Panic

by Jeff Abbott

  A passing car slowed – a Lexus SUV, a mom driving, a teenage boy in the passenger seat, staring at the police car in the yard. Bald raised his hand – the one not holding the shotgun – in a friendly wave. The Lexus zoomed away.

  ‘She’ll call the cops. We got seconds,’ Bald said.

  Evan got in the driver’s seat, his hands shaking. Bald slid in next to him. He rested the shotgun so that it aimed at Evan’s thigh.

  Evan glimpsed the unconscious officers in the rearview. ‘They’re hurt.’

  ‘They’re lucky they’re breathing,’ Bald said.

  ‘Let me check them, be sure they’re all right. Please.’

  ‘No way. Go,’ Bald said, jabbing Evan with the shotgun. Evan drove the Ford off the curb, roared down Shoal Creek Boulevard.

  ‘Turn east onto 2222,’ Bald said.

  Evan obeyed. ‘What do you want with me?’

  ‘Listen carefully to me. I’m a good friend of your mom’s and she asked me for help.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

  ‘You don’t know me, but you also don’t know shit about your parents.’

  ‘You know so much, tell me who killed my mother.’

  ‘A man named Jargo. Done on his orders.’

  ‘Why?’ Evan shouted.

  ‘I can explain everything, once we’re settled. We’re going to a safe house. Turn right here.’

  Evan veered south onto another major thoroughfare, Burnet Road. Safe house. A place where the hit men couldn’t find you. Evan thought he’d stepped into a mobster movie. His guts clenched, his chest ached as if it were being wrung from muscle into string. ‘Did you see their faces, can you identify them?’

  ‘I saw them. Both of them. I don’t know if one is Jargo or if they just work for him.’ Bald glanced through the back of the window.

  ‘Why would this Jargo kill my mother? Who is he?’

  ‘The worst man you can imagine. At least the worst I can imagine, and my imagination is pretty twisted-sick.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Gabriel.’ Bald softened his tone. ‘If I wanted you dead, I would have shot you back at your house. I’m on your side, I’m the good guy. But you must do what I say. Exactly. Trust me.’

  Evan nodded but thought, I don’t know you and I don’t trust you.

  ‘Do you know where your father is?’ Gabriel asked.

  ‘Sydney.’

  ‘No, where he really is.’

  Evan shook his head. ‘He’s not in Sydney?’

  ‘Jargo may already have grabbed your father. Where are the files?’

  ‘Files? What the hell are you talking about?’ Evan’s voice broke in fury and frustration. He pounded the steering wheel. ‘I don’t have any goddamned stupid files! What do you mean, grabbed my dad? You mean he’s been kidnapped?’

  ‘Think, Evan. Calm down. Your mother had a set of electronic files that are very important. I need them.’ Gabriel’s voice softened. ‘We need them, you and I. To stop Jargo. To get your dad back safe and sound.’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’ Tears burned in his eyes. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Here’s where you start trusting me. We need new wheels. That soccer mom’s calling the cops, no doubt. Turn here.’

  Evan drove into a shopping plaza that had been caught in the last economic downturn, half the storefronts empty, the others held by an Episcopal thrift shop, a used-book store, a taqueria, and a mom-and-pop office supplies store. A center on its last legs until the inevitable midtown gentrification.

  But full of people, Evan thought. He could get away. Yell for help. The parking lot wasn’t too crowded, but if Gabriel let him park close to a store, he could run into the shops.

  ‘Show me you’re smart.’ Gabriel gave Evan a cool stare. ‘No running, no yelling for help. Because if you force my hand, someone gets hurt. I don’t want it to be you.’

  ‘You said you’re the good guy.’

  ‘Good is a relative concept in my line of work. Be still, shut up, and you’ll be fine.’

  Evan surveyed the parking lane. Two women, laughing, getting into a station wagon, carrying grease-spotted bags from the taqueria. An elderly woman with a cane hobbled toward the office supplies shop. Two black-togged twenty-year-olds window-shopped at the resale store.

  ‘Don’t test me, Evan,’ Gabriel said. ‘None of these good folks need trouble today, do they?’

  Evan shook his head.

  ‘Park next to this beauty.’

  Evan stopped the Ford next to an old gray Chevrolet Malibu. A sticker on the back window announced that a child was an honor student at a local high school.

