by Jeff Abbott
Cal fired the Taser. The needles slammed into Jane Norton and she screamed and collapsed. For a few moments Perri stood frozen in shock as Jane writhed on the floor. She threw herself at Cal, who shoved her to the floor and yanked the crowbar from her grip. When she came at him again, he hit her.
It was unimaginable. The father of her son, the man who had said “I do” to her.
55
SHILOH DROVE, LOOPING through Lakehaven, the burn of revenge hard in his heart. After the adrenaline had faded from the attack last night, he’d felt at odds, loose, restless. He had tried to call Mimi, to inch his foot onto that thin ice, but she had told him to drop dead and not to call her again. She had been the one good thing in a long time, his reason to get up in the morning, his reason to (usually) not chase after a woman he wanted. And she was gone.
The rage needed an outlet. He had taken out the pretty black girl he’d seen Jane Norton talking to, and the guy who was with her…that reporter. They were both on his list of people who had been quoted in the old series of articles about Jane’s accident and amnesia. The follow-up story would be about Jane and the Halls. Even if Jane wasn’t Liv Danger, well, if she hadn’t driven so recklessly, there wouldn’t have been a wreck, Shiloh wouldn’t have responded, and then none of this misery would have happened. He tried to tell himself he was doing it for poor Brenda and her burned-up house, too.
But now Jane had vanished and Perri Hall was gone; he’d driven past the circle and seen a police car at the Norton house. They must be questioning Laurel, or looking for Jane, about the attack on Bowman and Vasquez. It hadn’t gone how he planned it and perhaps he needed to stage another attack. He had the list from the article of people who Matteo Vasquez had interviewed in the aftermath of the crash. There was the lawyer, Kip Evander, but he had a wife and kids he was around a lot and he hadn’t gone to his office. There was this Kamala Grayson, Jane’s best friend. Yeah, maybe her. She was pretty but he hadn’t yet figured out where she lived.
But he did have an address for one of them. One easy-to-find target was this friend of Jane’s and David’s, this blond boy, Trevor Blinn. He had been interviewed in one of the articles, his picture taken along with Kamala Grayson as mutual friends of David and Jane. According to the news reports, Amari Bowman had been at a party and he’d called a police officer friend and gotten the address of the party she’d been at—a detective had talked to the boy. Shiloh was restless and curious. When he drove by the house once the next day, he’d seen the boy from the old news article getting into a black truck, wearing a shirt that said Security. He was a big kid, bigger than Shiloh, but he was weak. You could tell he was weak, he wouldn’t stand up in a fight. Shiloh prided himself on his ability to read people’s capacity to really fight, which very few had. Shiloh had driven off then, before he got noticed parked on the residential street. Neighborhoods had Faceplace pages now and they loved to warn each other when a stranger or a door-to-door salesman was around.
Shiloh had the crowbar. A crowbar could take care of the blond boy real quick. Blond boy could be the dot under the exclamation mark of Bowman and Vasquez. He was tied, loosely, to the crash. He would fit the pattern of Liv Danger’s attacks.
He had then decided to pay blond boy a visit. If blond boy fought back, then fine. He’d had to restrain himself from not beating on Amari Bowman or Matteo Vasquez again once they were down; the sense of power that had coursed up from the steel bar into his brain had nearly been intoxicating.
He had a taste for this, more than for the feel of Mimi’s kisses against his mouth.
Yeah. The blond boy. He headed toward his house.
* * *
He didn’t quite understand what happened next. He parked down from blond boy’s house and sat and waited, and not ten minutes later a dark-haired boy came to the blond boy’s house. He didn’t know the dark-haired boy. The blond boy met him in the yard of the house; they talked; they seemed to argue a bit.
The blond boy shook the smaller, dark-haired boy and with his window lowered, parked two houses away, pretending to text, Shiloh could hear him yell, “Where is she, Adam?”
And the other boy apparently told him.
