Runaway Model (27 page)

"I'm going down now. I have no choice."

"This is private property. No trespassing. Protected by Smith and Wesson. You know the drill. Get the fuck out. Last warning."

"Emergency landing."

"Fuck your emergency landing."

Stoney was sitting up now, but he put his face in his hands. The other men were utterly still. The jet pilot never betrayed a flicker of worry. He tapped the landing wheels on the tarmac, bounced, then caught. The jet slowed.

Bryce's stomach fluttered. The jet came to a stop with its nose inches away from the Citation.

A lone man had already scrambled out of the smaller plane. His face kept changing colors in the lights from the jet. He clutched an AR-7 in both hands.

Roberto nudged Bryce. "Look at the way he's holding it. He's not a shooter."

Wilton: "We can take him if we have to."

A bell dinged, and Johnston pulled open the metal door.

"I'll lead the way," Bryce said. "It's my operation. You guys cover me."

"Are you wearing your vest?" Wilton asked.

Bryce nodded. All four of them had Kevlar vests to protect their core from bullets. Stoney, Arnold, and the pilot didn't, but they'd stay in the jet.

The welcoming committee appeared to be alone and uncertain about what he should do. He made no move to fire the AR-7 he shook in their direction. "You're out of bounds, man. This is private property. Private airspace. You have no fucking clue what you just stepped into. Pack up your toy jet and go home."

Thin, unwashed yellow hair, bad teeth. The very image of a longtime tweaker.

"Where's your ground crew? We need help, man. Hole in the fuel tank." Too late Bryce wished he'd rehearsed the lie with Vernyn Carter. He was just spitballing it right now, saying whatever popped into his head. Wouldn't they have already gone down in flames if they really had a leaky tank?

"There's no fucking ground crew. I told you before. I can't help you people. This is not an official airstrip. This is private. For like... private individuals. Bad-tempered private individuals. The kind who believe in free enterprise."

Bryce kept his voice very low. Very level. You don't want to spook a meth user who's waving around an AR-7. "Look, dude. Be real. I'm not interested in your tacky little drug-running operation. I just need a few of your people to help me get my bird back in the air. It will take them all of thirty minutes. Forty-five minutes tops. Then I'm out of your life and out of your hair."

"How many times I have to tell you there's nobody fucking here?"

"You're alone?"

The three soldiers flanking Bryce were spreading out in slow-motion. They held their Glocks at the ready. Mr. Tweaker looked like he was about to piss his pants. "I can't let you stay here, man. They'll be here any minute."

"Who's they? Maybe they can help us."

"They'll help you cut your own fucking throat, dude. Just go. Just go. Go now."

Johnston and Roberto had him surrounded. Wilton pulled a flashlight from his belt and shone it around the interior of the Cessna.

"He's telling the truth. There's nobody here," Wilton said.

"Didn't I tell you? Count yourself lucky. If you don't get out of here before they arrive—"

"Who's they? When do they get here?" Bryce asked.

"Fuck you," the man said. He fired the AR-7 just once, the shot going wild. Without even breathing hard, Roberto wedged his Glock deep in the tweaker's right ear.

"Drop the weapon. Drop it now. I won't ask you twice."

He didn't drop it but he didn't fire it again either. Wilton calmly pulled it out of his sweaty grip. "I hope you're a good pilot because you're a fucking useless soldier."

"Fuck off."

"Language," Johnston said.

"Fuck you too."

"We're wasting time," Bryce said. "Where's Roman Nigel? Did you know he'd taken a teen boy? Did you know you'd be involving yourself in human trafficking?"

"Am I supposed to be shocked because it's a boy instead of a girl this time? There's a fuck for every fucker, isn't there? I'm just the pilot. I don't give a fuck what they're carrying."

"Do you even have a conscience?" asked Roberto.

"Fuck you."

"We're not going to get anything useful out of this fuck-up," Wilton said. "I vote we shoot him and dump him in the swamp."

"We can't do that," Bryce said.

"We're already guilty of several felonies. We don't need this fuck-up out there talking about it. Not to mention the planet's better off without him."

"Please." The tweaker brushed his stringy hair out of his face. "I work for some important people. If you kill me, I don't know how they'll kill you but I know it'll be slow. Slow and painful."

