You're Next

by Gregg Hurwitz

  ‘Aren’t you gonna eat?’ she asked around a mouthful of food, and he just shook his head.

  She ran out ahead as he paid the bill. When he dashed after her in a low-grade panic, he found her standing in front of a store window, hand to the glass, captivated. A yellow gingham dress floated on display, strung up by fishing line before a holiday backdrop, a dress without a girl. Mike took Kat inside and bought it, along with new shoes and a few shirts.

  They went to the movies afterward, Kat boinging her arm along, as always, with the hopping Pixar desk lamp in the opening credits. For two hours, leaning back in his seat, Mike watched her instead of the screen. Openmouthed smiles, bursts of giggling, snorkel breathing through Red Vines. For a moment it was as though they’d skipped back in time and everything was normal again.

  He found a boutique hotel that took cash for a deposit. The country decor was a bit frilly, but it was markedly nicer than the motels they’d been staying in. He bathed Kat, tilting her head back beneath the faucet to wash her hair. The lice were still in there, sure, but he didn’t have the heart to cap the evening with a chemical rinse.

  Tucked into bed, her skin flushed and clean, Kat said, ‘Tell me a story.’

  Mike realized that he’d pulled his flowery armchair bedside like a nurse on deathwatch. ‘About what?’

  ‘About next month. About us going home.’ Her blinks were growing longer. ‘Mom’s been cooking all day. You know how she gets with Thanksgiving. And there’s turkey. And pumpkin pie. And those oranges we stick cloves into. And we sit down, all together, and . . .’

  She was asleep.

  Mike remembered when she was first handed to him at the hospital, a fluffy bundle with a pink face, how he’d looked down at her and thought, Anything you ever need for the rest of your life. He rested his head on her chest, listened to the faint thumping, breathed her breath.

  He stepped out onto the balcony. Smog had wiped away the stars. He asked Annabel if he’d be forgiven for doing what he was about to do, but no answer came back from the firmament.

  In the morning Kat wolfed down a tall stack of pancakes, pausing only to scratch her scalp. Back upstairs, Mike packed her few things into the rucksack, laying aside his gun and a chunk of cash. Standing before the bathroom mirror, he brushed her hair slowly, meticulously, and drew it back, at last, into a perfect ponytail.

  She smiled and flicked at it. ‘Nice, Dad!’

  She lingered in the bathroom and came out wearing her new yellow dress. She pinched out the sides in a show of self-conscious theatricality. ‘Well?’

  He swallowed hard. ‘It was made for you.’

  He drove the route he’d been given over the phone yesterday as he’d sat in the back of that arcade. The referral chain to the address was too convoluted to remember – a caseworker to a social worker to a character reference – but that was partially the point. Somehow, through prevaricating, cajoling, and begging, he’d managed to arrive at a name he thought he could trust.

  He looked straight through the windshield, his hands fastened robotically on the steering wheel, his gaze on the dotted center line, yellow streaks on black tar. He was heartless, insentient, a thing of steel and purpose. He sensed Kat’s gaze tug over to him once, twice, then stick, and he felt his resolve melting away. But then they were there, parked across the street, and she looked out the window and saw the rambling ranch house and the backyard crammed with play structures and girls.

  She breathed in, a sharp intake of air. ‘Why are we here.’ It was not phrased as a question.

  He couldn’t talk. He could barely breathe. There is no forgiving a parent who could do that to a child.

  ‘Why,’ she repeated, ‘are we here.’

  He forced words through the tangle of his throat. ‘I need your help, honey.’

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Mommy’s in danger, and I need to . . . I need to go with Shep to help her.’ He couldn’t look over at her. ‘And I can’t do that and keep you safe at the same time.’

  ‘No, Dad. No no no. You can’t.’

  ‘I need to make sure you’re safe first. Before I do anything else.’

  She was crying, little-girl crying. ‘What did I do? It’s not my fault I got lice.’

  ‘No, honey, nothing is your fault. Remember that. Nothing—’ ‘I’m sorry.

