by Mark Dawson
The two Suburbans pulled closer, getting ready to bracket them. Milton held the Porsche steady, waiting. He wanted to get a feel for what the drivers behind them were doing before he made his decision. He accelerated slightly, then signalled to switch into the left lane. He moved across and checked the mirror. The SUV on their right mirrored his move, changing lanes and moving to the middle.
They wanted to stay close and wide. They weren’t going to wait much longer.
Milton looked ahead for a way out. “I’m going to call the police, Oscar.”
“I wouldn’t do that. That wouldn’t end well for her father.”
“Doesn’t matter if he’s already dead.”
“He’s not dead.”
“What about her brother?”
“What?”
“Her brother. What about him?”
“I don’t need her brother, señor. I have the father.”
Milton gave a little push to the accelerator and watched.
As the Porsche moved forward, so did both of the SUVs.
“And her father is okay?”
“He is.”
“Really? I saw blood at the house.”
“Señor Russo did not cooperate. We had to be forceful. But he is alive.”
Milton muted the microphone. “You’re belted in, Jessica?”
“Yes.”
“Next exit. What’s it like?”
She squinted. “What do you mean?”
“Just describe the exit and what it takes us to. Downhill? Uphill? Multiple lanes? Busy crossroad?”
“Señor Smith?”
“Downhill, I think,” she said. “Two lanes. There’s a light at the bottom. You can turn either direction. It’s mostly strip malls and a gas station, I think. You should probably be thinking about getting over if we’re getting off.”
“I will,” Milton told her, watching the mirror.
“Señor Smith? Are you still there?”
He unmuted the mic. “I am. And I’m going to say this once. You won’t be able to find out who I am, so I wouldn’t waste time trying. I don’t know Jessica. I just met her today. She’s lucky I did. I can’t say the same for you. I have a set of rules I live my life by. A series of steps. You could call it a moral code. Do you understand?”
“What does that have to do—”
“I’ve done some bad things in my life, Oscar, and I’m trying hard to make up for them. That means that I react badly to people like you.”
“Is that so?”
The off-ramp raced toward them.
“It really is. You should let her father go and forget this ever happened.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a suggestion. But you should give it some thought. I’m not the sort of man you want in your life.”
There was a pickup in the middle lane just ahead of the first Suburban. The car directly behind the Porsche, sandwiched between them and the second Suburban, was a Nissan sedan.
“You’re going to miss it,” Jessica said.
Milton gripped the wheel.
“John! You’re going right past it.”
“Hold on.”
Milton floored the accelerator and pulled the wheel hard to the right.
18
The pickup jammed on its brakes and Milton flew across the two lanes. They hit the off-ramp at full speed and the Porsche lifted off the ground as it hit the downslope. He watched the rear-view mirror. One of the SUVs was behind them, just reaching the off-ramp, but he didn’t see the second.
There was a traffic signal at the bottom of the ramp. Milton lifted his foot from the accelerator. The light was red, but he didn’t stop, spinning the wheel hard to the right again, taking the turn. He caught a glimpse of a sedan approaching from the left, screeching to a halt as Milton cut them off.
He stomped on the pedal again and the Porsche responded. They roared forward. He checked the mirror.
The SUV had made the corner, but it was alone.
Good. Maybe the second was stuck on the highway. Evading one pursuer would be far easier than two.
He scanned the road ahead. It was four lanes, two in each direction, with signals every half mile or so. Jessica had been correct. The area was devoted to industrial and retail, with warehouses and stores flying by on both sides. The Porsche continued to pick up speed. The SUV kept pace behind them. Milton knew that the Macan had a horsepower advantage over the Suburban, but he wasn’t sure if it would be enough to outrun them. He hit the button on the display to bring up the map and confirmed that that wouldn’t work in any event; there wasn’t going to be enough road.
It would take a little more than pure speed to get loose.
“Can we get back on the highway?” he asked, his eyes fixed ahead.
Jessica didn’t reply.
“Jessica?”
“I’m thinking,” she said, flustered. “Probably three more lights. Take a right; then it’ll be in front of us.”
Milton nodded and shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable as the car barrelled forward at ninety.
The first light was green. Milton swerved around a motorcycle and another sedan, leaving both of them in his wake.
The SUV did the same, veering hard, staying behind them.
There was still no sign of the other SUV.
Milton focused on the next light, watching the rhythm and timing of its changing. He flexed his fingers on the wheel. The light was green, but they were still a good distance away. Milton knew it would be on red when they hit the intersection. He saw cars on both sides of the junction, ready to go just as soon as the light turned in their favour.
“Come on,” Milton muttered, standing hard on the accelerator.
Green.
Five hundred metres away.
Ninety-five miles an hour.
Two hundred metres away.
Come on.
Green.
One hundred and five.
Yellow.
“Hold on,” Milton said.