The blond boy headed for his truck and the dark-haired boy started to yell at him, Don’t be an idiot. Jane doesn’t even like you. She doesn’t like you and she doesn’t need you. I’m the one who has been there for her, not you. I’m the one she chose to live with, after all. I just need your help, that’s all. But we’re doing this my way.
For a second, Shiloh could tell, the words scored home, and the big kid paused. Oh, looky, looky, who has a crush on Jane. The dark-haired boy came toward the truck, like he was going to get in, but then the big blond shoved him back, knocking him a good ways across the yard. Then the blond boy got into his truck and roared off, leaving his dark-haired rival standing on the lawn.
Shiloh followed the blond boy.
* * *
The blond boy drove to a big, two-story house on Lake Austin. Shiloh followed, hanging back, but the kid didn’t seem to notice him. Nothing dumber than a guy in love, Shiloh thought, knowing that was well true. As the blond boy slammed the brakes on his truck in the driveway, there was another car there, a Lexus that Shiloh recognized as Perri Hall’s. No other car.
Blond boy ran into the house. The back door was ajar, as if someone had left in haste.
Interesting, Shiloh thought. He got out the second crowbar he’d bought. And waited by the door, to be sure the big dumb blond was alone.
56
THE POLICE HAD left. Jane clearly wasn’t there, and Laurel shivered at the thought of the cops actually inside her house. She texted Cal on the cheap orange phone he’d given her, which she kept locked in a drawer in her office; she was to use it only to contact him and he would give her a new phone every month. He got them in bulk somewhere, he’d told her. The phone was so ugly no one would steal it, he said.
The police were here! Looking for J. I have men looking for her. What do I do? She pressed Send and thought, This isn’t going to make for a good chapter in my book.
The text came back: Come to where the car crashed.
She stared at the words. Why? She texted back.
That’s where your daughter is.
She’s with you?
Yes. She remembers.
Laurel’s chest tightened. Don’t hurt her, please. Laurel’s hands were shaking. She needs help. No one will believe anything she says.
You know it’s not up to me. Get here. Wait for me if I’m not here.
Don’t hurt her, she texted again. But there was no answer.
Laurel ran for her car. She was scared that there would be a police car waiting, watching for Jane to return, but there wasn’t. She nearly dialed the two hired muscles who were now over at St. Michael’s, looking for Jane along her old haunts at the school and along South Congress; she might try to blend in with her old crowd. They had already determined she hadn’t headed to Trevor Blinn’s or Adam Kessler’s house. But if she called them to where Cal had Jane…she would have to explain why her daughter was with this man. It was too many questions for private security.
Laurel opened her safe and found the gun. It wasn’t where she usually put it. She loaded it, put it in her purse, and headed out the door.
57
PERRI THOUGHT, He’s going to kill that girl.
Cal had held out a pair of plastic flex cuffs to bind the unconscious Jane’s wrists—You know, like he was prepared for this, she thought with shock—and ordered Perri to put them on Jane. She stood across from the man she’d taken vows with, loved every night in her bed, kissed on a Paris bridge after attaching a lock to the railing with their names etched on it, bore a son with.
“Do it,” he said, gesturing with the Taser. “Now.”
“Cal…”
“Do it, Perri. For so long you’ve said she killed our son. Why wouldn’t you make her pay?”
“You’re Liv Danger. You. You hacked my compute
r. You set the fires. You targeted that lunatic, Shiloh.”
He shoved her. “I don’t want to hurt you. Do as I tell you.”
“What are you going to do to her?” To us, she amended in her thoughts.
“Nothing, sweetheart. Nothing to her. She’s not going to rat on her own mother.”
Perri knelt by Jane and put on the flex cuffs, but not too tight.
“Tighten them. Do it right.” His voice was steel.
She did as he said. “I don’t understand this. I just don’t. You were in the car with our son…?”
“Come on.” He unplugged the computers with a kick of his foot against the cords, put the unconscious Jane over his shoulder, and gestured at Perri with the gun. “My car. You’re driving. Do as I tell you and this will all be OK.”
“Cal.” It was as if their whole shared history were in that one, pleading word.