  I’m sorry I got lice.’ She was twisting one hand in the other like a wet rag. ‘Please, Dad. Please. You can shave my head like Shep said. I don’t care.’ She’d popped up to her knees on the seat, eyes wide, pleading. ‘You can protect me.’

  ‘This is how I am doing that.’

  ‘You always protect me. I’m safe with you. You’ll take care of me.’

  He struck the wheel. ‘I can’t.’ His words rang around the car. His fist throbbed. Choking back panic, he searched for words soft enough. Jesus – how to put this in terms she could grasp. ‘This . . . this is what you can do to help Mommy right now.’

  Kat wilted in the seat. ‘How long?’

  He lifted his hands from the steering wheel, spread his fingers, lowered them again. ‘Whatever happens, you’ll be okay. It may not feel like it. But you will.’

  ‘What do you mean whatever happens? What does that mean? So if Mom . . . if Mom dies and they get you, then I . . . I . . .?’ A breath shuddered through her, and then she was still for a moment, her shoulders curled, arms hugging her stomach. ‘I’m eight,’ she said. ‘I’m only eight.’

  He did his best to fight his throat open, his chest still. His jaw was clamped shut, but he could feel the muscle pulsing at the corners. Still, he could not look over at her. The silence lasted ten seconds or ten minutes.

  ‘If that happens’ – his fingers, clenched around the steering wheel, had gone white – ‘you’ll think I won’t know how great you turned out and how you built a family and what a wonderful woman you grew up to be. But I do. I know already.’

  ‘No. No no no no no.’

  He had to get it all said before his will deserted him. ‘However long you’re here, you can’t tell anyone your last name.’ An echo from his childhood tore into him like a drill bit. ‘You’re Katherine Smith. Listen to me, Kat. You’re Katherine Smith now, do you understand? Don’t give my name. Don’t give your mom’s name. Don’t say where you’re really from. You have to make it all up and memorize it, and never forget it.’

  Each word ground like broken glass on the way out. She had buried her head in her arms and was shaking her head violently.

  He thought, I am damned for telling her this. I am going to hell. My heart will fall out of my chest and disintegrate into a cloud of ash.

  ‘You need to be tough. Your life is at stake. No one can know anything about you.’

  It was every lesson he wanted not to teach her, every Bad Parent caricature. But he steeled his back and drove on into the face of it. ‘Swear it to me, Kat.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have to. They’ll find you.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘There is no choice here, Kat.’

  She looked up sharply, her face streaked with tears. Her words warbled through sobs. ‘Then you swear to me. If I stay here and I keep my mouth shut about who I am then you have to live and come back for me. You have to. Promise. Or I won’t go. I won’t.’ She stuck out her hand. ‘Deal?’

  He stared down at her trembling fingers, his blood rushing so fast and hard that it vibrated his vision. Was that a promise he could make? Did he have a choice?

  She kept her hand pointed at him, her bruised gaze on his face. He blew out a breath, pinched his eyes closed, then reached over. ‘Deal.’

  Her hand was warm, and it trembled.

  ‘You will come back for me.’

  ‘I will come back for you.’

  ‘You swore it, now,’ she said. ‘You swore it.’

  He lifted the rucksack from the backseat, and they headed for the house.

  A plump woman answered the door, drying her hands on an apron. Behin
d her, four girls older than Kat were glued to cartoons while a toddler played with a one-legged Barbie. The sounds of the kids playing outside wafted through an open window – laughter and thumping and someone crying. A visceral reaction set Mike’s gut roiling. He looked around to assess the surroundings, but past and present were fused. There sat the Couch Mother on the sofa, fanning herself with a TV Guide. There, the yellow cushion with its effluvium of cat piss. Sure, shithead. My momz, too. All our parents is coming back.

  Mike’s eyes stung, and he blinked his way back to the present. There was no Couch Mother, no cat-piss reek, but there was a bay window, put there as if to tempt kids to watch and wait. The couch arms were threadbare, the walls dented and scuffed, but the foster girls looked healthy and the house was suffused with the rich scent of tomato soup.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the woman asked.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been standing there. ‘Jocelyn Wilder?’

  The woman twisted her curly gray hair up into a knot. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Can we talk for a moment in private?’