  ‘I didn’t plan on your mother getting killed and rescuing your ass from the police in a car that could be identified. Pop the hood, like we’re jumping the battery.’ Gabriel stepped out of the Ford, fiddled at the Malibu’s lock with a slim finger of metal, opened it, dove under the steering column for a fast hot-wiring.

  Open the door. Get out and run. He’s bluffing.

  Evan opened the door and Gabriel was back in the car, gun at Evan’s ribs. ‘What part of don’t do you not get? I told you not to force my hand. Shut the door.’

  Evan closed the door.

  Gabriel ducked back into the Malibu and put his head back under the wheel.

  Leave a sign, Evan thought. He stared down at the wheel. His fingers. He pressed his fingertips against the steering wheel. Then forefinger and middle finger against the ashtray and the face of the radio. He didn’t know what else to do; it was the only trace of himself he could think to leave.

  Gabriel gestured him over with the gun. Evan got into the car, behind the steering wheel. The car smelled of a sun-spoiled milk shake and the backseat held a stack of yellowing Southern Living magazines.

  Gabriel returned to the Ford and quickly wiped it down. Evan’s heart sank. He watched Gabriel smear a cloth along the steering wheel, the doorknobs, the windows. He was fast and efficient.

  But not the radio.

  Gabriel left the Ford’s keys in the ignition.

  Gabriel slid into the Malibu’s passenger seat next to Evan, tossed out the leftover milk shake. Evan headed out of the lot, slow and casual, and merged into a steady stream of Burnet Road traffic.

  Gabriel fished a baseball cap from where it rested on the backseat. He shoved it down hard on Evan’s head. He stuck a pair of woman’s sunglasses that had rested on the middle seat onto Evan’s nose. ‘Your face will be all over the news tonight.’ Gabriel’s lips were a thin, pale line; Evan saw, for the first time, he’d left a rising bruise on Gabriel’s jaw when he’d punched Gabriel at the house. ‘I’d prefer no one be able to recognize you.’

  ‘Please listen to me. Really listen to me. My mom doesn’t have your files, whatever it is you or this Jargo guy wants. This is a huge mistake.’

  ‘Evan, in your life, nothing is as it seems,’ Gabriel said softly.

  The statement made no sense, but then it did. His mother, packing up bags for an extended secret trip. Her demand he return home immediately without explanation. His father not where he was supposed to be. Carrie, gone this morning, quitting her job, calling him and warning him back to Houston. You’re in danger. Serious danger. Carrie. How would she know his life had crumbled into dust since last night?

  ‘Get onto the highway here. Head south to 71 West.’

  Evan eased onto MoPac, the major north-south highway on Austin’s west side, pushed the speed up to sixty. After fifteen minutes MoPac ended, merging onto Highway 71, which fed into the rolling Hill Country west of Austin. ‘You said you’d explain the situation to me.’

  Gabriel watched the traffic.

  ‘You promised me.’ Evan pushed the accelerator up to seventy. He was sick of being pushed around; a sudden awful rage burned into his skin.

  ‘When we get settled.’

  ‘No. Now. Or I crash this car.’ He knew he would do it. At least take the car off the road, let Gabriel’s side be torn
up by the wire fencing marking property lines, render the Malibu undrivable.

  Gabriel frowned, as though deciding whether to play along. ‘Well, you might.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘Your mother has certain files that would be devastating to certain people. Powerful people. Your mom wanted my help in getting out of the country in exchange for those files.’

  ‘Who? What people?’

  ‘It’s best you not know specifics.’

  ‘I don’t have these files.’ Evan rocketed past a pickup truck. Every day they handed out tickets in Austin, here he was speeding like a maniac, and he couldn’t get a police officer’s attention. Traffic was light and the few cars he raced behind politely moved over to the right lane.

  ‘I think you do,’ Gabriel said, ‘but you don’t know it. Slow it down and drive steady if you want to know more.’ Gabriel nudged the shotgun into Evan’s kidney.

  ‘Tell me everything you know about my mom. Now.’ Evan floored the accelerator. ‘Tell me, asshole, or we’re both dead.’

  The last thing Evan saw was the speedometer inching past ninety as Gabriel slammed his fist into Evan’s head, sending it smashing into the driver’s window, and the world went black.

