Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

Fred is looking at the car I arrived in: a midnight-blue sedan, with supple leather seats and a stereo still playing light jazz, even though the engine is off. Blood on the passenger’s seat, mud on the driver’s. A bullet hole low on one of the doors.

Fred looks at the hole for a strangely long time. A shadow crosses his face.

‘Nice ride, Lux,’ he says finally.

‘Not my car.’ Not my name, either.

He nods, unsurprised. ‘Anyone looking for it?’

‘Maybe. Probably.’

‘I’ll tell Kyle to take care of that.’ He holds out a hand for my keys.

If I give them to him, I’m trapped. If I don’t, he might realise I’m not Lux.

‘You don’t need to do that,’ I say.

Fred waves this off. ‘It’s no trouble.’

Hesitating any longer would look suspicious. I pass him the keys. He slides the car key off the ring and tosses the rest back.

‘It’s fine for tonight, though,’ Fred says. ‘No one will see it. We’re miles from anywhere.’

He’s not wrong. The house is in the middle of the woods, at the end of a long driveway off a dirt road. None of my contacts at the FBI know where I am. I don’t even have a phone. If I die out here, no one will ever know what happened to me. That was the point.

‘Come on,’ Fred says. ‘You must be freezing.’

‘Yeah.’ My tattered white shirt, suit jacket and thin socks offer no protection from the night air, and I’m still getting used to having a shaved head. My ears hurt. Hunger burns in my gut, or maybe it’s fear. I broke my nose in a car crash two days ago—I can still taste blood pooling at the back of my throat.

Fred locks the car with the key remote. The music and the interior lights fade out, like in a cinema when the movie’s about to start. We crunch across the gravel towards the house.

Fred is white, lean and younger than I expected. Late twenties, maybe. Fair skin, scruffy hair, friendly wrinkles at the edges of his brown eyes. He has the voice of a venture capitalist or a junior lawyer. He doesn’t look or sound like he runs the most violent porn site on the dark web.

The house is made from many kinds of wood, carefully arranged. Pale slats around the foundations, darker beams up top, with a gradient in between, like a sunrise. Recycled timber, maybe, like in one of those expensive eco homes. The windows on either side look double glazed, the light inside dampened by thick curtains. The second level is smaller than the first, maybe just an attic.

It’s a fusion of the Old South and the New. Texans used to march into the wilderness with nothing but a hatchet and build a house to live in. If anyone else settled within a half-mile of them, they’d abandon the house and build another somewhere even more remote. That urge is still there—but now people want their isolated homes to have solar orientation and heated towel rails.

Fred is unlocking the front door, even though he only just walked out of it. ‘Automatic locks,’ he explains. ‘Can’t be too careful. There are some bad people out there.’

‘Oh?’ I say.

He welcomes me into the warmth of a short hallway, two mirrors gleaming on either side, like in an elevator. I can hear a fire crackling somewhere. The downlights are painfully bright, making me feel as though I’m in a dentist’s chair, about to be poked with something sharp.

Fred hangs his jacket on an old-fashioned coat stand. The door locks itself behind us with a crisp beep.

‘Come on.’ Fred leads me through the hallway, which opens out into a spacious living area. Two white men in muscle shirts drop their Xbox controllers and get up off a grey sofa. A refined-looking woman in a slinky dress appears at the far end of the room holding a glass of white wine. A young man—maybe a teenager—sits on a beanbag in a hoodie and a baseball cap, looking at his phone. A skinny guy in a suit turns away from the fireplace and looks at me through glassy eyes.

I worked hundreds of cases at the FBI and studied thousands of mugshots, but I don’t recognise any of these people. Am I supposed to? Lux never met Fred in person, but he might have met Fred’s friends. If he did, I’m screwed. I don’t look anything like him.

But everyone is giving me polite smiles. My cover is intact … for now.

‘Guys,’ Fred says, ‘this is Lux.’

Heads nod all around. The two muscle men each raise a hand in a small wave. The young guy says, ‘’Sup?’

‘These are the Guards.’ Fred points to each person. ‘Donnie, Samson, Zara, Kyle and Cedric. Now, repeat all that back to me.’

He’s kidding, and everyone laughs.

‘Sure.’ I point. ‘Donnie, Samson, Zara, Kyle, Cedric.’

Fred raises an eyebrow. ‘Not bad.’

Memorising names is easy. Sometimes I use celebrities—Donnie, one of the two brawny Xbox players, looks a bit like Mark Wahlberg, and I know Mark has a brother named Donnie, so that’s easy. The other player, Samson, has shoulder-length hair. I visualise him as the Samson from the Bible, a servant girl hacking off his locks as he sleeps.

Other associations also work. Zara, the elegant woman in the cocktail dress, has the same name as an upmarket shoe store in Houston. I used to beg for change on a nearby street corner. I imagine this Zara as the owner, shooing me away, threatening to call the cops.

The more emotional the connection is, the better it works. After my parents were shot, I was put in a group home, and one of the other orphans was named Cedric. He wasn’t a friend, but no one adopted either of us, so I knew him