by Jeff Abbott
‘Don’t-’
The man pressed the gun harder into Luke’s back. Luke hushed. He could not remember how to breathe. Not with a gun in his back, against his spine, up under his jacket. This couldn’t be possible. It wasn’t happening.
‘You parked in row H. Let’s go. Easy. Stay calm.’
‘Take the keys. Just take them.’ Luke found his voice. He held up the BMW keys with a tremble. Panic swept through him. That was what you were supposed to do; just let them have the car. The car could be replaced.
‘No, you keep the keys, Luke. You’re driving.’
‘What do you-’
‘We’ve got places to go, people to see.’ He steered Luke toward row H. ‘It’ll all be fine.’
A family, young mom and dad, two daughters maybe six and four, approached them from a minivan. The younger girl was singing loudly off-key, dancing in the rows.
‘I’ll make you a deal,’ the man hissed. ‘You yell, you run, and I’ll shoot all four of them in the head. Be good and they live.’
This cannot be happening to me. Luke made his mouth a tight thin line. His skin prickled away from the gun’s barrel. He tried not to look at the parents’ faces while the girl mangled her tune with off-key gusto. He just kept walking.
Five feet away from the family now, and the man with the gun said, in a calm, business-like voice: ‘So, what I need for you to do when we get back to the office is to review all the accounts…’
‘Yes,’ Luke managed to say. ‘I understand.’ Every fiber in him wanted to run, to get away. But the family. Jesus. He couldn’t risk their lives.
The oldest girl, moving away from her sister’s annoying singing as it echoed in the concrete garage, met Luke’s eyes.
She smiled, and they moved past, the mother chiding the youngest, ‘Emma, okay, enough with the singing. Mommy’s getting a three-pill headache.’
‘Well done,’ the man hissed into Luke’s ear. ‘We’re going to get into your car. Fight or yell and I’ll shoot that nice dad dead.’ Luke heard a click in the man’s throat as he swallowed.
‘The car’s yours, just take it, please…’
‘Do as you’re told.’ He forced Luke to enter the BMW from the passenger side, awkwardly scooting across the gearshift, the gun firmly planted in his back. Luke settled into the seat and the man closed the passenger door.
‘What the hell do you want? Please just let me go…’
‘Drive. Don’t draw attention to us, or I’ll kill you and then I’ll kill whoever notices us.’ He pulled out a steel knife from a holster under his coat. The edge looked brutally sharp. Luke’s throat turned to sand. ‘You see? It’s worse than a gun. I can hurt you and keep you alive to hurt some more. Start the engine.’
Luke, hands shaking, breath coming in hollow gulps, obeyed. He told himself to stay calm. He thought of those long weeks he’d spent on his own, fourteen years old, running away from his grief, hiding from the police, walking along the back roads, hitching rides, desperate to get from Washington, D.C. to Cape Hatteras. To the beginning of the long stretch of ocean where his father had been lost. He’d seen knives and guns then, once, and he’d gotten away. He could get away again. The key was to wait for the right moment.
‘Head out. Say nothing to the attendant.’
Luke backed out of the parking space, drove out of the garage, blinking at the sunlight. Two of the tollbooths were open; it was mid-afternoon, the rush of late-day flights not descending yet.
‘Here’s money for your parking,’ the man said. ‘My treat.’ He stuck a five-dollar bill under Luke’s nose and the money trembled slightly.
He’s scared, too, Luke realized and the thought did not comfort. A panicked man with a gun and a knife was more frightening than an icy calm kidnapper.
Luke closed his fist around the money, powered down the window.
‘Your ticket, sir?’ the attendant asked. He was a big kid, college age, dark hair cut in a burr, a wide friendly smile.
Luke dug into the pocket of his coat and felt the knife nestle into his ribs, where the attendant couldn’t see it. He yanked the ticket from his pocket, handed it to the attendant with the crushed fiver.
The attendant returned his change in ones. ‘You all right, sir?’
Most people would never notice. Luke heard himself say, ‘Airsick. Rough flight.’ He sounded unsteady.
‘Feel better.’ The wooden gate rose and he drove forward.
