Abby fumbled for her harness. She’d been knocked out, but her helmet was still on, and she was upright, trapped in the seat. That meant she needed to release the harness, but where was the pit crew? She needed them. Needed help.
Something wrong with her arm too. Broken, probably, and it felt like her hands were smashed together. Why couldn’t she separate them?
She opened her eyes and stared at her hands as if they were unfamiliar, and only when a lightning flash lit the yellow cord that bound her wrists together did she remember where she was and that there was nobody in the pit coming for her.
But she was too upright, just like if she’d been harnessed into the seat. Why was that?
A cord was around her neck, too, that was why. She was bound against the headrest, the cord just slack enough to let her breathe but not to let her slump sideways or forward. The kid had positioned her well. He’d also put his black baseball cap on Abby’s head, pulled low, shading her face. That was what Abby had confused for the helmet. To any passerby who glanced in the car, she was just a woman in a baseball cap, dozing in the dark.
Dax Blackwell looked over. “Morning, Abby.”
When Abby turned, the cord chiseled across her throat. She winced, then refocused.
It was the first time she’d ever seen the kid without the baseball cap, and even in the dark, his hair was a startlingly bright blond. It was cropped close to his skull, moon-white and luminescent in the glow from the dash lights.
“Nice touch with the hat,” Abby said. Her voice came out in a dry croak.
“I thought it would help. You had a little blood in your hair. Sorry about that.”
The road rolled beneath them, the lights of Boston up ahead. They were still on I-95, cruising by the northern suburbs. The hospital wasn’t far away.
“You’re lucky you’re necessary,” the kid said. “I’d have very much enjoyed killing you back there, but…priorities. Nice trick with the phone too. I almost missed it.”
He took one hand off the wheel and held the phone up.
Abby tried not to show her defeat. It had been the only win, the only thing she could take from the evil prick.
“Interesting developments in Tara’s room,” the kid said. “Investigator en route, it seems. Department of Energy, no less. Do you understand that?”
“No.” Speaking made Abby’s skull ache. She closed her eyes and waited out the pain.
“You’ve done some research on our friend Amandi Oltamu,” the kid said. “Where is Black Lake? Seemed to confuse Shannon, and I don’t know anything about it either.”
“I don’t know.”
“Tara thinks Oltamu came from Black Lake, but my information said he came from Ohio. There’s no Black Lake in—”
“Yes, there is.” Abby’s eyes opened. Suddenly she understood Oltamu. Something about him, at least. And why the Department of Energy would be interested in him.
“Siri disagrees with you,” Dax said. “Surely you don’t mean to tell me Siri is confused? She’s a voice of reason in a mad world.”
“Black Lake is not a town. Or even a lake.”
The kid looked at her, interested now. “What is it?”
Abby stared straight ahead, watching taillights pull away. Dax was keeping the Challenger pinned at the speed limit, refusing to tempt police.
“It’s the nickname for a place where they run cars through performance and safety tests,” she said. “It’s fifty acres of blacktop, and from the sky it looks like dark water—that’s where the nickname comes from. You can ask a car to do anything in that space. A high-end car, tuned right, can be a lot of fun out there.”
It could also be instructional, of course. The Black Lake was all about pushing limits. Sometimes you exceeded them. That was the nature of testing limits, of playing games on the edge of the deep end of the pool. Sooner or later, you slipped into it.
“Oltamu wasn’t in the car business,” Dax said, and Abby didn’t argue, but she believed Oltamu might very well have been in the car business. He was the battery man—and every automaker on the planet was working on electric vehicles now. But if Tara was right, and Oltamu had just come from Black Lake in East Liberty, Ohio, then he’d been watching performance tests. You didn’t go to the Black Lake to test a battery-charging station. You went to the Black Lake to push a car to its performance limits—or beyond.
Dax shifted lanes. Despite the late hour and the storm, traffic was thick. Welcome to Boston. Traffic was always thick.
“We’ve had to reroute, and I’ve been tempted to drive faster, but if I got pulled over, I’d have a hard time explaining you, wouldn’t I?” He laughed, a sound of boyish delight. “It’s a waste of the car, though.”
He put on the turn signal and then shifted again, gliding left to right in a move that would attract no attention, and yet Abby could feel that he was still learning the throttle of the Hellcat, the bracing amount of torque that even a light touch on the accelerator brought. It was a waste of the car with him behind the wheel. He had no idea how to handle it, how far it could be pushed. Or how quickly control could be lost.
