A Reagan Keeter Box Set: Three page-turning thrillers that will leave you wondering who you can trust

by Reagan Keeter

  One step over to the wall and back. He grabbed the first cane he could get his hands on. It was aluminum with a hooked handle and a rubber tip. He held it out like a sword, the rubber tip aimed straight at Baseball Bat.

  Connor kicked Olin. “Get up.”

  Reluctantly, Olin did.

  Then Connor directed his attention to Baseball Bat. “We’ll give you our wallets, but we’re keeping our phones.”

  Baseball Bat bobbed his head from side to side, like he was thinking it over. Connor could tell he was mocking them. “I’ll take everything.”

  Connor held one hand out to Olin, palm up. “Give me the car keys.”

  “What?”

  “I’m serious. Give me the damn car keys.”

  Olin glanced at Baseball Bat, and then handed Connor the keys.

  “These are the keys to a BMW. You’ll find it abandoned a block over. It’s yours.”

  Baseball Bat said nothing.

  “I’m going to give this to you, and you let us leave. Let’s not make this into a thing, okay?”

  Still nothing.

  Connor wasn’t sure what he should do. It was like negotiating with a statue. “I’m going to throw these to you, and you’ll let her go, all right?”

  Baseball Bat’s smile was back. In the absence of any other response, Connor decided to take that as a yes.

  The little voice in the back of his head told him this was a mistake. But he tried to convince himself that was just his fear talking. Since he had no better plan, this had to work.

  He gently tossed the keys into the air. Baseball Bat did not move to catch them. Once they landed on the floor, one of the man’s friends leaned in and picked them up.

  “Thanks. I’ll take your wallets and cellphones also.”

  Connor silently cursed himself for not listening to that voice in the back of his head. He had just handed these criminals Olin’s keys, practically making himself complicit in their crime, and for nothing. All he had done was make a bad situation worse. From the corner of his eye, he could tell Olin was furious.

  He wished he had the courage to step forward, swinging the aluminum cane. With the bat on the counter, he had the advantage of distance. But Baseball Bat’s friends would no doubt step in. If luck wasn’t on his side, they would beat him senseless. (Or worse.) And he did not even want to think of what might happen to Olin and Dylan. As much as he might have been able to will himself to stand in hopes of helping Dylan, he could not will himself into a fight he would certainly lose.

  Perhaps a subtle shift in his expression or some small gesture gave away what he was thinking, because Baseball Bat said, “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He forced his hand into Dylan’s pockets, found her cellphone, a small wallet, and a house key. He threw the house key in one direction and pushed Dylan in the other, then pocketed the phone and wallet.

  He charged straight at Connor. “I dare you, kid. Come at me.”

  And Connor knew right then he had no choice but to do just that. He swung the aluminum cane at Baseball Bat’s torso, intending to knock the wind out of him and hoping like hell Olin would back him up.

  Baseball Bat stepped back, dropping his knife, and then, moving with Connor’s swing, grabbed the cane and ripped it from Connor’s hands.

  Everything else happened in only seconds.

  As Baseball Bat closed in on Connor, two of his friends—pale, missing teeth, interchangeable in their hoodies—headed for Olin. The third, sporting a bright red Mohawk, produced a knife of his own and trained it on Dylan, who was moving toward the door. “Stay right where you are, Missy.”

  Baseball Bat swung the cane at Connor’s head, and Connor ducked. He swung it again and caught Connor in the shoulder. The pain shot down Connor’s arm and into his back. He stumbled, fell. Dylan screamed.

  Then Baseball Bat kicked Connor in the torso twice and was just about to swing the cane at him again when Connor heard a voice from the street: “Keep moving, folks. It’s just a power outage.”

  To Connor, that sounded like a cop. To Baseball Bat, it seemed to, as well. He threw the cane away, turned toward the two men in hoodies. All Connor could see of them now were their backs. Baseball Bat shouted to get their attention, and, faster than they had come, they exited back onto the street.

  Connor was in too much pain to make sense of what had happened at first. Still on the floor, he moved his shoulder gingerly around to make sure it wasn’t broken.

  Then, Dylan was there, asking if he was all right.

  “I think so.”

  “What the hell?” Olin said, now standing beside Dylan. “That was my car.”

  Connor slowly got back to his feet, using the arm that wasn’t in pain to push himself off the floor. “File an insurance claim. You’ll get the money back.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “Now they’ve got my car!” He held up three fingers and started ticking them off. “They’ve got my car, my wallet, my phone. I mean—what were you thinking?”

  Connor immediately felt his pockets for his and his father’s phones. He couldn’t imagine how Baseball Bat would have managed to take either of them, but he still needed to know they were there.

  They were. Apparently, he was the only one left with a phone or a wallet.

  He took a breath. “I didn’t want to give them our phones.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why do you think?” Connor snapped.

  Olin opened his mouth to respond, but didn’t. He seemed to have figured it out. His face softened, and he turned away, walked toward the front of the market.

  To Connor, Olin seemed like the kind of person who wouldn’t want anyone to see him cry, so when Dylan tried to go to him, Connor grabbed her arm, shook his head no. He could imagine how Olin felt, and so he gave him his moment.

