Undetectable (Great Minds Thriller) (35 page)

Just get out and go. Run away. Don’t look back. Move to Canada.

But when they ran the plates, they came up with nothing. The plates were fake. And fake plates didn’t sound like panic at all. Fake plates sounded like a
plan
.

Which was why there were now two officers on this beat today instead of just one. They’d be walking this beat for several days, maybe several weeks. Tracking down leads, tracking down
hunches.
They passed the school and continued on their way, heading toward those painters taking a break outside the t
hree
white vans parked near the end of the street. The officers didn’t expect to get anything useful from the painters, but they would ask a few questions just in case.

Just to be thorough.

An Actual Hold-Up

That night, Kevin could barely wait for his reading time. He stopped into the restaurant where Danny said the teachers would be, but not for more than a half-hour. And yes, he took his run in the park and then let Andrew stuff him full of food, but all of it seemed like a distraction, a necessary set of duties that kept him faithfully following Petak’s advice.

At his core, he just wanted to get to the books. And to the couch.

Get ready
.

“Right, that’s my plan,” Kevin said, addressing the bookcase
now
as if it were the source of the voice. It was still there, that voice – it hadn’t left his head completely, as he thought it might have done this morning – but Kevin believed the
tone
had shifted noticeably. It was still insistent, still urgent; but the voice was no longer panicked. No longer paranoid.

“I’m going to need some more stacks over here, Andrew.”

“On my way.”

When they were finished, nearly fifty titles had been placed in neatly spaced collections by the head of the large couch. Kevin saw Andrew’s eyes going over the stacks, then scanning the spare living room floor.

“I’ll try to be neater this time,” Kevin said, though he wasn’t sure this was true. He had no idea who was in charge of things – in charge of
him
– while he was reading. He might as well have promised not to rumple the sheets of a bed in which he was sleeping.

“I was only looking at the rug, wondering about its country of origin,” Andrew said smoothly. He cleared his throat, ashamed at the inelegance of the lie. “I’ll come get you at 6 AM again?”

“Please.”

Kevin settled himself down onto the couch. It was only now beginning to get dark outside the windows, but he knew Andrew would be walking around pulling the curtains soon; the light wouldn’t matter. He picked up the first book on the nearest pile.

The Stuff of Thought, by Thomas Pinker,
he read to himself.
All right, Mr. Pinker, show me what you’ve got. Keep me occupied for more than ten minutes and you win a big red balloon.

He opened the first page, let his head fall back onto the large cushion behind him, and began to read. The room went gray around him.

Kevin sat up suddenly. The book in his hands,
The Atlas of Emergency Medicine, Third Edition,
went sliding to the floor.

“What?”

He was on the verge of
reaching over to retrieve the book
when he realized abruptly that he didn’t want to. His mind was quiet, and his body felt rested. He wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. He needed conversation. Interaction.

Petak warned me. Socialize. Like a normal person. I thought half an hour at a bar would do it, but that’s ridiculous.

He slipped on his shoes and walked carefully to the elevator, hoping not to wake Andrew. He didn’t need to check the clock on his fancy cell phone; the dark silence coming from the living room windows told him it was sometime in the middle of the night. When he reached the first floor he walked through the lobby and then stepped out into the warm, quiet city night. Then he paused.

Where to find someone to chat with?

Not here, not with the slack-jawed, sleep-deprived doorman who had just let him out. And certainly not in some bar; he wasn’t falling into that trap again.

He turned east toward Lexington. There was one person he knew would be up at this hour – whatever this hour might be – and this person would be not only up and awake but
alert
, would be grinning and ready to talk and maybe even doing a little dance, moving his arms in small circles.

Kevin walked into the delicatessen with the large yellow awning outside, and the wiry Latino man was there. Just where he had been every night this week. Maybe he had been there since Kevin was in high school. He was thin and brown and ageless, with closely-cropped gray hair and tiny ears. As before, he was standing behind the counter reading a paper, rocking his body gently side to side with the sound of the music coming from somewhere in the back of the store. He looked up when Kevin came in, and this time his smile was wide and immediate,
welcome, so good to see you again, what can I get you tonight, more sleeping pills or more Vodka, or maybe even a shot of something stronger?

Kevin smiled back, hoping the
shopkeeper
didn’t think he was an addict of some kind. Then again, th
is
man didn’t look like the sort of person who passed judgment too quickly.

Running an all-night store in the middle of Manhattan probably gives you a good perspective on things,
Kevin thought.

