Gregg Hurwitz - You're Next

This was the first page. There were hundreds more.

With mounting alarm Mike leafed through the rest. Annabel’s siblings and cousins, Mike’s workers, subcontractors he’d used, doctors, neighbors, parents of Kat’s friends, ex-spouses of Annabel’s classmates in her teaching program. Page ninety-five solved the riddle of how William and Dodge had closed in on Mike and Kat. Beneath a picture of Jimmy’s girlfriend, Shelly, was the number of the license plates Mike had borrowed from her Mazda 626. The same number he’d dutifully written down at each motel when registering to ensure that his car wouldn’t be towed from the lot. A basic police flag on the plate number and a single phone call from a motel manager were all it took for Kat to be scooped off in the night.

The file also held credit-card statements going back years, red circles marking hotels Mike and Annabel had stayed at, towns they’d visited, stores they’d shopped at regularly, places they’d ordered takeout from. Then there were phone bills of friends, even a few transcripts from what he assumed were tapped lines, his name underlined where mentioned – Wingate’s ass been all edgy. Made me stop at a cemetery on the way back from the stone yard and he just float around like a ghost . Further back the data reached into associates of associates, stretching through six degrees of separation, an aerial snapshot of the web into which the Wingates were nestled, a road map to their existence. There was information new to Mike: Kat’s first-grade teacher’s parents owned a cabin in Mammoth; Annabel’s brother-in-law’s cousin participated in a time-share in Jackson Hole; the Martins across the street had a second home in North Carolina.

Anywhere Mike would run. Anyone he’d turn to.

It struck him that this was how Rick Graham and the Threat Assessment Center closed in on terrorists.

He shut the file. Stared blankly down. His elbows and hands had marred the patina of dust on the desktop. The brutal reality of how outgunned he was hit home, setting his nerves on vibration. He had a bag of cash and a rusty aptitude for boosting cars, and his pursuers had the most powerful data-mining software available to the U.S. government.

Mike glanced over at the clock. It was time.

Routing through the prepaid center, he called Annabel’s cell phone. He waited for the call to go through, sweat trickling down his ribs.

William said, ‘Mike Doe.’

‘William Burrell,’ Mike said. ‘And Roger Drake.’

‘You been doing some homework.’

Mike gazed down at the file. ‘As have you.’ Silence. ‘You came after my wife. To get to me.’

‘Yes.’

‘I can find out about your family, too. I can find out where they live.’

‘Family?’ William laughed. ‘My notion of family’s a bit different than yours. My people are nothing to me. Except for Hanley, and… well, he’s not around anymore. Is he?’

‘You’ve played a lot of games, but you’ve never said what you want.’

‘To kill you.’

Mike’s skin came alive – thousands of tiny insects crawling on legs of ice. ‘So that’s it?’ He was incredulous. ‘No information? No money? You just have to kill me?’

‘Yes.’ William sighed. ‘We’re foot soldiers, see? We have a mission directive. And you’re the target. It’s a bad state of affairs. I understand that. I wish it weren’t the case. But there are two kinds of crooks, you see. Those with a code and those without. We have a code, Dodge and I. We keep our word. I have never lied to you. And I’m not gonna start now.’

‘What was my father to you people?’ Mike asked.

‘Nothing. He was nothing.’

‘You’re after me for something he did.’

‘Maybe before I kill you,’ William said, ‘I’ll tell you why.’

Mike glanced across at Kat, her chest rising and falling steadily. ‘Then we can settle this face-to-face. I will come to you. But you leave my daughter out of this. She doesn’t know anything. She’s witnessed nothing.’

A faint little chuckle that held no amusement. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’

The insects squirmed back to life, Mike’s skin alive with movement. ‘Get what ?’

‘Katherine’s not a bystander in this,’ William said. ‘She’s our other target.’

The line went dead.

Mike and Kat were waiting at the front door of the mini-golf play center when the pimply-faced manager arrived to open the place. Mike had parked the Camry at the edge of the lot, its shattered window cleaned up. It sported license plates he’d swapped out with a Jetta.

In the video arcade, he got forty bucks of quarters and set up at the pay phone in the back while Kat played games in the nearest aisle where he could keep her in sight. The darkness and flashing lights were disorienting; they seemed an extension of the endless night they had emerged from. Was it really morning outside?

His eyes barely leaving his daughter, he made call after call, starting with 1-800 numbers, collecting referrals, then referrals of referrals. Given that he was dealing with emergency services, most places were open even though it was Saturday. Kat trudged from game to game, scratching her head, her vacant expression lit by the glowing screens. The arcade filled with kids until the aisles were jammed – all that candy and color and laughter surrounding Kat, a mocking vision of weekends past. Mike had to fight to stay focused. Slotting endless quarters into the pay phone, he ruled out fifty options and sniffed around fifty more, trying to zero in on a viable choice.

By the time he was done, the phone book was marked with sweat from his fingers. What if someone followed and lifted his prints? Could Graham, Dodge, or William pick a clue off the yellow pages that led to Kat? In a spasm of paranoia, Mike smuggled out the phone book and burned it by the Dumpster around back. Kat stayed in the car behind him, watching as if at a drive-in movie. Crouched in the cold morning air, warming his hands over the miniature pyre, he realized he was on the verge of sobbing with horror at what he was about to do.

He drove east through the afternoon, Kat with her face to the passenger window, watching the desert roll by. Juniper wagged in the breeze, lavender shuddered off purple dust, and Joshua trees twisted up, tombstones to unmarked graves.

Why would an eight-year-old be targeted by hired killers? Last week William and Dodge had scared Mike into grabbing Kat at school and bringing her home. He flashed on Hanley’s fingers obscenely working Annabel’s bra strap. This is too messy, too messy. We were supposed to wait . Wait not just for Mike but for Kat as well.

On that morning years ago in the station wagon, the horror in Mike’s father’s voice had been palpable. Maybe he’d feared for Mike’s life as Mike now feared for Kat’s. But why ? His father was responsible for whatever mess he’d turned their lives into, at least according to that splash of blood on his cuff. A countering image popped into Mike’s head – himself in the dim garage, using an old rag to wipe Annabel’s blood from his arm. What if Mike hadn’t been abandoned but saved ? What if dispatching him to a new life was the only choice Mike’s father had left to protect him?

But Mike didn’t – couldn’t – trust that explanation. It reeked of wish fulfillment, an origin story like Superman rocket-launched from Krypton. But worse, it seemed fueled by hope, by longing , and when it came to Mike’s childhood, he’d decided that hope and longing were dead ends.

And yet how could he hold on to that lifelong outrage given what he was on his way to doing?

‘Arizona,’ Kat said dreamily as the sign drifted past on the side of the freeway. ‘I always wanted to come here.’