“I did what I had to do.”
“Were you in the car when David died?” Her voice rose. Because that meant he had abandoned their son. In his worst moment of need, Cal had left David dying. It couldn’t be so.
Cal kept his voice steady. “It’s not what it seems. I will explain everything to you when this crisis is over. I am not having this conversation now. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you, I will hurt you. I don’t want to, but I will.”
“I’m your wife.” She nearly spat the words.
“You’re leaving me. You’re divorcing me.”
It could not have been a greater shock to her than if he had struck her. “Cal…”
“For two years I’ve heard you hate on this bitch, blame her for everything wrong in our lives, and now you take her side.”
“Cal, this isn’t you.”
“Shut up. Walk ahead of me. Run and I’ll shoot Jane, I swear I will.”
She believed him. She believed, in a rush, that Brent Norton’s death was no accident, that Cal had killed his best friend. He would kill Jane. Maybe he would even kill her. She was nothing to him, perhaps only the vessel that had given him his son. “Were you with David when he died?”
“I’m not talking about that.”
He shut the house door awkwardly and she, glancing back, saw it didn’t close right. She said nothing. He, flustered and angry, opened the trunk of his car and dumped the limp Jane in it and slammed it shut.
“Drive,” he ordered Perri, tossing her the keys.
“Where are we going?”
“To the crash site. Sort of.”
“Why? Who did you call?”
He didn’t answer.
“You cannot do this, Cal!” she screamed.
He ordered her into the car, gesturing directly with the gun. She obeyed. They drove onto Old Travis and had gone a quarter mile when she saw a large black truck racing past them. And then another dark truck following at a distance, but this one with Shiloh at the wheel. She glanced in the rearview; she had memorized his license plate. It was him. Shiloh. No. She assumed Shiloh was heading to the lake house. This had all gone wrong.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I made a mistake. That attack on Amari Bowman and Matteo Vasquez, I know that wasn’t you. It was Shiloh. He’s trying to make Jane and her mother look guilty. He’s out there, Cal, and he’s going to hurt someone.”
“Drive.”
She did, following, she realized, the same path her son and Jane had followed. At his direction, she turned onto High Oaks. But before she reached the crash site, he said, “Turn in here.” It was one of the three large houses on the road, its gates open.
The one man who had heard the crash and called the police. What was his name? James Marcolin. She turned in and the gates swung shut behind her.
58
SHILOH COULD HEAR the blond boy running through the lake house, calling Jane’s name again and again. Oh, yeah, some affection at work here. All Shiloh had to do was wait and the idiot would just barrel out the door and Shiloh could take him down with one solid home-run swing. He tested the weight of the crowbar in his hand. Mimi had been taken from him; if this boy was Jane’s version of Mimi, the one she cared about, then he would take him from Jane.
In the back of his mind he kept thinking how Perri Hall was going to react to this, if she would be suspicious of his hand in it. Didn’t matter. She hadn’t called the cops on him for Bowman and Vasquez. She wasn’t an idiot. She would shut up as soon as he made it clear she was part of this, as much a conspirator against the Nortons as he was. He wondered what she’d be like in bed.
He slapped the weight of the crowbar into his hand, thought of the blond boy’s head caving like a melon.
The sound inside stopped. No more calls for Jane. It gave Shiloh pause. Maybe something interesting was in the house? He resisted the urge to rush inside. Wait for it. Wait. There was a second-story window directly above him. Had the blond boy seen him or his truck? He cussed and waited.
He listened: the soft ripple of the water on the lake, a distant dog barking, the hum of a boat’s engine far down a bend of the lake. But he heard the door open on the other side of the house. He turned and ran around the house, the crowbar cocked back to deliver a crushing blow, and there was the blond boy, holding a wooden baseball bat, swinging with equal force at him. Shiloh barely got the crowbar up in time as the bat slammed down into him and then into his face. He felt his lip split but he pushed past the pain, like he’d told the patients to do as he stitched and held them together, and shoved back against the kid. The blond boy was big but Shiloh was strong and low to the ground, and the big kid didn’t really want to hurt him.
