You're Next

by Gregg Hurwitz

  ‘And Kat’ll what? Ride shotgun?’ He was pacing the corridor, the cleaning woman’s broom unnaturally loud, closing in on him, grinding at his nerves – SHHOOP SHHOOP SHHOOP. He turned, nearly tripping over her, but her head stayed bent as she squatted to touch dustpan to floor, the hollows of her eyes catching shadows. From the buds tucked into her pillowy, wrinkle-creased ears, music radiated faintly, a mariachi squall of violin and trumpet. He looked past a hunched shoulder to see, scattered in the spray of dirt and cigarette butts she’d shoved in from the parking lot, the hulls of innumerable split sunflower seeds, still gleaming with spit.

  The phone was falling from his hand, turning in slow motion, shattering on the concrete.

  The unit at his hip fuzzed Kat’s yelp into something like the buzz of a wasp.

  And he was sprinting, ten yards of panic scored by staticky commotion from the monitor, which he’d slapped to highest volume – a thud, the screech of metal on metal, hoarse, muffled bellowing.

  He took the door clean off the cheap hinges.

  The bed was bare.

  Kat – and the sleeping bag she’d been tucked into – were gone.

  Chapter 40

  The bedspread, smeared to the right, pointed at the window. Curtains rolled on a breeze. A dirt smudge marred the chair cushion where a large boot had set down.

  Something primal rose from Mike’s bones, from the twisted ladders of his cells, firing his nerves, setting his skin ablaze.

  The hip unit broadcast Kat’s shrieking, the rumble of an engine, violent rustling. Echoes of the sounds floated through the open window, coming at him in stereo. He dashed across, hands on the sill, leaning out in time to see a receding white square at the end of the alley. The square turned, elongating into a van.

  How? How had Dodge and William hunted them down?

  Kat’s cries warbled nightmarishly from his hip, and it took a moment for Mike to ground them in reality; they’d scooped her up in the sleeping bag and carried her off like a cat in a pillow-case, the baby monitor slipping unseen down with her.

  He yelled after the van as it motored from view. Leaped through the window. Got six frantic steps down the alley before strategy flashed back into reach, and he backtracked, racing for the Honda. He left four feet of rubber peeling out and clipped the corner screeching into the alley.

  The monitor gave out a steady roar of pure static. The van had traveled out of range, breaking the connection. He fishtailed out the far end of the alley onto a quiet residential street, but the van was gone. Reception stuttered back – Kat screaming for him – and then was lost again in a sea of crackling. He accelerated, hit an intersection, took a hard right.

  Pure static.

  He swung into a U-turn, smashing into a parked Bimmer, and flew the other way. Crackling, cracking, and finally the faintest edge of reception broke through the fuzz.

  William’s voice, ‘—better be quiet back there or else—’

  Gone. Static, full bore.

  Mike locked up the brakes and reversed, sending the truck behind him veering up onto someone’s front lawn. The blare of its horn faded as Mike zipped down a side street, the low-volume light bar of the monitor flaring, flaring, then catching fire.

  Kat’s shouting grew clearer as he accelerated, and he picked up the van on a parallel street, flicking into view behind fences and side yards. His head snapped back and forth – road, van, road, van – trying to keep tabs on the vehicle as it passed through cones of light dropped by streetlamps. The van peeled right, away from him, and the monitor light fell dead. He jumped a curb, skidded across a lawn, took out a side fence, and careened through a backyard. A guy looked up from his barbecue, sod flying at him, his Doberman leaping to safety. Mike plowed through a fence and across an embankment, screeching north across two lanes of traffic, cars skidding, the monitor giving up nothing but roaring static. The edge of a scream fought itself audible, vanished into the white noise, then wavered back again. He revved, nosing around cars, flying around alley Dumpsters, desperate not to snap the spider thread connecting him to his daughter.

  Reception grew clearer. He guessed on a left turn, and it grew clearer still. Leaving a wake of smoke, he floated through a gas station mostly sideways, the overburdened Japanese engine squealing at him in complaint. He swung to take in the whole road – no white van, no white van, no white van – as the car righted itself, the spinning wheels catching and ripping him forward into a strip mall’s parking lot.

