Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

“Shit,” Abby whispered, and she set the phone down as if she were afraid of it.

As if? No. You are afraid of it.

People were being killed over this thing, and for what? Something stored on it made sense, but wasn’t everything cloud-based now? What would be on the phone that couldn’t be accessed by a hacker? Hacking it seemed easier than leaving a bloody trail of victims up the Atlantic coast. She stared at the device as if it would offer an answer. It couldn’t. But who could?

Oltamu .

Right. A dead man.

“Why’d they kill you, Doc?” she whispered.

She couldn’t begin to guess because she didn’t know the first thing about Oltamu. That was a problem. Abby was out in front, but she didn’t know what was coming for her.

Look in the rearview mirror, then. Pause and look in the rearview.

To get answers, she would have to start with the first of the dead men.

Whenever the concealed microphones in Gerry Connors’s office were activated, Dax Blackwell received an alert on his phone. Generally, he chose not to listen unless Gerry was in the midst of a deal. He was always curious to determine how Gerry valued his efforts, since in Dax’s business, it was difficult to get a sense of the going professional rates. There weren’t many Glassdoor.com reviews for what he did.

Today he listened, tucking in earbuds. He sat in the car with an energy drink in hand and listened to Gerry Connors give his name to Abby Kaplan.

He was surprised by how disappointed he felt. He’d known Gerry was a risk, because anyone who knew how to find you was a risk, and yet he’d had as much trust in Gerry as anyone on earth since his father and uncle had been killed.

Time to put that away, though. Disappointment wasn’t a useful emotion; it did nothing to help your next steps.

And why be surprised? He remembered a day at the shooting range with his uncle and father, Patrick putting round after round into the bull’s-eye from two hundred yards, totally focused, eye to the scope, and Dax’s father looking on with the sort of pride that Dax wanted to inspire in him. Something about watching that shooting display had made his father reflective. Jack Blackwell tended to be philosophical when guns were in hand.

But that day, as Patrick racked the bolt and breathed and fired and hit, over and over, Jack Blackwell had watched his brother with fierce pride and then looked at his son and said, “Dax, if you find one person on this earth who would never fuck you over for money or women, you’ll be a fortunate man. People like that are rare.”

There you had it, then. Why feel disappointment in Gerry Connors when he was doing exactly what you’d expect him to? The only question was how to respond.

Dax sipped his energy drink and played the recording once more, then sat in silence, thinking, his eyes straight ahead. At length, he picked up his phone and called Gerry.

“It’s me,” he said. “I’m struggling here. Our girl Abby has done a good job of hiding. Any ideas?”

Gerry Connors had a decision to make, and he needed to make it fast. Abby Kaplan was out there doing exactly what Dax Blackwell had predicted — avoiding police and trying to make a play on her own. The German was out there, inbound and impatient, and he didn’t even know what a mess this had turned into yet. And now there was Dax Blackwell on the phone asking for guidance, and Gerry had to decide whether to set him up or give him a chance.

It seemed impossible that he’d been put in this situation by some disgraced stunt-car-driving chick turned insurance adjuster.

The most intriguing part of the whole thing was that the kid had been right. Kaplan hadn’t gone straight to the cops; she’d gotten scared and run. Gerry couldn’t imagine how the kid had been so damned sure of this.

Yes, you can. You have always imagined it. He’s one of them.

“Gerry?” Dax said. “Are you there?”

“Yeah. I’m here. And she’s not hiding. She’s calling people.”

“Calling who?” Dax said, and he seemed pleased by the news.

Gerry looked at Amandi Oltamu’s silent phone on his desk and wondered how long it would be before it rang again... and what Abby Kaplan would have done in the meantime. Beside the phone was a notepad on which Gerry had scribbled the number she had used to call him. He looked from the phone to the notepad, drumming a pen on the desk.

Trade Dax or trust him?

“Gerry?” Dax prompted.

“She’s trying to make her own way out of this,” Gerry said. “She might already be with the cops, but it didn’t feel like it. She says she’s got the phone, although she might be bluffing. But she understands the way it went, at least. She understands what Ramirez did wrong.”

Dax was quiet for a moment, then said, “How do you know this?”

There he went again, pushing, fishing.

“My client,” Gerry said tightly.

“How did Abby Kaplan reach your client?”

If he’d been in the room, Gerry might’ve shot him. Instead he squeezed his eyes shut, took a breath, and said, “She’s calling Oltamu’s phone.”

“And your client was dumb enough to answer it?”

“Listen, shut the fuck up and let me talk, all right? She called the phone and spun some bullshit about trading for... safety. I don’t know what that means to her exactly and probably neither does she — she just knows she’s in trouble.”

Dax didn’t say anything this time.

“I want to know where she’s calling from,” Gerry said.

“I’d imagine.”

Gerry would have shot him twice for that.

Trade him, then. Give him up.

“How’d you know she’d go this route?” he asked, and the kid must have heard the sincerity in his voice, because for once he wasn’t a wiseass when he responded.

“A lot of factors. She likes to be on the move. Has her whole life. From the cradle until I finally put her in the grave, Abby’s been about motion and speed. She doesn’t have a good history with police either. There are still people in California who are pushing for her to be charged in the wreck that killed the pretty-boy actor. And...” He hesitated, that brief hitch that his father had never shown, or at least had never shown to Gerry, before he said, “I guess you could call it my own instinct. Abby’s not dumb, and I saw that, but I also made sure she knew that I wasn’t dumb. Everything that’s happened since is a reaction to our understanding of each other. That seems simple, but it’s not. If someone is close to a mirror, you see it.”

“Close to a mirror? What the hell does that mean?”

The kid gave it a few beats before he said, “I understand her. That’s all it means.”

“She’s an insurance investigator. If you feel like she could work with you, then I’ve sorely underestimated your talents.”

With no trace of annoyance, the kid said, “Oh, you haven’t underestimated my talents, Gerry. Abby Kaplan’s, though? She’s something more than we’d have expected.”

“Because she got away from you. That’s all you mean. You don’t want to admit that you screwed up with her. Because she got away, we need to pretend she’s something special.”

Still no inflection change when Dax said, “Didn’t you tell me I was right in my prediction about how she’d choose to move, Gerry?”

“ Maybe you were.”

“She’s on the run and she’s calling you — sorry, calling your client . Give me the benefit of the doubt on this one. I was right about Abby.”

“After you lost her.”

“Once. Yes. After I lost her once.” He was unfazed. “It won’t happen twice.”