I made that gap in the guardrail, Abby thought dully. That was one hell of a move. Splitting traffic with the angle and acceleration perfect, then the hard brake and turn without misjudging the tires and rolling, putting it through a gap most people couldn’t hit at forty, let alone ninety, and doing it all on wet pavement…dumb, yes, and a product of panic, but…not easy to do.
Strange and sad, how that still pleased her. It was nothing to be proud of—she’d been melting down, her nerves no longer merely fraying but collapsing like downed power lines, sparking flashes of failure.
But it was also the first time she’d taken anything remotely resembling a test of the old instinct, the old muscle memory.
The old Abby.
For a moment, the woman she’d been had surfaced again. For a moment, she’d seen nothing but that narrow target, had anticipated the speed of the cars crowding in, felt the tires exploring the pavement in a way that was as intimate as skin on skin. She’d executed the intended maneuver perfectly and in circumstances where inches and fractions of seconds mattered.
There weren’t many people alive who could have pulled that off without causing a deadly pileup, and she’d landed without even scratching the paint.
And now you’re riding shotgun with a killer, tied to the seat, and you didn’t even succeed in taking his phone from him. Some victory, Abby.
Victories, though, like phobias, weren’t always rational. Sometimes they were very internal, invisible to the outside world. Matters of willpower or control were still wins. The short-term impact didn’t matter nearly as much as the fact that you’d held on in the face of adversity. A win was a win, as they said. No matter how small, no matter how private.
She watched the traffic thicken as Dax rolled southeast, and she wondered how she’d feel with the wheel in her hands again. The same old panic? Or would it be diminished by the knowledge that when things went to hell, she’d maintained enough of her old brain and body to execute the escape maneuver? Tough to call it an escape maneuver when there’d been no real external threat, nothing except the irrational dread that soaked her brain like chloroform, but the brain didn’t operate strictly on facts; its fuel was emotion.
This much, Abby understood very well.
The exit for the hospital was fast approaching, maybe five miles away. She wondered what the kid’s plan was and if he had any concern, any fear. He projected nothing but confidence. He was to killing what Abby had once been to driving—a natural pairing, in total harmony with his craft.
But killing Tara Beckley wasn’t his goal. Not tonight, at least. He had to get Oltamu’s phone to her, and she would need to be alive for that. How he intended to walk through a hospital and achieve this without attracting attention, Abby couldn’t imagine.
She figured she’d be a part of it, though. There was a reason she was still alive, and it wasn’t his compassion.
Dax shifted right again, decelerated, and exited. Abby didn’t follow this choice; if time was now an issue, then he shouldn’t abandon the interstate this far north. Then they were moving into a residential stretch, high-dollar homes on tree-lined streets. Driving farther from the hospital.
The kid pulled into a parking space on the street, tucking in behind a behemoth Lincoln Navigator, and studied the road. His eyes were on the houses, not the cars, but then he paused and checked the mirrors as well. Satisfied by whatever he saw or didn’t see, he killed the engine.
“Time to start earning your keep,” he said, turning to Abby. The boyish features seemed to fade, and his hard eyes dominated his face, eyes that belonged to a much older man.
“What are we doing?”
“You’ll be sitting right there. But you’ll be watching too.” He picked up his phone from the console, tapped the screen, and then set it back down. The screen displayed a live video image of the interior of the car. Abby twisted her head, searching for the camera, the cord rubbing into her throat. She didn’t see a camera, but when she looked back, she realized the video was in motion. When she stopped, it stopped.
Dax smiled. “I’ll need my hat back,” he said.
He took the hat off Abby’s head, and the video display followed the jostling motion. He settled it back on his own head, then turned to Abby, and Abby’s face appeared on the cell phone display, a clear, high-definition image. She saw there was dried blood crusted in her blond hair from where he’d hit her with the gun.
“I need to confess something,” the kid said. His voice seemed to echo, but it was really coming from the phone’s speaker. “Covert audio recording is illegal here in Massachusetts. This is a two-party-consent state.”
He sighed, and the sigh echoed on the phone like a distant gust of wind.