  Kat’s screams were torturously distinct, driving him to a razor-edged frenzy, but she could’ve been any direction on the compass rose, and he thought his head would explode from sheer terrorized rage when he caught the flick-flick-flick of a white van through the slats of the fence at the parking lot’s end.

  He dropped the pedal to the floor, blasting into the fence. There was no impact separation between slats and van, just an instantaneous smash of wood and vehicle, the van crimping around the nose of the Civic and rocking to a halt, a cloud of splinters settling dreamlike over the steaming catastrophe. Mike kicked out of the car, gun raised, closing ground as William coughed and blinked dust from his eyes in the crumpled driver’s seat of the van.

  The dented side door was hanging open, Dodge filling the rear interior, the sleeping bag cinched like a heavy sack in one block of a fist, ball-peen hammer drawn back at the pinnacle of a windup. Tripping through the jagged mouth of the fence, Mike had no clear shot at Dodge, but he jammed the Smith & Wesson through the open driver’s window into William’s cheek.

  Dodge froze in his windup. The powder blue sack bulged and writhed. William’s hands were up, stiff-fingered, and he was saying, ‘Whoa there, pal.’

  Dodge shifted so the sleeping bag was pinned against the floor, the bulge of Kat’s head isolated through the baby blue puff of the sleeping bag, a grapefruit grasped in his palm. Muffled cries and whimpers. The hammer wavered overhead.

  Mike had no quick, clear angle on Dodge, but the men’s eyes met above the seat back, and Dodge must have respected whatever he saw, because he said, ‘On three.’

  Kat was coughing and sputtering. The whine of a police siren was joined by a few others, baying like predators.

  Mike nodded faintly. His voice was steadier than he’d ever heard it. ‘One . . . two . . . three.’

  Holding his hands up, William began a graceless slide toward the passenger seat, Mike keeping the sights lined on the scruff of his neck. In the back Dodge lowered the hammer to his side an inch at a time. As the sirens grew louder, Mike became vaguely aware of movement in his peripheral vision, bystanders ducking behind cars and into the 7-Eleven just ahead. William pushed through the far door and spilled onto the ground, Mike leaning to keep his head in the revolver’s sights.

  Mike said, ‘Annabel’s cell phone. Two hours.’

  Dodge heaved the sleeping bag toward Mike. Mike had to lunge to catch her and by the time he looked up, Dodge and William were vanishing around the corner of the 7-Eleven, sprinting away.

  He shook Kat loose, grabbed her flushed face in both hands, savoring the blessed sight of her. She’d gone rubber-boned, and he held her until her legs firmed. She was intact. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘Now.’

  Stumbling after him, she grabbed Snowball II from the pavement and curled the stuffed animal to her chest. As Mike passed the van’s driver window, his gaze caught on a fat manila file wedged by the seat’s buckle guard, Mike Wingate written across the bright red tab in sloppy penmanship. Reaching through the window, he pried it free.

  Ahead, Dodge stumbled around the building back into sight and paused, palm on the brick wall. Mike glanced down at the folder in his hand; Dodge had come back for it. Mike grabbed Kat, took a step back, away. Dodge tensed to charge.

  Sirens screaming, closer. Closer.

  Dodge conceded, fading back around the corner. Mike and Kat started running in the other direction. As they scrambled through a stand of bushes at the lot’s edge, Mike caught flashes of blue and red spilling
through the intersection a quarter mile away.

  Backyards, alleys, streets – they ran for an eternity, alternating fits of speed-walking when they drew stares. Back at the motel, the manager and the maid were stupefied by the ruined door, surveying the damage. Mike shoved past them, grabbed the rucksack from the corner, and bolted.

  Kat moved swiftly at his side, mute and blanched. Four streets over he found an old Camry parked in a tiny driveway, the house beyond unlit. He smashed the driver’s window with a paver he plucked from the front walk. Reaching through the broken glass, he hit the garage clicker clipped to the visor. He told Kat to wait and ducked under the rising garage door. The interior door to the kitchen was unlocked, the car keys hanging on a hook by the light switch.

