The Crashers

by Cubed, Magen

  The meat in Kyle’s cheek ticked. “Do you have a point?”

  Luther laughed softly. “No, actually, I don’t. I wasn’t sure if you’d stay or if you’d throw a punch.”

  “Glad I passed the test.”

  “Me, too. So, ask your next question.”

  “What do you want with me?”

  “Besides knowing everything, Mr. Jeong, you’ll find I’m also in the business of finding assets. If you’re useful to me, I like to I see if I can absorb you into my operation. And I find that you are invaluable to me, Mr. Jeong, in ways I can’t even express.”

  “What about my friends?”

  Luther waved him off passively. “Not interested. Novel, yes, but Clara Reyes, Adam Harlow—they’re set in their ways. They don’t see the big picture. Not like you can.”

  “So, what? I’m just supposed to come work for you in your white tower?” Kyle said and shrugged. “And why would I do that?”

  “Because I’m well-connected, well-established, and I’m going to make you a powerful man.”

  “Why?”

  “I see in you the kind of man I was when I first started Kyrios. I see your intellectual strengths and your drive as untapped potential that was left to rot in a cell at Saint Angelo when you could’ve been building empires. You dream of machinations far larger than yourself, and I admire that about you.”

  “Wow.”

  “What?”

  “Did you practice that?”

  “Still not convinced.”

  “Not even a little.”

  Luther shrugged. “There’s still time for that. For now, here.” He pulled his briefcase out from under the table, opened it, and handed Kyle a file folder. “Consider it a peace offering.”

  Kyle opened the file to flip through surveillance photos of Damon White and credit card statements under three aliases. There were detailed purchase histories, digital receipts for household cleaning chemicals and fertilizer; they were all bought separately and discretely as not to raise attention. There was six months’ worth of bomb-making materials matching the evidence found at the scene of each attack, gift-wrapped with a working number to his burner phone and an address to a Section 8 apartment in the Hull. He shook his head disbelievingly.

  “How did you find all of this?”

  “A little bird told me about your hobby, so I used my resources to look into it for myself. Your boy Damon has quite the story. Fake addresses, fake credit cards—a lot of sleight of hand for an amateur.”

  Kyle closed the file. “Why are you giving this to me?”

  “So you can build your case.”

  “You want leverage.”

  “Consider it a favor.”

  “Same thing.”

  “I’ll scratch your back if you agree to scratch mine, Mr. Jeong.”

  “And if I do this? If I use this information, what does that make me to you?”

  “That makes you exactly what you’ve always been: a potential asset for my operation.”

  Kyle paused. “Let me think about it.”

  Luther smiled gently. “Take all the time you need.”

  V.

  It was long after dark by the time Kyle finally came home. He stepped into the kitchen to find the rest of his housemates waiting for him. With his new evidence tucked under his arm, he asked for the attention of the others. Quietly, the rest of them gathered around the dining room table as the coffee pot spat and sputtered in the kitchen. They stared into the spread of photos and papers from Luther Kind’s donated case file.

  “This is what we know,” Kyle said. “Damon White was a project manager at Pharmasuite for fifteen years before he lost his job in a company-wide consolidation. He lost his house in Plymouth Beach after he and his wife had to declare bankruptcy. Welsh Regional Bank foreclosed on it. Six months after moving into Merseyside, his daughter Rebecca was trampled in a subway accident. She died at St. Bart’s hospital because they couldn’t pay for her life support, having lost his insurance benefits with IGC. According to his wife, he disappeared four months ago. That’s when he started making bombs.”

  Norah nodded slowly, looking through the credit card receipts. “Now what?”

  “This is going down tomorrow,” Bridger said. Blood still stained his collar and sleeve where he had bled all over himself. “I don’t have a time frame, just the date. I think he’s going to hit his old job next, and it’s going to be big. I’m seeing lots of property damage and casualties. Big explosion, high flash.”

  “It’s the only target he has left,” Kyle said. “It fits with everything else we know so far. This is why we need to move quickly.”

