Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

They’re positioned wrong, she thought now.

Hank had said the police were coming, not that the police were already there. But the Jeep was sitting in front of the Tahoe. Unless Hank had come and gone in the twenty minutes since he’d called Abby, whoever was driving the Jeep had been here first.

She sat with the engine growling and the headlights on and stared at the cars and the house, and her hand drifted back to the gearshift. She almost put it in reverse. But what was she going to do, back out of here and call Hank from the road and say she was scared of the Jeep? Come on. She’d spent too much time thinking paranoid thoughts on the train after seeing Tara Beckley and hearing about Carlos Ramirez. Her mind was built for that now; the docs had told her this. Panic floated; panic drifted like dark smoke and found new places in the brain to call home.

Screw that. Be tough, Abby. Be who you always were.

She released the gearshift and killed the engine. While the headlights dimmed, she grabbed the three plastic bags of cell phones and chargers, and was reaching for the door when the strange fear rose again, and she found herself shoving the bag with the iPhones under the driver’s seat.

I’ll say I dropped it. When I know that things are legit, I’ll come back and get it.

No clean logic to the choice, just a response to that old pulse in the blood, to that fresh dark smoke drifting through her brain. People have died and someone wants those phones. You don’t just carry them through the door.

She got out of the car with the two bags in hand, the Chrysler parked behind the two SUVs, forming a mini-caravan in the narrow driveway. She looked at the Jeep’s plate — Massachusetts. Good. That was as promised. But where was David Meredith?

The rain had stopped but puddles littered the dirt driveway like land mines. Abby dodged them, crossed the yard, went up the front steps, and rapped her knuckles on the wall as she pulled open the screen door. Hank’s muted voice floated out from inside.

“Yeah, Abs. Come in.”

She pushed open the front door, stepped inside, looked toward the light, and saw Hank tied to a kitchen chair.

It was an old wooden straight-backed chair, and he was bound to it with thin green cord. His right arm was wrapped tight against his side, but his left arm was free, and he lifted it with his palm out, signaling for Abby to stop.

The gesture wasn’t required. Abby stood frozen in midstride, staring at the scene in front of her as the screen door slapped shut behind her with a bang.

“Close the other one too,” a soft voice from behind her said, and as Abby whirled toward the voice there was the distinctive metallic snap of a cocking revolver.

For a moment it was still and silent. The only light was coming from a battery lantern that threw an eerie, too-white glow over the kitchen and couldn’t penetrate the shadows in the rest of the house. Whoever was speaking was standing in the hallway, no more than a silhouette against the darkness.

A silhouette and a gun.

“Abby?” the figure in the hall said. “Close the door.”

Abby reached out and took the cold metal knob in her left hand and closed the door.

“Good,” the man in the hall said. “Now lock it.”

Abby moved faster to obey this instruction, turning the dead bolt and dropping her hand quickly to distract from the quarter turn she’d given the lock, enough to move the bolt but not enough to shoot it home. If she made it back to the door, it would open when she twisted the doorknob.

“Go into the kitchen,” the man in the darkness said, and Abby obeyed again, shuffling backward, moving off the wooden floor and onto the tile of the kitchen. She glanced at the kitchen counter, expecting to see the block of knives that always sat beneath a years-old calendar that showed Abby being showered with cheap champagne by her father and Hank and Hank’s then-girlfriend after Abby had become the youngest driver — and the first woman — to win at the Bald Mountain Speedway.

The calendar was there. The block of knives was gone.

“Stop,” the man said, and Abby stopped and then the man walked out of the shadows and into the light and Abby saw him clearly.

He was a child, almost. Eighteen or nineteen, maybe twenty — but probably not. His boyish face was shaded by a black baseball cap with chrome-colored stitching that matched the cylinders on his black revolver, as if he’d coordinated the outfit. The gun was offset by that almost friendly face. He wore the sort of perpetual but false half smile of someone whose job required him to feign interest in the troubles of strangers, like a hotel concierge.

“Hello, Abby,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“You think I’m going to give my name in this situation? Come on. Be better than that.”

Abby looked at Hank. He seemed unharmed — no blood, no bruises — but absolutely terrified. He searched Abby’s eyes but didn’t speak and Abby saw something beyond fear in his face — apology.

“Put the bags on the counter,” the kid said.

Abby did.

“You have a weapon?” the kid asked.

“No.”

“You don’t mind if I verify that?”

“No.”

“Very gracious, thanks.” The kid pressed the muzzle of the revolver to Abby’s head as he patted her down with his free hand. He was wearing thin black gloves, and his touch made her skin crawl and her stomach knot, but she tried not to give him the satisfaction of a visible reaction. He took her phone and felt over her car keys but left them in her pocket.

The gun moved away from Abby’s skull and then the kid stepped back, looked down at her phone, and tapped the screen. The display filled with the image on the lock screen: Luke sitting on a rock overlooking the Pacific, a smile on his face, his tousled hair blown wild by the wind.

“He was handsome, wasn’t he?” the kid said, and then he tossed the phone onto the counter. “A shame what happened to him. I know the expression is ‘Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,’ but he didn’t really earn that live-fast idea. I mean, at least James Dean was driving, right?”

Abby’s slap came without premeditation. She simply swung.

The kid sidestepped it with ease — damn, he was fast — and laughed.

“I seem to have touched a nerve,” he said. “Apologies.” He nodded at a chair that was pulled back from the table. “Take a seat.”

“What do you want?” Abby asked.

“More original material, for one. You’re asking such obvious questions: Who are you? What do you want? It gets tedious to be the guy with the gun. Redundant.”

The kid looked so unthreatening despite the gun that Abby found herself measuring the distance between them and wondering if she should attack. She just needed to sweep that gun hand away. As long as the bullet went wide when he pulled the trigger, Abby didn’t think it would be hard to take the gun from him. He was looking at her and seeing a small woman who couldn’t throw a punch. She’d blackened the eyes and bloodied the noses of a few guys who’d thought that same thing.

If he tries to tie you, then do it, she told herself. Punch, kick, bite — do anything and everything if he tries to tie you up. But not until then. As long as you can move, then just talk through whatever this is.

“I asked you to sit,” the kid said.

Abby sat. The battery lantern was on the table next to two tumbler glasses filled with whiskey, a bottle standing between them. Gentleman Jack.

She was now facing Hank, and her back was to the door. Hank’s jowly face was drained of color, and he was breathing in short, audible pants. His eyes flicked away from Abby’s, down and to the left, as if he were trying to see behind himself. Abby followed the look and saw that Hank’s portable generator was on the floor behind his chair.