Gregg Hurwitz - You're Next

Annabel was out of the truck now. ‘Mike, what the hell is going on?’

He grasped her biceps, reversing her protectively into the passenger seat. ‘We’re going. I’ll explain in a second.’

‘That’s hurting my arm,’ she told him quietly.

He let go. His grip had turned her skin red. She climbed in, and he started around the hood to the driver’s seat.

But William and Dodge were on top of him already. He turned and caught Annabel’s eye. She read his expression, her face draining of color. She moved her arm, and he heard the click of the automatic locks. In the rear Kat reorganized her books in her backpack, distracted.

William stepped up on Mike, moving swiftly. His hips dipped a bit when he walked, but it was nothing like the pronounced gait he’d put on display earlier. Mike wondered how much he used the illness to his advantage, the way Shep had his bad hearing.

Mike squared off as William sidled into reach and said, ‘I see your CP cleared up some.’

William bared his yellow teeth. ‘Thank the Lord Jesus.’

Dodge stood with one massive arm curled behind his back. Hiding a knife? A gun?

Adrenaline pounded through Mike, the rush leaving him light-headed. He could drop William in a heartbeat, but Dodge was a wild card. From the looks of him, he could snap Mike’s neck with a twist of his hand. But Mike’s only concern right now was Annabel and Kat. His daughter remained focused on her book bag, but she’d look up at any minute and take in whatever was going to happen here. He tried to will Annabel to scoot across the console and drive away, but he knew she’d never leave him here.

William spit a scattering of shells across Mike’s shoes.

Mike said, ‘Don’t spit on me.’

William’s tongue dug around his mouth and then poked into view, a black crescent riding the tip. He blew it into Mike’s chest.

Mike said, ‘One more time and we’re gonna have a problem.’

William bunched his lips, the scruff of his chin bristling, his stare narrowing appraisingly. ‘Aah. There it is.’

Oblivious, a woman in a fur coat, begging Mike’s pardon, slid past him and climbed into a Jaguar. Her presence returned him to his senses. He exhaled, dissipating his rage. Then he took a step away, ceding ground, his eyes on the bulge of Dodge’s shoulder, that arm curling out of view.

Mike glanced quickly over his shoulder. Kat’s face pointed back at him, her sober expression a match of Annabel’s. He grabbed for a line of reasoning. ‘Look at all these people. This is an upscale gig. We don’t want to fight here.’

‘Fight? Fight ?’ William grinned, and even Dodge’s face seemed to rearrange itself into an expression of amusement, a couple of spaced teeth peeking into view. ‘There are generally a few more steps of escalation in there. Shouting, chest bumping, shoving. We don’t want to skip all the foreplay, now, do we?’

‘Yeah,’ Mike said. ‘We do. Whatever game you’re playing, it ends here.’

‘No,’ Dodge said, the low voice, almost a vibration, surprising Mike.

Dodge moved his massive hand from behind his back and let fall a white stuffed polar bear.

Mike’s first reaction wasn’t anger or fear but total disbelief. Everything slowed to a syrupy crawl – Dodge’s hand, still open from the release; William’s mouth bunching around the sunflower seeds with convalescent imprecision; Kat’s polar bear rocking ever so slightly on the parking-lot asphalt, one furry arm gone sleek and dark from an oil puddle. It was surreal – disorienting, even – to see that animal in this context.

Mike’s mind spun, cogs clattering, searching for purchase. The implications about how the polar bear had gotten here seemed too large for him to process.

‘Where’d you get that?’ he asked.

William, closest to him, said, ‘Found it.’ He popped a sly grin. ‘It is Katherine’s?’

Hearing his daughter’s full name emerge from William’s lips jogged something loose. The gears meshed. The scene – and Mike’s thoughts – lurched back into motion at full speed. The voice through the monitor. Kat’s autolocking window. These men, in his daughter’s room?

His blood thrummed like a well-plucked string. His vision went impossibly sharp, then blurred as he lunged, driving his forehead into William’s face. Bone clashed. William’s breath left in a huff, intermingling with Mike’s, their eyes inches away for a frozen instant, Mike catching a close-up of one brown pupil rolling obscenely in shock and pain.

William reeled back, howling, Mike feeling the man’s sweat across his own forehead. There was something so primitive about a headbutt, using your own face as a weapon. The street move, Shep’s favored ambush, left Mike breathless and transported, suspended somewhere closer to Shady Lane than to the Braemar Country Club.

Dodge regarded him with level interest, a cat tracking a canary.

William was rolling on the ground, clutching at his cheek, crying out, ‘Did you see? He hit me! This man hit me !’

Guests from the ceremony paused to gawk. Heads pivoted above car roofs. A few people stayed frozen at a ten-yard standoff, looking on, contemplating what the hell to do. William’s bad leg scraped the asphalt stiffly.

Dodge’s lips parted to show the thinnest sliver of teeth, but on him it seemed a massive display of kinetics.

Mike squared to meet him head on.

Somewhere he registered Kat screaming from the backseat of the truck. The sound broke through the muted rush of white noise pervading his head, knocking him back to the present. He halted, searching for restraint, breathing so hard his shoulders rose and fell with the effort.

Annabel was shouting for him to get into the truck, and he thought of her and Kat behind him, watching through the movie screen of the windshield. Everything he stood to lose seemed summed up in the countless glares pointed in his direction, all those well-dressed folks who’d watched him knock down a cripple.

Mike backpedaled to the truck, a few brave souls rushing in to aid William.

Dodge’s gaze never faltered from his. ‘Soon,’ he said, the word sending a line of fire up Mike’s spine.

Mike got into the truck, turned over the engine. A scrum of people now surrounded the two men, illuminated in the headlight glare. William, holding his face, was helped to his feet, but then his leg faltered and he collapsed again. Several women shot mortified glances at Mike.

Annabel asked, quietly, ‘What just happened?’

Mike said, ‘I don’t know.’

Throwing an arm over the seat back, he reversed out of the space. Kat lay curled up in the backseat, her cheeks glittering. The cluster of people dissipated as Mike pulled away, keeping his stare fastened on the rearview mirror.

In the red light of the brakes, William stayed down, twisted over his limp legs. At his side, Dodge stood inhumanly tall, head tilted, his insensate eyes watching them drive off.

‘So we’ve got a William. And a… Dodge , was it?’ The detective edged his coffee mug meticulously into one of many ring stains blemishing the surface of his too-small desk. The big man had a lantern jaw, a wide and crooked seam of mouth, and a Slavic family name – Markovic – printed across a peeling nameplate.

His partner, a study in contrast, had precise, focused features and smooth, dark skin. Simone Elzey wore a cheap button-up with her sleeves cuffed. Callused hands and a bull neck betrayed a propensity for the weight room. An angel tattoo walling the left side of her throat gave her an intimidating air, which Mike assumed was precisely the point. After they’d run through the essentials, she’d gone to the back office to key in an incident report, which sounded like deputy shorthand for doing fuck-all.