Jeff Abbott - Fear

A long silence. ‘Listen, you stupid bastard. I don’t believe you were an innocent bystander at Allison’s house tonight. You and Ruiz, you’re in on it with her, and you’re going to return Frost, or I’m going to kill you. Simple.’

Frost. The same word on Ruiz’s bracelet.

‘The man in her tub… Sorenson. I think he hid a bomb in her office today. I don’t know anything else.’

A pause and Miles could hear the man’s heavy footsteps on tile. ‘What man in what tub?’

‘There’s a guy in her tub… knocked out.’

A pause. ‘There’s a bunch of sheets wadded up on the floor, and that’s all.’

Sorenson must have escaped between the time the shooting started and when the shooter returned to Allison’s house – presumably to search for whatever this Frost was.

‘She’s dead, you can’t sell the research, I told you I’ll pay you. Last chance,’ the shooter said.

You want answers, tell this guy you’ve got what he wants. Draw him out, catch him. You couldn’t save Allison but you can find out what the hell happened to her. Except if he did that, he was drawing a giant bull’s-eye on his back, and an attack could come from any direction.

Miles closed his eyes. ‘I don’t have… Frost… but I might know where you can get it.’

‘Where?’

‘Not now. I’ll – have to be in touch with you later.’

‘There is no later. You got right now. You tell me what you know, I’m going to let you live.’

‘You don’t even know who I am.’

‘I know what you are. Greedy. Stupid. In over your head. Listen, jackass, I hunt for a living. I’ll find you, I promise.’

Miles kept his voice steady. ‘You give me a number to reach you at, and I’ll call with Frost when I have it.’

‘Unacceptable. I made you a one-time offer. You’re declining. Suffer the consequences, asshole.’

A cold rage gripped Miles’s chest, stomach, throat. ‘I’ll make you suffer instead.’

When the shooter spoke, his voice was barely a whisper. ‘When I’m done with you, you’re going to think having your face ripped off is a walk in the goddamned park.’ And the shooter hung up.

Miles closed his eyes, saw the house burning, him late for the most important appointment of his life, Allison dead and gone.

She asked you for help and you failed her. He had failed her, failed her as he had failed Andy. I was supposed to save you. He’d wasted his time with her, parrying her therapy, playing smart guy, never letting her within distance of the truth, when all she’d wanted to do was help. He felt her absence in the world like a hole punched into his chest.

But he didn’t have to curl up in a ball. He could make the people who had killed her pay. He got up from the bed, weighed his options.

Ruiz. Had the shooter and his people with the searchlights caught Ruiz? Nathan Ruiz knew his name was Michael Raymond now. Or worse, maybe his cell-phone number had appeared on Allison’s cell. It gave the shooter roads to finding him. The apartment was rented to Michael Raymond, and the shooter could trace the billing address of the number to this apartment. He couldn’t stay here.

But he couldn’t run again, he couldn’t fail Allison again. The man thought Miles had something Allison had stolen. Why? What was Frost? This involved Sorenson, clearly – he’d shown up at Allison’s house after the blast – presumably hunting for Frost as well. But all that mattered right now was getting the hell out of here and hiding before the shooter came calling.

Miles grabbed a bag of clothes, called DeShawn’s number, got no answer. He tried to calm his thoughts, decide what he was going to say. He had to hide from the shooter, but at the same time, he couldn’t let WITSEC move him from Santa Fe. If that happened, he could never nail the shooter, nail Sorenson, nail Ruiz, whoever had killed Allison.

‘Is that the idea?’ Andy said, sitting on his bed. ‘Avenge her – a charming concept – and you’re well adjusted again and I vanish. You’re kidding yourself, Miles. You and I are a team. Forever.’

Miles took his bag and walked alone in the dark to a modest motel off Cerillos that catered to starving artists and hikers. The clerk didn’t ask for ID when he put an extra twenty on top of the night’s rent.

The room was plain but clean. He lay down on the bed and switched on the TV. The local news was all about the terrible explosion in Santa Fe. The fire was out. Firefighters had found badly burned remains in the rubble. The deceased had not yet been identified, but investigators believed it was the body of the woman who rented the office space, a psychiatrist. The reporter, standing before the fire trucks and the ruined shell of the building, said investigators were not ready to comment on the cause of the explosion.

The deceased. Allison was dead and gone, and in the smoke-kissed night beyond the grimy window was the lying Sorenson, and a shooter determined to kill, and a screwed-up kid named Nathan Ruiz, and they held the answers he needed.

Now all he had to do was find them without getting killed.

‘It’s going to be fun, seeing you lose it all again,’ Andy said.

Groote ordered the two security guards to dump the kid on the bed, fasten the restraints to his arms and then to the railings, then told them to get out. They left and shut the door behind them. He clicked the call log back open from Allison’s cell phone that he’d taken from her home. A cell-phone number from the man who had called, coded in Allison’s cell phone as MR.

MR was the walking dead.

He tucked the phone back in his pocket and dumped a pitcher of water on the kid. Nathan Ruiz sputtered to consciousness with a jerk.

‘Hi,’ Groote said. ‘You’ve had a field trip tonight.’

‘I – I…’

‘You’re at a loss for words. Probably because you were expecting to see Doctor Hurley. Well, he’s not suited for this kind of therapy, Nathan.’ Groote sat down next to him. He lit a cigarette, although he hadn’t smoked in ten years, puffed deep enough for the fire to catch hard, blew the smoke without a cough. ‘It’s just going to be you and me.’

Nathan blinked.

‘You’re back where you belong.’ Groote tapped his own temple. ‘You’re not getting out again.’ He let five seconds drip by and said, ‘Your friend took off without you. Guess he didn’t care.’

‘Who?’

‘His initials are MR. You give me the rest of his name, we’re cool, you and I. Cool is good.’ He held up the smoldering cigarette. ‘Hot is not.’

The boy’s expression hardened past the grogginess. Groote could see him summoning up what stray courage remained in his gut. ‘I don’t know his name.’

Groote jammed the cigarette into Nathan’s wrist.

Nathan screamed. Groote withdrew. ‘I’ll do the other wrist, then I’ll do your tongue. Then your eyes. It’ll be incredibly gross.’ He thought: Please don’t make me burn you bad. ‘What’s MR’s name?’

‘I really don’t know who he is – he wasn’t supposed to be there.’

Groote decided to deal the boy a bit of rope. ‘Then who was supposed to be there?’

‘Allison.’ Nathan gritted his teeth against the pain. ‘She gave me a passkey to get past the door… told me to meet her at her house.’

‘And do what?’ He leaned back, as though getting comfortable for their nice chat.

‘Leave here.’

‘Why?’

‘She said… I shouldn’t be at Sangriaville anymore.’

‘Your insurance hasn’t expired, Nathan, so why did she want you to check yourself out?’

‘She said Doctor Hurley wanted to kill me.’

‘Gosh, Nathan, and he only speaks highly of you.’