S
locum pushed slowly into the room. His eyes widened as he took everything in. Then he smiled. The door slammed shut behind him.
“That’s it,” Danny said. “No farther.”
With his right hand he aimed the Beretta at Slocum’s chest. At center mass. He’d read somewhere that aiming for center mass increased the odds of hitting your attacker, especially if you weren’t confident in your aim. He thumbed the manual safety off. The gun was solid and fairly heavy, maybe a pound or two.
Slocum stood no more than fifteen feet away. It would be hard to miss.
If he could bring himself to pull the trigger.
He brought his left hand up to steady his grip. “Hands up.”
Slocum seemed to be calculating something. He hesitated, looked twitchy. He seemed to be contemplating making a run at Danny.
But he shrugged and lifted his hands as high as his chest, grudgingly, palms out, a tolerant grin on his face. As if Danny were an annoying child who insisted on playing patty-cake. As if the whole thing amused him and he was putting up with it just to be a good guy.
“All the way.”
Slocum exhaled. Lifted his hands up. His smile had morphed into something closer to a sneer. He didn’t look as nervous as a guy who had a gun pointing at him should.
“Step around to the side. That way.” Danny indicated, with a wag of the pistol, the armchair by the window. The reading chair. Next to it was a standing lamp with a big white cylindrical shade. “Sit over there.”
The TV in the adjoining room came on, muffled but audible through the thin walls. The other impostor, Yeager, was home now, too.
“Maybe you’re not aware that killing a federal law enforcement agent is a capital offense,” Slocum said, standing defiantly.
“Yeah? What’s the penalty for killing a
former
law enforcement agent who’s gone bad? Sit down.”
Slocum nodded and grinned and remained standing. Their secret was out, and he knew it.
“Twelve feet away and you probably think your chances of hitting me are pretty good,” he said. “Well, guess what. You’re more likely to drill a forty-caliber round through the drywall and kill or maim an innocent civilian. A hotel guest you can’t even see. An employee, maybe. That’s why police are instructed never to fire a gun in circumstances like this unless they’re absolutely certain of the stopping range.
Are
you, Danny?” He shook his head. “You haven’t really thought this through, have you?”
The surge of adrenaline was making it hard to collect his thoughts. What should he do now? He wasn’t going to shoot the guy, and he had no name or phone number of anyone at the FBI. Call the police? By the time the police got here, Danny would be long dead.
Suddenly, Slocum lunged at him, hands outstretched like claws. Danny sidestepped, then swung the Beretta hard. Gripping it tightly, he slammed it into the side of Slocum’s head. Slocum grunted and yowled in pain and then sprawled backward to the floor. Blood seeped from his eye. “You just screwed up big-time, you pathetic bastard,” he snarled.
Behind him Danny could hear the faint metallic clunk of the door to the adjoining room coming open.
Danny turned and saw Yeager coming through the doorway. “Oh, Daniel, this is not good,” he said as he trundled in. A gun drawn.
On Danny’s left, Slocum was scrambling to his feet. Rivulets of blood streamed down one side of his face. The gun had apparently gashed the skin just below Slocum’s eye. Danny turned and pointed the weapon at Slocum, then moved it around to the right, aiming at Yeager.
“Put the gun down, Daniel,” Yeager said patiently. “Don’t be foolish.”
“Back off,” Danny warned Slocum, jerking the gun at him.
“Daniel, I see you hurt Phil,” Yeager said. “Looks like you kicked ass beyond your wildest dreams. I salute you for that.” He tipped a hand to his brow, making a salute. “Sure, you could try to shoot my friend here, which would be ill-advised. You’d be shocked at how quickly I can put you down. Which I really don’t want to do, because frankly you’re far more useful to me alive than dead. So please, let’s both lower our weapons so we can have a civil conversation. We have some things to discuss.”
Slocum swiped a hand over his bloodied face. He gave Danny a poisonous glare. As if he’d go after Danny if Yeager weren’t there.
Yeager was utterly calm. He could have been discussing football scores.
“Daniel, if we wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead, I
promise
you.”
He was right: They still needed him. It wasn’t in their interest to kill him. This was pointless.
He lowered the gun.
“Thank you,” said Yeager. “You’re doing the right thing.”
“I’m onto you guys,” Danny said. “You’re frauds. You don’t work for the DEA anymore.”
“Busted,” Yeager said. “You’re right. We’re not with the DEA. You should be so lucky.”
“All your threats about sending me to prison—they were all lies.”
“Also true. We’re not going to send you to prison. No, Daniel, if you don’t cooperate, you’ll
wish
you were going to jail. It will be far, far worse. Am I making myself clear?”
