The Lupin Project

by Allan Leverone

  And admired his cool.

  Once he’d gotten them turned around and safely into the middle of the road, Rob accelerated smoothly, and soon the gunman disappeared into the murky darkness and falling snow behind the Jeep.

  “What the hell?” Alicia said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “That’s an understatement,” Rob agreed. “You said you thought it was a Humvee that rolled up the logging trail last night after Eddie got killed. That was a Humvee back there that tried to run us off the road. Is it the same vehicle you saw?”

  “I can’t say for sure, but I think so. The paint job looked the same and I’ve never seen a truck like that around New Quebec before yesterday. What are the odds I’d see two different ones on consecutive days?”

  He nodded. In the dim light emitted by the Jeep’s instrumentation, she could see the color slowly returning to his face. She was beginning to breathe more normally as well.

  “Second question, and I think I know the answer,” he said. “Are those the same two guys you saw last night?”

  She squinted out the rear window as if to double-check, but they were long gone. “Again, I’m not positive. We were a little too far away when they climbed out of their truck to say for sure, but I think so.”

  “It makes sense,” he said.

  “Why would they try to kill us? Even if those are the two men I saw last night, neither one of them saw me. I’m certain of that. How would they even know who I am?”

  “The New Quebec Police know who you are, remember? If the local cops are involved in some way, is it much of a stretch to assume they would have shared that information with those two idiots?”

  Alicia shook her head. “My God,” she muttered. The full realization of how much trouble she was in only now began to dawn on her. Suddenly she felt every bit as cold as she had standing outside in the falling snow. Maybe colder.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Even if the New Quebec Police told those men about me, how did they find us today? We’re not even in my car.”

  “They must have been watching your house. Or maybe they watched my house—after all, it was my brother who got killed—and then followed me to our meeting at Dunkin’ Donuts. If the police are involved, and at this point I think we have to assume they are, then they know all about both of us: where we live, what kind of cars we drive, everything.”

  Icy tentacles wrapped themselves around Alicia’s heart. She didn’t think she would ever feel warm—or safe—again.

  “There’s one thing I don’t understand, though,” Rob continued.

  “What’s that?” Alicia was grateful not to be alone, even if only for the moment. The act of talking about what had happened was helping keep her grounded, helping to prevent her imagination from running wild with grisly possibilities, and she welcomed the opportunity to continue the conversation.

  “Why did those two wait until after we drove out of the logging trail to ambush us? They could have driven up behind us while we were deep in the forest and put bullets in our heads. Then they could have called for another ‘cleanup crew’ like last night, and we would simply have disappeared without a trace, just like Eddie.”

  Alicia started to say, “Would anyone really do such a thing?” but closed her mouth before getting the words out. Of course someone would do such a thing. If she weren’t aware of that reality before last night, she most certainly was aware of it now.

  So she swallowed back those words and instead said, “What happens next?” Her mother would have left for her sister’s house in Paskagankee by now, and the prospect of spending the rest of the weekend alone, knowing two pyschos were out there somewhere in the snow, on a mission to put her in a shallow grave, filled her with dread.

  Rob’s answer indicated he had been considering the same question. “I don’t want to make things seem worse than they already are, but—”

  “I doubt that’s possible.”

  “Don’t be so sure. We’ve already decided we can’t go to the police, either here in New Quebec or the Staties in Concord.” He looked across the front seat, holding her gaze for a moment before returning his attention to the snowy road. “I don’t think you should go home. You wouldn’t be safe. Those guys either know where you live or can find out pretty easily.”

  “But what do I do instead? We can’t drive around all night and I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “I say we rent a cheap motel and lie low until we can figure out our next move. We have a few different choices, thanks to the winter ski business. We’ll be completely anonymous, which means we should also be completely safe.”

  “I don’t have money for a motel, even a cheap one.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I have enough money, at least for a couple of days.”

  “But what if they have the capability of tracking your credit card? Won’t that lead them right to us?”

  “I won’t be using a credit card. Good old-fashioned cash is untraceable, no matter how sophisticated these guys are. And where we’re going, they’ll be only too happy to accept cash.”

  A rush of relief blew through Alicia like a hurricane. It was followed immediately by an uncomfortable thought. “You said ‘we.’ There’s no reason for you to hide. You didn’t see anything last night.”

  “But I saw everything that just happened today, and while nobody got murdered this afternoon—luckily—those guys have seen my Jeep and they undoubtedly know who it belongs to. Or if they don’t, they will soon. I doubt I’d be a target in my parents’ home, but I’m not willing to bet my life on it.”

  “You could always go back to school.”

  “There’s no guarantee I’d be safe there, either, but that’s really beside the point. My brother just got killed, and you and I damned near followed him into the grave. I’m not leaving New Quebec until I get some answers, and some justice for Eddie.”

  19

  By the time Toler returned to the damaged Humvee, waving his gun around like a lunatic and muttering curses under his breath, Jason had climbed back into the front seat. The engine had quit when the truck hit the tree, but it was still much warmer inside the truck than out. For now, at least.