  When Olin spoke again, he said, “They left the bat.”

  Connor had seen Baseball Bat grab the switchblade on his way out. But he hadn’t thought about looking to see if the bat was still here until just now. Baseball Bat had also left the laptop, Connor noticed. He probably didn’t want to explain to the cop why he was walking around with a brand-new computer.

  “We should take it with us,” Connor said, referring to the bat. “Just in case.”

  Olin nodded and picked it up. Dylan went for the laptop.

  “Hey,” Connor said. “Leave that.”

  “But if I don’t take it, somebody else will. And I could use a new laptop.”

  Dylan’s laptop was top of the line, Connor knew, and had more power than she would ever need. But he decided it might not be a good idea to tell her she was lying since it would mean explaining how he knew that. So instead he settled for a simple “It’s not yours.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Connor, Olin, and Dylan made it back to Austin’s building without further incident. Connor tried the door, but it was locked. Which wasn’t unusual. Austin had said he would make Connor a key, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet. So, of course, Connor knocked.

  Austin opened the door immediately. Behind him, the apartment was lit with candles. “Where have you been? I was trying to call you before . . .” He trailed off, gestured to the darkness around them. “Why didn’t you answer?”

  Connor remembered the calls. They had come in while he and Olin were scouting the Albright Mall. “I didn’t hear them,” he lied. Well, half-lied. He hadn’t heard them, but he had seen the missed calls. He could have called back.

  “Who are these people?” Austin said, looking past Connor and stepping out of the way so all three could enter.

  “Friends,” Connor said, which, before he had said it, had seemed like merely an easy answer. But after he had spoken the word aloud, he realized it was true. More for Olin than Dylan, since he had just met her, but true nonetheless.

  Dylan, however, was not at that same point yet. “Yup. All you have to do these days to make a friend is hack into their website.”
She plopped down onto the sofa and put her feet, still in those red sneakers, up on the coffee table.

  Austin winced—Connor knew he didn’t like people putting their feet on his coffee table even when they weren’t wearing shoes—but he didn’t say anything. Perhaps there was enough going on right now with the blackout and the explosions that it seemed trivial. “You hacked into her website?” he asked Connor.

  Dylan jumped in to answer. “He hacked in. I kicked him out. He followed me to the mall.” To Connor: “How did you know I was at the mall, anyway?”

  Connor stammered. He wasn’t ready to tell her what he had done.

  Olin did not seem to have that same problem. “He hacked into your phone through your computer and installed a tracking application,” he said as he leaned the baseball bat against the wall.

  Dylan put her feet back on the floor and rocked forward. “You what?”

  “I didn’t know how else to find you.”

  She glared at him, then collapsed back into the sofa. “Touché.”

  If any of this concerned Austin, he didn’t let on. “Sit down,” he said to Connor and Olin, and they did. “I’m just glad all of you are safe. I think there’s something bad going on out there.”

  “We know,” Connor said.

  “We were at the Albright Mall when it happened,” Olin added.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There was a bomb that went off in the food court. We’re lucky be alive.”

  Austin sighed. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight. Anyone want some coffee?”

  Olin said he would take a cup, and Austin disappeared into the kitchen.

  Connor heard him open a cabinet and then turn on the tap. He knew the sounds meant Austin was making a fresh pot.

  “Why do you think it was my parents in the fire?” Olin asked.

  Dylan, who seemed to be staring at nothing, perhaps thinking about Tom and whether he was okay, tuned in. “What fire?”

  Connor summed up for her what he had told Olin just so they could move on, then apologized to Olin for what he had said. “It’s just the ring. It still bothers me that it was on the wrong finger. And I just assumed if it wasn’t my parents, it had to be yours. But I don’t know that. I don’t know that it was yours or mine. For all we know, it could have been another two people entirely.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Let’s try to stay positive for now.”

  Dylan rolled her eyes. “Have you been outside?”

  Connor wasn’t sure what to say to that. Dylan was right. Things out there were bad. It would be easy to give in to the anxiety that had been hounding him since his parents were taken and had compounded when the bomb went off. But that wouldn’t do him any good. Instead of explaining that to Dylan, though—which was a one-way ticket to feeding his anxiety—he went into the kitchen to check on Austin.

  A pot of water was sitting on the gas stove, not yet boiling. Austin was leaning against the counter, watching it. He had set out three mugs and a tin of Folgers instant coffee. “It’s the best I can do under the circumstances,” he said.

  The kitchen was narrow and cramped. There was no reason to hang out here, literally watching a pot boil. Connor figured he must have overheard their conversation and was giving them some space.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”

  Connor shrugged as the water bubbled up to a simmer.

  Austin turned off the stove, put a scoop of instant coffee into each mug, and then poured in the water. He handed two of them to Connor. “For you and your friend. I’ll bring some milk and sugar in case he wants any.”

  There weren’t enough seats in Austin’s living room for all four of them, so Austin carried in a chair from the dining room. They drank their coffee while Connor and his friends filled Austin in on what had happened at the mall and afterward.