  6

  S teven Jargo was killing mad. He hated failure. It was a rare occurrence, but it haunted him longer than most men, and he despised the sensation of panic that was a misstep’s inevitable partner in his world. Work went well or badly; a middle ground was only a theory. Panic was weakness, a lack of preparation and resolve, a poison for his heart. The last time he had been afraid was when he’d committed his first murder, but that terror soon dissipated, like smoke caught in a breeze.

  But now he was scared and running, his hands scraped raw from sliding along the rooftop of the Casher house when all hell had broken loose in the kitchen while he was erasing the upstairs computer. He had dropped down to the cool of the yard, crashing into Donna Casher’s rosebushes, thorns ripping at his hands, and seen Dezz running out the back door, heard the shriek of the bullets, and they had both retreated to their car parked one street away. The noise meant police, and the police always drove fastest in wealthier areas.

  Jargo had rented an empty apartment in Austin yesterday, under a different name and for cash, and perhaps it wasn’t safe but they had no other place to go.

  ‘At least one of them.’ Dezz breathed hard as Jargo drove twenty miles over the limit to a quiet, faded neighborhood on the east side of town. ‘Shaved head. Old like you. Mexican-looking. That’s all I saw.’ Dezz dabbed at his head, reassuring himself that a bullet hadn’t tweaked his skull. He jabbed a caramel in his mouth, chewed fast. ‘Didn’t recognize him. I saw a blue Ford on the street. License plate XXC, didn’t see the rest. Texas plates.’

  ‘Did Evan take a bullet?’

  ‘Unknown. The attacker fired in his direction. He was almost dead from the rope. You erased the files on her system?’

  ‘She’d overwritten her system already. She wasn’t leaving anything for us to find in case we showed up.’

  Dezz leaned against the car window. ‘That fucker scared the piss out of me. I see him again, he’s dead.’ Then Dezz – small but wiry, with a look in his eyes as if he always had a fever – said, ‘What the hell do we do now, Dad?’

  ‘We fight back.’ Jargo parked at the condo, still watching the rearview to be sure they hadn’t been followed.

  ‘Evan didn’t see us.’

  ‘But he had the files on his computer,’ Jargo said. ‘He knows.’

  They hurried upstairs and Jargo made two phone calls. In the first he gave no greeting, just brief directions on how to drive to the apartment, heard a confirmation, then hung up. Then he called a woman who used the code name Galadriel. He employed a group of computer experts on his payroll and he called them his elves, for the magic they could work against servers and databases and codes. Galadriel – the name came from Tolkien’s queen of the elves – was an ex-CIA computer expert. Jargo paid her ten times what the government had.

  He fed Galadriel Dezz’s description of the attacker and the blue Ford’s plates, asked her to find a match in their databases. She said she’d call him back.

  Jargo put antibacterial lotion on his scored hands and stood at the window, watching two young mothers walk in the sun, carrying their babies, indulging in idle gossip. Austin embraced this beautiful spring day, a day for watching pretty moms lift their faces to the sun, not a day for death and pain and everything in his world unraveling. He studied the street. No cars parked with occupants. Foot traffic heading to a local small grocery. He watched to see if anyone watched him.

  He would have to call London in a moment. He had been lied to, and he wasn’t happy. Then he would make the most difficult decision of his life.

  ‘The files are gone,’ Dezz said. ‘If Evan’s alive, he can’t hurt us.’

  ‘If Evan had them on his computer, I assume he saw them,’ Jargo said. ‘He can name names. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take.’

  Dezz sat on the couch in the condo, turning over his closed Game Boy in his hands. Not playing it. Three more caramels wadded in his cheek. Jargo saw Dezz was angry and nervous, the kill interrupted before it was done. Dezz would vent all that pent-up fury on the next weak person he encountered.

  He sat next to Dezz. ‘Calm down. We were right to run. It was an ambush.’

  ‘I’m wondering who let Mr. Shotgun know we were there.’ Dezz slid the blob of caramel from one side of his mouth to the other.

  Jargo went to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of water. Evan resembled his mother, and that had made trying to kill him harder. Jargo thought about Donna Casher’s once-lovely face, how he shouldn’t have left her alone with Dezz for two minutes while he searched her computer, how he had said, I’m sorry, to her after she was dead. Dezz needed more self-control.

