No Second Chance

Still, Pavel was a realist. He would adapt. He had spent time selling women in Kosovo. White slavery in the guise of strip clubs was a big market over there, though Bacard had come up with another way of using those women. Pavel, no stranger to sudden change, would do what needed to be done. He gave Lydia some attitude, but once she handed him a wad of bills adding up to five thousand dollars, he grew quiet. The fight was out of him. It was only a question of how.

She handed Pavel a gun. He knew how to use it.

Pavel set up near the driveway, keeping his two-way radio channel open. Lydia called Heshy and told them they were ready. Fifteen minutes later, Heshy drove past them. He tossed the tracking device out the car window. Lydia caught it and threw back a kiss. Heshy kept driving. Lydia brought the tracking device into the backyard. She took out her gun and waited.

The night air was starting to give way to the morning dew. That tingle was there, lighting up her veins. Heshy, she knew, was not far away. He wanted to join in, but this was her game. The street was silent. It was 4:00A .M.

Five minutes later, she heard the car pull up.

Chapter 33

Something was verywrong here.

The roads were becoming so familiar I barely noticed them. I was wired, jazzed, the pain in my ribs barely noticeable. Rachel was absorbed in her Palm Pilot. She’d click screens with her little wand, tilt her head, change viewing angles. She dug through the backseat and found Zia’s road atlas. With the cap of the Flair pen in her mouth, Rachel started marking up the route, trying to discern a pattern, I guess. Or maybe she was just stalling, so I wouldn’t ask the inevitable.

I called her name softly. She flicked her eyes at me and then back to the screen.

“Did you know about that CD-ROM before you got here?” I said.

“No.”

“There were photos of you in front of the hospital where I work.”

“So you told me.”

She clicked the screen again.

“Are the photos real?” I asked.

“Real?”

“I mean, were they digitally altered or something—or were you really in front of my office two years ago?”

Rachel kept her head down, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see her shoulders slump. “Make a right,” she said. “Up here.”

We were on Glen Avenue now. This was getting creepy. My old high school was up on the left. They’d refurbished it four years ago, adding a weight room, a swimming pool, and a second gymnasium. The façade had been intentionally scuffed up and aged with ivy, giving the place a proper collegiate feel, reminding the youth of Kasselton what was expected of them.

“Rachel?”

“The pictures are real, Marc.”

I nodded to myself. I don’t know why. Maybe I was trying to buy myself some time. I was heading into something worse than unchartered waters here. I knew that the answers would alter everything again, make it all go topsy-turvy, just when I hoped to set the world right. “I think I’m owed an explanation,” I said.

“You are.” She kept her head down on the screen. “But not right now.”

“Yeah, right now.”

“We need to concentrate on what we’re doing.”

“Don’t hand me that crap. We’re just driving here. I can handle two things at the same time.”

“Maybe,” she said softly, “I can’t.”

“Rachel, what were you doing in front of that hospital?”

“Whoa.”

“Whoa what?”

We were approaching the traffic lights at Kasselton Avenue. Because of the hour, they were blinking yellow and red. I frowned and turned to her. “Which way?”

“Right.”

My heart iced. “I don’t understand.”

“The car has stopped again.”

“Where?”

“Unless I’m reading this wrong,” Rachel said, and finally she looked up and met my gaze, “they’re at your house.”

I made the right turn. Rachel no longer needed to direct me. She kept her eyes on the screen. We were less than a mile away now. My parents had taken this route to the hospital on the day I was born. I wondered how many times I’d been on this road since. Weird thought, but the mind goes where it must.

I made the right on Monroe. My parents’ house was on the left. The lights were off except, of course, for the lamp downstairs. We had it on a timer. It stayed on from 7:00P .M. to 5:00A .M. every day. I’d put in one of those long-life, energy-saving light bulbs that look like soft-ice-cream swirls. Mom bragged about how long it lasted. She’d read somewhere that keeping a radio on was also a good way to scare away burglars, so she had an old AM radio constantly tuned into a talk station. The problem was, the sound of the radio kept her up at night, so now Mom put the volume so low that a burglar would have to press his ear against it to be warded off.

I started making the turn onto my road, onto Darby Terrace, when Rachel said, “Slow down.”

“They moving?”

“No. The signal is still coming from your house.”

I looked up the block. I started thinking about it. “They didn’t exactly take a direct route here.”

She nodded. “I know.”

“Maybe they found your Q-Logger,” I said.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

The car inched forward. We were in front of the Citrons’ house now, two away from mine. No lights were on—not even a timer lamp. Rachel chewed on her lower lip. We were at the Kadisons’ house now, nearing my driveway. It was one of those situations people describe as “too quiet,” as if the world had frozen, as if all you saw, even animate objects, were trying to stay still.

“This has to be a setup,” she said.

I was just about to ask her what we should do—pull back, park and walk, call the cops for help?—when the first bullet shattered the front windshield. Shards of glass smacked my face. I heard a short scream. Without conscious thought, I ducked my head and raised my forearm. I looked down and saw blood.

“Rachel!”

The second shot zinged so close to my head that I felt it in my hair. The impact hit my seat with a sound like a pillowy wallop. Instincts took over again. But this time it had a mission, a direction of sorts. I hit the accelerator. The car lurched forward.

The human brain is an amazing instrument. No computer can duplicate it. It can process millions of stimuli in hundredths of a second. That was, I guess, what was going on now. I was hunched over in the driver’s seat. Someone was taking shots at me. The base part of my brain wanted to flee, but something farther along the evolutionary path realized that there might be a better way.