  Jason resisted the urge to shake his head at the colonel’s rash actions. He could have told Toler there was no way the Jeep’s driver was going to sit there and allow a raving madman to walk up to the vehicle and put a bullet in his head—thank God—but at the moment Toler walked away from the Hummer he’d had been so lost in his unreasoning rage that he wouldn’t have paid any attention anyway.

  Or maybe he’d have put a couple of slugs in Jason’s head, just for opening his mouth.

  Jason had held out a tiny bit of hope that the colonel’s anger might have leached away in the wind and the cold and the snow, but it was not to be. The Frank Toler who climbed into the Humvee was every bit as angry as the Toler who had tried to run an innocent driver off the road and then approached that same person with the intention of shooting him to death.

  “This is all your fault,” Toler said. He slammed the door closed and fixed Jason with a malevolent gaze. Apparently he thought Jason might have missed his dozen or so other accusations of blame.

  Jason hoped the colonel wasn’t waiting for an answer, because he was afraid to open his mouth. After a long moment, during which he tried to look unafraid but doubted he came close to succeeding, Colonel Toler turned his attention to his cell phone. He lifted it out of its holder and punched in a series of numbers, then pressed the send button and lifted the phone to his ear.

  A moment later he started speaking. “This has been a fucking disaster. I’m off the road, up against a tree on Route 9 and I need a new vehicle. I also need this truck towed out of here for repairs. And I need these things ASAP.”

  Toler knitted his eyebrows together in concentration as the person on the other end of the call responded. “Thirty minutes isn’t good enough. I can’t take the chance a police patrol will come by and find us h
ere. Haviland could smooth things over eventually, but it would cost valuable time, and time is a luxury I do not have.”

  Another silence, and then Toler’s simmering anger exploded again. He raised his voice and shouted into the phone. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing you can do about it. I have more than enough dirt on you to sink your career, and send you to jail to boot. If you want those skeletons to stay in that closet, you’d better goddamned well get here in fifteen minutes!”

  He disconnected the call and threw the phone onto the front seat, and Jason was once again the focal point of Colonel Frank Toler’s anger.

  Jason Greeley hoped he would survive the next fifteen minutes.

  20

  The Sleepy Logger Motel was old and run-down, but to Alicia’s surprise seemed reasonably clean and fairly well maintained. It was one of a handful of lodging establishments that had remained in business following the collapse of New Quebec’s logging industry back in the 1970s and 1980s. Now they relied on the winter ski trade for their survival, counting on the months between November and April to provide enough operating capital to stagger through another summer and fall.

  At the height of the logging boom, there had been well over two-dozen motels lining Route 9 south of New Quebec proper. Over the years, that number had been whittled down to six stubborn holdouts. Alicia wondered whether the cluster of ancient wood-framed buildings, lined up one after the other along the route into town, would be sufficient to prevent the pair who’d tried to kill them a little while ago from finding them if they felt sufficiently motivated to do so.

  “I think we’ll be okay,” Rob said. “Granted, these fleabag motels are located on the same stretch of highway where we nearly became road kill, but that encounter took place more than five miles from here.”

  Alicia’s skepticism must have shown on her face, because he added, “I’ll hide my Jeep at a buddy’s house and borrow his truck. The guys who are after us would have no way of recognizing it, so unless they plan on breaking down the doors of every unit in all six motels, they’ll have no way of finding us, even if they correctly assume we’re hiding out at one of them.”

  Alicia tried to come up with a flaw in his reasoning but couldn’t do it. “Your friend will let you borrow his car?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? I’ll leave my keys with him. My Jeep is a hell of a lot nicer than his old rust bucket even considering the damage that asshole did to my rear bumper a little while ago. My friend has nothing to lose.”

  A matching pair of single beds took up most of the tiny room, and Alicia sat perched on the edge of the one closest the door. She felt awkward and uncomfortable, and Rob seemed to feel the same. He remained standing, leaning a hip against the ratty TV stand placed against the far wall.

  After a moment of silence he said, “You should call your mother and get her out of your house for a day or two. I don’t know whether the crazy bastards from earlier would be bold enough to break in, but I wouldn’t bet against it.”

  She shook her head. “My mother isn’t home. She’s been planning to spend the weekend at her sister’s house in Maine. I’m sure she’s been there for hours by now. She’s probably half in the bag already.” Alicia spoke the last sentence lightly, as if making a joke, hoping the pain she felt didn’t show in her voice.

  No such luck. Rob said, “There’s no shame in having issues to deal with, Alicia. I know your dad left years ago and I’m sure it’s hard growing up with an alcoholic mother.”

  Alicia felt her face burning. She stared steadfastly down at the ancient carpeting as her eyes filled with tears. Why had she said anything?

  “But,” he continued, “somebody did a great job of parenting somewhere along the line, because you’re a daughter any parent would be proud of.”

