced beneath the harsh fluorescent glow with the cordless phone pressed to his mouth. Finally he dialed. The last number he had in his book was no longer in service, but the recording gave a forwarding number with a Reno area code.

It rang and rang. Though it had been seven years, the voice was just as he remembered, quiet and a touch hoarse. ‘Yeah?’

‘I need you here.’

‘What?’

‘I need you here,’ Mike repeated, a bit more loudly.

A rustling sound. A second or two of silence. Shep said, ‘’Kay.’ There was a click, then the dull blare of the dial tone.