"Your people don't know you're on a side mission for a semi-professional stalker perv," Wilton said. "They're not going to avenge your sloppy ass when they don't even know who the fuck you're working for." It was a guess but a good one.

The man whimpered. If you could call him a man.

"Stop it," Bryce said. "We can't murder this loser in cold blood. If he makes a move, blast away. But we can't shoot him while he's cooperating."

Johnston was quick to side with Bryce. "It isn't Army."

"We have nothing to gain from killing this piece of shit." Roberto took out a syringe. "I can take care of him this way and not spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder at a possible capital murder charge."

"Wait." It was Arnold Geurne, who'd emerged from the jet when he realized there wasn't going to be a shooting war. "Don't knock him out. He might have a prearranged code that he needs to send Nigel to let him know it's safe to come here."

"Well, we'll have to hope he already sent it." Roberto yanked up the man's multiple sleeves—coat, shirt, and T-shirt—all in one fast move. "Hold still, asshole. If you make me jab an artery, you're one dead piece of fucked-up shit."

The man went very still indeed.

"I don't know, man," Arnold said. "I think we need him awake. If Nigel calls and expects to speak to him..."

"We're not giving this piece-of-shit tweak-ass excuse for a pilot any kind of chance to exchange some signal with Roman Nigel. OK? That's final." Roberto was making a moot point. He was injecting the drug even as he spoke.

The tweaker slumped. Johnston caught him around the waist and under the buttocks. "We've already lost the element of surprise. We have to assume he'd notify Roman Nigel the minute he spotted our jet."

"Does he have a cell?" Arnold asked.

Roberto pulled a discount smartphone out of the inside pocket of the dirty coat.

"What's the plan now?" Bryce asked. "Why wouldn't Nigel do a runner? If he doesn't come to this airstrip, how do we find him?"

Silence. If it was summer, you'd hear crickets. But it was December.

***

A
mosquito bite. His right arm. Deep in the vein. A vicious mosquito. A bite and then an itch. It seemed to go on and on, the itching.

Kyle jerked.

He was in the driver's seat now. Nigel was in the suicide seat. When had he made the switch?

Why
had he made the switch?

It was a nightmare. But not a dream. The shadow hovering over Kyle was Nigel brandishing an empty syringe. His eyes glittered. Reflections from the stars. It was that dark.

He'd injected Kyle with something in a needle after all.

Beyond Nigel, out the window, Kyle saw trees and stars.

Who knew there were so many stars?

Where the hell were they? He'd never heard of a place like this anywhere near Manhattan. Even Queens had skyscrapers, and that was about as far out as Kyle had ever been.

He took a deep breath. Tried to collect his scattered thoughts.

Nigel had pulled off on the side of a road somewhere in a wilderness Kyle didn't know existed in this century. He'd never seen a rural road in America. He didn't know what he'd expected, but it wasn't this unpaved dirt path that was little more than a series of disconnected potholes.

The dark trees sparkled with lights. He blinked, and the lights were gone. Fireflies in December? More likely a trick of the eye caused by the drug.

"Wake up," Nigel said. He tossed the needle out the window. "Wake up. I know you're awake. Your eyes came open just then. Stop playing dead. You have to drive."

"What, mate? I can't drive."

"You're not that impaired. I just gave you something to counteract the effect of the sedative you took before. I know how it works. I wouldn't put anything in your body I haven't used myself. So you can't fake me out. I know you're just pretending to be fuzzy. And you'll be fully alert in five fucking minutes. If you're not already."

"No," Kyle said. His eyes felt huge in his own skull when he blinked them a couple of times. "I mean I can't drive. I bought my driver's license, innit? I never took me driving test. Never sat behind the wheel of a car. Don't need to drive in Vegas, mate. Don't need to drive in New York."

Nigel paused. He picked up his cell and sent a text. Waited. The wind in the pine trees made an eerie sound.

No answer.

"You'll have to," Nigel said after a moment. "Don't be afraid, lad. It's an automatic. There's no traffic. Easy peasy. And you have to learn sometime. You'll never have a better chance."

In the dead of night in the middle of a New Jersey swamp wasn't quite where Kyle had ever imagined taking his first driving lesson.