“I’ve had to make my peace with that,” he said, “because my uncle was a big fan of recording things. Knowledge is power, right? The more eyes and ears one has, the more one knows. I think my uncle would’ve liked this hat. I never got the chance to show it to him, but…” He shrugged. “I’m confident of his opinion.”
He moved his hand to the ignition and started the engine again.
“You’re about to meet the man who’s responsible for the unfortunate trouble Hank Bauer encountered,” Dax said, pulling away from the curb.
“You killed him,” Abby said. “I don’t care who paid you.”
“Sure you do.”
At an intersection, they paused at a stop sign, then they continued along the dark street and pulled into a driveway that was flanked by ornate brick pillars, a gate between them. Dax put the window down, punched four buttons on a keypad mounted in one pillar, and the gates parted. He drove through. The gates closed behind them and locked with a pneumatic hiss followed by a clang.
He pulled down the drive, parked, and cut the engine.
“Just sit tight,” he said. “I know it’s uncomfortable, but at least you’ll have a view.”
With that, he stepped out of the car, slammed the driver’s door, and locked the car with the key fob, engaging the alarm. If Abby tried to smash the window, it was going to be loud, and the kid would have plenty of time to get outside. There was a slim chance that a neighbor might come to investigate, but probably not. Car alarms were viewed as nuisances, not cries for help. Unless Abby freed herself from the passenger seat, she wasn’t going to achieve anything by breaking a window.
Dax walked around the back of the house and disappeared from sight. Abby’s eyes went to the cell phone, and now she could see from Dax’s point of view: a light came on in the back of the house. Dax went to knock, but the door opened before he could make contact, and a short, wiry man with graying hair and a nose crooked from a bad break stood in front of him, gun in hand.
For an instant, Abby thought this could be good news—she didn’t care who this guy was; anyone who shot the kid was on her team.
But the man didn’t shoot. He lowered the gun and said, “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“My job,” Dax said. If he was in any way troubled by the gun, he didn’t show it.
“Your job? You don’t come to my fucking home unless I tell you to! That’s not your—”
Something moved at the edge of the frame and then came into the center. Dax was holding up Oltamu’s phone. “This was my job, Gerry.”
The man stared at the phone. He leaned forward, then pulled back, suspicious and confused.
“How’d you get it? Kaplan said—”
“Kaplan’s trying to bluff her way back to life,” Dax said. “Let me in. I don’t want to stand outside and talk about this shit.”
Gerry hesitated, then nodded, and stepped aside. Abby followed the bouncing path of the camera as the kid walked through a sunroom with a marble fireplace, opened another door, and stepped into a kitchen that was filled with expanses of white cabinets and stainless-steel appliances.
“You alone?” Dax asked.
“Yeah. And remember, the questions are—”
“The questions are yours to ask, right. I didn’t think that one could do much harm.”
Gerry paced back into the frame. His body language was tense, like a fighter’s before the bell. The kid worked for him, but he didn’t seem to have his employer’s trust.
Maybe that was because Gerry had just arranged to kill him.
“How in the hell did you get that?” he asked.
“Kaplan’s been bullshitting you the whole time. She never had it. The salvage-yard guy gave it to his brother. It was in his pawnshop. I bought it for ninety bucks. I assume I’ll be reimbursed?”
“Let me see it.”
Dax passed it over. Gerry set his gun down on the counter to study the phone.
Unwise, Abby thought, watching in the car. She was captivated by the scene playing out on the phone’s screen, but it was time to worry about more important things—she was literally captive within the car, and that wasn’t going to change unless she could free her neck.
She reached for the cord with her clumsy, bound hands. There was just barely enough room between skin and cord to get a grasp, and when she did, the cord had no give. She leaned forward, straining painfully, and twisted until she got her hands over her shoulder. It was an awkward movement that put pressure on her rotator cuff as well as her throat, but she was able to feel the way the cord had been looped around the headrest and knotted. The knot was a pro’s work; Abby wasn’t going to be able to untie it from this angle, working blind and unable to separate her hands.
There was, however, another option. She was tied to the headrest, which was a perfectly effective approach when the headrest was in place, but the headrest could be removed. It would be awkward, and it would be painful, but if she could lift the headrest out, the cord would slide off it.
She arched her back, wincing at the pain, stretched her shoulders until the tendons howled in protest, and began to hunt for the headrest release with her fingers.