Jeff Abbott - Panic

They loaded Gabriel in the back of the dented but drivable Malibu, wiping down and abandoning their own car behind a dense motte of live oaks. Gabriel had two bullet wounds, one in the shoulder, one in the upper back, and he was unconscious. Carrie took a medical kit from the car they were leaving behind and tended to his injuries.

‘Will he live until we get back to Austin?’ Jargo asked.

‘If Dezz doesn’t kill him,’ Carrie said.

Dezz got into the car, jerked the rearview mirror to where he could see Carrie in the back, Gabriel’s head in her lap.

‘I could kill you,’ he said again. But now there was just the hurt of the denied child, the tantrum fading into pout.

It was time, she decided, to start playing a new hand. ‘You won’t,’ she said calmly. ‘You’d miss me.’

Dezz stared at her and she saw the anger begin to fade in his face. She allowed herself to breathe again.

‘Go eat dinner,’ Jargo ordered them when they returned to the Austin apartment. ‘I need peace and quiet for my talk with Mr. Gabriel.’

Carrie did not like the sound of that announcement but she had no choice. She and Dezz walked down the street, under the arching shade of the oaks, to a small Tex-Mex restaurant. It was crowded with young, hip attendees from the massive South by Southwest music and film festivals that dominated Austin every mid-March. Her heart went into her throat. Evan had talked about coming to the festival until just last week; Ounce of Trouble had debuted at South by Southwest a couple of years ago and he loved the craziness, the energy, the deal-making. He loved seeing all the new movies at the cutting edge of cinema, the heady rush of thousands of people who loved to create. But the edits on Bluff nagged at his mind, undone, so he had decided to skip this year’s events.

Crowded around the tables were young people who reminded her of Evan – talking, laughing, their minds focused on art rather than survival. He should be here with her, watching movies, listening to bands, his mother alive. Instead she watched Dezz signal the hostess with two fingers and she followed him to a booth. Carrie excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, left him playing with the sugar packets.

The ladies’ room was busy and noisy. In the privacy of a stall, Carrie opened a false bottom in her purse. She removed a PocketPC, tapped out a brief message, and pressed send. The PDA tapped into the wireless server in a coffee shop next door. She waited for an answer.

When she was done reading the reply, she blinked away the tears that threatened her eyes and washed her face with trembling hands. She came out of the ladies’ room, half-expecting Dezz to have his ear pressed to the door, and then she could simply kill him on the spot. But the hallway held only a trio of laughing women.

She returned to the booth. Dezz dumped his sixth sugar packet into his iced tea, watching a mound of sweetness filter down past the cubes into the tea. She considered him: the high cheekbones, the dirty-blond hair, the ears that protruded slightly, and instead of being afraid of him she pitied him. For just one bent moment. Then she remembered the deputy and the woman on the highway, him shooting at Evan, and disgust filled her heart. She could shoot him, right here in the booth. His hands were nowhere near his gun.

But instead she sat down. He had ordered iced tea for her as well.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, not looking at her, ‘I really hate you and then I don’t.’

‘I know.’ She sipped at her tea.

‘Do you love Evan?’ He asked this in a soft, almost childish whisper, as though he’d spent his day’s ration of bravado and bluster.

There was only one answer she could give him. ‘No. Of course not.’

‘Would you tell me if you did?’

‘No. But I don’t love him.’

‘Love is hard.’ Dezz poked his straw into his sugar hill, stirred it down to nothing. ‘I love Jargo and look how he talks to me.’

‘That deputy. That poor woman. Dezz, you understand why it was a terrible mistake. How you put us at further risk.’ She had to treat it like a tactical error, not a human tragedy, because she was not sure that his unfinished jigsaw of a brain understood sadness and loss.

‘Yeah. I know.’ He crumbled a tostada, flicking the fragments across the table, stuck his finger in the salsa, licked it clean. The waitress came and took their orders. Dezz wanted tres leches cake first, but Carrie said no, dessert after dinner, and he didn’t argue.

Her hate for him did not ease but she wondered what chance he had ever had, with Jargo as a father. ‘Where did you go to school, Dezz?’

He looked at her in surprise, unaccustomed to a personal question. She realized he never regularly spoke to anyone other than Jargo and Galadriel. He had no friends. ‘Nowhere. Everywhere. He sent me to school in Florida for a while. I liked Florida. Then New York, and I didn’t even know if he was alive or dead for three years, then California for two years. Then I was Trevor Rogers. Trevor, isn’t that a name that suits me? Other times he didn’t bother with school. I helped him.’

‘He taught you to shoot and strangle and steal.’ She kept her voice lower than the Tejano music drifting from the speakers, than the laughter from the tables.

‘Sure. I didn’t like school, anyway. Too much reading. I liked sports, though.’

She tried to imagine Dezz playing baseball without taking a bat to the opposing pitcher. Or three-on-three basketball, occupying the court with boys whose fathers did not teach them how to disarm an alarm system or slice open a jugular. ‘You don’t do this often, do you? Just sit and eat with another human being.’

‘I eat with Jargo.’

‘You could call him Dad.’

He sucked a long draw on his sugar-clouded tea. ‘He doesn’t like it. I only do it to annoy him.’

She remembered her own father, her clear and unabated love for him. She watched Dezz swirl the tea in his mouth, look up at her, then look down back to his drink in a mix of contempt and shyness. She saw, with aching clarity, that he believed she was probably the only woman he could talk to, that he could hope for.

‘I’m still mad at you,’ he said to his tea glass.

Their plates arrived. Dezz forked a chunk of beef enchilada, looped a long string of cheese around his fork, and broke the thread with a flourish. He tested out a smile. It chilled her and sickened her all at once. ‘But I’ll get over it.’

‘I know you will,’ she said.

The apartment was quiet and dark. Jargo had rented the two adjoining apartments as well to ensure privacy. He set a small digital voice recorder on the coffee table, between the knives.

‘No objections to being recorded, do you, Mr. Gabriel? I don’t want to trample on your constitutional rights. Not the way you did on other people’s in years gone by.’

‘Fuck you.’ Gabriel’s voice was barely a creak, faded from blood loss, pain, and exhaustion. ‘Don’t you talk to me about what’s moral or decent.’

‘You hunted me for a long time. But your license got revoked.’ Jargo selected a small knife and a long blade geared for holiday duty. ‘This big beauty is designed to cut turkey. Rather appropriate.’

‘You’re nothing but a goddamned traitor.’

Jargo inspected the knife, ran its edge along his palm. ‘That line is awfully tired. Traitor-baiter. Baiting isn’t a very strong action. Catching is more impressive.’ He came closer to Gabriel. ‘Who are you working for these days? CIA or Donna Casher or someone else who wants to bring me down?’

Gabriel swallowed. Jargo held up the thin silver of the small blade, raised an eyebrow. ‘This one’s not for turkey. It’s for sausages.’