Danny stared. He’d begun to feel cold.
“You mean to tell me you still haven’t figured out who we work for? I’m disappointed in you. Here, here’s a hint.” He pulled something from his jacket pocket and tossed it at Danny. He grabbed it with his free hand: a necklace of green and black beads with a pendant of a robed woman holding a scythe. “Look at all familiar?” Yeager said.
“That—that—” Danny had last seen that necklace around the neck of Galvin’s driver in Aspen. He’d thought it was the Virgin Mary. But it wasn’t. With that scythe it looked more like the Grim Reaper.
A few of the beads were crusted with something dark that was probably blood. Danny dropped it in revulsion.
“That’s right. Consider it a gift from us. You don’t mind if it’s pre-owned, do you? That’s Santa Muerte. Saint Death. A noncanonized saint. South of the border, some people wear it for protection. It’s supposed to bring you luck.”
“I’d say this one’s had sort of a mixed record,” Slocum said.
Yeager chuckled. “It didn’t turn out so well for Alejandro, that’s true,” said Yeager. “But hey—you never know. Maybe Daniel could get lucky.”
And Danny knew then that either they’d been the ones who’d murdered Galvin’s driver in Aspen or they worked with the people who did. The room seemed to tilt.
So who did they work for? A cartel, was it possible?
That e-ticket he’d found: One of them was flying to Mexico, back to the city of Nuevo Laredo, where they’d been fired by the DEA. Was a cartel based there?
“Phil,” Yeager said, “could you cue up the home movies?”
Slocum moved to the desk and tapped away at the laptop. Then he turned it so that it was facing Danny. He hit a couple more keys on the laptop, and a window on the screen opened. It took him a minute to recognize the image.
The blood drained from his face. He felt dizzy.
Lucy wore a pastel blue T-shirt and navy gym shorts, doing something in a room that looked like her own kitchen.
Making coffee. The image was grainy. It looked like surveillance video.
“Want to know why she always smells like smoke?” Yeager said. “Not because of the bums she hangs around, I’m sorry to say. I know, she told you she quit smoking. But I’m afraid your ex-girlfriend is what you call a chipper—she borrows cigarettes from friends, never buys her own. Phil, pull up the next channel, could you?”
Another video window came open on the screen. With terror, Danny recognized the family room of his childhood home. His father was leaning back in his favorite chair, the Barcalounger. His mother sat in her customary place on the plaid couch. Both watching TV.
“It’s cute,” Yeager said. “Mom and Dad go together to Stop & Shop in Orleans twice a week. Your dad insists on buying the day-old bread, and your mom hates it, but she puts up with it. In a long marriage, I guess you gotta make all sorts of compromises, you know?” He cleared his throat. “Yeah, there’s your teenage daughter, too, but we don’t do kids unless we really have to. Which I hope doesn’t come to pass. I have a daughter myself.”
“You son of a bitch,” Danny said, crackling with anger. “You goddamned son of a bitch.”
“So here’s the thing, Daniel. You asked for two hundred fifty thousand dollars in cash by tomorrow morning at ten, and that’s not going to happen. But I appreciate your directness, and I’m going to be just as direct with you. Thomas Galvin keeps all of his account numbers and passwords in one cloud-based encrypted site. Which is locked by means of a single password. That password generates a random key and a random vector initialization and blah blah blah. So you, my friend, are going to get us that password by ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Your own deadline. If you
fail
to give us that password, you’re going to become an orphan. And that will be just the beginning of your troubles.” He brightened. “On the other hand, give us that password, and all of these problems go away. Life becomes good again.”
Danny stared.
“Are we clear?” Yeager said.
Danny nodded. His pulse raced and the room had gone bright. “Yes,” he said. “We’re clear.”
“Good. One more thing?” Yeager said.
Danny turned.
“Please be careful with that gun. You might hurt someone.”
H
is tires squealed as he swung through the Lyman Academy’s wrought-iron gates, barreling past the teacher’s parking lot—Hyundais and Nissans and Ford Fiestas—and careening around the semicircular pickup lane. Two hours before school got out, and his was the only car parked in front of the main entrance. He hummed with anxiety. Everything was too bright and seemed to move like a jagged stop-motion video. Adrenaline pulsed through his bloodstream.
Their assurance that children were off-limits—that was meaningless. What they, or their colleagues, had done to Galvin’s driver in Aspen bespoke a limitless violence. If abducting his only child was the way to force his obedience, they wouldn’t hesitate.
