Delusion Road (3 page)

The guy in the hoodie sauntered down the steps. “What’s up?”

Celia tilted her head toward Willa. “My friend here needs something from you.”

He looked at Willa. “What d’you need?”

Willa flushed, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut.

“An apology,” said Celia.

“What for?”

“Seems you don’t know much about parking lot protocol,” Celia drawled, stretching out the moment, and Willa could tell she was enjoying herself. Celia had always liked an audience.

“What’re you talking about?”

Celia recounted what Willa had told her and Britney, embellishing the incident with details that made Willa’s experience sound almost harrowing.

The guy just stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

Celia lasered him with narrowed eyes, and Willa could feel the crowd on the steps studying them with growing interest. Then, as if coming to the same sudden awareness, the guy looked at Willa again. “Sorry,” he muttered, then turned on his heel and strode off before Willa could respond.

Celia turned and raised her hand in the air for Britney and Willa to high-five. “You two bitches ready for the best school year ever?” she asked.

As her palm slapped Celia’s, Willa watched the tall guy disappear, his shoulders hunched even more than before.
Man, wouldn’t that suck? Starting your senior year in a new place and not knowing anybody?
How about being humiliated in front of strangers before you even stepped inside the building?

She pushed that thought aside. After all, she had better things to think about. Best school year ever? You bet.

L
ess than two minutes on the school grounds and he’d already ruffled some bitch’s feathers.
Christ.
Waiting in the lineup at the school’s main office, Keegan Fraser stared at his feet, trying to ignore what had happened outside. But he couldn’t. Molten lead roiled inside him, waves of throttled wrath crashing against the wall of his chest. And behind each wave was a feeling even worse than anger. Regret. Getting noticed like that was the last thing he needed, and he could just imagine his father’s reaction to it, not to mention Forbes’s. Hadn’t Forbes repeated his prime directive again and again?

Keegan forced himself to look up, his eyes drawn to the person in front of him. She was more than a foot shorter than he was, and he found his gaze drifting to the top of her head, where her thick black hair parted in a ruler-straight divide before falling to her waist. Although he couldn’t see the girl’s face, she reminded him of—

He ground his teeth together, trying to bite back the surge of self-pity that joined the anger and regret seething inside him. It was pointless to let his mind go there. He looked again at the black-haired girl and noticed a bruise on her coppery forearm that the sleeve of her blouse only partially concealed. She looked
athletic, so maybe she’d whacked it playing sports. The way she balanced on the balls of her feet made him think basketball or volleyball, but she could be a dancer or—

“No hats.”

Keegan turned to see a man in a chipmunk-brown suit glaring at him, pointing toward the wall behind the counter, where a secretary waited on the guy two people ahead. A sign showed the black silhouette of a life-sized baseball cap with a red circle and diagonal line superimposed over it. Keegan shrugged.

The suit approached him and yanked his hood from his head. “You have trouble reading signs?” he asked.

“It’s not a hat,” Keegan replied, fresh anger churning inside him.

“If it covers your head, it’s a hat.”

“You find that on Wikipedia?” muttered Keegan. Judging from all the white faces he’d seen so far, he could tell that Brookdale lacked the large Middle Eastern population at his last school, and he would’ve liked to see the suit apply his definition to a hijab.

The suit bristled. “You’re new, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

Keegan told him.

“I can’t say I care for your attitude, Keegan. I’m Mr. Caldwell, the vice-principal, and already you’re on my radar. Not a great way to start the school year.”

Keegan felt the heat in his belly work its way to his face, and he’d have given anything to tell the guy what he could do with his radar, but he noticed that others had turned to watch their exchange, and Forbes’s prime directive echoed in his head. “Sorry,” he muttered. His second
sorry
in his first four minutes at Brookdale High.

The vice-principal appeared almost disappointed by the sudden apology, perhaps eager to make an example of someone on this all-important first day. He nodded crisply. “I’ll be keeping an eye on you,” he warned as he stepped back, his attention moving to the growing crowd in the corridor.