  Dylan did most of the talking. Olin just nodded along, and Connor, regularly checking his phone for a signal, only spoke up when he thought he had something to add.

  Although nobody said as much, Connor suspected they were all waiting for the power to come back on so they could find out how bad the situation actually was.

  CHAPTER 47

  Oldrich was barely out of bed when Basia called. He must have sounded tired or annoyed when he answered (he was both), because the first thing she said was, “I thought you would want to know about this right away.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s no match in the system for the knife you gave me.”

  Oldrich walked to his bedroom closet in just his underwear and pulled out a suit. It was brown and wrinkled. Brown because he liked the color, wrinkled because he didn’t iron. “What are you saying? That you couldn’t get any DNA off it?”

  “I got DNA. Plenty of it. The sample I pulled from the blade didn’t have a match, but I expected that. The problem is, neither did the DNA on the handle.”

  Oldrich tried to make sense of what Basia was telling him. He knew Matthew Jones had killed Heather Callahan. There was no doubt about that. So why wasn’t his DNA on the knife? “Are you sure there wasn’t a second sample you missed?”

  “If there was DNA on that knife that had been in our system, I wouldn’t be telling you we didn’t have a match.” Basia sounded insulted.

  Maybe, because he was American, Matthew Jones had been overlooked when they had catalogued the DNA of current prisoners. “When you get to the office—”

  “I’m at the office. How do you think I know what the results of the test were?”

  “Could you look up a name for me? I want to make sure they’re in the system.”

  “Matthew Jones?”

  Oldrich had an uneasy feeling about where this was going. “Yes.”

  “I already did. He’s there.”

  That was exactly what Oldrich had worried Basia was going to say when she’d rattled Matthew’s name off so easily. Still, since the DNA wasn’t a match, he had to consider the possibility that another sample had been miscategorized or that the record tied to Matthew’s name had been corrupted. While neither of those things happened often, they had both been known to happen before. Especially with some of the original records, which, since Matthew was in jail at the time the system was set up, would have included his.

  Oldrich decided he had better go down to the prison, get a fresh sample, and run it again.

  Praha Pankrác looked a lot like the American prisons Oldrich had seen on TV. He parked in the lot along the north wall and flashed his badge at a guard on his way in. The guard hardly even looked at it before waving him through.

  The process of gaining access to a prisoner was pretty boilerplate. Oldrich filled out a short form at the front desk and then was taken to an interrogation room, where he would wait for Matthew to arrive.

  The room was a perfect square. Eight by eight. Cinderblocks walls, peeling linoleum on the floor. A small foldout table and two foldout chairs. No windows.

  Oldrich took a seat in the chair that faced the door and occupied himself with his phone while he waited. The news about the blackout in New York was just starting to hit his feed. There wasn’t much information yet. Likely a problem with a transformer, one article speculated.

  But the door opened before he could finish reading it. A guard stepped in. “Detective, we have a problem.”

  CHAPTER 48

  It seemed like a strange thing to play cards in the middle of a blackout, with Connor’s parents missing, Olin’s parents missing, and Dylan’s friend dead, but that was what they did. None of them could sleep, and it was better than staring at each other in the dark, waiting for the power to come back.

  When it did return a couple of hours later, the whole apartment lit up at once. Austin placed his cards face down on the coffee table, then got up and went to the window. He peeked through th
e blinds. “It’s not just us. Far as I can see, everything’s back.”

  Connor didn’t realize how stressed the blackout had been making him until it had passed. It was as if they had made it through the worst—the literal darkness before the dawn—and maybe this was a sign that everything would be okay. It was crazy thinking, he knew. As if somehow the restoration of power had anything to do with the return of his parents. But he didn’t think too hard about it. He needed to take comfort where he could. And if he found that comfort in a sort of disjointed logic that bordered on being a wish, so be it.

  He picked up the remote, turned on the TV, and was greeted by a commercial for Pillsbury biscuits. As if nothing at all had happened.

  Without saying a word, everyone turned their attention to the screen. They all wanted answers, and they all seemed to know that was exactly what Connor was trying to get them.

  He pressed the up button, browsing from one channel to the next.

  “Forty-seven,” Austin said.

  Connor moved his thumb from the arrow to the digits. When the channel changed, they saw a news anchor sitting behind a desk and the CNN logo in the corner of the screen. “. . . reports are still coming in. So far, we are aware of five explosions at malls across New York City. The bombs were detonated within minutes of each other. Deaths and casualties combined are expected to be in the thousands. New York City Health & Hospital has already reached capacity and is routing ambulances to other locations . . .”

  All four stared in silence, watching the broadcast. The news anchor cut over to experts who speculated on the reasons behind the bombings and how they would change the country and shopping malls, in particular. Governor Flores would be addressing the nation soon. So would the president.

  Connor didn’t have to say this was bad, but he did anyway, and Olin agreed. Austin put a finger to his lips and shushed them. Even though the gesture was common enough to be meaningless, it still reminded Connor of the night his parents were taken and gave him a chill.