  “You know what we have to do,” Clara said with a shake of her head.

  “We can’t go to the cops with this,” Norah said. “They won’t believe us. Hell, they haven’t believed us up to this point, either.”

  “Which means we do this ourselves.”

  Bridger looked to Kyle. Kyle looked to the floor. Adam said nothing.

  Clara scoffed. “Look, we know we have to do this, okay? He won’t stop until we do it ourselves.”

  “But what are we talking about here, Clara?” asked Norah.

  “We’re talking about killing him,” Bridger answered for her. “We have his address. We know where he lives. We can take care of this our way.”

  Clara nodded. “Exactly. Put an end to this once and for all.”

  “Do we kill people now?” asked Adam. “Because that’s what we’re talking about—going to this guy’s house and killing him.”

  Norah sighed. “Adam, you know I love you, but what other choice do we have right now?”

  “He’s killed hundreds of people, Adam,” Clara said. “He’s killed us. He has this coming to him.”

  Adam shook his head. “Look, I’m not saying he doesn’t. I’m just saying we need to know exactly what we’re prepared to do here. We all want him dead, I know that. I do. But if we go there—if we murder this guy—we can never come back from that. That’s on us.”

  “I can live with that,” Clara said.

  “I think we all can,” said Bridger.

  Adam leveled him a hard look. “Shooting yourself is different than shooting somebody else.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “No, but I do think I’m the only one here who’s fired a gun at another human being and had to live with the consequences.”

  Before Bridger could respond, Norah spoke up instead. “I need this to be over, guys. I need to go back to my life and finish raising my kid, and not have to look over my shoulder waiting for this guy to come out of the shadows. He’s cost us all too much already, and I’m done, okay? I’m just done.”

  “You’re right,” Kyle finally said. “Damon White has to die.”

  The room fell silent. After a moment, Adam licked his lips and shrugged. “Then, how do we do this?”

  “I’ll do it,” Kyle replied.

  “Like hell you will,” Clara butted in sharply. “You go, we all go.”

  “Fine. Then we go at first light.”

  “I’ll stay behind,” said Norah. “I can’t leave Hannah alone.”

  “No, you go,” Bridger told her. “I’ll stay here with the kid.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “You’re all better prepared for this. I have a gun, but you have powers. I’ll make myself useful and babysit her for you.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.”

  Gathering the files together, Kyle closed the folder over. He avoided their eyes. “It’s the middle of the night and we’re all too ragged. Get some sleep, then we leave at dawn. If you’re not ready, you stay behind.”

  Kyle left up the stairs to his nest in the attic. After disappearing one by one, drawn to different rooms in different corners of the boarding house, no one slept. In the morning, they said nothing of it. There was far too much on the line.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I.

  Rebecca Abigail Whi
te was born on a Monday and died on a Friday in the ICU of St. Bart’s. She was eight years old and she loved to dance. She was an athlete just like her grandmother, Margaret. The day she died, she was on her way to practice at the Kleine Dance Academy in Camden with her new ballet shoes in her backpack. She was smiling that day and squeezing her mother’s hand as they walked down the street to the Fairway Station. Rebecca was always smiling. Her mother chose to remember her like that.

  Dance, like the ballet shoes themselves, was the last real luxury her mother and father could still manage for all their scrimping and saving. Her mother kept books for Horton Toyota and her father was still looking for work, but they put money aside for Rebecca’s classes every week. Before he lost his job at Pharmasuite, he made more than enough money for their small but comfortable family. Back then, he could pay for their house in Plymouth Beach, the two cars in the driveway, and Rebecca’s steep tuition at Kleine’s private school. Then, the credit card bills, student loan debt, and mortgage caught up with them. It choked them out of the nice neighborhood and into foreclosure. But Rebecca still had her lessons; her parents made sure of that much. There was no reason she should have to suffer because of her father’s bad luck or her mother’s measly hours at the dealership. Rebecca would still have a future, even if theirs was uncertain.