The bite of the knife went through his shirt and he nearly drove off the road. ‘Do you think I’m stupid, Luke? Do you? Were you trying to make him remember you?’
Luke winced at the sharp pain. The knife withdrew from denting his flesh and he now felt the barest trickle of blood ease along his ribs. ‘No, I didn’t mean anything, I did what you asked…’
‘You just paid for short-term parking but you complain of a rough flight. Flyers don’t park in short-term. You tried to stick in his memory. For when he talks to the police.’
Luke flinched, then put his eyes back to the road. ‘I didn’t know what to say. You cut me… are you crazy?’
‘I’ll make you a deal.’ This was apparently the guy’s favorite phrase. ‘You cause trouble and I’ll cut your stomach open and you can see what your guts look like. Do you understand?’
‘Yes. I understand.’
‘Exit the airport. Head east on Highway 71.’
‘Look, seriously, I didn’t know what to say…’
‘Don’t pretend to be stupid. It will just piss me off.’
Luke turned onto Highway 71, which threaded through the outskirts of Austin and eastward toward Houston. He eased into the traffic. The knife left his side but the gun returned to his ribs.
‘Drive to Houston.’
Three hours away, three hours sitting next to this lunatic. The suggestion unnerved him. What did this guy want? He knew your name. He knew where you parked. ‘Houston… why?’
‘You’ll find out when we get there. You pull over or try and wreck us, or get brave and fight me, you’re dead. You obey me, you get out alive. Now shut the hell up and drive.’
‘You’re crazy, man. Please, just let me go!’ Crazy. The word thudded past all his fear. A guy who looked ordinary, but had a single-minded mission of violence. Luke glanced at him again.
‘I’m not crazy,’ the man said, and Luke saw that he wasn’t. Not a glint of madness in his eyes. He was utterly and completely intent on what he was doing.
Are you one of them, Luke thought? One of the people I drew out of the darkness?
The Night Road, Luke realized, had found him.
3
Highway 71 curled past the towering lost pines of Bastrop County, crossed over the Colorado River as the waterway snaked south and east toward the Gulf of Mexico. The land was rolling as it slowly flattened into the coastal plain. Traffic was light.
I am being kidnapped. The realization cut through the shock in Luke’s brain. No one would be missing him until tomorrow. Henry said he’d call tomorrow – an eternity, now. No one else would be expecting him or looking for him. Maybe the doorman at his condo, but if he didn’t see Luke, he wouldn’t think much of it. He wasn’t on duty every day. Maybe, Luke thought hysterically, the doorman’ll think I’ve finally gone out to party.
He drove in silence.
Luke ran the options through his mind, trying to calm his nerves. Stopping the car and simply running would get him a bullet in the back. He rejected the idea of crashing the car; if other drivers stopped to help, he’d be putting them in danger. Brawn couldn’t beat a gun. He needed to figure out how he might reason with the guy. But everything he knew about the psychology of violence seemed to evaporate from his brain. He kept thinking about the knife and the gun.
‘Don’t quit your day job to play poker,’ the man said. He had not spoken since ordering Luke toward Houston. Forty minutes of gallows silence.
‘What?’
‘You’re thinking it through. How soon you’ll be missed
. How long it will take for someone to realize you’re not where you should be. Plan A is obeying me. You’re trying to hatch Plan B.’
‘I wasn’t.’
‘You live alone in a tower condo in downtown. You’re sort of friendly with your neighbors, but not so much that they’ll notice you’re not around today or tomorrow or even the day after. It’s spring break; you don’t have classes.’
‘You know a lot about me.’ Maybe, Luke thought, because he’s one of the people you went looking for. He played out the times when the Night Road responded to his postings via private messages to his online accounts, engaged him in long conversations about their obsessions and agendas. He’d been most careful not to reveal any real information about himself. But this man had still found him.
‘What do you want from me?’ Luke’s voice was steadier.
‘I just want you to come with me. Play nice and you don’t get hurt.’
Draw him out, Luke thought. Draw him out the same way you would if he was on the other side of the computer monitor. ‘If I understood what you were trying to accomplish…’
‘You don’t.’