The man watched him, still smiling that broad smile, waiting to see if a request would be forthcoming. He was ready to serve. Kevin hesitated, suddenly aware that he had no idea where to begin. He just wanted to talk. About anything. But
the shopkeeper
had his routine already in place; he had his Samba music and his newspaper, and maybe he wouldn’t want to talk. Maybe his English wasn’t even that good.

Kevin had a sudden thought. He looked up at the ceiling for a moment, trying to put the right book in front of his mind’s eye. Then he looked back at the man and spoke quickly, careful not to listen to his own words. “You own this store? How long have you been here?”

The
shopkeeper’s
eyes brightened, and his arms stopped their rhythmic rotations. He cocked his head to the side. “That’s good,” he said in English, and Kevin felt a small mental jolt as he was knocked out of his Spanish groove. The man’s English was passable, though far from perfect. “I understand you,” he continued, “but I’m Brazilian. You speak Portuguese?”

Kevin opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked around the store as if he were searching for a Portuguese dictionary. “I don’t know if – ” He stopped again. Then he shrugged. “Can you say something to me in Portuguese?”

“Sure. What’s wrong, can’t sleep?”

Kevin looked back blankly at him. He was confused. “Yes, I’m up all the time. But wait, are you going to say something in – ”

The man’s laughter interrupted him, a hooting, gleeful sound that filled the little store like a new song. “
That
is atrocious,” the man said in between hoots. “That
’s
the worst Portuguese accent I have ever heard. Where did you learn that?”

Kevin exhaled with relief. He had read a book on this man’s language. Whether the night before or within the last several hours, it would have been impossible to say. But Kevin didn’t care. The conversation had begun. It was maybe going to be a conversation focused on his phonetic butchering of the Brazilian tongue, but he could live with that. He was making a friend. “I took a course,” he explained. “On-line.”

“Wow. For what?”

“Um.” This was a question Kevin wasn’t prepared for. “I don’t know,” he said. “For a girl.”

The man’s expression turned a shade more serious, and he nodded knowingly. This, it seemed, was exactly the right response. Kevin made a mental note to use “for a girl” or “because of a girl” as the answer to a wide range of otherwise unanswerable questions that might come up in the conversation.

What was all that Vodka for two nights ago?

How come you’re having trouble sleeping?

Why are so many politicians in hot water these days?

It was, Kevin decided, a response with broad cross-over capacity. The man leaned over the counter and reached out a hand. “Alexi,” he said.

“Kevin.” They shook hands.

“And did you get her?”

“Who? Oh, the girl. No, not yet.”

Alexi stood back. He put up his lean brown hands, shaking them above his head in shock and sympathetic outrage. “But you speak Portuguese! You speak it very well. The accent is American, yes. The accent is
heavy
. But this is real effort on your part. She doesn’t see it? What is the problem?”

“Oh. Well, she – ”

Kevin stopped again. Now they were heading down a path he didn’t want to travel. He
hadn’t
learned Portuguese for a girl, after all. He had just… learned it. For the same reason he had learned all about hand guns and diesel engines and artillery and electrical engineering and hand grenades and God knew what else. For no reason at all. Simply because he
needed
to. Because it was the only way he knew how to
get
calm, how to rest. How to make that relentless voice leave him alone about getting
ready
all the time. Yes, there was a girl. And yes, it was true he had not made much progress with her. Had barely talked to her, as a matter of fact. But that wasn’t because she was ignoring any grand gestures on his part; he hadn’t written her a song or tried to decorate her classroom door with rose petals. There was really nothing to tell.

So now he worried he would end up having to create a whole fiction for Alexi, a story about unrequited love, a story that didn’t exist. It would
n’t
ring true.

But Kevin’s new friend was not pushy. He sensed the discomfort, saw the hesitation, and he assumed he had touched a sensitive spot. He closed his eyes and shook his head quickly, dismissing the topic as though it were distasteful, as though it were not worthy of their time. “No, come over here,” he said, with a beckoning wave. “You sit on the stool over here, sit as long as you like. You’
re big, you’
ll scare away the late-night robbers. We will chat. We will talk about sports and politics and whatever you like. Until you are ready to go back to sleep. Okay?”

Kevin nodded. The man was incredibly kind and welcoming – they had been virtual strangers until three minutes ago – and now he was offering exactly what Kevin had been hoping for when he came into this store. Some easy social time. Some normalcy, relatively speaking. He would have settled for two minutes of banter about the uncommonly warm September weather.