Jeff Abbott - Panic

‘Help me by finding my dad.’

‘I don’t know where he is, son, but if you come in, we’ll move heaven and earth to find him.’

It sounded like an empty promise. ‘I don’t have the files you all want. They’re gone. Jargo and Dezz destroyed them.’ He picked up his music player. Perhaps not. But if he simply gave them the files, they could use them how they wanted, destroy them, and make him vanish. He would only trade them for his father. Nothing else.

Bricklayer paused, as though contemplating unexpected news. ‘Jargo won’t leave you alone.’

‘He can’t find me.’

‘He can and he will.’

‘No. You want what he wants. These files. You’ll kill me, too.’

‘I most certainly would not.’ Bricklayer sounded offended. ‘Evan, you’re emotionally exhausted. It’s understandable, given your horrible ordeal. Let me give you a number, in case we get disconnected. I loathe cell phones. Will you write the number down?’

‘Yes,’ and Bricklayer fed him a number. He didn’t recognize the area code.

‘Evan. Listen to me. Jargo and Dezz are very dangerous. Extremely.’

‘You’re preaching to the choir.’ He risked a guess. ‘Are you with the CIA?’

‘I loathe acronyms as much as cell phones,’ Bricklayer said. ‘Evan, we can have substantive talks when you come in. I personally guarantee your safety.’

‘You won’t even tell me your name.’ Evan paced the room. ‘I could buy time by talking to the press. Telling them the CIA is offering to help me. Give them this number.’

‘You could go public. I suspect, though, that Jargo will kill your father in retaliation.’

‘You’re saying he has my father.’ Evan waited.

‘It’s most likely. I’m sorry.’ Bricklayer sounded like a mortician, gently agreeing that, yes, it was a beautiful casket. ‘Let’s move forward, so we can work together to get your dad home. Would you meet with me? We can meet in Texas; I assume you’re still in the state…’

‘I’ll consider it and call you back.’

‘Evan, don’t hang up.’

Evan did. He switched off the phone, dropped it on the bed as if it were radioactive. If Bricklayer could triangulate on the phone, the government could just bust the door down.

He pulled on a change of clean clothes he’d packed in the duffel. He spread his cash in front of him. He had ninety-two dollars. A camcorder, a cell phone, a Beretta with no ammunition.

He couldn’t face Shadey or the sweet-talking Bricklayer or Dezz and Jargo without being armed. It would be suicide. But he didn’t think gun shops were open on Sundays, and he couldn’t go into one anyway, not with his picture all over the news as a missing man. Pawnshops? He didn’t want to part with the camera suddenly; he wished he could have gotten Dezz on film. That would have been leverage. Selling the camera was a last resort.

You could buy all sorts of things on the street. Drugs. Sex. Why not ammo?

He closed his eyes. Thought out ways he could acquire ammo for a particular gun. One idea came to mind, crazy, definitely daring, but it played on the only common wish he knew how to grant with the skills and resources he had.

Evan ventured into the early-morning damp. Down low on his head, he wore a baseball cap that had been in the rear seat of the stolen truck. He bought the Sunday Houston Chronicle out of a vending machine in front of a decrepit coffee shop. His face and his father’s face were on the cover of the metro section, an old publicity photo his mother had shot after Ounce of Trouble had made the short list for the Oscars, where his hair was shorter and he wore nerd-boy eyeglasses. He didn’t need glasses but he’d decided they made him look smarter, more artistic. It had been a shallow affectation, his mother had teased him about how seriously he took himself, and now he felt embarrassed. The paper said his father was also considered missing; no record existed of anyone named Mitchell Casher having flown to Australia from the United States in the past week. No mention or picture of Carrie.

Carrie’s here with me, Dezz had claimed in his creepy singsong voice. Evan had not believed him. If Carrie had been kidnapped, it would have been in the papers.

Or would it? She had quit her job. She wasn’t with him. Who would report her missing? But if she had been taken, she wouldn’t have been able to call him and warn him before Gabriel’s attack. So where was Carrie? Hiding? He ached to talk to her, to hear her soothing voice, but he couldn’t go near her, he couldn’t involve her again.

He folded the paper under his arm. Pay phones were a dying breed with cell phones wedged in every pocket and purse, but he found one two blocks down at a convenience store where the lot smelled of Saturday-night beer. A gangly kid lounged near the phones, chewing on a grape Pixy Stix, watching Evan with all the suspicion and arrogance of a prison guard.

He might do. Evan picked up a phone, dropped in the required coins.

‘’Spectin’ an important call on that phone,’ the boy said in a low murmur. Giving Evan a narrowed stare.

‘Then they’ll get a busy signal for a minute.’

‘Find another phone, son,’ the kid said.

Evan stared at him. He wanted to pop the kid in the sneering mouth and say, You picked the wrong guy to mess with today. But then he decided he didn’t need another enemy. He had learned one thing as a film-maker: everyone wanted to be in a movie.

Evan didn’t put a smile on his face because smiles weren’t always good currency. ‘You an entrepreneur?’

‘Yeah, that’s me. I’m a fucking mogul.’

Evan grabbed the Beretta tucked in the back of his jeans, under his shirt, and he jammed it into the kid’s flat stomach. The kid froze.

‘Calm down. It’s unloaded,’ Evan said. ‘I need bullets. Can you get them for me?’

The kid let out a long wheeze. ‘Man, double-fuck you. I might’ve if you hadn’t been a dick just now.’

‘Then I’ll make my call.’ Evan let his fingers drift back to the filthy keypad.

‘Wait, wait. What is it?’ The kid put his back to the street and examined the gun. Evan kept it in a tight grip. ‘Beretta 92FS… yeah, I bet I can score a few sweet mags for you. Friend of a friend. Cash basis.’

‘Of course.’

‘Lemme make a call on your coins,’ the kid said.

Evan handed him the receiver. The kid punched numbers, spoke in a low tone, laughed once, hung up the phone. ‘An hour. Be here. Cash. Four mags, two hundred dollars.’

He didn’t know ammo prices, but the quote was higher than what he thought he would pay in a gun shop. But the street didn’t ask questions. ‘I don’t need that much ammo.’

‘Won’t deal less. Otherwise not worth getting out of bed, son.’

Evan didn’t have two hundred dollars, but he said, ‘I’ll be back here in an hour.’

Now that he had a customer, the kid nodded. Ambled off across the lot, sliding a fresh Pixy Stix out of his pocket, tearing off the top, and dumping the purple powder onto his tongue.

Evan walked four blocks until he found another convenience store. He wore the sunglasses he had found in the stolen pickup and he bought hair-coloring dye, a pair of scissors, a giant coffee, and three breakfast tacos thick with fluffy eggs and potato and spicy chorizo sausage for breakfast. It didn’t get him closer to two hundred dollars. He swallowed the crazy urge to show the clerk the gun tucked in the back of his pants to see if that would produce two hundred bucks. The clerk rang him up. Watching Evan when she gave him the change.

Fear slammed into his stomach like a fist. Was this what paranoia was?

He hurried back to the motel. Evan locked himself in. Devoured the breakfast tacos and finished the black coffee while he read the directions on the hair dye. It would take only thirty minutes to set.