‘Have we talked before? Maybe online?’
The man gave a soft laugh. ‘I’m not one of your research projects.’
He definitely knew about the Night Road, then, at the least he knew what Luke was doing for Henry. ‘My stepfather will call me as soon as he lands in New York.’
‘Give me your cell phone.’ The gun’s barrel dug into his ribs.
Luke winced and fished his smartphone out of his jacket pocket. The man took it and tossed it to the car’s floor. He crushed it under the heel of his heavy shoe. ‘Instant peace of mind.’
Luke glanced at the radio. Above it was a button to a locator/monitoring service – one that would call him if the car was in an accident or that he could call if he needed directions or assistance. But he remembered, with a jolt, that he hadn’t bothered to renew the service contract last summer. The monitoring service was useless.
‘If you let me go,’ Luke said, ‘I won’t tell the police. We’ll pretend this didn’t happen. I never saw you.’
‘It can’t work that way.’ The man’s voice went quiet and low, but not calm. ‘I’m sorry for you. But this is going to happen.’
Going to happen. He thought of all the empty side roads that lay between Austin and Houston. The woods. Places a body could be dumped. He made himself stay calm.
‘Doesn’t have to,’ Luke said. ‘We’ll say… You let me out here, by the time I walk to a town you’re already halfway to Houston. I’ve already forgotten what you look like…’
‘No negotiation.’ The man wiped his lip with his finger.
‘Trust me, I don’t need to remember you, I won’t. I am very practical that way.’
‘We’re already past the point of no return.’
‘Wrong. You can always turn back.’ He didn’t want this guy feeling more desperate than he already was. ‘You have a choice.’
‘You haven’t gotten out much in life, have you?’ The man choked on a nervous laugh.
Luke couldn’t tell how to read this guy; one second he seemed like a hardened criminal, confident in his capacity for violence, the next he seemed nervous, fretful, as though he’d taken on the wrong job and he knew it. ‘Look. Mistakes were made. Things were said. It’s all in the past. I’m the world’s most forgiving dude. Also the most generous. Just let me go.’
‘We need us some bright and cheery tunes, and for you to shut the hell up.’ The man fiddled with the radio and spun past stations but found nothing he liked and switched it to silence. ‘I hate not having driving tunes. Or even the news. Except all the news is bad these days, it’s the way we’ve made the world, nothing but bad bad news.’
Luke drove on in eerie silence. The man just stared out the window, lost in thought. But the gun stayed steady in Luke’s side and he kept imagining the blood and torn intestines that would gush into his lap.
Luke saw a sign for Mirabeau, a good-sized town halfway between Houston and Austin. He remembered there was often a speed trap on the eastern edge of the town. He pressed gently but steadily on the accelerator. Rev the speed up past the limit, slow enough where the man wouldn’t notice. For the first time in his life, Luke hoped he’d fall into a speed trap.
Talk to him; don’t let him notice what you’re doing.
But before he could say anything, the man’s cell phone rang. He pulled it free of a pocket and read the display.
‘You stay quiet,’ he said. He flicked the knife up along Luke’s ribs and Luke winced and nodded.
‘Yeah?’ the man said into the phone.
Luke heard a woman’s voice crackle through the cell, saying, ‘Eric, this is Jane. How goes the project? Gathered the nerve to grab our boy yet?’ Her accent was British. Luke pushed the car to four miles an hour over the limit.
‘It’s – it’s under control. But I really cannot talk right now.’
‘Hard for you, I’m sure, to do two things at once,’ the woman – Jane – said. She gave a sick, cruel laugh. ‘But hurry – time’s running out.’
The man thumbed the volume control on the phone, making Jane’s words into a murmur.
Eric. His name is Eric. Luke kept his eyes on the road. Under control. This Jane woman must know what Eric was planning and why. A barely felt tap, and he was six miles an hour faster than the limit.
Eric, huddled, listening on his cell, wasn’t watching the speedometer or Luke, and Luke jolted the speed up higher. Eight over the limit. And then ten. He debated in his mind as to whether to push it higher, to risk it. No. He couldn’t risk Eric noticing. He squeezed the steering wheel hard.
