Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

He took one hand off the wheel and held the phone up.

Abby tried not to show her defeat. It had been the only win, the only thing she could take from the evil prick.

“Interesting developments in Tara’s room,” the kid said. “Investigator en route, it seems. Department of Energy, no less. Do you understand that?”

“No.” Speaking made Abby’s skull ache. She closed her eyes and waited out the pain.

“You’ve done some research on our friend Amandi Oltamu,” the kid said. “Where is Black Lake? Seemed to confuse Shannon, and I don’t know anything about it either.”

“I don’t know.”

“Tara thinks Oltamu came from Black Lake, but my information said he came from Ohio. There’s no Black Lake in—”

“Yes, there is.” Abby’s eyes opened. Suddenly she understood Oltamu. Something about him, at least. And why the Department of Energy would be interested in him.

“Siri disagrees with you,” Dax said. “Surely you don’t mean to tell me Siri is confused? She’s a voice of reason in a mad world.”

“Black Lake is not a town. Or even a lake.”

The kid looked at her, interested now. “What is it?”

Abby stared straight ahead, watching taillights pull away. Dax was keeping the Challenger pinned at the speed limit, refusing to tempt police.

“It’s the nickname for a place where they run cars through performance and safety tests,” she said. “It’s fifty acres of blacktop, and from the sky it looks like dark water — that’s where the nickname comes from. You can ask a car to do anything in that space. A high-end car, tuned right, can be a lot of fun out there.”

It could also be instructional, of course. The Black Lake was all about pushing limits. Sometimes you exceeded them. That was the nature of testing limits, of playing games on the edge of the deep end of the pool. Sooner or later, you slipped into it.

“Oltamu wasn’t in the car business,” Dax said, and Abby didn’t argue, but she believed Oltamu might very well have been in the car business. He was the battery man — and every automaker on the planet was working on electric vehicles now. But if Tara was right, and Oltamu had just come from Black Lake in East Liberty, Ohio, then he’d been watching performance tests. You didn’t go to the Black Lake to test a battery-charging station. You went to the Black Lake to push a car to its performance limits — or beyond.

Dax shifted lanes. Despite the late hour and the storm, traffic was thick. Welcome to Boston. Traffic was always thick.

“We’ve had to reroute, and I’ve been tempted to drive faster, but if I got pulled over, I’d have a hard time explaining you, wouldn’t I?” He laughed, a sound of boyish delight. “It’s a waste of the car, though.”

He put on the turn signal and then shifted again, gliding left to right in a move that would attract no attention, and yet Abby could feel that he was still learning the throttle of the Hellcat, the bracing amount of torque that even a light touch on the accelerator brought. It was a waste of the car with him behind the wheel. He had no idea how to handle it, how far it could be pushed. Or how quickly control could be lost.

I made that gap in the guardrail, Abby thought dully. That was one hell of a move. Splitting traffic with the angle and acceleration perfect, then the hard brake and turn without misjudging the tires and rolling, putting it through a gap most people couldn’t hit at forty, let alone ninety, and doing it all on wet pavement... dumb, yes, and a product of panic, but... not easy to do.

Strange and sad, how that still pleased her. It was nothing to be proud of — she’d been melting down, her nerves no longer merely fraying but collapsing like downed power lines, sparking flashes of failure.

But it was also the first time she’d taken anything remotely resembling a test of the old instinct, the old muscle memory.

The old Abby.

For a moment, the woman she’d been had surfaced again. For a moment, she’d seen nothing but that narrow target, had anticipated the speed of the cars crowding in, felt the tires exploring the pavement in a way that was as intimate as skin on skin. She’d executed the intended maneuver perfectly and in circumstances where inches and fractions of seconds mattered.

There weren’t many people alive who could have pulled that off without causing a deadly pileup, and she’d landed without even scratching the paint.

And now you’re riding shotgun with a killer, tied to the seat, and you didn’t even succeed in taking his phone from him. Some victory, Abby.

Victories, though, like phobias, weren’t always rational. Sometimes they were very internal, invisible to the outside world. Matters of willpower or control were still wins. The short-term impact didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you’d held on in the face of adversity. A win was a win, as they said. No matter how small, no matter how private.

She watched the traffic thicken as Dax rolled southeast, and she wondered how she’d feel with the wheel in her hands again. The same old panic? Or would it be diminished by the knowledge that when things went to hell, she’d maintained enough of her old brain and body to execute the escape maneuver? Tough to call it an escape maneuver when there’d been no real external threat, nothing except the irrational dread that soaked her brain like chloroform, but the brain didn’t operate strictly on facts; its fuel was emotion.

This much, Abby understood very well.

The exit for the hospital was fast approaching, maybe five miles away. She wondered what the kid’s plan was and if he had any concern, any fear. He projected nothing but confidence. He was to killing what Abby had once been to driving — a natural pairing, in total harmony with his craft.

But killing Tara Beckley wasn’t his goal. Not tonight, at least. He had to get Oltamu’s phone to her, and she would need to be alive for that. How he intended to walk through a hospital and achieve this without attracting attention, Abby couldn’t imagine.

She figured she’d be a part of it, though. There was a reason she was still alive, and it wasn’t his compassion.

Dax shifted right again, decelerated, and exited. Abby didn’t follow this choice; if time was now an issue, then he shouldn’t abandon the interstate this far north. Then they were moving into a residential stretch, high-dollar homes on tree-lined streets. Driving farther from the hospital.

The kid pulled into a parking space on the street, tucking in behind a behemoth Lincoln Navigator, and studied the road. His eyes were on the houses, not the cars, but then he paused and checked the mirrors as well. Satisfied by whatever he saw or didn’t see, he killed the engine.

“Time to start earning your keep,” he said, turning to Abby. The boyish features seemed to fade, and his hard eyes dominated his face, eyes that belonged to a much older man.

“What are we doing?”

“You’ll be sitting right there. But you’ll be watching too.” He picked up his phone from the console, tapped the screen, and then set it back down. The screen displayed a live video image of the interior of the car. Abby twisted her head, searching for the camera, the cord rubbing into her throat. She didn’t see a camera, but when she looked back, she realized the video was in motion. When she stopped, it stopped.

Dax smiled. “I’ll need my hat back,” he said.

He took the hat off Abby’s head, and the video display followed the jostling motion. He settled it back on his own head, then turned to Abby, and Abby’s face appeared on the cell phone display, a clear, high-definition image. She saw there was dried blood crusted in her blond hair from where he’d hit her with the gun.