  She and her mother were leaving the station at 5:00 that Friday evening, walking hand in hand up the narrow platform stairs. Beneath their feet, the old staircase moaned and shook. It creaked from the burden of hot, sweating bodies racing up and down from stop to stop. Sonya was always so careful when she brought her daughter into the city, and Rebecca knew to stay close and hold on tightly to her mother’s hand. She never wandered off or disobeyed. She was a good little girl. Her mother chose to remember that, too.

  Neither of them saw the man in the suit go jogging down the steps in the jostle of human traffic. Rebecca didn’t see him, but she felt the first shove that knocked her off her feet. No one heard her mother scream; their heads were down, their earbuds were plugged into their phones; and their eyes were glued to their screens. She fell down forever, it seemed. Down, down, down, the steps where she laid trapped at the mouth of the stairs. By the time Rebecca found herself at the bottom, the concussion she had suffered along the way had already caused her brain to swell, which cut out the sea of people washing over her. A burly old man with tattoos on his strong arms shoved back the crowd to pick her up, but it was already too late.

  The ambulance that arrived took her to the emergency room at St. Bart’s Hospital. Doctors tried to slow her internal bleeding while her parents held each other in the waiting room and sobbed quietly to themselves. Her brain was still swollen when the woman at the admittance desk told them that they couldn’t do anything else for her. She was hooked up to machines to keep her heart beating, but there was no insurance and no money left to keep her at St. Bart’s. Instead she was transferred to a St. Mary’s on the other side of the city, but Rebecca’s heart stopped en route.

  A week later, her parents scraped together every penny they could find and, with the help of family and friends, buried Rebecca in Primrose Pines Cemetery. Within a few weeks, her father disappeared. He was determined to join her in her tiny coffin. Left alone, her mother could only lie awake at night and wait for the inevitable.

  II.

  It was just after sunup at Damon White’s building in the Hull when Adam pulled up to the street outside. The grubby block was abandoned. Shopfronts were shut up tightly behind metal bars and the curtains were drawn in every apartment window. Each of them had gathered in the kitchen of the boarding house to nurse coffee in silence. When Kyle finally came down the stairs, his gun was in its holster and his gut was full of a slow and tightening dread. He didn’t have the resolve to lie to the faces of his friends and so he said nothing. Within the hour, Kyle, Clara, Norah and Adam piled into his car—after Adam and Bridger had a quiet exchange at the front door that no one else heard—and made their silent trek to the Hull.

  No one was on the street to see Adam pull the lock from the door and open it. There was no one awake in the dirty, winding halls to see the four of them climb the six floors to Damon White’s unit behind door 601. They had no plan as Kyle drew his weapon and nodded to Adam to kick the door open. Norah and Clara stood by, ready for whatever laid in wait on the other side. They didn’t foresee the trip wire that linked the door to the detonator or the explosion that followed, rigged to destroy all the evidence of White’s guilt. With a held breath, Norah did the only thing she could do: she swept an arm across Adam to hold him back as the force field emanating from her core pushed the flames back in on themselves. The force of the concussion knocked Kyle and Clara off their feet and shook the building to its foundation, but Norah choked the explosion out before it could engulf the apartment.

  Swallowing, Clara looked up from the ground. “Are we good?”

  “Yeah,” Norah said, pushing the hair back from her face. “I think we’re good.”

  Kyle led the way with his gun raised. Inside, the apartment was barren but for the charred furniture that sparsely populated the living space. Flames had lapped scorch marks across the walls and up the ceiling to burn away the loose evidence of White’s life. White was long gone already as the four of them spread out across the unit.

  Kicking at the wreckage, Adam sighed. “Now what do we do?”

  Norah shook her head. “We know he hits his old job. We just have to figure out how.”

  Holstering his gun, Kyle shuffled through the blueprints of the Percy and Pascal bridges. The chicken scratch in the margins provided shorthand on explosion radius, bomb placement, and ignition. Clara found herself in White’s bedroom with his rickety twin bed, secondhand dresser, and photos taped to the mirror. In the room where her killer slept, she saw his shrine to Rebecca above the dresser in eight years of Fourth of Julys and Christmas mornings. She smiled back at Clara with clear, dark eyes and long, brown hair, just like she did on the train and at the bank. It settled in Clara’s stomach like a cold and awful weight. Taking a photo from the wall, she returned to the living room.