That was the mistake. That, Shiloh thought, was why he would win.
They tumbled back and the blond boy started to yell, “Where is she?” in an enraged voice. But he was down, and Shiloh was on top and he swung the crowbar, connecting with the boy’s shoulder. The boy howled. Shiloh raised it again, grinning, and the kid kicked out and Shiloh went flying back into the dirt.
The blond boy, his right arm useless, staggered to his feet.
This was bad. He’d gotten a good look at Shiloh’s face. That had not been part of the plan. Shiloh had thought it would go like Vasquez and Bowman, where neither had gotten a look at his handsomeness. OK. So be it. The decision to murder this boy was quick and not barbed with a lot of regret. Mimi was as good as dead to him, wasn’t she?
Shiloh swung again with the crowbar. The kid had moved the bat to his left—clearly not his dominant hand—parried with the bat, and Shiloh laughed—this was like a redneck swordfight. It would make a great story except he really couldn’t tell it to anyone. He swung and caught the boy’s hip, heard the crack of glass and plastic taking the blunt of the blow. He swung again and the boy stopped the blow, but the bat splintered, leaving a long, sharp shard in the boy’s hands.
“Where is she?” the blond boy demanded, like he still had a weapon, still was in the fight.
Shiloh decided to play a bit. Make it last. Make the blond boy’s ruddy face go full crimson. “What’s it like to bone an amnesiac? Does she remember it the next day? Five minutes later?”
The boy didn’t say anything. Shiloh laughed at his own joke and swung again, but the kid, moving faster than a big guy should, stepped into the swing and pile-drove a fist into Shiloh’s gut. It hurt. He thought of all the football players he’d hated in high school, and then the thought got knocked clear of his brain when the blond boy hit him again, sharp and hard, with an uppercut that lifted him off his feet and caught his tongue between his teeth. He collapsed, in shock that he had been beaten. Through the pain in his center and in his head he felt the tip of the crowbar press against the hollow of his throat.
“Where. Is. Jane?”
He spat blood. “I don’t know.”
“Why are you trying to hurt me? I looked out the window and saw you waiting for me.”
Shiloh didn’t answer.
“Where is she? The inside of the house, did you break into those rooms?”
“I don’t know where
she is.”
“Is this what happened two years ago? When they left here? Is this the same?” the kid said, his voice rising.
Shiloh didn’t know what the blond boy meant. Everything hurt. He didn’t have Mimi, he didn’t have anything. He lay back on the grass and waited for the boy to pummel him. It was what he would have done.
The blond boy took the crowbar away from Shiloh’s throat. He hit Shiloh’s right arm once, breaking it, and Shiloh howled. The blond boy got into his truck and drove off.
Shiloh lay on the cool grass, writhing in pain, furious. He had certainly misjudged the blond boy. He dug his cell phone out of his pocket and called her number. “Mimi? Please. Please, wait. I need to go to the hospital. Please. Yes, really, I’m hurt. Will you come get me?” He listened, staring at the sky. “No, don’t call an ambulance. You come, please, please. I don’t know the address.” He started to cry. “I’m not kidding, help me, please.” Then he heard her saying, “I’m not falling for this, don’t call again,” and then he listened to the quiet of the lake, the distant birdsong, and knew he was going to always be alone. Always.
59
JANE?”
Jane shivered to full wakefulness, drool spilling from her mouth. Her head lay in Perri’s lap. “Where are we?”
“In a house on High Oaks. Up from the crash site,” Perri whispered.
“Where is Cal?”
“He left.”
“We have to get out of here.” Jane raised her head slowly.
“We’re locked in this room.”
“Why did you let him lock us up?” Jane said, still sounding stunned.
“He had a gun,” Perri said after a moment. “And a Taser.”
“You think he would use it on you?”
“On you.”
Jane trembled.
“I can reason with him,” Perri said, trying to calm her. “I know him better than anyone. He won’t hurt me. Or you. But we have to get out of here.”
