Gregg Hurwitz - You're Next

Mike just looked at him.

‘Okay, from your position, sure. Of course. But you have to understand, there’s a lot at stake.’

‘An Indian casino with no Indians.’

‘That’s right.’ Slyness bit into Graham’s voice. ‘We’re just holding it in trust, see.’

‘For an extinct tribe,’ Mike said.

‘Not so extinct, are you?’

Mike leaned forward, and again Graham’s eyes tracked the barrel of the.357. A bead of sweat worked its way down from Graham’s left sideburn. He held up his hands. ‘Listen, I can be your friend here. Proving your claim will be really tough-’

‘My claim ?’

‘You won’t get shit without that genealogy report. That’s why McAvoy keeps it buried in his private safe with all his valuable dirt, behind a painting of an Indian healer in his office. No one knows about the safe except him and me.’ He mistook Mike’s stunned expression for disbelief. ‘I don’t have the combination, but I could smuggle you in there and you could force him to open the safe. With that genealogy report, you could claim the casino and all its assets. I could help you navigate-’

Mike’s voice was as cool and hard as the bullets he’d removed from Graham’s gun. ‘I don’t give a shit about the casino.’

Through the open balcony door carried the buzzing of cicadas.

Graham wet his lips. ‘Then why are you here?’

‘You’re the profiler. Look into my eyes and tell me why I’m here.’

Graham’s fingers fussed in the sheets nervously. ‘Your parents.’

‘They’re dead.’ Mike couldn’t bring himself to phrase it as a question.

Graham looked away sharply.

‘Go on,’ Mike said. ‘Give me all those facts you add up to make a person. Because that’s all I’m gonna get.’

Graham cleared his throat, still kneading that sheet. ‘They were high-school sweethearts. Your mother was in the music society. She won Best Smile senior year – I think it was the contrast with her skin. Your father was voted Most Optimistic. He came from more money than her. Not that he was rich or anything – his dad was an accountant – but Danielle was raised by a single mother in a one-room apartment, helped her clean houses on weekends, wore thrift-store clothes. She identified heavily with her father, though she knew him only fleetingly for her first eight years. She emphasized her Native American heritage, which fits with the idealization-’

‘Which instrument?’ Mike asked. Graham looked at him blankly, so Mike said, ‘She was in the music society. Which instrument did she play?’

‘Flute, I think it was.’

Mike’s throat was dry, so he gestured with the gun for Graham to keep talking.

‘They were married out of high school. John ran a fabric distribution center. He was fairly paid but didn’t love his work. He loved baseball, western movies, and Mexican food. Danielle worked as a manager at a clothing store until he made enough, and then she stayed home. Family folks. Picnics on weekends, had a Dasher and a Ford station wagon – one of the Country Squires with the fake wood paneling?’

Mike could see the car, could smell the dust of the backseat.

Graham was still talking. ‘She was a gardener, Danielle, liked her hands in the earth. She loved candles and Cat Stevens and incense.’

‘Sage,’ Mike said faintly. ‘Sage incense.’

Graham looked suddenly agitated. ‘How much do you need to know?’

‘You killed them,’ Mike said.

Graham looked at him steadily, though his fingers still fussed at the bedding. The bullet glinted into view, surfing the folds of the sheet. ‘You gave me your word.’

Mike raised the.357 and sighted on Graham’s forehead.

‘Of course I didn’t goddamned kill them. I’m a cop.’

‘So you had people. Like Roger Drake and William Burrell?’

Graham’s eyebrows rose with surprise. He said, ‘Like Lenny Burrell.’

Mike set the revolver on the chair arm, keeping it aimed toward the bed. ‘William’s father?’

‘Uncle.’ That bullet rolled ever closer to Graham’s fingers. ‘He took care of your mother first-’

‘ How ?’

‘Shot her in the bath, I think. It was quick, painless. You were asleep in the other room, but your father chased down Lenny on his way down the hall to you. There was a tussle, and your father beat Len away. He had rage going for him, John. Somehow he’d caught wind of what was going on. That you were marked, too. He took off with you that night before Len could circle back with reinforcements. Len caught up to him a week later outside Dallas. We needed to know where your father had parked you – it wasn’t like now, with databases and alerts and interagency communication around missing persons.’ Graham rubbed his eyes wearily, his voice rueful. ‘Len took his time with him, too. Leonard Burrell was a capable man. Your father had impressive stamina. Despite what he endured, he never gave up where you were.’

Mike looked up at the beams reinforcing the dark ceiling, his thoughts a haze. He said slowly, ‘I’ve hated my father for thirty-one years.’

‘Is it a relief?’ Graham’s dark-shaded face seemed almost paternal. ‘That you don’t have to anymore?’

Mike thought, You have no idea .

Graham cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry for what I did. There are nights where… Well, that’s no concern of yours.’

Mike was aware, vaguely, of Graham’s arm tensing, his fist working the sheet, the dark spot of the bullet against the pale cloth. Mike said, ‘Why didn’t anyone ever find them? My parents?’

‘Len was expert at a lot of things. One of them was making bodies disappear. Easier that way. No murder investigation without a body. A lot less heat. No missing-persons reports in police files. People get into all sorts of trouble, pick up and go. Everyone just figured the Trainors moved on. No funeral service, no obit, much smaller splash. No one to miss them.’

‘I did,’ Mike said. ‘I missed them.’

‘What do you want me to say?’

Mike could see Graham’s guilt quickening into anger, and he felt a powerful urge to lift the.357 from the arm of the chair and shoot him through the teeth. Instead he said, ‘Tell me where they’re buried.’

Graham turned back the sheet, his hand disappearing beneath the fold. ‘I won’t tell you,’ he said, ‘but I’ll show you.’

‘Okay, then.’ Mike rose.

Graham swung his legs sluggishly off the mattress, but then at once his arms blurred, hands clamping together, that stray bullet seating in the wheel of the.38 with a clink. The revolver was up and aimed at Mike’s face before Mike could snatch the.357 from the chair’s arm.

Graham gestured for Mike to step away from the chair, and Mike complied. Graham said, ‘I’m doing you a favor. If William and Dodge caught up to you…’ He shook his head, gave a dying whistle. ‘And they will. That team of them… well, sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Those boys do something magical to each other. But I’m willing to settle this here. Leave Katherine wherever the hell she is. So what do you say? Is that a fair trade?’ His thumb rose to the hammer.

Mike said, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’

Graham cocked the revolver.

A roar.

The blast of light from the balcony illuminated Shep’s emotionless face behind the barrel of his gun, safely back out of the security camera’s range. Before Mike could blink, the space beyond the open door had vanished into darkness again, taking Shep with it.

The side of Graham’s neck went to red and white, a tailed dollop of blood rising like syrup, then falling with his body to land in a slash across his cheek and chest. The gun flash had seared into Mike’s retinas, and he stood there a moment, breathing cordite, his eardrums on tinny vibration. Staring down at the bone and exposed flesh, he felt nothing. He recalled a dinner not so long before with some parents of Kat’s friends, roast chicken and Chilean Shiraz, how they’d all chatted and chewed and wiped their lips, resting happily in their assumption that they were decent, civilized folks.