Out of Control

by Sarah Alderson

  He struggles to swallow his smile. ‘We need to be inside somewhere,’ he says. ‘We need to sleep. And eat. And you need a change of clothes.’ He rubs a hand across his eyes.

  ‘You don’t need to do this,’ I say. It’s clear he’s having second thoughts about agreeing to stick with me.

  His eyes flash to me. ‘I know,’ he almost growls. ‘You don’t need to keep reminding me. Let’s just say I’m repaying a debt. Not just to you. A karmic one.’

  He believes in karma? It’s my turn to raise an eyebrow. After what I saw today I don’t believe in God or karma. Not that I did before. After what happened to Felix when I was twelve years old, I stopped believing in God or justice and started believing only in man’s capacity for evil and in the intrinsic unfairness of life. What good did karma do the Goodmans or the cops that died in that police station?

  ‘I’ll stay with you until you can get to your dad. Until I know you’re OK. Then I’m gone.’

  I nod at the ground. I want to say thank you, but I’m not sure how he’d take it.

  ‘We just need to find somewhere to hole up.’

  ‘There’s always my dad’s apartment,’ I blurt. ‘We could grab some clothes, some money. I could leave him a note.’ I’m aware that I’m talking fast, rattling on, trying to make a case. ‘There’s cash in the safe. For emergencies . . .’

  ‘Your dad’s apartment?’ Jay interrupts. He’s biting the bottom corner of his lip and his left eyebrow – the one with the scar dissecting it – is raised.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, excited now. Why didn’t I think of this before? It was staring me in the face. ‘It’s in Manhattan,’ I say. ‘We’re near the bridge. We can walk. It’s only a couple of miles.’ I glance around me. Actually I have no idea how many miles it is because I don’t even know where we are, but I suddenly feel energised enough by having a plan that I don’t care if it’s ten miles, or even twenty. ‘Come on, let’s go,’ I say, starting to march faster back towards the river. We need to find a bridge.

  ‘Liva.’

  I look over my shoulder. Jay hasn’t moved from his spot standing in the shade of a tree. It’s casting shadows over his face, hollowing out his already tired eyes.

  ‘Yeah?’ I say. Why isn’t he moving? We have to get off the streets.

  ‘They found you in the house tonight. They found you at the police station. They even found you at the pick-up point. You don’t think they’ll have thought to find you there? At your dad’s place?’

  The air hisses out of me like I’ve been punctured. Goddamn it. I sink to the kerb. He’s right. Why does he have to be right? I rest my head on my arms. It feels suddenly as heavy as a bag of bricks. I am so tired. I need some water. I need a shower. I need for everything to stop and to go back to the way it was. Why is this happening? It’s Monday morning. I should be making my way to dance class, taking the subway for the first time on my own. I should not be sitting on the street with some gang member who steals cars, trying to figure out how to stay alive for the next twenty-four hours.

  ‘Maybe I should just go to the police,’ I mumble to my feet.

  ‘Because it’s been proved that police stations are really safe and that the police do not have it in for you. At all.’

  ‘Well, where then?’ I yell, surprising both of us. ‘Where do I go? Who can I trust?’

  Jay doesn’t answer me. And after glaring at him for as long as I can, I rest my head back on my knees and shut my eyes.

  ‘OK,’ Jay says finally. ‘We go to your dad’s apartment. We got no other choice.’

  My head flies up.

  ‘We case it first though,’ he says, eyeing me warily. ‘We don’t just walk straight in. We sneak in. We do as you say, grab a change of clothes, some money, leave your dad a note and then we’re gone.’

  I ignore the fact he used the word case as casually as I use the word OK – as though casing joints is something he does regularly. ‘It’s an Upper East Side apartment. You can’t just sneak in,’ I point out, already starting to walk towards the river.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ Jay says, running to catch me up.

  12

  It’s not about me being a witness. The final dot materialised a while ago in my mind but I kept ignoring it, shoving it aside, not wanting to face up to the picture that was slowly taking shape. When Jay asked me why they hadn’t shot at me I told him I didn’t know. But I did. Or I had an idea at least. I just didn’t want to admit it to myself, let alone to him. But as we climb the steps on to the bridge the picture is revealed as surely as the skyline of New York right ahead of us.