“Someone needs a happy pill.”

Keegan turned to see the black-haired girl smiling up at him. “I don’t think they come that big,” he said, grateful for the swell of sound beyond the office that masked their murmured comments.

“If it’s any consolation, it’s my first day, too,” she said. “I’m Raven.”

“Keegan,” he replied.

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Why Brookdale?” he asked, eager to keep the conversation going so he’d feel less alone.

“You mean what’s a nice girl like me doing in a place like this?”

He grinned. “Something like that, only not as cheesy.”

“I wanted to see it first-hand.”

“See what?”

“Rampant cocklaphobia.”

He blinked at her. “Rampant what?”

“Fear of hats. Judging from that sign, it must be epic around here.”

Keegan snorted, drawing another glower from Caldwell. “That’s really a word? Cocklaphobia?”

“According to answers.com it is,” she replied, “although doesn’t it sound more like a condition affecting lesbians?”

Keegan’s sudden bray of laughter drew looks from even the harried secretary. To hell with the prime directive—it had been a long time since he’d laughed. He wanted to talk longer, but the secretary said “Next?” and it was Raven’s turn.

“Nice meeting you, Keegan,” she said before pivoting and handing a sheet of paper across the counter.

When it was his turn, the secretary sorted out Keegan’s schedule conflict and looked up his locker number and combination, which he’d gladly taken. Finding his locker would help him kill time before the assembly. He’d already gotten dozens of
Uh, new guy
glances from people he’d passed in the corridor, a definite disadvantage of attending a school with only seven hundred students. There were more than four times that in his school back home.

He frowned.
Home.
As if that word had any meaning now. He dug in his pocket for the paper the secretary had given him, pulled it out, then began scanning the numbers on the lockers he passed.

Sudden activity at the end of the corridor caught his attention, a flurry of high-fiving and fist-bumping as some guys greeted each other, followed by a squealed “It’s about
time
you got here!” and “Where
were
you last night?”

Keegan arrived at his locker and tried the combination while glancing at the scene unfolding thirty feet away. The bitch he’d had to apologize to had wrapped herself around a big muscular guy who, because his hair was as blond as hers, might have been her brother. That is, if it weren’t for the lip-lock that suggested he was trying to remove a kidney with his tongue. Judging from the way everyone else was staring at them, he guessed they were The Couple, the godlike duo in every senior class that everyone
else in the building wants to be half of—or, failing that, wants to be around. Keegan tried not to give in to the anger he’d felt earlier, focusing instead on retrying his combination.

“Sorry, Wills,” Keegan heard the blond guy say when the two came up for air. “I was helping Dad move stuff up to the community college for Casino Night. Took way longer than I thought.”

“You didn’t even answer your
phone
!” the bitch named Wills—
Wills
?—pouted.

“Changed my clothes and forgot my cell in my jeans. But I heard your messages when I got home. You liked the flowers, huh?”

“I
loved
my yellow roses!” she gushed, and Keegan got the feeling she was making sure everyone around them could hear her. Yellow roses. Big deal.

A bell rang and Keegan sensed everyone in the corridor give a collective shrug. Spinning the dial on his lock one more time, he watched out of the corner of his eye as The Couple headed in his direction on their way to the assembly, and he saw they had an entourage—the bitch’s two girlfriends and two buff guys, clearly athletes. One of them was wearing a Bears cap in clear violation of the no-hats rule, and Keegan watched with interest as a male staff member came out of his classroom and followed the six down the hall.

The teacher made no mention of the offending hat.

G
riff opened his eyes and, like so many other mornings, couldn’t believe he’d made it through another night. It had been more than five months since he’d botched that hit, and those months had taken a toll on him. He’d lost weight, his scar now pulling up into the hollow beneath his cheekbone, tugging the ragged line askew and making him look haggard. And more intimidating, too, judging from the reaction of the woman standing in front of him at Starbucks the other day—glancing up into his face, she’d promptly dropped her cup, the liquid splashing all over the floor. She’d apologized again and again, but she’d avoided looking at him each time she’d said “I’m sorry.”