Jessica pressed herself back into her seat. “Oh, my God.”
They were fifty metres out of the intersection when the light went red.
One hundred and ten.
The car to the left of the junction stayed where it was. Perhaps the driver had seen the speeding Porsche headed in their direction. The car on the right, though—a lime green Volkswagen Jetta—took off as soon as the lights turned.
Milton angled the Porsche slightly to the left. He couldn’t afford to brake and he had already committed to getting through. What he needed now was to avoid being sideswiped by the Jetta. He saw the driver’s eyes as the Porsche crossed in front of it. It was a young kid with a backwards baseball cap, now furiously pounding his brakes. The Jetta slowed, but not enough, and clipped the back corner of the Porsche.
The front of the Porsche jerked right as the back swung left. Milton kept his foot on the pedal, steering the car into the skid, turning out of the contact. The car wobbled for a moment, righted itself, then kept flying.
Milton exhaled. He checked the mirror.
The Suburban couldn’t avoid the Jetta. The two cars slammed together, the impact sending the smaller car spinning. The SUV stopped for a moment, then lurched forward, smoke coming from the tyres as they attempted to catch up.
“You’re going to kill us,” Jessica said.
“So will they,” Milton said, already eyeing the signal up ahead. “If they catch us.”
Milton had a bigger lead on the SUV now, but he still wasn’t sure that it would be enough.
“This next light,” Jessica said. “Go right if you want the freeway again.”
“Hold on. This might be rough.”
The needle on the speedometer reached one hundred and fifteen. Milton pulled his foot from the accelerator and felt the Porsche slow. He knew he could not take the corner going that hard, no matter how good the car was, but he didn’t want to brake, either, and indicate to their pursuers what he was about to do.
/> The Suburban loomed larger in the rear-view.
“This one,” Jessica said, leaning back in her seat, bracing herself. “This one.”
“Got it,” Milton said, then yanked the car hard to the right.
The tyres shrieked beneath them but stuck to the asphalt. The force pulled both of them hard to the left, and Milton had to brace himself against the door as they got around the apex of the corner. The Macan jerked them back to straight, but they were in the wrong lane, with a car coming straight for them.
And Milton immediately recognised it.
A black SUV.
Blinding headlights.
A twin to the one that was still right behind them.
Milton flattened the pedal, taking dead aim at the oncoming vehicle.
“What are you doing?” Jessica cried.
The Suburban in front of them slowed a fraction, just as Milton had hoped it would.
The gap closed between the cars quickly and, a split second before they struck the front of the oncoming vehicle, Milton lurched hard to the right. His driver’s mirror caught the side of the second vehicle and snapped off, the debris cartwheeling across the road behind them.
Milton checked the rear-view.
The first Suburban had followed them around the corner and into the opposite lane and was still going full bore as Milton squirted out from in front of the second vehicle. He watched in his rear-view as the drivers veered off in desperate evasion. One Suburban went right and the other careened to the left, both of them leaving the road. Milton heard the crash as one of the cars blasted into a guardrail. The other one bounced down a slope, crashed through a chain-link fence and slid across the asphalt of an empty Walmart parking lot.
Milton turned his attention back to the road. He reached the green light before the underpass, took a wide arc to make the left-hand turn, then put them on the on-ramp. He slowed to a normal rate of speed as they ascended.
He looked back at Jessica. “Are you alright?”
She nodded slowly.
Milton nodded back at her, then began to head back in the direction that they had originally come from.
“Just a cook?” she said.
“Sorry?”
“Who are you?”
“Just a guy.”
“Not a race car driver?”
“No, not a race car driver.”
“So how does a cook know how to drive like that?”
Milton flexed his fingers on the wheel. “I’ve had some practice.”
19
Milton headed south into Rainbow Park. He turned onto West Sahara Avenue and saw the red and yellow signage for a branch of In-N-Out Burger. He hadn’t eaten since the baba ghanoush at the restaurant where he had met Jessica, and he was hungry. He could see that Jessica needed a break, too, and, more than that, he needed to have a conversation with her. He was happy that they had lost their pursuers and was as confident as he could be that it would be safe to stop: it was busy here, and he would be able to hide the Porsche at the back of the parking lot, away from the road.
He turned to her. “Hungry?”
“Not really.”
“I am. And we need to work out what to do next. We can stop here for a while.”
He indicated and turned off. The restaurant looked as if it had only recently been built, nestled amid a collection of similarly recent-looking businesses. There was a drive-thru lane and a busy parking lot. Milton guided the Porsche into the lot and parked it behind a large pickup that offered extra obstruction in the unlikely event that anyone who was looking for them might happen to drive past.
Milton got out of the car, went around to the passenger side and opened the door. Jessica got out from the back and came to stand behind him. He crouched down and reached his arm inside the front passenger footwell.
“What are you looking for?”