  I was twelve. We were living in Nigeria. My dad’s company was doing business with a lot of the oil companies in the region. We lived in a compound like every other ex-pat who didn’t have a death or kidnapping wish, and I went to an international school that had more security around it than the Pentagon. We had maids and a driver and I had my very own bodyguard – Felix. Sound over the top? Not to my father – his company is a private security firm. Felix was one of his men. And at twelve years old I didn’t know any different anyway. Before Nigeria we lived in Pakistan – not exactly Disneyland. My whole childhood was spent behind electronic gates, around adults who packed firearms and spoke in military-sounding acronyms about things like collateral, targets and marks.

  My father is paranoid – he says he has to be. Paranoia keeps his clients – and he has many of the wealthiest people in the world on his client roster – alive and in good health. His company provides surveillance and close protection to oil barons, royal families, government officials and bank personnel in developing countries – the kind of people who are often targeted by criminal gangs. He also supplies private contractors in places like Iraq and Afghanistan – that’s another more polite term for mercenaries – people who basically get paid to play Call of Duty for real and who work for the highest bidder rather than for king, country, or because they’re inspired by that little thing called patriotic duty.

  The specialist work, which my dad mainly handles himself, involves dealing with hostage-taking and kidnapping cases, especially in countries where corruption is so endemic the police can’t be trusted. A lot of the time the police are the ones behind the crime in the first place. Maybe that’s why I’m so sceptical about trusting them now.

  Felix was with me from the age of seven. A constant at my side, with a Glock 19 in a holster under his jacket and my schoolbag over his arm. He came with me to school and he picked me up at the end of the day. He took me to ballet class and sat and watched me plié and curtsey and try to pirouette. He even used to pin my hair in a bun when it came loose; his scarred, rough hands more used to stripping gun parts, gentle as could be as he tried to figure out how bobby pins worked. He came with me on play-dates and more often than not he was my play-date. He taught me to swim. He taught me darts. He taught me to play poker (when my dad wasn’t around). He taught me bad jokes, and basic self-defence moves like sticking thumbs in eyeballs and aiming for the balls. He taught me how to read body language and to recognise the little tells when someone is lying – the heightened pitch of a voice, a lack of hesitation when answering questions – things like that. He taught me how to make bacon caramel popcorn and he taught me not to be afraid of the dark.

  He died on a street in broad daylight, his blood draining out his body before my eyes.

  He died because of me.

  They weren’t trying to shoot me then either, the three men who cut us up in a rusting van on the way back from school and jumped out waving shotguns and yelling – they were trying to kidnap me. That’s what my father told me later, weeks after Felix’s funeral, when I was just coming out of my catatonic state of shock but still refusing to speak.

  They had thought I was some diplomat’s kid. At any rate a kid with parents who were rich enough to send her to the international school in the centre of Lagos in a blacked-out Mercedes car. The kidnappers couldn’t actually tell us what they were thinking or why they chose
me, because they were all too dead to talk. Felix shot and killed two of them during the gun battle that ensued and the third – well, he died too, shortly afterwards. My dad claimed the police had caught him and he’d been shot attempting to escape custody, but I have a theory that it wasn’t the police that caught up with him at all. It wasn’t like my father to rely on the police for anything. He would have had someone from his team straight on it. He never leaves stray threads hanging.

  I guess the kidnappers should have done their research better when they picked me as a target.

  As I walk along beside Jay that’s what I’m thinking of. I’m thinking of Felix and about the similarities between that day and this. They didn’t shoot me then, they shot Felix and they shot my driver. They needed me alive to get the ransom. But if they are trying to kidnap me, who is Agent Kassel and what does she have to do with anything?

  Jay glances over at me. ‘What’s up?’ he asks. ‘You look like you just saw a ghost.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I mumble. ‘Just tired.’

  He mutters something under his breath.

