Gregg Hurwitz - You're Next

‘There’s gotta be someone I can tell my story to.’

‘What story, Mike? That you’re innocent?’ Hank was less angry than distressed. ‘I think they get that particular tale from time to time.’

Mike looked across at Kat in the stolen Civic. The glare of passing headlights turned the windows opaque. She flickered into view, gone, into view, gone again. Watching her ghost in and out of existence intensified the knot in his gut – all the deepest, darkest fears he’d swallowed over the years hardening into physical form. He thought about that morning he’d sat in his truck and watched her climb the fireman’s pole at school, how she’d dinged the top bar with the tiny ball of her fist.

He felt like a third party listening to his own voice. ‘So what do I do?’

The connection seemed to achieve a sudden crisp clarity, the static taking a rest. The rush of passing cars on the freeway was hypnotic, exhausting. When was the last time he had slept? He wet his lips, waited.

‘Hank, what do I do ?’

‘I don’t know what to tell you, Mike.’

Bickering, the family packed themselves back into the station wagon and pulled out on their semi-merry way. Breathing gas fumes and hot tar, Mike watched them merge onto the freeway, watched until the brake lights blended into the river of traffic.

‘Mike? Mike? You there?’

A voice echoed in his head, Shep’s reply when Mike had mentioned how they’d had stamina back in the day: That’s because we didn’t have anything else .

‘Yuh. I’m here.’ His voice was flat, robotic. ‘I talked to Shep already.’ When he had, Shep hadn’t offered so much as a told you so. He’d just given Mike the update on Annabel and pushed forward as Mike was trying to now, moving the pigskin a yard at a time. ‘He thinks the best play is Kiki Dupleshney.’

‘Mike, you can’t-’

‘That’s his world, so he put out word through his network that he needs a con woman for a heist he’s pulling. He’ll try to lure her in.’

‘ Mike . These men are looking to kill you. You can’t drag Kat along with you.’

‘What choice do I have?’

No answer but the gently falling rain that had started up without Mike’s noticing.

‘Good-bye, Hank.’ He set the phone gently back in the cradle.

He trudged over to the car. Kat had locked the driver’s door. He knocked, but she didn’t look over at him; she glowered dead ahead at the raindrops tapping the hood. He walked around, climbed into the passenger seat, rucksack in lap, and sat, dripping, both of them staring at nothing, going nowhere, a stolen car parked on a rest stop off a freeway Mike couldn’t name.

When Kat spoke, the intensity of her voice surprised him. ‘What’s the deal with Green Valley?’

He bent his head. Water dripped from his forehead onto his thighs.

‘Phony green houses.’ Kat wiped angrily at a stray tear, but her voice hadn’t changed at all. ‘You said “phony green houses.” That’s what you and Mom were whispering about before in the police station.’

‘Given everything going on, this isn’t important right now.’

‘It’s important to me . Right now.’

He realized that this was the end of the line, that there was nothing left to do but submit to the truth swiftly and brutally, but still, it took him two tries to get the words moving out of his mouth. ‘The houses weren’t really green. A guy laid in the wrong pipes. And I covered it up.’

She was shivering, pale. ‘What about your award?’

‘I didn’t deserve it.’

Her voice now was weak, pitiful. ‘You lied to me?’

His hands were shaking. His face numb. ‘Yes.’

She choked out a little cry, and then her door was open and she’d vanished into the rain. He sprang out after her, sloshing through puddles. She was ahead, a wraith in the downslanting wet, faster than he’d imagined. She breached the grassy rise behind the bathrooms and darted down the far side, but he caught her, wrapping her up so they wouldn’t tumble down the slope.

She kicked to get free, shrieking at him, ‘What else have you lied about? What else?’ She kept thrashing violently, and he lost his footing, skidding onto his ass, rainwater soaking instantly through his jeans. ‘I hate you!’ she yelled. ‘You can’t keep me in motels and cars for the rest of my life. I just want to go to school and have my room back and Mom .’

He held her frail little frame until she went limp against him, sobbing.

He spoke into the wet tangle of her hair. ‘I will never break my word to you again. Never again.’

She murmured into his chest, half moan, half mantra, ‘ I want my mom I want my mom I want my mom. ’

He held her in the rain.

Footfall, slow and heavy, proceeded up the hospital corridor. It paused. Two blots interrupted the seam of light beneath the door. The lockless handle dipped silently. The hinges issued no complaint.

A wedge of light fell from the bright hall into the dark room, widening like a fan as the door swung inward.

A man’s form, distorted and massive, stretched across the floor, a black cutout framed in a yellow rectangle. Inside, Annabel lay at rest, limp arms over a pilled hospital blanket, her mouth slightly pursed. The cutout hands twitched impatiently. Two shuffling steps and the door eased closed, extinguishing the light. Dirty boots moved across sterile white tile.

Uplit by the seesawing EKG line glowing from the monitor, Dodge stared down at Annabel’s tranquil face.

Dodge’s hands twitched again. One moved to the tangle of tubes on the cart beside Annabel’s bed, the other slipping into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants.

The partition curtain screeched back on its tracks, shrill as a scream. Dodge barely had time to pivot when Shep hit him on the side of the neck, staggering him. Dodge took a knee, broad fingers groping, clutching for air, his mouth agape. One hand settled on Annabel’s bed, fisting the blanket into a black-hole whorl. Even with Dodge stooped, his mass dwarfed Shep, making him look, improbably, average-size.

Before Dodge could regroup, Shep grabbed him by the shirt collar and arm and rode him like a battering ram toward the closed door. Dodge twisted at the end, falling, ball-peen hammer magically in hand, steel head whistling past Shep’s temple, just missing. The collision was titanic, both men bouncing back into the room. The door cracked but did not cave. Stunned, it wobbled open.

Dodge’s breath came as an ongoing squawk, a reed-thin draw of air smothered in his throat. His Adam’s apple jerked. Even drowning, he was finding his feet, hammer loose at his side like something mythological, something Nordic. He drew himself up, his back to the doorway, a head taller than Shep.

Shep had torn his St. Jerome pendant from around his neck. One worn silver edge protruded from the fingers of his fist like a push dagger. He drove flesh and metal into the high center of Dodge’s chest, a brimstone variation on Dr Cha’s sternal rub. Dodge flew back through the doorway, arms and legs trailing weightlessly.

Shep slammed the lockless door closed, leaning all his weight into it. A thunderclap shuddered it in the frame as if a truck were butting the other side. Shep’s sneakers left the floor, chirp-landed on the tile. He drove the door closed. Another thunderclap, the door yawning open a foot this time, then banging shut.

Silence. Shep panting, shoulder to the wood, waiting. The wound on his forearm had torn open around the stitches.

A nearby smash. Someone screamed down the hall. A bang, farther away. Footsteps and panicked voices.

Then the handle rotated again in Shep’s grip, and someone shoved at the door. After Dodge it felt like a puppy nuzzling a palm.