The kitchen blinds were open again. The way they always were, or always had been until last night.
Bad sign. If he took that much time to set things right...
She crossed the yard like an inmate walking to her execution. Went to the window and looked in at the kitchen.
The chairs were tucked under the table, which was bare except for a newspaper, open to the sports section. No whiskey, no tumbler glasses, no lantern. The generator was gone, and so was the space heater. The block of knives was back on the counter.
You’ll have to tell them that this sociopath did all this while you were passed out in the woods. You will have to convince them of that, and you don’t even know anything about him.
No, that wasn’t true. Looking in at the kitchen, all traces of chaos eradicated from it, Abby felt like she knew plenty about that kid.
And all of it was terrifying.
Could she describe him? Not in much more than general terms. And the kid did not fit the story, because the story seemed to be a professional killing, and baby-faced teenagers did not carry out professional hits.
I’ll need to be able to tell them who he is, but I don’t know who he is. All I know is that he’s fucking scary, and he wanted the phone.
He’d wanted it, yes. But did he have it? The bags of phones Abby had carried in were gone, but what about the one she’d jammed under the driver’s seat? Had the kid searched the car?
Abby left the house and started back down the road, moving at a jog this time, but it was a long distance and she was hurting, so she quickly fell back to a labored walk. She opened the driver’s door, avoided staring at Hank’s face, and reached below the seat.
The bag was there. Three iPhones inside.
She took it out and stepped away from the car and looked up at the lightening sky — the day was moving along, and she needed to do the same. One way or the other, she had to make a decision.
It was a memory that sealed the choice. When she’d been sitting at that table trying to reason her way out of the situation, she’d told the kid that he would end up in jail. The response had been immediate, and chilling: You’d be surprised how many friends I’ve got around jails. Some in cells, some in uniforms.
Abby didn’t think he’d been lying.
She looked at the dead man who’d backed her time and again throughout her life. “I’m sorry, Hank,” she said. She wanted to remember some other version of Hank’s face, not this death pallor and endless stare, not the broken-stem look of his neck. All she could see was that, though — that and the image of Hank’s face, sweaty and scared in the lantern light, as he screamed at Abby to run.
Backing her one last time.
“Thank you,” Abby told the dead man, and then she closed the door. She walked back up the lonely road to Hank’s house and up the steps. The screen was damaged from where she’d blasted through it — the only physical evidence that supported her story. The knob turned freely. Once inside, she didn’t waste much time looking for things the kid might’ve missed in his cleanup effort. She had a feeling there wouldn’t be any, and she needed to move quickly.
Hank’s guns were stored in a glass-doored cabinet in the living room, impossible to miss. Some people were proud of guns and wanted them as conversation pieces. The cabinet had a lock, which was better than nothing, but a lock didn’t mean much when it secured thin glass doors. Abby wrapped her fist in a blanket that was draped over the back of the couch and then punched each door once, without much force. The glass shattered and she swept it away with the blanket. She took one shotgun, a black Remington over/under; one rifle, a scoped.308; and both handguns, a Glock .45 and a SIG Sauer nine-millimeter. The ammunition was stored on a shelf below the guns. She took all of it, boxes and boxes of shells and bullets, and wrapped them in the blanket with the guns.
She stepped back and looked at what she’d done and tried to find the voice in her head that would say this was a mistake. Before it could so much as whisper, though, she glanced into the kitchen and saw the tidy arrangement of chairs and tables, no trace of violence.
Friends in cells and friends in uniforms, the kid had said.
Abby picked up the blanket with the guns and the ammunition and walked out of the living room. She crossed to the kitchen counter and picked up her phone. It had a charge and a signal, but she put it in her pocket without pause. She’d make the call to police, but not from here.
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.
24
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?”