Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

There are several different ways I could play this, none of them good. Too many angles. Not enough information.

‘We talked about boundaries,’ I hear myself say. ‘I don’t know what the rules are here. But I’m not used to people coming into the bathroom while I’m in there.’

Fred takes a step in. Enough that I can sense his physical presence, but not so much that it’s definitely a threat. Zara may not be good at boundaries, but he is.

‘I don’t get angry,’ he says, as Zara promised he would. ‘Not since group. But that doesn’t mean I’m a pushover. Yesterday it was Ivy, today it’s Zara. I like you, Lux—but I don’t like the idea of you getting naked with my girlfriend.’

‘Is your girlfriend clear on that?’

He purses his lips, like a chimpanzee about to throw a punch. ‘Are we going to have a problem?’

‘You and me?’ I say. ‘Never. Bros before hos.’

Fred barks out a laugh, shattering the tension. ‘Cool. Listen, I need a favour.’

Fred has a complicated dance. Friendliness, oblique threats, favours. But I’m starting to learn the steps.

I blow some cool air on my coffee and take a sip. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘When you go with Kyle to the post office today,’ Fred says, ‘can you watch him?’

I realise that I never told Thistle that Kyle might be my son. Maybe I forgot. Or maybe I just didn’t want her to know he existed. I’ll let her arrest me, but I’m not sure I want her to arrest him.

‘To make sure he does it right?’ I ask.

‘No. Well, yes, but I’ve been thinking.’ Fred lowers his voice. ‘You know the hiker?’

I see where this is going. ‘You think he came here to meet somebody.’

‘It makes sense, doesn’t it?’

It does, especially after finding the file about Donnie in the fireplace. Maybe the hiker brought the file here and gave it to someone, who read it and burned it. Not Fred, who would have used his paper shredder instead. Not Donnie, who was the subject.

I put the coffee cup down. ‘You think it might be Kyle.’

‘He has been acting weird lately.’ Fred leans over the bench, resting on his knuckles like a general examining a map. ‘Will you let me know if he makes contact with anybody at the post office?’

I need to identify the killer before tonight’s escape attempt. Kyle and the hiker are two of my suspects. If they’re connected …

‘I’ll keep an eye on him,’ I say.

CHAPTER 31

What happens at ten o’clock and at again at two o’clock, but simultaneously?

‘How does the driveway sensor work?’ I ask.

Kyle turns the wheel and the van rumbles out onto the dirt road. ‘I don’t know. Infrared?’

‘Is there just the one?’

‘Sensor?’

‘Right.’

‘Just the one, yeah. Tied to a tree a few feet in. Why?’

I think of the second box I saw, camouflaged, a little deeper in the woods. Is it not a motion sensor—or does it not belong to the Guards?

‘Just doesn’t seem very secure,’ I say. ‘What if someone snuck up behind it and turned it off?’

‘Can’t do that,’ Kyle says. ‘It would ping all our phones, same as driving past it.’

‘Oh. But you can turn it off in the editing room, right?’

He frowns. ‘Why do you want to know that?’

‘Good point.’ I force a chuckle. ‘If an intruder broke into the house and turned it off there, we’d have way bigger problems than an unprotected driveway.’

Kyle laughs uncertainly. ‘Sure.’

This time the van turns left when it reaches the highway, away from Houston. I guess we’re going somewhere smaller. Maybe a town where the post office is so desperate for business that the owner will choose not to be suspicious.

I watch the entrance to the dirt road shrinking in the rear-view mirror. Thistle is back there, with Donnie, Zara, Cedric and Fred. They could do anything to her while I’m gone. I’ve bitten all my nails down to the quick, so now I start picking at the scabs on my arms.

Kyle drives both proudly and self-consciously. For the first half of the journey he rests one cocky hand on the wheel, leaving the other drumming his leg in time to the music. Then, when he’s sick of trying to impress me, he reverts to ten o’clock and two o’clock, his driving lessons only just beneath the surface.

I’ve been trying to work out how to get Kyle talking about his background. Was he capable of killing Samson? Could it have been a hate crime? And is it really possible that he’s my son?

It turns out no subterfuge is necessary. Being a teenager, Kyle rambles about himself throughout the journey with minimal prompting.

‘It wasn’t a big deal, dropping out of high school,’ he says. ‘Not like I was learning anything there anyway. I was surrounded by fucking morons. Not just the students, either. I had this one teacher, Mrs Spaniucci? She didn’t even know when the Vietnam War ended.’ This seventeen-year-old shakes his head in despair at what the world is coming to.

‘Was she your history teacher?’ I ask.

‘No. Math.’ Then he catches the implication. ‘But she still should have known.’

When people say the world is full of morons, what they really mean is, I’m smarter than everyone else. I had that attitude once—and I spent years getting outsmarted by people I had underestimated.

Now I’m not sure idiots exist. Or geniuses, either. A brilliant programmer might make a crappy CEO. A great songwriter might be a hopeless husband.

A skilled FBI consultant might be a terrible father.

‘What school did you go to?’ I ask.

‘Ackerly High. Why?’

I want to know if he was born in Houston, where I donated sperm, or if he and his mom spent their whole lives in