The Red Hunter

by Lisa Unger

  Those voices were louder, below me. The smoke from upstairs was dark and billowing from the bedroom door at the top of the landing. I heard the rumble of an engine, the squeal of tires, a vehicle racing away.

  I heard Seth’s voice. “You’re one of the good guys.”

  My parents’ murderer, one of the men who tortured me, left my body and my spirit crisscrossed with scars that never healed, was getting away with a bag full of money. I’d had the opportunity to kill him, but I’d hesitated. And now he was gone. If I gave chase, got to the Suburban, and made it to the main road, maybe I could still find them.

  But the house was on fire, and there were people trapped in the basement. I could hear their panicked yelling through the floorboards. Probably that blogger and her kid. With shaking effort, I pushed myself up. I was still hurting from being jumped last night—ribs, hip, bridge of my nose. Now there was blood on the floor, on my shirt, some combination of mine and Beckham’s. Mike would say I deserved it. I was careless last night, lost in thought. Today, I’d let my anger distract me. I’d hesitated when I’d had the upper hand.

  I moved toward the kitchen, but a wall of heat and smoke pushed me back, coughing. The house was groaning, the air growing more toxic by the second. If I’d lain unconscious, I’d have been dead from carbon monoxide poisoning inside a half hour—no doubt what they had in mind when they left.

  I raced to the front door, greedily sucking in the outdoor air, still coughing, as I ran to the cellar entrance I knew was on the side of the house. I came to a stop at the two metal doors in the ground locked with an old padlock. I summoned my strength and used the hard sole of my combat boot, drawing strength from my hips to kick at the lock. Once. Twice. Three times. On the fourth kick, the rusted door latch came loose, and I reached down to swing open the doors.

  “Here!” I yelled. “Come out this way!”

  A moment later, a woman and a young girl, a lanky, squinting boy came into view down below and climbed up quickly. Behind them was Josh Beckham. I watched him as coughing, red-faced, he tumbled out onto the ground. The woman and her daughter fell into each other sobbing. The boy sat beside them, his head in his hands. Josh Beckham just stared, like he was seeing a ghost. I stared back. I never saw his face that night, but I’d seen him many times since then.

  “Zoey,” he said, finally. He was pale, as if he was seeing a ghost. And maybe he was. Maybe I was a ghost. “Zoey Drake.”

  All three of the others lifted their eyes to stare; they obviously knew my name. Josh moved closer, but I held up a palm. He was a victim that night, too. Or anyway that’s how I saw it. He was in the thrall of older, dangerous men, one of them his brother. I hadn’t forgotten that he tried to hide me, to keep his brother from getting to me. Of course, he hadn’t done much else to help. He’d kept quiet all these years, never turned them in. But he wasn’t much older than I had been.

  “Thank you,” said the woman.

  She extracted herself from her daughter and came over to me. She had the bluest eyes I’d ever seen. “Thank you for saving my daughter. All of us.”

  She lay a gentle hand on my arm. If she wondered what had brought me here in the first place, she didn’t ask. I nodded, words failing me.

  “You’re hurt,” she said, touching a finger to my head. She was bleeding, too, from the nose, a black eye forming. “Let us call the police.”

  “No,” I told her. “Don’t do that. Not yet.”

  “Where is he?” asked Josh from the ground. He got to his feet.

  “He left with some woman,” I said. “Where is he going? Who is he meeting?”

  We stood there, sizing each other up.

  “The house,” said Claudia with a choking sob, as though she’d just realized it was on fire. “Our house.”

  A big billowing cloud of black was rising into the sky. Someone would see, call the fire department. When a window exploded from the heat, Claudia grabbed the kids, each by a hand, and dragged them away. In the distance, I heard the first wail of sirens. Once the authorities got here, everything was coming out, all of it.

  “Where did he go?” I asked again. I saw some kind of battle play out on Josh’s face. In the sad shape of his eyes dwelled fear, regret, a deep despair.

  “What are you going to do?” Josh asked.

