Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

“He went on a business trip,” she finally said. “Sort of an emergency. A last-minute thing.”

Now Gabe’s eyes went flat. “Don’t, Mom. The cops came to the house yesterday looking for him.”

“You – you were alone, Gabe?”

“Of course I was alone. I’m fine. I’m fourteen.”

“Oh, God, Gabe.”

“Chillax, Mom, okay? It’s all good.”

“ ‘Chillax’?”

“I’m just freaked out about Dad, that’s all. They wouldn’t tell me anything, but…”

“But you overheard what they were saying to me.”

He nodded.

She bit her lower lip, shook her head, and after a few seconds, she said, “Look, I don’t know where he is.”

“Did he – did he, like, go somewhere?”

She finally returned his gaze with a look that was equally fierce, yet also sorrowful and compassionate at the same time. “It’s possible he got hurt in the attack–”

“Like he’s lying somewhere bleeding to death?”

She shook her head. “The police assured me that he’s not in any hospitals or…”

“Or morgues,” he added.

“Which is a huge relief, Gabe. That means that he’s – he’s probably fine, just–”

“He’s dead. You know he is.” He swallowed, blinked rapidly, tears flooding his eyes.

“No, Gabe. No, he’s not. Don’t think that way.”

“How do you know he’s not?”

“Gabe, there’d – there’d be…” She couldn’t continue.

“Do you think it’s possible these guys who hurt you grabbed Dad or something? Like, kidnapped him?”

Finally, she replied, defeated, “I don’t know what to think.”

“Maybe Uncle Nick can find him.”

“I know you love Uncle Nick. Me, too. I just don’t think he can find anything the police can’t. He does corporate work, mostly.”

“Well, we’ll see,” Gabe said. “I called him and he told me he’s on his way home now. He promised me he’d find Dad.”

I’m not married, even though I’ve come dangerously close a few times, and I don’t have a family of my own. My “family of origin,” as the shrinks say, had been pretty well shattered by my father’s very public arrest and the squalid events that followed. So my nephew, Gabe, means a lot to me. I’m extremely protective of him.

Strictly speaking, I’d finished my work in L.A. anyway. I’d done the job I’d been sent there to do: I’d located the missing shipment. As I waited at L.A.X. for the first flight to D.C. that had an available seat, I got on my BlackBerry and fired off an e-mail to Jay Stoddard with the details. As much as I wanted to stay on and indulge my own curiosity and dig into what had really happened there, that was a luxury I no longer had. I had no intention of dropping it, of course. I never drop anything. But I had to get back to D.C. and make sure that Gabe and his mother were okay.

Because whatever had happened to his father – my brother – didn’t sound good at all. He’d been missing for two days.

The truth was, Roger and I hadn’t been close since Dad’s trial. Maybe that was a euphemistic way of putting it. I didn’t like the guy, and he didn’t like me either. We barely tolerated each other.

But damn it, he was my brother. And maybe more important, Gabe’s stepfather.

And I couldn’t suppress a feeling of gnawing anxiety, of growing disquiet.

The earliest flights were sold out, so I didn’t get to Washington until the late afternoon. In the cab, I called Lauren’s cell, expecting Gabe, and was surprised when Lauren picked up. The doctors were letting her go home. She told me what had happened, in broad outline, anyway. She sounded a little groggy but otherwise fine.

Which was a huge relief. Some of the tension I’d been feeling over the last several hours, like a low-level nagging headache, began to ebb away.

I stopped by my apartment, a loft in a converted warehouse in the Adams Morgan section of Washington. I’d bought it because there was parking in the building, and it came furnished. The agent talked about “hip modern urban living” and its “industrial aesthetic.” A sign out front said, obnoxiously, “You. Are. Here.” To me it looked like what it was, an old warehouse with raw concrete ceilings and a lot of painted ductwork. It had all the charm of an airplane hangar. Gabe thought it was cool, of course. He referred to it as my Fortress of Solitude.

A few hours later I pulled into the driveway of my brother’s house on Virgilia Road in Chevy Chase, a big old Georgian Revival on a leafy street surrounded by other big old houses. It was made of red brick with black shutters and white trim. It was imposing from the front, and even more imposing inside: six bedrooms and seven and a half baths, five fireplaces, a big pool in the backyard that they never used.

Roger once cracked to me that my entire apartment could probably fit in his media room. I replied that his entire house could probably fit in the conservatory of our childhood home in Bedford. That shut him up. We both knew what it was like to have a lot of money. We never thought about it. But after we lost it, I actually felt relieved, like I was taking off tight shoes.

Whereas Roger became obsessed, like Ahab and his damned white whale, with what we’d lost.

I found Gabe sitting on the front steps. He was wearing a black hoodie sweatshirt and frayed black sneakers and had iPod earbuds in his ears. He was drawing in his mysterious notebook, the one he never let anyone look at. He closed it quickly as I approached.

“Hey,” he said, pausing the music on his iPod, yanking the earbuds out. “Thanks for coming.”

“Hey.” I leaned over to give the kid a hug, and he got up only partway, and we embraced awkwardly. Gabe was small for his age. I could feel his bony shoulders and rib cage. “How’s Mom?”

“I don’t know why they let her out of the hospital so soon. She was in a coma for twenty-four hours.”

I shrugged, turned my palms upward. “Was she badly hurt?”

“Enough to give her a concussion.”

“You think she shouldn’t be home?”

He shrugged, palms up, an unconscious imitation. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Ah. No word from your dad?”

“The police were asking Mom if they had relationship problems. They think maybe Dad ran off.”

“That doesn’t sound like your dad.”

He was watching my face closely. “Or maybe he was kidnapped. Isn’t that possible?”

“Kidnapped? I doubt it. Look, we’ll figure this out. I don’t want you to worry, Gabe.”

“Yeah,” he said dubiously. “Sure.”

I turned toward the door, and he said, “Uncle Nick, will you teach me how to use a gun?”

“It’s late. We’d piss off the neighbors.”

“I mean, like, at the range or the gun club or whatever.”

“I don’t belong to a gun club, and I don’t shoot at a range. In fact, I rarely use a gun. I always prefer to use my hands.”

His eyes widened. “To kill people?”

“For database searches, mostly,” I said.

“I’m serious, Uncle Nick. I want to learn how to use a gun.”

“I don’t think teenagers who wear all black should use guns,” I said. “Bad stuff tends to happen. Don’t you watch the news?”

“I’m talking about protecting Mom. And self-defense and like that.”

“Sorry,” I said.

I opened the front door, and he said, “Uncle Nick?”

I turned.

“Thanks, man,” he said. “For being here, I mean.”

I’d always thought that the only smart decision Roger ever made was to marry Lauren. She was strikingly attractive – glossy black hair and milky white skin and caramel brown eyes; lips that pulled down at the sides when she smiled. Lauren was a beautiful and elegant woman.