by Jeff Abbott
16
Evan needed a car. Fast. Dezz could come after him at any moment, thundering down and running him off the road, smearing him into jelly. A sign down the road indicated he was two miles from Bandera.
He drove into town, stopping only to tuck the emptied gun into the duffel so he wasn’t flashing around weaponry. Lots of shops, a barbecue restaurant, signs for festivals happening every month. He peeled off the main road and wondered how he would go about stealing a car.
It was a strange decision. He wasn’t part of the normal world anymore; he had stepped over into a shadow land where he had no map, no compass, no North Star to guide him. He had seen his face on the national news, seen himself discussed as a victim of crime. He had run over Gabriel and kept driving. He had seen Gabriel shot twice but was not heading to the police. He had escaped from the man who might have killed his mother.
The rule book of his life was in the gutter.
He drove until the houses were smaller, the edges of the lawns less precise.
Small towns. Unlocked doors, keys in cars. Right? He hoped. He parked the Ducati, pocketed the keys, slung his dusty duffel over his shoulder. A slow rain began, the sky rumbled. Most of the homes had driveways with carports instead of garages. Good. That made spotting a target car easier, and he wondered if this was how thieves approached their work. The rain chased everyone inside. He prayed no one watched him as he ambled from driveway to driveway, peering into cars, testing the doors. Everything was locked. So much for small-town trust.
He was on his eighth driveway, soaked now, approaching a pickup when the front door opened and a tough, thick-necked guy stepped out onto the home’s small porch.
‘Help you, mister?’ he called. In a tone not exactly a threat, but not saying, Hi, come and drink a beer with me. ‘What you doing?’
The lie came to Evan’s mouth so easily it astonished him. ‘Flyers.’ He pointed at the duffel bag. ‘Supposed to leave flyers on windshields, but it’s too wet. So I was gonna stick ’em in the driver’s seats.’
‘Flyers for what?’ The giant stepped forward, giving Evan a doubting eye: his shaggy hair, the earring, the now filthy bowling shirt, begrimed with wet dirt and Gabriel’s blood.
‘New church in town,’ Evan said. ‘The Holy Blood of Our Lord Fellowship. Have you been saved? We give more redemption for the dollar. We use rattlesnakes in our services and-’
The giant said, ‘Thanks, I’m good,’ stepped back inside, and closed the door.
Evan headed down the street. Fast now, running in the rain. The giant either bought it or he didn’t and was calling the cops.
Two more doors down, a Holy Grail gleamed in the rain: an unlocked truck. It was a Ford F-150, red, an interior clean except for a Styrofoam coffee cup in the holder, a cell phone wedged in the seat divider, and a Teletubby doll, worn-out with affection. The lights were off in the house: the mailbox read EVANS. An omen, a kiss of good luck. He tore out a piece of paper from his notebook and wrote, Really sorry about taking the truck, the Ducati parked down the street is yours to keep, I’ll call and tell you where I’ve left your truck. He put the note and the Teletubby doll and the Ducati keys on the porch in plain sight, got in, started the truck, backed up. He thought the phone might be useful before the angry owner deactivated its service.
No one came out of the house.
He drove out of Bandera at modest speed, checking the gas gauge. Almost full. God had finally given him a break he hadn’t had to fight for.
Now you’re a real criminal. What would his mom say?
She’d say, Go get the bastards who killed me.
No. Revenge didn’t matter – saving his father did. Florida, Gabriel had claimed, was the rendezvous point for Evan’s dad. His father might already be there, if he wasn’t being held by Dezz Jargo’s group. Evan would drive to San Antonio – it was almost noon now – and head east. He cranked on the radio as he hit the highway. Willie Nelson implored Whiskey River to take his mind. The storm blossomed into full fury, and he pointed the truck southeast. He knew the signs would guide him into the sprawl of San Antonio. Then he could take Interstate 10 in a straight shot to Houston and beyond, across the Louisiana flatlands and bayous. Across the toes of Mississippi and Alabama and into the westward finger of Florida.
Then he could find his father. In a big, crowded state, where he had no idea where to start looking. But he couldn’t stay still.