  She didn’t trust herself to speak without dissolving into tears. She was still in seventh grade when Rob graduated from New Quebec High, so she had never known him. But the school system was as small and incestuous as the town—keeping secrets in a place like New Quebec, New Hampshire was practically impossible—so it didn’t surprise her to learn that Eddie Senna had been aware of her shabby family history. The fact that he had shared that history with his big brother was either horrifying or touching, depending upon how and why he had done so.

  Maybe it was both.

  “I wasn’t trying to embarrass you, Alicia” Rob said softly. “I just think you need to understand that we all have dirty laundry, and no family is going to hold up too well under bright lights and close inspection. So try not to be too hard on your mother. I’m sure she did the best she could under her own difficult circumstances. And like I said, you turned out pretty well, so she must have done something right.

  “Anyway,” he continued before she could answer, which was good because there was no way she could speak right now without breaking into tears and suffering further humiliation. “If you feel like you’ll be safe here, I’ve got to go for a little while.”

  Alicia looked up in alarm. It was one thing to stay in this depressing little slice of Northern Redneck Americana with Rob Senna, Mr. Reassurance, but it was another matter entirely to sit here by herself, mulling over the events that had taken place since last night and imagining men with guns—or preternaturally intelligent wolves, for that matter—bursting through the rotting wooden door and doing to her what had been done to Eddie.

  She had cheated death twice now in less than twenty-four hours, what were the odds she could manage a third time?

  Her sudden spike of fear must have been obvious to Rob. His eyes widened and he lifted his hands, palms out. “Don’t worry, I won’t be gone long. I promise. I want to get back as quickly as possible, because we need to figure out what to do next. But I have to get home and let my parents know about Eddie. It’s cruel to allow them to go on believing he may still be alive when I know he’s not.”

  “Of course. I understand,” Alicia said. Now she felt embarrassed and selfish. She’d been wrapped up in her own problems, once again completely ignoring the fact that Rob’s were so much worse. “You warned me to get my mother out of our house. Shouldn’t your parents go somewhere else, too?”

  “By now, my whole family is probably there, aunts and uncles and assorted nieces and nephews, all wanting to help find Eddie. It will make breaking the news about his death much more difficult, but with that many people in the house, they won’t be in any danger. I’d almost feel sorry for anyone stupid enough to try to break in.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Alicia muttered. “They’d be getting exactly what they deserve.”

  Rob’s eyebrows knitted together as he was quiet for a moment. “Jesus,” he said. “I’m an idiot. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this sooner.”

  “Think of what? What are you talking about?”

  “I just got done explaining that my parents will be safe at home because we’ll have a whole houseful of people. There’s no reason why the same theory shouldn’t apply to you.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning the hell with this motel. You should come to my house with me. You can stay there overnight, or even longer, until we figure out what to—”

  “No.”

  “Excuse me? Why not? My folks are going to be devastated about Eddie, but they’re not going to blame you. You’re as much an innocent victim as Eddie was.”

  “I’m sure your parents are very sweet, but I’m not worried about them blaming me. That’s not why I said no.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Rob, you’re probably right that your parents will be safe inside a full house. But I don’t think we can make that same assumption if I’m in there with them. These people tried to run us off a public road, and then came at us with a gun in the middle of that public road. A police car or any other witness could have come along at any moment. It was an extremely risky thing for them to do. What does that tell you?”

  “That they’re desperate.”

  “Exactly. If they fi
gure out I’m inside your house, there’s no reason to believe they won’t try something equally desperate, and I’m not putting your family at risk. I just can’t do that.”

  Rob spread his hands in exasperation. “How would they ever find out you’re at my house?”

  “They don’t have to find it out. Think about it, Rob. There are only so many places we can go. If they were watching your house before, who’s to say they’re not watching it now?”

  He shook his head in frustration but didn’t argue.

  “I just can’t take the chance of being the reason something bad happens to another member of your family. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

  “Besides,” she added. “You’ve convinced me. This place is a perfect hiding spot until the storm blows through and we can figure out our next move. Like you said, I’m sure I’ll be completely safe here.”

  He sighed. “Okay. I still think those guys would get more than they bargained for if they tried to get at you inside my house, but I understand your point.”

  “There’s something else,” Alicia said. The prospect of spending the night alone in this ancient motel, with the wind howling outside and nothing for company inside but the shadows, was terrifying, but she knew she’d never be able to forgive herself if she didn’t say what she was thinking.

  So she did. “You said your parents are going to be devastated when they hear about Eddie, and I know you already are. You should be with your family. Don’t come back here tonight. Stay home.”

  “No.” Rob’s voice was firm. “I’m not leaving you to face this alone. Eddie was killed, but you were victimized also, and I won’t allow you to deal with it by yourself.”

  Tears filled her eyes. Again. Her mother’s betrayal last night at the police station had left her feeling isolated and hurt, and Rob Senna’s words were like a soothing balm; aloe vera for her soul.

  “Thank you,” she said without looking up.