  “Did you guys see this?” she asked. “This is her, right? This is the girl from the train?”

  Norah and Adam looked. Kyle sighed. Norah nodded first, plucking the picture from Clara to look at it.

  “Yeah, I think it is. Who is she?”

  “Rebecca White,” Kyle answered. “Damon’s daughter.”

  “We saw her?” asked Adam. “This entire time?”

  “But she’s dead. That can’t be right.”

  Clara licked her lips and shook her head. “No. No, it’s her. Her eyes, her hair. I didn’t even think about it before, but... she’s been with us. She’s why we’re here.”

  “We can’t think about that now,” Kyle said.

  “But she led us here, Kyle. She wants us to stop her father.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She’s dead and we need to think about what’s in front of us. Right now, White is somewhere in the city and there are bombs on the Pascal and Percy bridges.”

  “He’s going to blow up the bridges in and out of Camden?” asked Adam.

  “It’ll cripple the city,” said Norah. “Make a huge splash, just like Bridger said it would.”

  Clara folded Rebecca’s photo and tucked it into her back pocket. “How do we find him?”

  “We need to split up and get to the bridges,” answered Kyle. “Clara, Percy is further from us and you’ll get there faster. Norah and Adam, take Pascal.”

  “What about you?” asked Norah.

  Kyle reached for his phone and opened his contact list. “I’ll call Amanda, try to get the bomb squad down there if they’ll take the lead. Then, I’ll try to head White off before he gets to Pharmasuite.”

  “But you have no idea where he is or when he’s going to be there.”

  “I’ll call Bridger,” Adam said. “Maybe he can see his route, figure out where he is.”

  “Good,
” said Kyle. “So go. I’ll meet up with you all later.”

  He didn’t tell them that the bombs were decoys. While the cops were chasing bomb threats across the city, Damon White would walk into Pharmasuite and murder everyone he could find. Instead, with Adam, Norah and Clara chasing ghosts beneath bridges, Kyle would kill White himself.

  III.

  Amanda’s phone rang while she sat in traffic at the security checkpoint for Exit 51A for Camden. She sighed as she reached for it, pulling it out of her purse to check the caller ID. When she saw Kyle’s name, she bit her lip, hesitant to answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Amanda, where are you?”

  “On the highway trying to get into the city. It’s been shut down for a half hour. What’s up?”

  “I need you to listen very carefully.”

  “Okay.” She shrugged. “Shoot.”

  “Damon White is going to blow up the Percy and Pascal bridges within the next hour.”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold up. How do you know?”

  “Today’s the final act, and he’s going out with a big, public spectacle.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. His targets were all personal. Why do this now?”

  “I don’t know,” Kyle said. “You need to find a way to get the bomb squad down there now before people die.”

  “Okay, I’ll call it in. But are you sure, Kyle? This just doesn’t feel right somehow.”

  “I know it doesn’t, but I have good intel. The lead tracks. I wouldn’t call you if it didn’t.”

  She nodded. “All right, I’ll trust you.”

  “That’s all I need to know.”

  Amanda didn’t know what Kyle had planned. It didn’t matter. In the end, they would all get what they wanted.

  IV.

  When Hannah got up to find her mother gone, Bridger was on time with the breakfast cereal, morning cartoons, and art supplies that Norah had prescribed before she left. He had spent the morning shuffling uselessly through Kyle’s folders with an eye on his phone, in case someone called. He did anything that made him feel like he was being productive and useful. Wandering downstairs, the seven-year-old watched him warily behind her thick lenses as he tried to appease her. She leaned against the kitchen counter where she could see him make her cereal, checking to see if he grabbed the right kind and used the right amount of milk. Bridger looked over his shoulder cautiously.