  Driving the Camry through the neighborhood, he passed the aftermath of the chase – dinged cars, torn-up grass, cop cars gliding in all directions. Four exits down the freeway, he was still reminding himself to breathe. He realized that the baby monitor was clipped to his hip and quickly pulled it free and tossed it down by his feet as if it were scalding to the touch.

  Leaving the Camry in a back lot four blocks away, they checked in to a motel tucked under a freeway ramp in Panorama City. He tried to talk to her, but she couldn’t get words out past her jerking breaths. For forty-five minutes, he sat on the bed, rocking Kat as her breathing calmed and her whimpers quieted. She stayed in a semi-fetal position, burrowed into him, needle-thin veins etched into her closed eyelids. Even after she fell asleep, he held on to her, rocking her, marveling at her warmth, at the miracle of having stolen her back.

  Finally he eased her gently beneath the covers and checked the clock. A half hour to his cell-phone date with William and Dodge.

  From the rucksack he retrieved an unused calling card and the stuffed folder he’d swiped from the smashed van. He set them side by side on the wobbly desk in the corner and clicked on the gooseneck lamp.

  When he opened the folder, information jumped off the page, hitting him in the face. He stared down silently for a few moments, drowning in disbelief. A report on Annabel’s parents, listing their phone numbers, addresses, vehicles, Social Security numbers, friends, former business partners, and places they’d traveled.

  This was the first page. There were hundreds more.

  With mounting alarm Mike leafed through the rest. Annabel’s siblings and cousins, Mike’s workers, subcontractors he’d used, doctors, neighbors, parents of Kat’s friends, ex-spouses of Annabel’s classmates in her teaching program. Page ninety-five solved the riddle of how William and Dodge had closed in on Mike and Kat. Beneath a picture of Jimmy’s girlfriend, Shelly, was the number of the license plates Mike had borrowed from her Mazda 626. The same number he’d dutifully written down at each motel when registering to ensure that his car wouldn’t be towed from the lot. A basic police flag on the plate number and a single phone call from a motel manager were all it took for Kat to be scooped off in the night.

  The file also held credit-card statements going back years, red circles marking hotels Mike and Annabel had stayed at, towns they’d visited, stores they’d shopped at regularly, places they’d ordered takeout from. Then there were phone bills of friends, even a few transcripts from what he assumed were tapped lines, his name underlined where mentioned – Wingate’s ass been all edgy. Made me stop at a cemetery on the way back from the stone yard and he just float around like a ghost. Further back the data reached into associates of associates, stretching through six degrees of separation, an aerial snapshot of the web into which the Wingates were nestled, a road map to their existence. There was information new to Mike: Kat’s first-grade teacher’s parents owned a cabin in Mammoth; Annabel’s brother-in-law’s cousin participated in a time-share in Jackson Hole; the Martins across the street had a second home in North Carolina.

  Anywhere Mike would run. Anyone he’d turn to.

  It struck him that this was how Rick Graham and the Threat Assessment Center closed in on terrorists.

  He shut the file. Stared blankly down. His elbows and hands had marred the patina of dust on the desktop. The brutal reality of how outgunned he was hit home, setting his nerves on vibration. He had a bag of cash and a rusty aptitude for boosting cars, and his pursuers had the most powerful data-mining software available to the U.S. government.

  Mike glanced over at the clock. It was time.

  Routing through the prepaid center, he called Annabel’s cell phone. He waited for the call to go through, sweat trickling down his ribs.

  William said, ‘Mike Doe.’

  ‘William Burrell,’ Mike said. ‘And Roger Drake.’

  ‘You been doing some homework.’

  Mike gazed down at the file. ‘As have you.’ Silence. ‘You came after my wife. To get to me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can find out about your family, too. I can find out where they live.’

  ‘Family?’ William laughed. ‘My notion of family’s a bit different than yours. My people are nothing to me. Except for Hanley, and . . . well, he’s not around anymore. Is he?’

  ‘You’ve played a lot of games, but you’ve never said what you want.’

  ‘To kill you.’

  Mike’s skin came alive – thousands of tiny insects crawling on legs of ice. ‘So that’s it?’ He was incredulous. ‘No information? No money? You just have to kill me?’