  ‘What is that?’ I ask. ‘Spanish?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  We’re halfway across the bridge. The view from here is incredible. The whole of Manhattan lies gleaming and proud. If any city can be said to thrust, then it’s Manhattan. The spit of land it sits on thrusts out into the water and the buildings thrust up into the sky. Even the Freedom Tower, which stands close to where the Twin Towers once stood, is tall and proud and defiant. The iconic Brooklyn Bridge straddles the river just down from us, a moving cloud of people swarming over it like locusts about to descend on the city and strip it bare. I’m glad we chose the Manhattan Bridge route. It’s almost devoid of pedestrian traffic, though trains rumble across regularly above us, and from the Lycra on display it seems to be popular with joggers.

  We’ve been walking for an hour and I’ve given up on trying to wipe away the sweat. My hair is plastered to my neck and my lips are dried and cracking. My knees sting and smart with every step I take and my shoulder is so tender that it jars with every stride.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I ask, squinting at Jay.

  ‘New York,’ Jay replies, offering me a sardonic look in return.

  ‘No. I mean, your heritage,’ I say, pressing on. ‘Where are your family from, originally?’

  ‘I’m half Cuban. The better-looking half at least.’

  ‘And the modest half?’ I ask.

  He laughs under his breath. ‘My father was Irish-American. He ran out on us though when I was three. So I hope I didn’t inherit shit from him.’

  Fair enough, I think to myself, studying him anew. Half Cuban, yeah that makes sense. The eyes, the tan skin, the way he moves, cruising a very fine line between sexy and don’t mess with me. Hell – did I really just think the word sexy? Clearly I’m delirious with dehydration, shock and endorphin overload. He’s a car thief. And he’s a gang member. Really not sexy. I need to get a grip.

  ‘You not hot?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ I ask, wondering if my heat-addled brain misheard.

  ‘You look hot.’ He rolls his eyes in the face of my dislocating jaw. ‘I meant you’re sweating. Why don’t you take off the sweater? It’s kind of attracting attention, little Miss NYPD.’

  What’s beneath will probably attract more, I think to myself. I shake my head at him and increase the length of my strides, even though it makes me sweat even more.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ I hear Jay say, then after a few seconds he catches me up. ‘Wait, are you naked underneath that?’

  ‘No!’ I yell, staring at him. God, what is with the interrogation? ‘What’s it to you anyway?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just going to offer you my T-shirt to wear if you needed it, you know, to protect your modesty.’

  ‘Really?’ I ask, not sure if he’s joking.

  ‘No. Not really,’ he answers, grinning at me. He glances down at his T-shirt. ‘It’s kind of filthy.’

  I shake my head at him, then exhale loudly, blowing my hair out of my sweaty face. I’m so hot. If I have to keep wearing the damn sweater I’m probably going to collapse from heat stroke and dehydration. ‘Don’t stare,’ I warn him. ‘If you stare I’m putting it back on.’

  ‘Hey,’ he says, doing that I surrender gesture with his hands again, ‘It’s your call. I’m just saying. You look hot . . .’ He presses his lips together to rein in the laugh. ‘Sweaty, I mean.’

  I walk ahead of him a few steps and tear off the sweater, instantly relishing the prickle of air against my sweat-coated skin. I glance down. At least it’s not a white camisole top. It’s pink. I pull it away from where it’s stuck to my skin and hear Jay make a whistling sound through his teeth behind me.

  I whip my head around. He is of course looking in the opposite direction. But I can tell he’s grinning. I ball up the sweater and hold it against my chest, my cheeks on fire. If I didn’t need it to cover myself with it I’d throw it at his head.

  ‘You’re making a lot of joggers very, very happy,’ Jay says. He’s snuck up behind me, walking in my shadow, and his breath hits the back of my neck making me shiver. Or maybe it’s just the wind off the East River. Or shock working its way out of my system. I grit my teeth and say nothing, marching on ahead of him, refusing to let on he’s riled me. He catches me up.