Eric listened to the phone and finally he said, ‘I’ll call you when the rest is complete and you better keep your side of the bargain.’
The rest is complete. Keep your side. What did Eric mean? And why would a British woman be involved in his kidnapping when his focus was on finding American extremists? He didn’t look over as Eric switched off the phone without a goodbye to his caller.
Mirabeau spanned a few exits on the highway – the BMW shot past a McDonald’s, a bakery/gas station selling kolache pastries, an exit for the downtown business district. No sign of a patrol car. Please, please be up ahead, Luke thought.
Eric seemed lost in thought and didn’t notice. Let’s keep it that way, Luke thought. Let’s make him just a little mad. Enough to keep him distracted.
‘Was that your girlfriend?’
‘Shut the hell up.’
‘I bet she doesn’t know you’re carjacking innocent people at airports. She’d be so proud.’
‘This isn’t a carjacking.’
‘I thought most kidnappers did their own driving. You’re a cheapass kidnapper, making me do my own driving.’
Eric stared at him. ‘Are you trying to be funny?’
‘Yes. I want to lighten the mood.’ Luke risked a bad imitation of a smile. Where the hell was the cop that was, on every other trip Luke made through this stretch of highway, so ready to give out a ticket? He wanted to pound his fist against the steering wheel in rage. But he had to keep Eric’s mind engaged, his eyes off the dashboard.
‘There’s nothing funny about today.’ But Luke heard a jagged curl in Eric’s words, nerves on end. ‘The hell I’m trapped in is not a joke!’
‘Exactly what hell are you trapped in? You have the gun.’ Luke screamed back in his face. They shot under a bridge and on the opposite side, a Mirabeau police cruiser sat, waiting like a spider in the heart of its web.
Yes, Luke thought, thank you Jesus and the patron saint of speeders. He was saved.
Eric glanced in the rearview, saw the blues and reds flash to life. ‘Slow it down!’ Eric yelled.
Luke obeyed but it was too late. The cruiser launched itself off the incline onto the highway.
‘Oh you rotten prick!’ Eric screamed.
‘I’m sorry. You made me nervous. I didn’t watch… s
hould I pull over?’
‘If I have to kill this poor stupid cop it’s your fault!’ Eric hissed. ‘Don’t kill anyone. You don’t really seem to want to do this!’
‘I can’t, I can’t! You don’t understand! You don’t know what you’re doing!’ Eric steadied his voice. ‘Pull over and say nothing. Not a word.’
‘And he won’t notice the gun in your hand.’
‘I’m going to put the gun out of sight.’
Luke thought: Good because then I’m going to yell my head off.
‘Because if you say a word I don’t like, if you do anything other than take the ticket and thank the officer, I’m going to shoot you both. You just put this cop’s life in needless danger, because, yes, I will kill him, and if I have to kill him, you die, too. I always have a Plan B and this is it. Right now that cop is walking into a trap you set for him, you stupid heartless moron.’ An icy certainty colored Eric’s tone now, unmistakable resolve.
‘Heartless? You’re the goddamned kidnapper!’ Luke stopped the BMW, the police car halting behind it.
Bile clouded into Luke’s throat. In the rearview he saw the officer get out of the car and start to approach.
‘Get out your insurance and registration. Now. I have the gun where I can reach it instantly. You warn him, you both die.’
Luke gathered the papers. The rising courage he thought he’d feel if he could attract police attention felt crushed. He powered down the window as the officer reached the door.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Luke said.
The officer was middle-aged, tall, heavy-built. He wore the professional look that said he’d already heard every excuse a hundred times before. His nametag read Moncrief. ‘You didn’t pull over very fast, sir.’
‘No sir, I didn’t.’ Luke handed the officer his license and registration.
‘That’s my fault, officer,’ Eric said with a crooked, wan smile. He sounded like a disappointed big brother. ‘I was yelling at him about his speeding and he’s already upset. We just got word of a death in the family, our grandma, and we were heading fast, too fast I guess, to Houston.’