Griff had lost track of the times he’d repeated those words to Morozov in the past five months. But apologies meant nothing to the guy. Sooner or later, Griff would be getting a visit from one of his goons, which was why he now slept with his Smith & Wesson in his hand. So far, though, the only thing that disturbed his sleep—besides his usual nightmare—was the memory of Morozov’s voice that day in the car:
The clock’s ticking.
And Griff was no closer to finding the target than when he’d started.

But as surprised as he was to wake up alive each morning, he could guess why Morozov hadn’t iced him yet. Because that’s
what a sick fuck he was. Years ago, Griff had watched a cat play with a mouse for over an hour before finally killing it, and he figured Morozov took some kind of kinky pleasure in knowing Griff woke up each morning wondering if this was the day he’d slip under the wheels of a CTA train or kiss the grill of a transfer truck. Never a knife in the back or a bullet to the head—Morozov liked his hits to look like accidents, which was why Griff had gone the extra mile to make the job on East 52nd look like a gas leak.

Griff wished now that he’d stayed behind that morning to make sure the target had been offed, but the whole point of using explosives was so he wouldn’t be there when the hit went down. With traffic cams everywhere, he didn’t like taking a chance on being recorded near the scene if somebody happened to suspect arson. It wasn’t likely—Griff had spent hours perfecting the mechanism to ensure the C-4 would wipe out any immediate trace of it—but you never knew.

Morozov had wanted the target’s wife and kids killed, too, probably to send a message to anyone else who might be thinking of doing what this guy had done, so Griff had watched the family for days. To maximize his equipment’s kill quotient, he needed all four to be in the same room when it detonated, which meant weekends were a wash because the family followed no schedule on those days. During the week, the target often worked late, which meant evenings were a problem, and since nobody in the family came home for lunch, midday wasn’t an option, either. Breakfast was the obvious choice. It was the only meal they routinely ate together during the workweek, and always from seven fifteen to seven thirty. Never before and never after.

Except that day.

It was bad enough that Griff had failed to take out the target. Worse, the explosion had tipped the guy off to the fact that Morozov was on to him, which explained why he’d covered his tracks so thoroughly. He was in the wind.

Griff had considered disappearing, too, but he was pretty sure that Morozov’s people—who included at least three cops on the Chicago force—would eventually find him. And if that happened, getting run over by a CTA train or pulverized by a transfer truck would seem like a lottery win compared to the end that Morozov would arrange for him. The guy was all about sending messages.

Surprisingly, Morozov’s huge network had been no use finding the target, who had somehow managed to vanish along with his digital footprint. He must have gotten help, because Griff had seen no evidence the guy had the know-how to scour his electronic tracks so cleanly, a skill Griff had spent the last five years mastering.

In the beginning, Griff had been confident that the facial recognition algorithm he’d created would do its job—considering the sheer volume of graphic uploads that were posted online daily, it was only a matter of time before he’d get a hit that would pay off. But days became weeks and then weeks turned into months and it still hadn’t happened, despite Griff’s continual retooling of the FRA to broaden its search parameters.

Although he was certain the FRA would eventually come through, Griff had pursued the target in other ways, too. His first step had been the obvious one—tapping into traffic cam footage and visually tracking the route the guy had taken—but the
three-second delay between some surveillance bursts had made the process unreliable, creating too many gaps the target could have driven through unrecorded, and apparently had. Undaunted, Griff had searched state DMV sites looking for updates related to the target’s licence and vehicle registration number. He’d hacked bus, railway, and airline manifests along with digital clearinghouses that made hotel and motel bookings, bringing up all three-person occupancies within the relevant timeframe. And finally he’d begun to consider long-term scenarios, infiltrating private and government sites across the country and uploading sifters that combed through records of new employees, rental agreements, even school board funding for specialized support personnel. But so far none of it had panned out.