  ‘The suitcases make me believe his mother told him they had to run. The files being on his computer are the why they had to run. She had to light a fire under his ass, get him home fast. You should have taken his laptop.’

  Dezz opened up the Game Boy, twiddled the controls. Jargo let him, although he found the ping-ping noise of the game annoying. The electronic opiate, the cheek full of candy, calmed the young man. ‘Sorry. It meant getting shot. It doesn’t matter, the files are gone.’

  ‘Evan talks to the police,’ Jargo said, ‘and we’re mortally wounded.’

  ‘He doesn’t have proof. He didn’t see our faces. They’ll think it’s a robbery interrupted.’

  The radio, tuned to local news, began a story about two police officers attacked and a witness in a morning homicide abducted from their custody. Dezz folded the Game Boy shut. The reporter said two officers were beaten and injured and gave a description of Evan Casher and a bald-headed assailant.

  Jargo drummed a finger against his glass. ‘Evan’s alive and our friend let him speak to the police before snatching him back. I wonder why.’

  Dezz unwrapped another caramel.

  Jargo slapped the candy from his hand. ‘My theory is Donna knew she was in danger, and she hired protection. That’s who attacked us.’ He gave Dezz a hard stare. ‘You’re sure she didn’t spot you trailing her?’

  ‘No way. I was extremely careful.’

  ‘I told you not to underestimate her.’

  ‘I didn’t. But if this guy’s just hired muscle, why does he grab Evan back? The job’s dead. No need for him to risk his neck.’

  Jargo frowned. ‘That’s a very good and a rather unsettling question, Dezz. Clearly he thinks Evan has something he wants.’

  Dezz blinked. ‘So what do we tell Mitchell about his wife? Or do you just kill him and not bother with explanations?’

  ‘We tell him that we were too late to save her. That a hired gun killed her, kidnapped his boy. Mitchell will be devastated – easy to manipulate.’

  Dezz shrugged. ‘Fine. Next step?’

  ‘Consider who Donna might ask for help. That�
�s the kidnapper. Find him, we find Evan, tell him we can take him straight to his father. That’s the shortest distance between two points.’

  A knock on the door. Three fast raps, then two slow. Dezz went to the door, his gun at the ready.

  The pattern repeated itself, then a voice said, ‘Girl Scout cookies.’

  Dezz opened the door. Broke into a smile. ‘Hey, Girl Scout.’

  Carrie Lindstrom walked in, her face tired, her dark hair gathered into a ponytail, wearing jeans and an untucked T-shirt. She looked around the room. ‘Where’s Evan?’

  Jargo sat her down, told her what had happened, described Bald based on the news report and Dezz’s fleeting glance. ‘You recognize the rescuer?’

  ‘No. Evan doesn’t know anyone who fits that description, at least in Houston.’

  Jargo gave her a hard stare. ‘Carrie. You were supposed to find those files if Evan had them. They were on his computer. I saw them myself. You didn’t do your job.’

  ‘I swear… they weren’t there.’

  He liked the shock and fear in her eyes. ‘When did you last look for them?’

  ‘Last night. I went to his place, we watched a movie, drank wine. I asked him if I could check my e-mail. He said yes. I looked, there were no new files on his system. I swear.’

  ‘You spent the night with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you fuck him good?’ Dezz asked. Amusement in his voice.

  ‘Shut up, Dezz,’ she said.

  Jargo said, ‘So how did he get away from you in Houston?’

  ‘I went to go get us breakfast. I stopped by my place and I got caught in bad traffic coming back. When I got back to his house, he was gone. He left a message with my voice mail that he’d had an emergency, he’d gone home.’

  ‘I accessed your voice mail this morning. Heard his message to you.’

  Carrie’s jaw trembled. ‘You accessed my messages. You don’t trust me to report to you.’

  ‘Carrie. I heard nothing from you this morning. For almost two hours. If I hadn’t tapped your voice mail, I wouldn’t have known Evan was heading to Austin and Donna might be running. Thank God I did, because otherwise we wouldn’t have known. Her street’s hard for surveillance and she apparently hired muscle to help her run. You cost me an hour of time today that I needed by not reporting his movements to me.’