He thought about the files. The files were the crux, the negotiating point, the key to rescuing his father. If Dezz Jargo and company believed he possessed another copy of the files and would eventually exchange them for his dad, then the files shielded his father. Kill his father, and Evan had no reason to keep the files secret.
People had lied to him before, with the cameras rolling, trying to make themselves look good. Or look smart. The best liars skirted the truth, stayed close enough to it. Maybe there were pebbles of truth in Dezz’s and Gabriel’s claims. The truth might lie between their tongues.
His whole body hurt, his whole body said enough. Concentrate on the road. Don’t think about Mom, about Carrie. Just drive. Every mile gets you closer. That’s what his dad had said on the long family drives. They never had other family to visit; these were always trips to the Grand Canyon, to New Orleans where his parents had lived when he was born, to Santa Fe, to Disney World once when he was fifteen, too cool for Disney but actually dying from excitement. Whenever he’d ask the inevitable childish question of how much farther, Dad would say, ‘Every mile gets you closer.’
That’s no answer, Evan would complain, and his father would just repeat the answer: ‘Every mile gets you closer.’ Smiling at Evan in the rearview mirror.
Finally Mom would say, just enjoy the journey. She’d lean back from the passenger seat, squeeze his hand, which embarrassed him as a teenager but now seemed like heaven’s touch made real. Typical motherly, zippy optimism. He missed her as he would an arm suddenly gone.
Your father does special work for the government, Dezz had said. Even if Dezz was a liar, this had a ring of truth, given the events of the past two days. The concept was hazy, foggy. He did not know what a spy looked like, but he didn’t picture James Bond. He pictured a man with the sallow, sad face of a Lee Harvey Oswald, a custom-made silencer in his pocket from a Swiss craftsman, a trench coat easily rinsed of blood and gore, an emptiness in the eyes to show the soul had withered from living under constant stress and fear of discovery. His father read Graham Greene and John Grisham, loved baseball, hated fishing, wrote computer code, and worshiped his family. Evan had never known a lack of love.
So did your dad tell you he loved you, go get on a plane, and then go steal secrets or kill people? Did blood money pay your way through college, put food in your belly, fund chewing gum and comic books and every other treasure of childhood?
The miles of Texas unfurled, long and rainy. ‘Every mile gets you closer,’ he said under his shallow breath. Again and again, a mantra to keep away the pain and to harden his heart.
He would find out the truth. He would find his father. And he would make the people who had killed his mother pay with everything they held dear.
17
‘I could kill you!’ Dezz screamed at Carrie. ‘I had him!’ She crossed her arms. ‘Jargo wanted him alive. You were aiming for his head.’
‘I was aiming for the bike. The bike!’
‘If you were aiming for the bike,’ Jargo said, stepping between them, ‘you could have shot it out when you shot the Suburban’s tire, son.’
Dezz’s red face frowned. ‘What?’
‘You hoped Evan would run,’ Jargo said. ‘Give you a reason to shoot him dead. Get over this jealousy regarding Carrie. Now.’
‘That’s not true.’ Dezz shook his head, fished in his pocket for candy. He jabbed a caramel in his mouth. ‘I don’t give a shit who she does.’
‘Why didn’t you take out the bike, then? After lecturing me about tactics earlier this morning?’ Jar
go said. He went over, prodded Gabriel with his shoe.
‘I didn’t think he’d try for the bike. Who the hell knew he would fight back, he’s a goddamn film-maker!’ Dezz spat out the title. He whirled on Carrie. ‘He knew how to shoot, why didn’t you warn me?’
‘I didn’t know he could shoot. He never mentioned it.’
‘Dezz,’ Jargo said in a cold voice. ‘His father is a crack shot. It’s not unreasonable that he might have taught Evan about guns.’
Dezz jerked off his jacket, pointed at the scorch in his skin. ‘Where’s your fucking concern for me?’
‘I’ll get you a bandage. Satisfied?’ Jargo said.
Carrie kept her voice cool. ‘If you want to know with certainty what Evan knows, and how big a threat he is, you need him alive. I can find him. He has few friends, few places to hide.’
‘Where will he go, Carrie?’ Jargo asked. He was calm, unruffled, kneeling to check Gabriel’s pulse.