  I didn’t answer, just stood waiting, looking at him right in the eyes.

  “The only reason I came here today was so that no one else would get hurt,” he said. He looked back guiltily at Claudia, who was holding her daughter again.

  “That’s not the reason I came here,” I said.

  The world crowded in around us—the burning house, the crying girl, the low gray ceiling of sky, the approaching sirens. He bowed his head and told me where Rhett Beckham was going.

  “Wait,” said Claudia.

  I knew her from the blog, her name, her history, her hopes for this house. I could have told her it wasn’t going to work. Some places don’t want to be renovated, some things can’t be fixed. For this house, for this history, maybe fire was a good thing.

  “Wherever you’re going,” she said. It was weird; I felt a connection to her, as if I’d known her a long time. “Don’t. Just stay here, let the police come, let all the secrets come out. Once you’re in the light, the healing begins.”

  The sirens were louder now, the trucks couldn’t be more than a few minutes away. It was good advice, true and right. I had a moment. I really did.

  But finally, I turned away from her and took off in a run for the Suburban.

  forty-one

  In the gloaming, I approached the warehouse from behind, pulling up slow through the deserted streets with my lights off. There were other vehicles parked: the black car I saw Beckham toss the bag into, and another, a beat-up old red pickup with New York plates. I snapped a shot of the tag with the camera on my phone. That’s when I saw that Mike had called three more times. He’d left a few messages, which I’d listened to on the way up.

  “Hey, he’s doing better,” he said. “He’s stable and asking for you. Come to the hospital when you get this.”

  Then: “What’s up? Where are you?”

  Then a text: “Zoey, he wants to talk to you. I’m trying to keep him calm. Where are you?”

  I wanted to go back. I couldn’t, not yet. I wanted to call Mike or Paul, their strong sensible voices always advising temperance, calm. I couldn’t do that either. Mike would know what I was doing. He’d try to talk me in, and he might be able to. I was weak and tired, hurt. I finally—finally—got what he was saying, what my imaginary dad was saying. When seeking revenge, dig two graves. One for yourself. But it was too late. I was too far gone. I was tumbling, falling into that dark place, and maybe that’s where I’d been headed all along. And wasn’t there a part of me that wanted to go?

  The building was an ominous gray rectangle, dark and vast. There had been talk of this run-down, abandoned area reinvigorating into an arts district. There was a plan, Seth said, for studios and work spaces, hot shops for glass and metal work, clay ovens. Artists being priced out of Manhattan would find a haven here. But the big structures sat fallow, abandoned by the failed businesses that had erected them.

  I opened the glove box and pulled out the package of wipes that I knew Paul kept there and tried to get some of the blood off my face. There was a stocking cap in the compartment, too. I pulled it over my head, though the pressure on the gash there caused the world around me to pitch and wobble for a moment. It was never a good idea to go into a fight looking like you recently got your ass kicked. But with the bruising from the night before, there was little chance of hiding it. I was a mess.

  Underneath the stocking cap was Paul’s old off-duty revolver, a five-shot Smith & Wesson. I knew how to use it; he’d made sure of it. But I didn’t like guns. A firearm was a weakling’s crutch. Anyone who couldn’t go hand-to-hand was a wuss. But since I didn’t know what I was walking into, and I wasn’t at my best, it didn’t hurt to be prepared.
I killed the engine and sat, watching, trying to assess the situation. The building was dark. There was only quiet. Could I trust Josh? Would he have called ahead to his brother and told him I was on my way? Were they just waiting for me inside, ready to finish what they started?

  I had some theories, some of them percolating for years, some since my visit with Seth. Scenarios that flipped through my mind like an old-time film reel, crackling and sputtering.

  First theory: My father took the money. He organized the initial heist with partners. Whitey Malone found out about it, sent Didion and Beckham to get it back. But my dad hid it too well and didn’t give it up when they came to call. This theory makes my dad a dirty cop and a coward that let his wife be murdered, his daughter tortured, rather than turn over the money that he stole.