  ‘Yes.’ William sighed. ‘We’re foot soldiers, see? We have a mission directive. And you’re the target. It’s a bad state of affairs. I understand that. I wish it weren’t the case. But there are two kinds of crooks, you see. Those with a code and those without. We have a code, Dodge and I. We keep our word. I have never lied to you. And I’m not gonna start now.’

  ‘What was my father to you people?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Nothing. He was nothing.’

  ‘You’re after me for something he did.’

  ‘Maybe before I kill you,’ William said, ‘I’ll tell you why.’

  Mike glanced across at Kat, her chest rising and falling steadily. ‘Then we can settle this face-to-face. I will come to you. But you leave my daughter out of this. She doesn’t know anything. She’s witnessed nothing.’

  A faint little chuckle that held no amusement. ‘You still don’t get it, do you?’

  The insects squirmed back to life, Mike’s skin alive with movement. ‘Get what?’

  ‘Katherine’s not a bystander in this,’ William said. ‘She’s our other target.’

  The line went dead.

  Chapter 41

  Mike and Kat were waiting at the front door of the mini-golf play center when the pimply-faced manager arrived to open the place. Mike had parked the Camry at the edge of the lot, its shattered window cleaned up. It sported license plates he’d swapped out with a Jetta.

  In the video arcade, he got forty bucks of quarters and set up at the pay phone in the back while Kat played games in the nearest aisle where he could keep her in sight. The darkness and flashing lights were disorienting; they seemed an extension of the endless night they had emerged from. Was it really morning outside?

  His eyes barely leaving his daughter, he made call after call, starting with 1-800 numbers, collecting referrals, then referrals of referrals. Given that he was dealing with emergency services, most places were open even though it was Saturday. Kat trudged from game to game, scratching her head, her vacant expression lit by the glowing screens. The arcade filled with kids until the aisles were jammed – all that candy and color and laughter surrounding Kat, a mocking vision of weekends past. Mike had to fight to stay focused. Slotting endless quarters into the pay phone, he ruled out fifty options and sniffed around fifty more, trying to zero in on a viable choice.

  By the time he was done, the phone book was marked with sweat from his fingers. What if someone followed and lifted his prints? Could Graham, Dodge, or William pick a clue off the yellow pages that led to Kat? In a spasm of paranoia, Mike smuggled out the phone book and burned it by the Dumpster around
back. Kat stayed in the car behind him, watching as if at a drive-in movie. Crouched in the cold morning air, warming his hands over the miniature pyre, he realized he was on the verge of sobbing with horror at what he was about to do.

  He drove east through the afternoon, Kat with her face to the passenger window, watching the desert roll by. Juniper wagged in the breeze, lavender shuddered off purple dust, and Joshua trees twisted up, tombstones to unmarked graves.

  Why would an eight-year-old be targeted by hired killers? Last week William and Dodge had scared Mike into grabbing Kat at school and bringing her home. He flashed on Hanley’s fingers obscenely working Annabel’s bra strap. This is too messy, too messy. We were supposed to wait. Wait not just for Mike but for Kat as well.

  On that morning years ago in the station wagon, the horror in Mike’s father’s voice had been palpable. Maybe he’d feared for Mike’s life as Mike now feared for Kat’s. But why? His father was responsible for whatever mess he’d turned their lives into, at least according to that splash of blood on his cuff. A countering image popped into Mike’s head – himself in the dim garage, using an old rag to wipe Annabel’s blood from his arm. What if Mike hadn’t been abandoned but saved? What if dispatching him to a new life was the only choice Mike’s father had left to protect him?

  But Mike didn’t – couldn’t – trust that explanation. It reeked of wish fulfillment, an origin story like Superman rocket-launched from Krypton. But worse, it seemed fueled by hope, by longing, and when it came to Mike’s childhood, he’d decided that hope and longing were dead ends.

  And yet how could he hold on to that lifelong outrage given what he was on his way to doing?

  ‘Arizona,’ Kat said dreamily as the sign drifted past on the side of the freeway. ‘I always wanted to come here.’

  When they reached the town of Parker, Mike took Kat to a diner. She ordered a stack of grilled-cheese sandwiches with french fries and a chocolate shake.