Jeff Abbott - The Last Minute

Nic lived with his mother, at his age? Jack couldn’t imagine. Of course, Jack’s mother didn’t want him around. He stepped out and made sure the rest of the apartment was empty. He guessed a back bedroom had been Nic’s. Large desks with a slight settling of dust, with clean spots where computers and monitors had likely sat.

Naturally the police had taken all of Nic’s gear. It was evidence – he was a hacker and a scumball and he’d been murdered. He searched the rest of the room. Nothing electronic remained. He saw no papers, no records. The room had been picked clean except for Nic’s computer books.

No sign of a notebook. He didn’t even know how big it was, which could affect where it was hidden.

He checked the room a final time, being extra careful, and then went back to the old woman’s bedroom. She was snoring now.

He sat on the edge of the bed and shook her awake. He thought she would scream in horror at a stranger in her room. Her eyes stared at him, muddled, then widened in fear. ‘Who… Get away from me.’

‘I won’t hurt you. I’m a friend of Nic’s.’

‘Friend of Nic’s.’ She spat at him, made her face a scowl.

‘I am. He gave me a job.’

She stared at him. ‘Get out of my house.’

He pointed to the healing wound on his neck. ‘The people who killed your son did that to me. I want to make them pay.’ He tried to smile. What did you say in a situation like this? ‘I am his friend, I promise you.’

‘His friends got him killed. And now the police, they say all these lies about my Nic. That he did terrible things.’

‘Mrs ten Boom, please, let me help you.’ He got up and jetted water into a clean glass and brought it to her. She drank it down and then she glanced at the vodka bottle. Uncertain, he poured a tiny bit into the glass. She took a tiny sip, as though embarrassed, and then looked at him with sullen eyes.

‘I’ll leave you alone,’ Jack said, ‘but I know of a way to get back at the people who hurt Nic.’ Like avenging Nic was his motive. Lying to a grieving mother. Gosh, he was so proud of himself these days. A slow throb of headache began to pulse in his temples. He looked at the vodka glass instead of her, which was fine as she was looking at the vodka as well.

‘How?’

‘Nic was researching the bad people who led him astray. He learned their secrets. I helped him a bit, but I don’t know where he would have hidden the information.’

‘He kept everything on computers. I don’t even know how to work one. I don’t like them.’ She flapped her hands, as if computers were gnats floating near her face. Her voice turned a bit petulant.

‘It’s a notebook. With printouts in it from the computer. Where would he keep it?’

Her gaze went sly. ‘How do I know you’re not a cop, or one of the people who hurt Nic?’

‘If I was a cop, I’d arrest you and take you down to the station,’ Jack said. ‘If I was your enemy, I would not pour you vodka.’

‘You waited a long time to come.’

‘The people who shot me killed Nic,’ he said. ‘I just got out of the hospital. You see the news last night?’

‘Yes.’ She blinked at him and then sipped the vodka as though it would sharpen her recollections rather than dull them. And maybe, Jack thought, they would. ‘Yes. I remember you. Nic’s friend. At the coffee shop. The smart boy from Hong Kong.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Yes. All right. Give me some more.’

He dribbled more vodka into the glass, feeling guilty with each chug of the clear liquid. No vodka like morning vodka, he thought. She drank it down, wiped her mouth with an age-spotted hand. ‘I can’t help you. The police came. They took all the computers. They said there were dirty pictures on them, and they said Nicky had hacked into the police’s own computers.’ She threw up her hands. ‘He’s dead. No one cares about his reputation any more except me.’

‘Well, I do. Do you remember him having a notebook, maybe one that he would have hidden?’

She blinked, considered, drank more of the vodka. These seemed new questions to her, Jack thought, ones the police hadn’t asked.

He poured another few fingers of vodka into the glass. ‘This notebook will protect you and it will protect me. Think.’

‘But you know him and his computers. He did everything on them.’ She blinked again, slurped more of her poison. ‘But he asked me to go to the store, just this once, and buy a red notebook and tape, something he needed for writing and photos. We didn’t have any photo albums. Not after Nic’s father left. I don’t like them.’

A few photos still dotted Nic’s room but Jack noticed he hadn’t seen any in this room, or the outer room. A lot of painful history in this apartment, he thought. That he understood. ‘So Nic asked you to buy a notebook for him.’

‘Yes, a big one, and it was red.’

‘Can you tell me where it is?’

‘No.’

Jack thought his patience would explode and scatter his brains around the bedroom. He took a calming breath. She was old, drunk, grieving, and she was his only hope.

‘Did the police search the entire apartment?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they give you a list of what they took?’

She considered this. ‘Yes. They did.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I don’t know’, and then a rare neuron fired. ‘I signed it on the kitchen table.’

Jack got up and shuffled among the debris on the table. Found it: a list from the Amsterdam Police Department, offering an inventory of what they had seized. Four laptops, two desktop computers, financial files, cell phones. Jack wondered if any record there would lead back to him. It made him feel as though time were moving faster. He felt feverish. But there was no mention of a notebook. The police hadn’t taken it.

‘I have to know where that notebook is.’ He tried to keep the panic out of his voice.

She had followed him out of the bedroom. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t have any money, do you? Or income, now that Nic is dead.’ It was a brutal truth.

She didn’t look at him. ‘Nic made so much I didn’t have to work.’

Because corporate espionage, spamming and porn paid so well. Jack pitied her. If he sold the notebook, he would have to make sure she got some of the money. ‘Think. Where would Nic have hidden the thing that mattered to him most? Did he have a storage unit? Another apartment? Anywhere?’

‘No, no.’

‘They said he did videos.’ Jack had to tear the words out of his mouth. ‘Um, illegal ones. Did he have a place where he might have filmed them?’

She bit her lip and he could see that if she’d known about her son’s horrible activities she’d chosen to ignore them. She sat down.

‘Mrs ten Boom. Please.’

‘He told me… he had stopped doing that.’ Her lips tightened into a line. ‘He promised me.’

‘Where?’

‘He had an apartment… he paid cash for it. I think under a different name.’

‘Do you know where it is?’

‘Well, he never took me there,’ she said with some indignation. ‘But once… long ago, I followed him. He told me he’d quit, I wanted to be sure. It was like an addiction, you see.’

The irony seemed lost on her. ‘So I followed him and I saw another man bring three teenage girls to his door… ’ She blinked. ‘I came home and I had a drink and… ’ She left the sentence unfinished. But he could guess that painful moment would have been when her drinking started in earnest.

He said nothing for a long minute. He’d thought this woman a stupid old drunk and now he had an idea of what the knowledge of her son’s crimes had done to her.

‘He was my baby. Every person who does wrong in this world, they were once someone’s baby. Full of hope and promise. He was so smart. Where did I go wrong? Where did I bend him the wrong way?’