Hellbent

Gregg Hurwitz Hellbent

Dedication

To Gary and Karen Messing

and

Darra and Zach Brewer.

You don’t get to choose your family,

but sometimes you luck out.

Epigraph

“And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Evan’s scuffed knuckles, a fetching post-fight shade of eggplant, ledged the steering wheel. His nose was freshly broken, leaking a trickle of crimson. Nothing bad, more a shifting along old fault lines.

He inspected his nose in the rearview, then reached up and snapped it back into place.

The Cadillac’s alignment pulled to the right, threatening to dump him into the rain-filled roadside ditch. The seat springs poked into the backs of his thighs, and the fabric, dotted with cigarette scorch marks, reeked of menthol. The dome light housed a bare, burned-out bulb, the brake disks made a noise like an asphyxiating chicken, and the left rear brake light was out.

He should have stolen a better car.

Rain dumped down. That was Portland for you. Or — if he was being precise — a country road outside Hillsboro.

Big drops turned the roof into a tin drum. Water sluiced across the windshield, rooster-tailed from the tires.

He sledded around a bend, passing a billboard. A moment later smeared red and blue lights illuminated the Caddy’s rear window.

A cop.

The broken brake light.

That was inconvenient.

Especially on this car, since a BOLO had likely been issued. The cop would be running the plate number now if he hadn’t already.

Evan blew out a breath. Leaned harder into the gas pedal.

Here came the sirens. The headlights grew larger.

Evan could see the silhouette of the officer behind the wheel. So much like a shooting target — head and chest, all critical mass.

Hillsboro prided itself on being one of the safest cities in the Pacific Northwest. Evan hoped to keep it that way.

As he popped the brakes and jerked the wheel, the heap of a car rocked on its shocks, fanning onto an intersecting road.

Two more cop cars swept in behind him from the opposite direction.

Evan sighed.

Three patrol cars lit up like Christmas, sirens screaming, spreading out across both lanes and closing in.

That was when the thumping from the trunk grew more pronounced.

1 No Version of Being Too Careful

Evan moved swiftly through the door to his penthouse suite at the Castle Heights Residential Tower, his RoamZone pressed to his ear. The phone, encased in hardened rubber and Gorilla glass, was as durable as a hockey puck and essentially impossible to trace. Every incoming call to 1-855-2-NOWHERE traveled in digital form over the Internet through a labyrinth of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels. After a round-the-world tour of software telephone-switch destinations, it emerged through the receiver of the RoamZone.