  Second: Other men, cops, took the money, and my father was complicit only in hiding it. All the same implications apply to my father—dirty cop, coward. But it would add another layer, other people he had to fear or protect. Maybe he was even forced into this role. It was somewhat more palatable, but not by much.

  Third: Someone else stole the money and used our property to hide it. My dad didn’t know it was there. So when they came for it, he had no idea how to save us. In it, my dad was just a victim, like Mom and me. Blameless, innocent. This was my preferred theory, though it was probably the least likely one.

  But the truth was that I had no idea, even after all these years of poring over evidence with Boz and Mike, who was behind that initial heist and who sent Didion and the Beckham brothers to find the stolen money. Didion and Beckham were thugs, hired men, pirates who took their spoils; there was someone else at the helm. Seth’s theory that there were cops involved from beginning to end made sense, but it was hard to stomach. Cops stole the money, sent men to get it from my father, impeded the investigation to the degree that Didion and the Beckham brothers were questioned and released, the case went cold. It couldn’t be the truth, could it?

  I slipped from the Suburban and moved quickly in the growing dark. There was the silence of the urban wasteland, a particular quiet to buildings that sat empty, something about the way air moves around and through abandoned structures. Life usually finds the deserted places—foliage springs up through cracks in concrete. Birds and small animals nest in windowsills, chimneys and rafters. The faint chirping of an unseen bird was the alarm of my arrival, if anyone was listening. But most people weren’t listening, not to things like that.

  I found the back door open and slipped inside. Voices carried, echoing. I could hear the tone, measured, but not the words. Through towers of boxes, I crept toward the sound of men talking.

  “Why did you do that? I can hear the sirens from here.”

  “I was destroying all the evidence,” he said. Beckham. I recognized the rumble of his voice. “Getting rid of witnesses.”

  “If you’d done it your brother’s way, it could have gone differently. You called a lot of attention.” The voice was odd, muffled.

  There was a rasping breath, a long, unhealthy cough.

  “My brother spilled his guts to that woman,” said Beckham. “He told her why we were there, what we wanted.”

  Only a tense silence followed.

  “And then you bring a stranger here.”

  “She’s cool,” said Beckham. “She found the tunnel. Without her, we wouldn’t have known about it maybe.”

  A nervous giggle followed the silence that was growing heavier. The skin on my arms tingled. I couldn’t see the other man. His voice was strange, disguised somehow, something over his mouth? I used the shadows to hide, moving closer to the dim light that burned. Even then, I didn’t know. A cough, rasping and long. But no—the mind resists. No.

  The three of them gathered around a long table, a camping lantern the only light. His back is to me; there’s something on his head—a stocking cap, a mask. I can’t make it out. Rhett Beckham stood tense and shifting from foot to foot, his hands in his pockets. The woman who hit me with a shovel was behind him, looking back toward the door. She wants to leave. She’s scared. She should be.

  The stranger’s hands are gloved. There’s a large plastic tarp on the ground beneath where Beckham and the woman are standing. They don’t get it. What’s about to happen. I want to stop it. Rhett Beckham is mine. But I was frozen, my body tingling; I don’t know why.

  “She’s taking part of my cut,” said Beckham. He smiled, lifted his hands. I had a good view of his face. He was scared, too. Way out of his league. “You don’t have to worry about her.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Good,” Beckham said. He issued a nervous laugh, glanced over at the girl, who was nodding stupidly. “Because I’ve been quiet all these years. Didn’t run my mouth off in the joint like so many of those losers. I promised you one day I’d go back for it. And here I am.”

  The stranger dumped the contents of the bag on the long table and a pile of cash cascaded across the surface. The girl reached for Beckham’s hand in excitement, her eyes bright, but he pushed her away. The gloved man started counting, shifting the stacks into neat piles.

  Situation assessment: There were three people, all of them motivated to fight for the payout they’ve waited years to collect. What were my odds? Poor. I would have to take my moment in the chaos I could sense was about to descend. The thinker panics, goes off half-cocked. Or freezes, paralyzed by indecision. The watcher bides her time, waits for the opportunity.