  ‘So how far is it from here?’ he asks, his attention on the cityscape stretching out ahead of us like it’s a stage set cut out of card.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admit, eyeing the never-ending spread of skyscrapers against the achingly-blue, painted sky.

  ‘How can you not know? It’s your apartment, right?’

  ‘No. It’s my dad’s apartment. I only just moved here to live with him.’

  Jay sidesteps out of the way of a jogger. ‘Where were you living before?’ he asks.

  ‘Oman.’

  His eyebrows shoot up. ‘In the Middle East?’

  I glance at him, trying not to look surprised that he knows where Oman is. Normally when I tell people I get asked things like: Is that a state in the Mid-West? Or, Is that where they found Osama Bin Laden hiding out? ‘Yeah,’ I say.

  ‘Bet you wish you’d stayed put.’

  I press my lips together, remembering my last few days there. They weren’t much fun either. My mum yelling at me for getting expelled, my father trying to convince her to let me come to the States with him, friends treating me as if I was contagious or just plain mental.

  ‘You’re American though, right?’ Jay asks.

  ‘Half,’ I tell him, ‘like you.’

  ‘The hot half or the modest half?’ He’s nudging me with his eyes, trying to get a reaction or a smile out of me, but I feel like I’m running on empty. I have no smile to give.

  ‘My dad’s American,’ I say tiredly. ‘My mum’s half English, half Russian.’

  I can feel his eyes skimming me, checking me out in the light of this new information, and I stare straight ahead, focussing on the rooftops getting closer, wishing I could take a flying leap from the bridge like Spider-Man and find myself clinging to the top of the Empire State Building.

  Jay’s gaze burns. I have my mother’s pale English skin and Slavic features – overly-full lips, blue-grey eyes that slant a little, and my father’s poker-straight brown hair. It’s a weird combination. It took me a very long time to grow into my features and some days I’m not sure I have or that I ever will. I hate people scrutinising me. My shoulders pull back and my chin lifts as though I’m standing in a ballet studio in front of an examiner. I will myself to shrink a few inches and for my hips to get smaller, even as I squeeze the sweater tighter against my chest. My skin prickles with heat.

  Jay doesn’t make that sucking noise through his teeth. He doesn’t make another comment in fact about my looks or my family or where I’m from. All he says is, ‘This crime that you witnessed, it wasn’t at the apartment, right? We’re not about to walk into a place that’s criss-cro
ssed with yellow tape and overrun with police?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I was staying with friends of my father’s in Brooklyn for a few days while he was out the country.’

  ‘The old man doesn’t trust you not to party while he’s away?’

  ‘No. He just likes to know where I am.’ Kind of goes with the territory, I add silently.

  After the attempted kidnapping in Nigeria we moved to Oman, where it was safer, but my dad never eased up on the whole personal security. In fact, he doubled it. I was the only kid in my new school with not one, but two personal security guards to accompany me on the school run. It was one of the reasons my mother left him and hooked up with Sven, the doctor with as much personality as a jar of pickled herring. My father was obsessed with tracking our every move, and it got too much for her.

  My dad only eased up on the close protection in the last year or so, realising finally I think, that his paranoia had cost him his wife and was about to cost him his only daughter. I mean, try going out for dinner accompanied by a six foot two Israeli bodyguard who likes to flash his gun every time your date leans in too close.

  Yeah, having a bodyguard did wonders for my social life, but as Jay and I head down off the bridge and enter the grid of streets that make up Manhattan, I muse on the realisation that maybe my dad had a point with the close protection after all.

  13

  I tell Jay the address and he heads us in the right direction. At least I think he’s heading us in the right direction until he crosses the road and I see he’s making for a subway entrance.

  ‘Woah,’ I say, grabbing his arm. ‘I thought you said we didn’t have enough money for the subway.’

  ‘We don’t. But I’m not walking five hundred blocks.’

  ‘It’s not that far.’

  ‘It’s not that near either. If I’d have known your dad lived in Trump Tower I would never have agreed to walk. I thought you knew where we were going and that it was within walking distance. In case it’s escaped your attention Manhattan is BIG.’