Milton leaned in so that he could look up at the underside of the console. “The on-board diagnostics port.”
“What’s that?”
He found what he was looking for just above the footrest. His fingers brushed a block of plastic, and with a single firm tug, he pulled it loose.
“This is a GPS tracker,” Milton said. “Modern cars often have them installed. It pings the location of the car back to a monitoring station.”
“And you think they could use that to follow us?”
“Probably not,” Milton said. “They’d need a password to get at the data, and I doubt they have that. Still, I’d rather be safe than sorry. It won’t work now.”
Milton didn’t mention that getting the password would have been possible, given that their pursuers had her father in their custody. That, at least, didn’t matter now; the tracker was inert. He dropped it into the cupholder.
Jessica was looking at him with a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. “Who are you?”
“You already asked me that. I’m no one.”
“You shot those men,” Jessica said, eyeing him closely.
“I told you—I was in the military.”
“You said it was years ago. And you shot them like it was nothing.”
“I didn’t like the alternative,” he said.
“You knew how to get us out of the house, and then you drove like a stunt driver. None of that is normal.” She gestured down to the tracker. “And then you knew about that. Who knows stuff like that?”
“People who read the manual?”
“No. Come on. Stop lying to me. What exactly are you?”
“I’m a lot of things,” Milton said. “Right now, I’m just trying to figure out if my help is needed. If it’s not, you should tell me that it isn’t so that we can go our own ways. But if you do want my help, you need to trust me. You need to stop asking about me and start telling me about you. You, your family, everything. That’s the only way you’ll see your father again.”
20
They went into the restaurant. It was a popular hangout and it was Friday night, so there were only a couple of tables free. Milton told Jessica to go and get the table at the back of the room, and went to the counter to place his order.
“What can I get for you, sir?” the server asked him with a bright smile.
Milton looked up at the illuminated menu board on the wall behind the counter. “What’s good?”
“You had a Double-Double before?”
“First time I’ve eaten here.”
“Two patties, two cheese slices, lettuce, tomatoes, raw onions and Thousand Island dressing on the bun. You should try it. Seriously. Best burger in town.”
Milton was famished and, although Jessica had said she wasn’t hungry, he figured she’d change her mind after the adrenalin subsided. “I’ll take two.”
He added fries and sodas, paid, then picked up his numbered receipt and went to the table while the food was being prepared. Jessica was fretting with a napkin, tearing it into neat strips and then placing the strips one atop the other. Her phone was on the table. The screen was lit.
“You okay?” Milton asked her.
“Not really.”
“I know this is hard.”
“You think?”
He ignored the snark. “He’s alive,” he said. “Your father. I’m sure.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because the guy on the radio said so.”
“What did he say?”
“I told him that I was going to call the police, and he said that wouldn’t be good for your father.”
“And you believe him?”
“I do. If they were going to kill him, they would have done it in the house. What would be the point in taking him away? No. They want something from him. That’s why they came back for you, too—you’re extra leverage to get it from him.”
“But what? What do they want?”
“I don’t know,” Milton said. “I don’t think your brother is with them. I asked—he said he wasn’t, and there would be no reason to lie.”
“So where is he?”
“You should try to call him again.”
“I just did,” she said, tapping a finger against the lit screen of her phone. “Same thing—voicemail again.”
“Keep trying,” Milton said.
Two drunken couples took the table next to them. Jessica glanced over at them, then back at Milton.
“This guy,” she said, her voice a little lower. “Who is he?”
“He said his name is Oscar. That ring any bells?”
“I don’t know anyone called Oscar.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I said I don’t,” she snapped. “Jesus.”
The server called out Milton’s number, and he went up to the counter to collect his tray of food.
“Sorry,” Jessica said to him when he returned.
“It’s no problem.”
She looked down at her phone, as if expecting a message that might clear everything up. “Why has he done this? Taken Dad? What has he ever done to him?”
“That’s what we need to work out. You can start by telling me what your father does for a living. You said he worked for the casinos. You said he was in IT?”
“Yes,” she said. “Network security.”
Milton pushed one of the burgers and a packet of fries towards Jessica, unwrapped his own burger and took a bite. “What does that involve?”
“I don’t know. It wasn’t like I went and hung out with him. He went to his job; he came home from his job.”
Milton took a second bite and then set the burger down on the greaseproof paper. “He must have talked about it, though?”
“Sometimes. But it wasn’t like we had these long discussions. I’m not interested in computers, and he was discreet. I think a lot of the stuff he did was sensitive. Talking about it would’ve got him fired.”
“Was there any stress?”
“He never said. Why?”
“I’m trying to work out what might be behind what happened. Maybe it’s to do with money.”
“Meaning?”
“There is a lot of money in the resorts,” Milton said, dancing around the implication. “It might be valuable to the wrong sort of person.”
