Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

She carried the guns to the door, found the basket where Hank kept odds and ends, and fished out his car keys. She was moving quickly and purposefully now, not wanting to slow down long enough to consider the reality of what she was doing. Driving away in a murdered man’s car was obviously a dangerous choice.

Staying, though, seemed worse.

In another life, Gerry Connors had been a bomb maker, but that was long ago. For the past two decades, he’d been a networker, a middleman. He was not a fixer, although people often thought of him as one. In reality, he put the players together, and he kept silent when silence needed to be kept. He asked only the necessary questions, and he shared only the minimum of information. He handled contacts and he handled money. For the German, he’d handled the hiring of Carlos Ramirez, but he had not told the German of the hiring of Dax Blackwell. That had been his own decision.

This now had the potential to cause real problems for Gerry.

The kid sat across from him in the dark-paneled office with his customary slouch, eyes alert but body loose, and if he was at all aware of the trouble that he’d caused, he didn’t show it. If he was at all concerned about what this trouble meant to him, he certainly didn’t show that. If not for the kid’s lineage, Gerry might’ve had to view this as stone-cold stupidity, but Dax’s bearing was so similar to his father’s that in the midst of the frustration, there was a strange reassurance. Gerry dearly missed the kid’s dad and uncle. Right now, Jack and Patrick Blackwell would have kept his pulse down. He needed Dax to do the same. Because the German had paid a lot of money for killing Oltamu and recovering the phone and doing it all quietly. Efficiently. Gerry had managed to accomplish only a third of that.

Now it was growing exponentially worse, Dax Blackwell seemed indifferent to the problem, and the German was due in town in forty-eight hours.

“There was no iPhone except her own,” Dax said. “You’ve got what she brought in. I checked her phone. I chose to leave it behind because if she manages to make it out of those woods alive, it’s going to hurt her story when they find the house clean and her phone inside. But it was not Oltamu’s phone.”

“Then where is Oltamu’s phone?”

“That question would be easier for me to answer if I knew something about the situation. Like who wants it, why they want it, and who else might want it.”

“That’s not your fucking role!”

A shrug. “Then it’ll be harder.”

“You’re not even sure she’s dead! She saw you, and she might be able to talk!”

“Correct.”

Gerry took blood pressure medication daily, and he thought that was the only thing saving him now. He breathed through his teeth and said, “You want to tell me how you’re going to deal with that? If she walks out of those woods, we’ll have some sketch artist’s rendering of your face on every news broadcast in North America.”

The kid said, “I don’t think so.”

“ Pardon? You poisoned her, shot at her, and killed her boss, but you expect her to go quietly into the night?”

Dax nodded calmly. Gerry was incredulous. Every time he wanted to kill the kid, he found himself asking questions instead. He did that again now.

“Want to explain why she’d stay quiet?”

“Her personal history. She’s been involved in a car wreck that left a movie star in a coma and, eventually, dead. People hate her for that. It’s always amusing to me just how much people care about some asshole in a movie, but they do. Her boss, Bauer, thought the Tara Beckley case might make Abby confront those demons.” He smiled at that, then said, “Sorry. That one kind of broke me up. I mean, how’s it going to help ? But Hank Bauer, may he rest in peace, didn’t strike me as a particularly skilled psychotherapist. It was an effort, though. You have to appreciate friends who make an effort.”

Gerry could hardly speak. The kid’s attitude was that astonishing. “You talked through all this with them?” he managed finally. “You got their life stories but no phone?”

“I really only had the chance to speak with Mr. Bauer at length.”

Gerry needed a drink. Needed to lie down. Hell, both. Lying down and drinking at the same time, that was what this called for. “Abby Kaplan is going to bring cops down all over this.”

“I disagree. You’ve got to think about the story she has to tell them. You really think the police are going to buy that? I had this same conversation with her, and my guess is that it lingered. She’ll think about it before she calls, at least. I’m sure of that.”

He hadn’t gotten the phone, he’d killed a man, and he’d left a witness alive, and if any of this bothered him in the slightest, it didn’t show.

“The phone, however, remains a concern,” he said.

“No shit, it remains a concern!” Gerry shouted. “ That’s what I need. I didn’t ask you to kill some hick in Maine, I asked you to get the phone!”

“Well, things come up.”

Things come up. Holy shit, this kid. Gerry rubbed his temples and forced himself not to shout. “You said Abby Kaplan had the phone.”

“That’s what I was told. She showed up in good faith for the boss with phones and chargers, like the salvage guy said she should have. They weren’t in a box. When I broke into her apartment, I found the box. Empty. There were no phones in the apartment either. But it’s not a lost cause. You can help me with that.”

Gerry lowered his hands and stared. “ I can help you with that.”

Another nod.

“How might I be of service to you, Dax?”

The kid ignored the sarcasm and said, “I could talk to your client.”

You didn’t ask to speak to the client. Ever. You pretended there wasn’t a client.

Gerry said, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“I understand it’s not protocol, but—”

“You understand it’s not protocol . Well, that’s reassuring. Why would you possibly need to speak to—”

“But I think it’s time to consider that someone else has the phone,” Dax finished. “It’s difficult for me to locate that person if I don’t understand the value of the phone, do you see? I’ve come up with an alternative, though, if you don’t want me to have an open dialogue with your client.”

“I do not want you to have an open dialogue.”

“Then in lieu of that, we’ll have to settle for a lesser option. Suggest to your client that he give me the phone that Carlos grabbed by mistake. Let me work off that. Oltamu’s personal phone gives me a starting point.”

The client did not have Oltamu’s personal phone. Gerry still did. It was in the drawer just below his right hand.

“Could you do that much?” Dax asked, and there was something about his eyes that gave Gerry the uncomfortable sense that the kid knew Gerry had the phone. He was sniffing around the edges, asking questions that he shouldn’t, questions that he knew better than to ask.

“You’re not your father or your uncle,” Gerry said.

Dax’s face darkened. Barely perceptibly, but it was the first anger Gerry had ever seen him display.

“No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m better than them.”

Gerry snorted. “You think?”

“Unquestionably,” Dax said. “They’re dead.”

He was giving Gerry that flat stare again, the one that sent spiders crawling into your brain.

“Think it over,” he said. “I’ll get back to work regardless. I will get the right phone, and I will kill Abby Kaplan if she’s still alive. These things will happen, but they’ll go slower if I don’t have some insight into the situation. And speed’s important at the moment.”