  Kat swiped at her nose with a sleeve. She was staring at her shoes. Jocelyn’s gaze flicked to her, then back to Mike. ‘Do you want to play outside, sugar?’

  Head down, Kat walked through the open back door and sat alone on a bench. Warily, Jocelyn gestured toward the kitchen, and he followed her through a swinging door. They faced off over yellow peeling linoleum. Her handsome face showed that she’d dealt with a variation of this scene a time or two.

  He said, ‘We’re in trouble. I need to take care of some business.’

  ‘Sir, I don’t run a—’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. But if she goes into the system, she’ll be in danger.’

  ‘A lot of kids are in danger.’

  ‘Not like this.’

  She blinked. ‘What does that mean? Like she’ll be killed?’ Though she’d said it herself, the word made an impression. ‘Why would anyone want to kill her? She’s a little girl.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Mike said. ‘That’s what I need to find out. I have to go. I have to be gone. My car can’t be out front. If they see the car, they’ll know she’s here.’

  Jocelyn regarded him skeptically, but he could see the concern blossoming beneath the surface.

  ‘I’m sorry to put this on you,’ he said.

  She made a sound that was a cross between a snort and a laugh. ‘You’re not going to put anything on me, Mr . . .?’

  She crossed her considerable arms, legs planted, an immobile force. She was the kind of foster mom who’d take you by the ear and drag you to Valley Liquors to fess up to stealing nip bottles of Jack Daniel’s. Mike knew her as he’d known the Couch Mother, which meant he could read her. The watery blue eyes. The feathered skin at her temples. The kindness etched into every crease of her venerable face.

  He held a hand up, palm down, calming the waters or holding his balance; he wasn’t sure which. ‘Don’t trust anything you might hear on the news. Don’t trust anyone. Anyone, no matter who they say they are. If you turn her in, if you call the cops or Child Protective Services, she will be hunted down.’

  ‘Well, that’s quite a thing, isn’t it?’ She swallowed angrily, her neck clucking up and down, and looked away.

  ‘You know kids. Talk to my daughter and you’ll know I’m telling the truth.’

  ‘How’d you find me?’

  He swung the rucksack off his shoulder, letting it thunk to the floor. ‘This holds two hundred thousand dollars in cash. It’s not blood money. It’s from our savings before all this happened. You can declare it as an anonymous donation, pay taxes, whatever. It’s yours to keep. Spend it on the other kids, too, so they don’t get jealous.’

  ‘Donations don’t work that way. I don’t want your money regardless.’

  ‘Keep it in case you need it.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me.’

  ‘Then will you guard it for me?’

  ‘Like collateral?’ She practically spit the words.

  ‘I will be back.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘I won’t do it,’ she said, with grave finality.

  ‘You will,’ he said gently. ‘I know that you will.’

  ‘Two hundred thousand.’ She set her hands on her hips, the flesh wobbling around her arms. ‘Why so much money if you’re coming back?’

  His face felt unattached to him, a separate entity, a stone mask. If it cracked, it would crumble away and leave nothing behind. He heard a noise escape him, and Jocelyn’s stance softened. She lowered her hands to her sides, seeming to take pity on him as he fought for composure.

  ‘So she can have whatever she needs until then.’ He gestured at the rucksack. ‘Her clothes are in there, too. They’re her clothes. Buy whatever for the others—’

  ‘All my girls have their own clothes,’ she said indignantly.

  ‘And,’ he said faintly, ‘she has head lice.’

  ‘Splendid.’

  ‘I tried mayonnaise—’

  ‘It doesn’t work. You need the heavy-duty stuff.’

  He toed the linoleum. It was no longer his right to object. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Any other problems? Drug-resistant tuberculosis, perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t do this – I won’t do this – for long,’ she said. ‘It’s illegal, which puts the whole family at risk. I have no birth certificate for her. What am I supposed to do if—’

  ‘You don’t run a battered-women and children’s shelter for seventeen years without figuring out how to give people a new life.’

  A glare. ‘You’ve certainly done your homework.’ She took a deep breath. ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘Not so long that you couldn’t get the right folks in the right offices on the phone. If it comes to that.’