‘Think about it from Gabriel’s perspective. He is ex-CIA. He not only has a bone with you, but with the Agency. If we assume he’s operating alone, he’ll have wanted to maintain total control over Evan. He stole him from the cops, for God’s sake. That means he would have warned Evan off the cops, off the authorities.’ She hoped she’d made a good case and went for the close. ‘He’ll go to Houston. He’ll look for me. He has friends there.’
Dezz jabbed his gun against her chest. It was still warm, the heat spreading through the material of her blouse. ‘If you hadn’t let him head to Austin yesterday morning, we’d be in a lot better shape.’
She gently moved the gun away from her. ‘If you thought before you acted…’
‘Be quiet. Both of you,’ Jargo said. ‘All of Carrie’s theorizing aside, he may be heading straight to the Bandera police. Gabriel’s alive. Let’s take him and get the hell out of here.’
They loaded Gabriel in the back of the dented but drivable Malibu, wiping down and abandoning their own car behind a dense motte of live oaks. Gabriel had two bullet wounds, one in the shoulder, one in the upper back, and he was unconscious. Carrie took a medical kit from the car they were leaving behind and tended to his injuries.
‘Will he live until we get back to Austin?’ Jargo asked.
‘If Dezz doesn’t kill him,’ Carrie said.
Dezz got into the car, jerked the rearview mirror to where he could see Carrie in the back, Gabriel’s head in her lap.
‘I could kill you,’ he said again. But now there was just the hurt of the denied child, the tantrum fading into pout.
It was time, she decided, to start playing a new hand. ‘You won’t,’ she said calmly. ‘You’d miss me.’
Dezz stared at her and she saw the anger begin to fade in his face. She allowed herself to breathe again.
‘Go eat dinner,’ Jargo ordered them when they returned to the Austin apartment. ‘I need peace and quiet for my talk with Mr. Gabriel.’
Carrie did not like the sound of that announcement but she had no choice. She and Dezz walked down the street, under the arching shade of the oaks, to a small Tex-Mex restaurant. It was crowded with young, hip attendees from the massive South by Southwest music and film festivals that dominated Austin every mid-March. Her heart went into her throat. Evan had talked about coming to the festival until just last week; Ounce of Trouble had debuted at South by Southwest a couple of years ago and he loved the craziness, the energy, the deal-making. He loved seeing all the new movies at the cutting edge of cinema, the heady rush of thousands of people who loved to create. But the edits on Bluff nagged at his mind, undone, so he had decided to skip this year’s events.
Crowded around the tables were young people who reminded her of Evan – talking, laughing, their minds focused on art rather than survival. He should be here with her, watching movies, listening to bands, his mother alive. Instead she watched Dezz signal the hostess with two fingers and she followed him to a booth. Carrie excused herself to go to the ladies’ room, left him playing with the sugar packets.
The ladies’ room was busy and noisy. In the privacy of a stall, Carrie opened a false bottom in her purse. She removed a PocketPC, tapped out a brief message, and pressed send. The PDA tapped into the wireless server in a coffee shop next door. She waited for an answer.
When she was done reading the reply, she blinked away the tears that threatened her eyes and washed her face with trembling hands. She came out of the ladies’ room, half-expecting Dezz to have his ear pressed to the door, and then she could simply kill him on the spot. But the hallway held only a trio of laughing women.
She returned to the booth. Dezz dumped his sixth sugar packet into his iced tea, watching a mound of sweetness filter down past the cubes into the tea. She considered him: the high cheekbones, the dirty-blond hair, the ears that protruded slightly, and instead of being afraid of him she pitied him. For just one bent moment. Then she remembered the deputy and the woman on the highway, him shooting at Evan, and disgust filled her heart. She could shoot him, right here in the booth. His hands were nowhere near his gun.
But instead she sat down. He had ordered iced tea for her as well.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, not looking at her, ‘I really hate you and then I don’t.’
‘I know.’ She sipped at her tea.
‘Do you love Evan?’ He asked this in a soft, almost childish whisper, as though he’d spent his day’s ration of bravado and bluster.
There was only one answer she could give him. ‘No. Of course not.’
‘Would you tell me if you did?’
‘No. But I don’t love him.’
