You're Next

She read his face in the mirror and fought out of his grasp. ‘No. Not again. No more mayonnaise on my head. I can’t do it anymore. I can’t. I can’t.’

‘We don’t have a choice!’ he yelled.

She flinched, her back to the counter, leaning away from him.

‘We’re out of choices. And the mayo doesn’t even work.’ His teeth were clenched. ‘Gentle isn’t effective, Kat. To fix this we have to consider harsher options. The chemical wash might sting and it might seem like it’s not good for you, but sometimes that’s what… what’s required… if we’re gonna keep you safe from…’

He realized, with horror, that he was about to cry.

Kat had gone as white as the towel, which had fallen to her feet. Her mouth was ajar, lips trembling. Arms half up in front of her.

He pressed a hand to the wall, leaned over a little, tried to catch his breath. Clenched, she waited. He reached for her, and she drew back violently.

‘I’m sorry. I miss your mom, too. She’s so much better at-’ His voice broke, hard. ‘I miss her, too.’

Kat unfroze, shoulders lowering first, then the arms coming loose. She crouched, picked up the towel, and wrapped it tightly around herself. Her head was down, and tears were dotting the worn-thin linoleum. He reached for her unsurely, but she didn’t push away, and then he drew her in and hugged her as she grasped his arm.

They watched bad TV for a while and ate a late dinner – ‘Oh, swell, Dad! Peanut butter and fruit juice! Mm- mmm.’ He did his best to smile, to keep things light, but his face felt wooden, the passing minutes a countdown to some terminal event. He took a long shower and dragged a disposable razor across his face. The last time I shaved, it was in my own bathroom, thinking I needed to pick up more razor blades. Annabel was in bed, flipping through a magazine and humming out of key to Nina Simone.

He shoveled cold water over his face to clear the residue, then returned to watch the end of The Simpsons. Finally he zipped Kat into the powder blue sleeping bag, checked the baby monitor’s batteries, and tucked it between her and Snowball II. He and Kat both pretended not to notice her scratching her head.

The curtains barely touched in the middle, so he slid a chair over to trap them closed. When he turned, Kat’s stare was focused and intense, and he realized that when his shirt had pulled up a moment ago, it had revealed the gun at the small of his back.

‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘Of dying.’

He crossed, sat beside her, and ran a knuckle gently down the slope of her nose. ‘Everyone is.’

‘You, too?’

A prescient question, given what he was considering.

‘A little,’ he said. ‘Sure.’

‘What scares you the most? Being dead or not seeing me and Mommy anymore?’

He said gently, ‘What’s the difference?’

After a moment her face changed, and she nodded. He kissed her cheek, breathing her in. She snuggled into the pillow.

He stroked her hair until she was asleep.

Pocketing the Batphone and clipping the monitor receiver to his belt, he locked Kat in the room, walked a few steps down the outside corridor, and crouched with his back to the wall. Across the strip of parking spots, traffic whirred past. The air was diesel fumes and fast-food grease. On the ground, ants overran an apple core. The monitor complained a bit, and he crab-walked a foot or so closer to their door so it would shut up.

A maid pushed a long-handled broom up the corridor toward him, head down. She was badly slouched, ancient, attired in a black, old-fashioned maid’s dress, a stereotype unto herself were it not for the iPod headphones visible through the gray wire of her hair. The broom shushed its way down the corridor, a delta of dirt tumbling ahead of it. She did not acknowledge Mike, not even when she bent arthritically to pick up the apple and dustpan the debris. She continued out to the parking lot, broom bristles scraping against the concrete soporifically – shhoop shhoop shhoop.

Shep picked up on the first ring. ‘I’m getting close,’ he said. ‘Kiki Dupleshney. Everyone knows I’m auditioning con women for a job. Her name keeps getting tossed around. Sooner or later someone’s gonna produce a contact.’

Mike said, ‘Annabel’s recovering, right?’

Shep did not respond.

‘Can you watch Kat until Annabel’s back on her feet?’ Mike asked.

The old woman made her way around the parking lot – shhoop shhoop shhoop.

‘What are you doing, Mike?’

‘They want me. Not Kat. Me.’

‘And if Annabel doesn’t get better? And you’re not around? You want me to explain to your daughter that her father gave up and that’s why she’s being badly raised by a safecracker?’

‘I’m not giving up. I’m facing them. Maybe I get the drop anyway. If they win-’

‘I’ve seen Dodge,’ Shep said. ‘He’ll win.’

At Mike’s hip the monitor whined, and he nudged down the volume. ‘Then they’ll have gotten what they want. And Kat will be useless to them. She’ll be safe.’

‘I will find Kiki Dupleshney,’ Shep said. ‘Soon. She will point us to them. Then we’ll find them instead of them finding you.’

‘And Kat’ll what? Ride shotgun?’ He was pacing the corridor, the cleaning woman’s broom unnaturally loud, closing in on him, grinding at his nerves – SHHOOP SHHOOP SHHOOP. He turned, nearly tripping over her, but her head stayed bent as she squatted to touch dustpan to floor, the hollows of her eyes catching shadows. From the buds tucked into her pillowy, wrinkle-creased ears, music radiated faintly, a mariachi squall of violin and trumpet. He looked past a hunched shoulder to see, scattered in the spray of dirt and cigarette butts she’d shoved in from the parking lot, the hulls of innumerable split sunflower seeds, still gleaming with spit.

The phone was falling from his hand, turning in slow motion, shattering on the concrete.

The unit at his hip fuzzed Kat’s yelp into something like the buzz of a wasp.

And he was sprinting, ten yards of panic scored by staticky commotion from the monitor, which he’d slapped to highest volume – a thud, the screech of metal on metal, hoarse, muffled bellowing.

He took the door clean off the cheap hinges.

The bed was bare.

Kat – and the sleeping bag she’d been tucked into – were gone.

Chapter 40

The bedspread, smeared to the right, pointed at the window. Curtains rolled on a breeze. A dirt smudge marred the chair cushion where a large boot had set down.

Something primal rose from Mike’s bones, from the twisted ladders of his cells, firing his nerves, setting his skin ablaze.

The hip unit broadcast Kat’s shrieking, the rumble of an engine, violent rustling. Echoes of the sounds floated through the open window, coming at him in stereo. He dashed across, hands on the sill, leaning out in time to see a receding white square at the end of the alley. The square turned, elongating into a van.

How? How had Dodge and William hunted them down?

Kat’s cries warbled nightmarishly from his hip, and it took a moment for Mike to ground them in reality; they’d scooped her up in the sleeping bag and carried her off like a cat in a pillow-case, the baby monitor slipping unseen down with her.

He yelled after the van as it motored from view. Leaped through the window. Got six frantic steps down the alley before strategy flashed back into reach, and he backtracked, racing for the Honda. He left four feet of rubber