  ‘If it comes to that,’ she repeated sharply.

  She let out an angry laugh, and he saw it again, the steel in her eyes that said she was the kind of woman who could figure out just about anything she decided was necessary.

  ‘And why should I believe you are coming back?’ she asked.

  ‘Because I told her I would.’

  ‘Then you’d better goddamned come back, hadn’t you?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Turning to the stove, she dismissed him with a wave.

  He pushed through the swinging door into the foyer. They were all as he’d left them, the girls fixated on the TV, the toddler twisting one-legged Barbie’s remaining limbs this way and that, and his daughter sitting on the bench just through the open rear door, her untied shoelaces scraping the concrete. Her fingers fiddled with themselves autistically in her lap. Her lips were bunching; she was doing everything not to cry. He filled the doorway. He didn’t want to blink – there was only this moment of seeing her, of capturing her image, and then it would be over. For a moment he thought he might just fly apart there in the doorway like a horror-movie effect.

  Finally Kat looked up, fixing that amber-and-brown gaze on him. ‘Please, Daddy.’

  Tearing his gaze from her, he turned away.

  He drifted numbly through the front door and back to the stolen Camry. Snowball II remained on the dashboard where Kat had perched him. He held the tiny stuffed animal in his hands and looked at the house but couldn’t bring himself to go back in and deliver it to her. Resting it on the passenger seat, he drove off. A few miles up the road, he noticed the baby monitor down by his feet where he’d dropped it after the chase.

  He threw it out the window.

  Chapter 42

  Mike blinked back to consciousness in a motel room with a vague recollection of driving for hours to put as much distance between him and Jocelyn Wilder’s foster home as possible. Space, he hoped, would lessen temptation. Snowball II was mashed in his fist, and between his legs was a brown-bagged bottle of Jack Daniel’s, though he had no memory of wanting to get drunk. He sat with the TV flickering across
his face, pulling from the bottle, craving numbness, but he’d had no more than two gulps when he vomited in the corner. He saw himself from the outside – one shoe off, belt undone, curled on the coarse carpet. And then Annabel appeared, kneeling over him, hand on his shoulder, saying, It’s okay, I’m here, We’ll get through this together, but when he rolled over, she bled into a surprising blast of light from the high-set window.

  He was cold in his bones where the rays couldn’t reach. He thought he should shower, but he found he already was, the scalding water raising streaks on his chest and arms, though he couldn’t quit shivering. Closing his eyes, he retreated into bleached-out memories of his mother. That yellow-tiled kitchen. Looking up as she’d bathed him, her black-brown hair draped along one tan arm. Patchouli and sage, the flesh-warm scent of cinnamon. That spot of blood – her blood? – on his father’s cuff.

  A dead patch of time.

  And then the room was dark and he was trembling beneath an icy spout, the hot water having long run out.

  Next he was wet on the floor, wrapped in a bedsheet, hugging the shopping bag containing the gun and his remaining cash. The room was a mess – splotch of puke, tipped-over chair, sheets pulled onto the floor to form a nest.

  The door opened, and a fall of light from the corridor landed on his face, making him blink. Then the door closed, heavy footsteps padded across to him, and a man’s shadow darkened his sight.

  They were here, at last, to kill him.

  ‘Get up,’ Shep said.

  A hand lowered into the fuzzy edge of Mike’s vision. Mike considered it with stunned incomprehension.

  His voice, hoarse from disuse: ‘How’d you find me?’

  ‘You called me. You told me what you had to do. Now get up.’

  Mike took his hand. Shep hoisted him to his feet.

  Shep crossed and set a worn brown paper bag on the crappy kitchenette counter. He removed a sleek black cell, a Batphone replacement, and tossed it at Mike. Next came the Colt .45 and a police scanner, which Shep plugged into the outlet by the microwave: ‘—1080, you got a location? That’s affirmative. I’m on scene at 1601 Elwood, back window looks to be broken. How many units we got in the area?’ He thumbed down the volume, leaving it loud enough to keep an ear on, then unpacked can after can of SpaghettiOs, setting them in a row by the sink.