  Then, “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “That’s all there was,” said Beckham. His voice cracked and he cleared his throat “We took the bag from the tunnel, some kids had it first. But I brought it straight here.”

  “What kids?”

  “The girl, her friend,” said Rhett. “They got to the bag first.”

  “They got to the bag first.” His tone was flat with menace. “How did that shake out?”

  “I don’t know,” Rhett said. He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I don’t how they got to it. Like I said, Josh was spilling it.”

  “There’s only four hundred thousand here,” said the stranger.

  “That’s what there was.” I can hear the creep of fear. “I swear.”

  “You swear.” Not a question. I could hear the mockery.

  “Yeah,” Beckham said. It was only a whisper.

  The stranger issued another long cough.

  “The night the money was stolen from Whitey Malone, there was a million. Two hundred thousand got paid out that night. Then it sat, locked in that tunnel for ten years. There should be eight hundred thousand here.”

  Silence. Beckham shook his head and lifted his palms. I thought about the money in my bank account, tried to do the math—the money my mother had saved, my father’s death benefit and pension paid to my education trust. An extra three hundred thousand give or take.

  It happened so fast.

  Two sharp explosive bursts of sound bounced and expanded in the space, causing me to drop into a protective crouch, my ears ringing, head vibrating. When I looked again, Beckham and the girl both stood for a moment, wobbling slightly, their expressions slack. What? What just happened?

  Then they crumbled, first him, then her, onto the waiting tarp. She stared at me, unseeing, a neat red circle between her eyes, blood from the hole that must have opened in the back of her head pooling black around her. I felt bad for her, even though she’d hit me in the head with a shovel. Some people were just not smart; they make bad decisions, throw their lot in with the wrong people. It’s a problem.

  My breathing came shallow. I deepened it. I pushed myself against the wall. The man at the table, slowly started packing up the money. My whole body was tense, vibrating, ears ringing in the silence.

  “I know you’re there,” he said. “Zoey. Come out.”

  I stepped into the light, my hand gripping the gun in my pocket. He turned to me, but he was wearing a mask, a monstrous grinning blue face, mouth full of fangs, red-eyed skulls for hair, eyes bla
ck holes. The Tibetan mask for the sorcerer’s dance. It was a guardian’s mask, a protector against evil. I knew it well. No.

  He put the rest of the money in the bag, unhurried as if we had all the time in the world. He pulled the zipper. I saw there was a stack left out, sitting at the corner of the table.

  That’s when another form stepped out of the darkness. He wore a mask as well, the face of a gray wolf with a wide nose and deep-set eyes, yellow bared teeth. He stared at me a moment, and I slowed my breathing, hoping my heart rate would follow. But then he looked away, started dragging Rhett Beckham’s body toward the center of the tarp.

  I thought about Josh Beckham. Would he mourn his brother? Would there simply be relief? In my limited experience, family relationships are complicated. Love is rarely pure, always laced with something else. Likewise, anger, even hatred was often undercut by love and loyalty.

  While I watched, the big man took off his mask and lay it on the table. I knew it was him, but it still felt like a knife through the heart.

  Mike. My mentor. My friend. The ground beneath my feet shifted.

  “Paul’s doing better,” he said. “He was asking for you. I tried to call, finally had to make up an excuse that your phone was dead. I told him you’d come after your shift. He wants to talk to you.”

  I felt a lurch of happiness, relief that Paul was okay for now, but it quickly sank into the pit of dread that my stomach had become.

  The other man dragged the woman’s body to lie beside Beckham. I was surprised to feel a sob rise up in my throat. The student grows disillusioned with her teacher and so with everything he taught her. I thought of all those hours spent with him, all his words knocking around my head. He taught me so much about fighting, surviving, about myself and the watcher within. How could I reconcile that with the man who stood before me now?

  “Tell me,” I said.

  He released a sigh, long and slow. “You weren’t supposed to be there. Neither was your mother. Chad—he was supposed to be alone.”