‘Love is hard.’ Dezz poked his straw into his sugar hill, stirred it down to nothing. ‘I love Jargo and look how he talks to me.’
‘That deputy. That poor woman. Dezz, you understand why it was a terrible mistake. How you put us at further risk.’ She had to treat it like a tactical error, not a human tragedy, because she was not sure that his unfinished jigsaw of a brain understood sadness and loss.
‘Yeah. I know.’ He crumbled a tostada, flicking the fragments across the table, stuck his finger in the salsa, licked it clean. The waitress came and took their orders. Dezz wanted tres leches cake first, but Carrie said no, dessert after dinner, and he didn’t argue.
Her hate for him did not ease but she wondered what chance he had ever had, with Jargo as a father. ‘Where did you go to school, Dezz?’
He looked at her in surprise, unaccustomed to a personal question. She realized he never regularly spoke to anyone other than Jargo and Galadriel. He had no friends. ‘Nowhere. Everywhere. He sent me to school in Florida for a while. I liked Florida. Then New York, and I didn’t even know if he was alive or dead for three years, then California for two years. Then I was Trevor Rogers. Trevor, isn’t that a name that suits me? Other times he didn’t bother with school. I helped him.’
‘He taught you to shoot and strangle and steal.’ She kept her voice lower than the Tejano music drifting from the speakers, than the laughter from the tables.
‘Sure. I didn’t like school, anyway. Too much reading. I liked sports, though.’
She tried to imagine Dezz playing baseball without taking a bat to the opposing pitcher. Or three-on-three basketball, occupying the court with boys whose fathers did not teach them how to disarm an alarm system or slice open a jugular. ‘You don’t do this often, do you? Just sit and eat with another human being.’
‘I eat with Jargo.’
‘You could call him Dad.’
He sucked a long draw on his sugar-clouded tea. ‘He doesn’t like it. I only do it to annoy him.’
She remembered her own father, her clear and unabated love for him. She watched Dezz swirl the tea in his mouth, look up at her, then look down back to his drink in a mix of contempt and shyness. She saw, with aching clarity, that he believed she was probably the only woman he could talk to, that he could hope for.
‘I’m still mad at you,’ he said to his tea glass.
Their plates
arrived. Dezz forked a chunk of beef enchilada, looped a long string of cheese around his fork, and broke the thread with a flourish. He tested out a smile. It chilled her and sickened her all at once. ‘But I’ll get over it.’
‘I know you will,’ she said.
The apartment was quiet and dark. Jargo had rented the two adjoining apartments as well to ensure privacy. He set a small digital voice recorder on the coffee table, between the knives.
‘No objections to being recorded, do you, Mr. Gabriel? I don’t want to trample on your constitutional rights. Not the way you did on other people’s in years gone by.’
‘Fuck you.’ Gabriel’s voice was barely a creak, faded from blood loss, pain, and exhaustion. ‘Don’t you talk to me about what’s moral or decent.’
‘You hunted me for a long time. But your license got revoked.’ Jargo selected a small knife and a long blade geared for holiday duty. ‘This big beauty is designed to cut turkey. Rather appropriate.’
‘You’re nothing but a goddamned traitor.’
Jargo inspected the knife, ran its edge along his palm. ‘That line is awfully tired. Traitor-baiter. Baiting isn’t a very strong action. Catching is more impressive.’ He came closer to Gabriel. ‘Who are you working for these days? CIA or Donna Casher or someone else who wants to bring me down?’
Gabriel swallowed. Jargo held up the thin silver of the small blade, raised an eyebrow. ‘This one’s not for turkey. It’s for sausages.’
‘You’ll kill me regardless if I talk or not.’
‘My son didn’t leave me much of you to work with. But it’s your choice whether the end is fast or slow. I’m a humanitarian.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Not me. Your daughter. Or your granddaughters. She’s, let’s see, thirty-five, very rich husband, living in Dallas. I’ll send my son up to her showcase home. Dezz’ll fuck her, make rich hubby watch, tell them the reason their wonderful lives are being cruelly abbreviated is her dumbass father, then gut them both.’ He paused and smiled. ‘Then I’ll sell your granddaughters. I know a reclusive gentleman in Dubai. He’ll pay me twenty thou for them. More if I don’t break up the set.’