He had to get her out of here, keep her away from all known locations, which included Lyman and his apartment. Wellfleet, staying with his parents—that was out of the question now, since the cartel had them under surveillance.
There was only one safe place right now, and that was the Galvins’ house in Weston. It was a target, yes, but a hardened one. The property was fenced in, and Galvin had assured him he’d brought in private security. Not manpower provided by the Sinaloa cartel, but real security guards. If she’d be safe anywhere, she’d be safe there.
He sprang out of the Honda and raced through the school’s front doors.
Leon Chisholm, the school security guard, looked up from the chair where he was reading the
Globe
, and said “Hey, Dan—” but Danny kept running through the hall and up the stairs, no time to talk. Mrs. Gifford, the school secretary-receptionist, gave him a perplexed smile that quickly turned into alarm. “Mr. Goodman, is everything all right?”
“Where’s Abby?”
“She didn’t sign out—”
“What class is she in?”
She lifted her reading glasses from their chain around her neck and peered at the computer monitor. “She’s in Mr. Klootjes’s precalculus class. Do you need me to get a note to her? Is there something wrong?”
“Where’s the class?”
“Mather 29, but—”
“Which way?”
“I can send a message, but parents can’t—”
“Thanks,” he said, and he vaulted into the corridor in search of Mather Hall.
In his peripheral vision he saw Mrs. Gifford get up from her desk chair and heard her call after him, “Mr. Goodman?”
His shoes slapped against the terrazzo floor and rang in the hallway. The damned school was a maze of halls and cubbyholes and lockers and short flights of stairs and blind turns.
It took him a good five minutes to locate Mather. Room 29 was a modern-looking classroom, at least by Lyman standards: whiteboard walls instead of blackboards or greenboards, M. C. Escher posters, inscrutable diagrams. Danny stared into the classroom through the window in the door. Fifteen bored-looking students sat in burgundy tablet-arm desks staring dazedly at Mr. Klootjes, an obese bearded redhead with grimy wire-rimmed glasses and a soporific teaching style, scrawling a tangle of digits with green marker on a whiteboard. Danny had met him once, at a routine parent-teacher conference, and understood at once why Abby detested the man.
Abby was in the back row apparently struggling to stay awake. He didn’t see Jenna; maybe she wasn’t in the same math class.
Danny yanked open the classroom door. Mr. Klootjes turned around slowly, squinting. “Um, hi . . . ?”
“Abby, come on,” Danny said, beckoning with an urgent wave.
Abby looked up at the door, alarmed. “Daddy?”
“Let’s go, come on, now!” Fifteen girls were staring at him, a few tittering. He heard one of them say, “Abby’s dad.”
“Excuse me, sir,” said Mr. Klootjes.
“Abby, let’s go, this is important,” Danny said.
Mortified, she slunk out into the hallway. “What’s going on?” she said.
“Let’s go, we’ll talk in a minute.”
“I need to get my stuff from my locker.”
“No time for that.”
“It’s close, it’s just in Burke—”
“We can get stuff from your locker another time.”
“What? What’s going on? What
happened
?”
“We’ll talk in the car.
“Wh-why are you doing this? Did something bad happen?”
“We’ll talk in the car,” he said again.
• • •
Abby slammed her car door. “Oh my
God
, this is so
embarrassing
! What the hell is so
important
that you have to pick me up now? What’d I
do
?”
“You didn’t do anything.” He couldn’t tell her the truth, couldn’t tell her what was going on, what exactly the threat was. “I’m taking you over to Jenna’s house now.”
“Jenna’s—for what? How come we’re going there now?”
“Just . . . just
listen
to me, please,” he snapped as he maneuvered the car out of the main gates of the school and onto St. Agnes Road. “You’re going to be staying at the Galvins’ for a couple of days.”
“The Galvins—?”
“At their house. Just for a couple of days.”
“Why?”
“You’re not complaining, are you? I would have thought you’d be thrilled.”
“I can’t—I mean, all my stuff’s at home!”
“I’ll get it for you later on today.”
“You don’t know what to get! You don’t know where I keep all my stuff.”
“It’s not a big apartment. I’ll find whatever you need.”
It wasn’t as if Danny could give her an explanation that would make any sense to her.
I’m afraid something might happen to you. I’m afraid someone might take you hostage. You’ll be safer, far less vulnerable, in a house in the suburbs surrounded by fenced-in acres and armed guards than in a second-floor apartment in the city with a couple of flimsy locks between you and them.
No reason to terrify her.
“What is the big
rush
, are you going to
tell
me?”
“No,” he said. “Not now. Later.”