Jeff Abbott: Fear

The accountant arrived shortly after nine-thirty Monday night, but wasn’t alone. Groote heard the accountant and a woman, talking in awkward tones, then the accountant’s laughter, hearty, trying to be macho. Then the unmistakable sounds of kissing, of clothes sliding along skin, of movement on mattress.

Groote played solitaire on his PDA during the lovemaking, yawning once, waiting for the accountant to be done. He could simply pick the lock on the adjoining room door, walk in, shoot them both, and not miss a second of visitation time with Amanda. But he did not see why he should kill a woman who simply had selected the wrong sexual partner for the evening. He hated the idea of an innocent person suffering needlessly. He waited and hoped that the target’s girlfriend wouldn’t stay the night.

But she did. Groote listened to them continue their intimacies until midnight, then they fell asleep. He gave them another hour, hoping the woman would rouse from the post-coital slumber. Still the sound of silence, of light snoring from both the accountant and the woman. Then Groote dozed himself, waking in the thin light of Tuesday morning.

He listened at the door. Hushed, steady snoring. But he heard a soft step, heard the shower next door rush to life.

Now. He could be done and gone while the woman showered, out of harm’s way. Groote jimmied the lock between the door linking the two rooms, eased it open. The accountant was fortyish, tall, barrel-chested. He didn’t look the part of a bean counter; more like a laborer, with his rough face and heavy jaw.

‘Hi,’ Groote said.

The accountant’s eyes opened in sleepy confusion and he said, ‘Uh, hi.’

‘You helped destroy my family. Just so you know.’ Groote shot him with his silenced gun, twice between the eyes.

He heard a scream from behind him, over the hiss of the shower. Damn, she’d started the hot water but hadn’t stepped under the spray. He grabbed the woman, shoved her hard against the wall, covered her mouth with his hand. She was older than the accountant, in her late forties. Groote recognized her; a concierge at the hotel. Groote had noticed her last night; he’d noticed and taken account of every person in the lobby during his walk-through. She’d had a welcoming smile for him then, glancing up from her computer, and he had nodded in return.

Now Groote jabbed his gun against the woman’s throat. ‘Answer me and I’ll let you live.’

The concierge closed her eyes, shuddering underneath his touch.

‘You understand?’

She nodded.

‘Why are you here?’ Groote took his hand a centimeter off her mouth.

‘Here?’ The concierge sputtered in her terror. ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God…’

‘Yes. Here. With him.’ Wrong place, wrong time, rattled in Groote’s head, but he hated the phrase. He heard Cathy’s final words: I’m taking your car, more room for junk in the trunk.

‘He invited me. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t.’ The concierge tried to back away from the gun barrel pressed into her throat, but Groote kept a hard grip on the woman’s hair.

‘Does he stay at this hotel often?’

She nodded a yes.

‘Did you know him before tonight?’

‘Yes.’

A predetermined choice then, not the random lovemaking of just one night. ‘You know what kind of man he is?’

She shuddered with fear. ‘He – he’s just a CPA. For a boating company…’

‘He had a different job before. His actions helped kill my wife, maim my daughter. He paid out the cash that bought the guns that destroyed my family.’

She shivered under his touch. ‘Boating… company…’

‘You should be more discerning about your friends, miss,’ he said gently.

‘Yes, okay, I will, I promise…’

‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.’

And he shot the concierge once between astonished eyes.

He took I-5 North to Orange. Staying up most of the night, generously giving the concierge the chance to leave, taking the time to check the accountant’s laptop and files for anyone else connected to the remnants of the Duarte crime ring who needed killing, setting up the scene to appear like a robbery, battling the morning traffic sludge, made him late for his morning with Amanda. But at least he knew now he had not been unfair.

Not like Amanda or Cathy, who had never had a chance.

At ten – almost an hour late – he screeched into the heart of Orange, zooming past the restored Orange Circle with its charming shops, down past Chapman University and its sparkling new buildings. Orange was a nice town; he ought to move here, be closer to Amanda. Hit man of suburbia – the idea nearly made him laugh. He drove a few more blocks down to a cluster of brick buildings that suggested the quiet ambience of a modern prep school. Except with bars on the windows. At the gate at Pleasant Point Hospital, he gave his name to the guard at the post. He drove up to the main building, parked his Mercedes, hurried across the lot. He knew he needed a shower, a shave, but he had not wanted to waste another moment. A group of the children played outside in the morning sunshine, a few others standing, staring off at the sky or the ground or their hands. He didn’t see Amanda.

He hurried into the building, checked in at the front desk. Today’s nurse was Mariana, his favorite.

‘I’m late,’ Groote said. ‘Terrible traffic.’

‘Amanda’s in her room,’ Mariana said.

‘Thank you.’ Groote signed in and hurried down the hall to Amanda’s room. He heard the plaintive notes before he reached her door, stepped in slowly so she could see him, not be startled. She remained jumpy, months after the horror.

Amanda lay twisted on her bed, knees drawn close to her chest, her right cheek pressed to the pillow. Patsy Cline, her mother’s favorite singer, drifted softly from the speakers. ‘Walking After Midnight.’ Too sad a song for a bright morning, too sad a song for a sixteen-year-old. She ought to be listening to those boy bands, snapping her fingers, singing into a hairbrush, dancing before bathroom mirrors. At home with him, where she belonged.

‘Amanda?’ He stepped over to the CD player, turned the volume low. ‘Amanda, it’s Daddy.’

Now she opened her brown eyes, looked at him, through him.

‘Hey, Amanda Banana.’ He drew a chair close to the side of the bed. ‘How are you?’ He kept his voice gentle and soothing.

Amanda didn’t answer. The frown on her mouth, the way her stare cut through him as if he were mist, told him a bad day loomed for her. And for him.

He took her hand. ‘You want to get up and go outside?’

She barely shook her head. One of the scars on her face – the small star-shaped one near the corner of her mouth – jerked and he thought she would say good morning. But she went still.

‘I’m so sorry I’m late, pumpkin, I had a work project this morning I had to finish.’

Now her eyes focused on his face. She said, slowly and carefully, ‘Mom came to see me.’

‘Ah. Did she?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did Mom say?’

‘She wants me to hurt myself.’

‘Oh, no, baby, she doesn’t. She doesn’t.’ Groote tried to take one of her hands in his but she kept her hands twisted into claws, tucked tight against her chest.

‘She said,’ Amanda whispered, ‘that I should cut off my face.’

‘No, baby,’ Groote said. The drugs, the lame-ass therapy’s not working, she doesn’t even remember Cathy’s dead. ‘She wasn’t here.’

Now steel crept into Amanda’s tone. ‘She was. She comes nearly every day.’

‘Baby. It’s all in your head.’

‘She was here!’

He stopped trying to argue with her. He wanted her calm and talking, not shrieking and screaming and cutting his visit short. There was so much necessary ugliness in the world, she was his pocket of beauty. He touched the scar at the corner of her mouth; another scar bisecting her eyebrow; the wriggled thread of tissue beneath her ear. The outward souvenirs of bullets smashing through glass, of a car tumbling down a rocky canyon. He kissed each scar. He whispered in her ear: ‘Mom would never tell you to hurt yourself.’