‘You, too?’
A prescient question, given what he was considering.
‘A little,’ he said. ‘Sure.’
‘What scares you the most? Being dead or not seeing me and Mommy anymore?’
He said gently, ‘What’s the difference?’
After a moment her face changed, and she nodded. He kissed her cheek, breathing her in. She snuggled into the pillow.
He stroked her hair until she was asleep.
Pocketing the Batphone and clipping the monitor receiver to his belt, he locked Kat in the room, walked a few steps down the outside corridor, and crouched with his back to the wall. Across the strip of parking spots, traffic whirred past. The air was diesel fumes and fast-food grease. On the ground, ants overran an apple core. The monitor complained a bit, and he crab-walked a foot or so closer to their door so it would shut up.
A maid pushed a long-handled broom up the corridor toward him, head down. She was badly slouched, ancient, attired in a black, old-fashioned maid’s dress, a stereotype unto herself were it not for the iPod headphones visible through the gray wire of her hair. The broom shushed its way down the corridor, a delta of dirt tumbling ahead of it. She did not acknowledge Mike, not even when she bent arthritically to pick up the apple and dustpan the debris. She continued out to the parking lot, broom bristles scraping against the concrete soporifically – shhoop shhoop shhoop.
Shep picked up on the first ring. ‘I’m getting close,’ he said. ‘Kiki Dupleshney. Everyone knows I’m auditioning con women for a job. Her name keeps getting tossed around. Sooner or later someone’s gonna produce a contact.’
Mike said, ‘Annabel’s recovering, right?’
Shep did not respond.
‘Can you watch Kat until Annabel’s back on her feet?’ Mike asked.
The old woman made her way around the parking lot – shhoop shhoop shhoop.
‘What are you doing, Mike?’
‘They want me. Not Kat. Me.’
‘And if Annabel doesn’t get better? And you’re not around? You want me to explain to your daughter that her father gave up and that’s why she’s being badly raised by a safecracker?’
‘I’m not giving up. I’m facing them. Maybe I get the drop anyway. If they win-’
‘I’ve seen Dodge,’ Shep said. ‘He’ll win.’
At Mike’s hip the monitor whined, and he nudged down the volume. ‘Then they’ll have gotten what they want. And Kat will be useless to them. She’ll be safe.’
‘I will find Kiki Dupleshney,’ Shep said. ‘Soon. She will point us to them. Then we’ll find them instead of them finding you.’
‘And Kat’ll what? Ride shotgun?’ He was pacing the corridor, the cleaning woman’s broom unnaturally loud, closing in on him, grinding at his nerves – SHHOOP SHHOOP SHHOOP. He turned, nearly tripping over her, but her head stayed bent as she squatted to touch dustpan to floor, the hollows of her eyes catching shadows. From the buds tucked into her pillowy, wrinkle-creased ears, music radiated faintly, a mariachi squall of violin and trumpet. He looked past a hunched shoulder to see, scattered in the spray of dirt and cigarette butts she’d shoved in from the parking lot, the hulls of innumerable split sunflower seeds, still gleaming with spit.
The phone was falling from his hand, turning in slow motion, shattering on the concrete.
The unit at his hip fuzzed Kat’s yelp into something like the buzz of a wasp.
And he was sprinting, ten yards of panic scored by staticky commotion from the monitor, which he’d slapped to highest volume – a thud, the screech of metal on metal, hoarse, muffled bellowing.
He took the door clean off the cheap hinges.
The bed was bare.
Kat – and the sleeping bag she’d been tucked into – were gone.
Chapter 40
The bedspread, smeared to the right, pointed at the window. Curtains rolled on a breeze. A dirt smudge marred the chair cushion where a large boot had set down.
Something primal rose from Mike’s bones, from the twisted ladders of his cells, firing his nerves, setting his skin ablaze.
The hip unit broadcast Kat’s shrieking, the rumble of an engine, violent rustling. Echoes of the sounds floated through the open window, coming at him in stereo. He dashed across, hands on the sill, leaning out in time to see a receding white square at the end of the alley. The square turned, elongating into a van.
How? How had Dodge and William hunted them down?
Kat’s cries warbled nightmarishly from his hip, and it took a moment for Mike to ground them in reality; they’d scooped her up in the sleeping bag and carried her off like a cat in a pillow-case, the baby monitor slipping unseen down with her.
He yelled after the van as it motored from view. Leaped through the window. Got six frantic steps down the alley before strategy flashed back into reach, and he backtracked, racing for the Honda. He left four feet of rubber peeling out and clipped the corner screeching into the alley.
The monitor gave out a steady roar of pure static. The van had traveled out of range, breaking the connection. He fishtailed out the far end of the alley onto a quiet residential street, but the van was gone. Reception stuttered back – Kat screaming for him – and then was lost again in a sea of crackling. He accelerated, hit an intersection, took a hard right.
Pure static.
He swung into a U-turn, smashing into a parked Bimmer, and flew the other way. Crackling, cracking, and finally the faintest edge of reception broke through the fuzz.
William’s voice, ‘-better be quiet back there or else-’
Gone. Static, full bore.
Mike locked up the brakes and reversed, sending the truck behind him veering up onto someone’s front lawn. The blare of its horn faded as Mike zipped down a side street, the low-volume light bar of the monitor flaring, flaring, then catching fire.
Kat’s shouting grew clearer as he accelerated, and he picked up the van on a parallel street, flicking into view behind fences and side yards. His head snapped back and forth – road, van, road, van – trying to keep tabs on the vehicle as it passed through cones of light dropped by streetlamps. The van peeled right, away from him, and the monitor light fell dead. He jumped a curb, skidded across a lawn, took out a side fence, and careened through a backyard. A guy looked up from his barbecue, sod flying at him, his Doberman leaping to safety. Mike plowed through a fence and across an embankment, screeching north across two lanes of traffic, cars skidding, the monitor giving up nothing but roaring static. The edge of a scream fought itself audible, vanished into the white noise, then wavered back again. He revved, nosing around cars, flying around alley Dumpsters, desperate not to snap the spider thread connecting him to his daughter.
Reception grew clearer. He guessed on a left turn, and it grew clearer still. Leaving a wake of smoke, he floated through a gas station mostly sideways, the overburdened Japanese engine squealing at him in complaint. He swung to take in the whole road – no white van, no white van, no white van – as the car righted itself, the spinning wheels catching and ripping him forward into a strip mall’s parking lot.
Kat’s screams were torturously distinct, driving him to a razor-edged frenzy, but she could’ve been any direction on the compass rose, and he thought his head would explode from sheer terrorized rage when he caught the flick-flick-flick of a white van through the slats of the fence at the parking lot’s end.
He dropped the pedal to the floor, blasting into the fence. There was no impact separation between slats and van, just an instantaneous smash of wood and vehicle, the van crimping around the nose of the Civic and rocking to a halt, a cloud of splinters settling dreamlike over the steaming catastrophe. Mike kicked out of the car, gun raised, closing ground as William coughed and blinked dust from his eyes in the crumpled driver’s seat of the van.