"Why do I have to drive? This is madness, mate."

"They're waiting for us. I need my hands free." Nigel pushed the black handgun into the side of Kyle's neck. Kyle hadn't paid enough attention at the movies to know what kind it was. Knowing guns hadn't seemed that important, really.

He certainly never imagined learning to drive at gunpoint. "Fuck me, mate. You're going to get us both killed. Who's waiting for us?"

Nigel shrugged. He didn't want to say. Or he didn't know.

Kyle's blood itched. He wanted to dig his fingernails deep into the veins in the back of his hands. The stimulant might be working but it was a nasty drug.

So hard to sit still. He realized he was squirming in his seat. Nigel must have strapped him in, and he'd set the seatbelt a little too tight. The shoulder strap dug into the right side of his neck. The metal clasp cut into his left hip.

"How do you know somebody's waiting for us?"

"I got a text from our pilot that he had incoming at the airstrip. That's the last text he sent. Incoming."

Police, Kyle thought. Homeland Security. FBI. He could think of all kinds of possibilities, none of them good. He didn't want to go with Roman Nigel, but he didn't want to get shot in the crossfire between the perv and law enforcement.

He sure as hell didn't want to go through all this shite only to get deported back to England.

"So you drive us back to Manhattan. You let me go. I say nothing, and you say nothing, and we call it a night. Stoney won't talk. His people won't let him. They're still trying to front. They don't want him at the center of a tabloid frenzy complete with a story about being kidnapped by some wanker in love with one of his fans."

"That plane is our way out," Nigel said. "Our only way out. Now get your sweet arse in gear or I'll end it right here." He nudged Kyle's neck harder with the barrel of the gun.

The key was in the ignition. The engine was purring. Kyle had no choice. He shifted into drive and tapped the gas.

It couldn't be that hard, right? Stupid gits drove up and down the public roads at all hours from the age of twelve.

He gassed it a little more, and the sedan picked up speed. Wheeeee. They hit a pothole in approximately six seconds flat. Kyle slammed the brakes. They stopped but not before bouncing out of another pothole.

"You're a shit driver, all right," Nigel said. "You better be more careful, lad. You don't want this thing going off by accident."

Maybe it would be a more merciful death than driving straight up a pine tree. Kyle shimmied here and there, hitting the very potholes he swerved to miss.

At one point he saw a pair of white-tailed deer standing in the road. Their eyes lit up in the headlights. Then they bounded away and were gone.

Lucky not to have an accident then and there.

"You wouldn't have to have the gun ready every fucking minute if we weren't driving into a trap." Kyle knew in his heart it was pointless to argue, but the drug was making him talkative. "Why don't we drive straight north toward the Canadian border and take it from there? Nobody's going to report me as a missing person. I was never supposed to be in America in the first place."

"And how do you propose we cross the Canadian border, angel?"

"Is it a trick question, mate? I might not have me GCSEs but I'm not fucking stupid. It's undefended, innit? Take a hike through the right bit of forest and just stroll right over."

"You'd like that, wouldn't you? You're half my age and a runner. We'd get in the woods and you'd do a runner for real."

Well, yeah.

"OK then." Kyle tried not to think about what might be in his veins. Every time he lost focus, he gave the car too much gas. "We could cross at the border like everybody else. You got this far. You must have paper that stands up. I'm not going to make a fuss and risk getting deported straightaway, am I? That's doing the job of shipping me back to England for you."

"I'm not fucking stupid either, Kyle. I'm not going to engage with well-trained, well-armed customs officials when I have the option of taking on shite security guards who've never done anything tougher than peel a fourteen-year-old off some singer's leg."

"You think that's who's waiting for us up at the airstrip? Stoney's men?" Now they were on a bit of road that someone might have tried to line with gravel once. Little stones kept clattering upward. Several of them pinged the windscreen, and at least one of them had already left a tiny star in the glass.

"Nobody else knows you're missing. You think your rocker buddy called the cops? That wanker's going to keep his relationship with you on the downlow forever. Even if it costs you your life. He's all about one man. Stoney Rockland."

Kyle realized he was going too fast again and tapped the brakes. But his mind kept flying at supersonic speed.