American Lease (A Dylan Cold Novel Book 1) (2 page)

“Hello Dylan,” the man on the ground said, wincing. “I thought you’d never get to me.”

“How do you know my name?” Dylan asked, confused.

“You introduced yourself to the Bizzie.” The man’s British accent was now pronounced.

Dylan inspected him where he on the ground. He was wearing a suit and a tie that had been loosened. His right hip was dark and glistened with moisture. The man looked uncomfortable, but gave no indications of impending death.

“If you’re thinking of running, don’t. Killing you doesn’t help me, but it doesn’t hurt as much as letting you go off.”

Dylan had been seconds away from a mad dash for cover. He still thought he could make it—though he had never raced a bullet before.

“Maybe I could call an ambulance and get someone to look at that hip,” Dylan replied coolly.

“No. You’re going to help me into the back seat or I’m going to put a gaping hole in your chest,” the man answered.

Running would result in a painful, and possibly fatal, gunshot wound. What would happen if he stood still?

The man cocked his gun and steadied his aim. “Tick tock.”

Dylan licked his dry lips. There had been times, during detox, when he had prayed for death. There were other times, while fighting to stay sober, when death had felt like the easiest way out. Lately it felt like he had been just sitting around waiting to grow old and die. Today he suddenly wanted to live forever.

“Okay. Here I come.” Dylan stepped forward with his hands in the air.

The man on the ground tracked him carefully with the barrel of the gun. This was not some petty criminal using a gun to be scary. Someone had trained this man to remain calm and focused even through what must have been excruciating pain.

Instinctively Dylan stepped to get behind the man for the easiest lift.

“Nuh-uh,” the cop-killer grunted, stopping him with a steely glance.  “From the front please.”

As Dylan leaned in close to place his hands under the man’s armpits, the hard steel of the gun pressed into his chest.

“Any funny business —” the man started

“And I get a hole in my chest. I know,” Dylan said, finishing the thought.

Dylan had been around some shady characters before. Once he was kicked off the football team, it had gotten more and more difficult to get the drugs his body had grown to need. When the easy money from his bank account ran out, so did the “respectable” drug dealers. While he swirled the toilet bowl of life, selling stolen goods and buying stolen drugs, each character he met was worse than the one before. Charm and wit had no impact on a thug looking to get paid, and those guys were nervous more than they were really tough.

But this guy was tough and calm.  He had killed a cop and it was clear he was comfortable with killing again.

Once both men reached a full standing position the one in charge spoke directly into Dylan’s ear: “I’m in back, you’re driving. Don’t test me.”

Dylan’s mind raced as they awkwardly shuffled the few steps to the rear door. At some point the gunman would have to drop his guard; Dylan was healthy and quick, surely he could get away.

“Listen. I have a record. As soon as the cops find out I was involved, they are going to like me for killing this guy. Even if I give you to them, it’ll take days before they ever decide to track you down,” Dylan said, trying every ounce of persuasion he had. Being let go seemed to be safer than making a run for it.

“No dice. I like to do things the easy way. Right now, the easiest way out of here is you driving. Get behind the wheel and no funny business.” The cop killer’s voice had settled, and there was no longer an expression of pain on his face.

Dylan helped the man into the back seat. The barrel of the gun never faltered from his chest. As he turned to lower himself into the driver’s seat, he imagined he could feel the aim of the gun on his back.

“My dog, he’s still with the…body. I don’t want to leave him.” Dylan was afraid to speak.

“Fuck your dog. Go north.” The passenger spoke slowly and clearly. “No toll roads and nothing stupid. If you’re still alive at the border, I’ll tell you what to do before we hit Canada.”

The last time Dylan had driven this carefully he’d had more than $5,000 of stolen oxycodone in his car. He had been so paranoid about getting stopped he had waited too long at each stop sign and traffic signal. People had honked and screamed at him so much he felt like the whole world was watching.

He was a young drug addict then. Now he was an older recovering addict who needed to be cool to live, not just avoid getting in trouble.

As he navigated the quiet streets of town, he considered various escape scenarios.

If he saw a cop, he could slam on the brakes and dive out of the car. That would have to get some attention. If the man in back wanted to shoot him, he would also have to kill another officer.

There was no way Dylan could have stopped the first officer from dying, but it didn’t feel right to put another officer at risk. There had to be another way out.

The car was equipped with airbags. He could drive into a telephone pole and count on his airbag to save him while disorienting his rear seat passenger. Then what? Get out and run? Hope he was able to get his bearings before the bad guy?

During his football days he could have recovered faster, but it had been years since he’d been hit or even knocked off balance. If the man in back was as trained and hardened as he seemed, it may have been only days or weeks since he had a physical altercation. He’s better equipped for it.

Just drive
, Dylan told himself.
Canada is several hours away, let your mind drift and the answer will come to you.

As they approached the Everett Turnpike, the gunman leaned forward.

“No tolls,” he commanded.

“Sorry. Habit,” Dylan answered.

Dylan continued over the highway and turned north on the old road. There were traffic lights and a few other cars. Not many chances to be spotted and potentially rescued.

At the first traffic light, Dylan casually looked around as if checking for other cars. He noticed a pile of papers on the front passenger seat but did not inspect them for details. The roads were still quiet due to the early hour, but there were joggers and a small pack of bicyclists coming toward the intersection.

The next light was even quieter and desperation started to set in.

Dylan realized that he would likely drive this man all the way to Canada only to be shot in the back of the head. The few people in the world who knew and cared about him would assume he had been using again and had just fallen back in with the wrong people.

His past sins were catching up with him. Karma really is a bitch.

One car that looked promising from a distance turned out to be a Volvo with a ski rack. The one police car they drove past had an officer focused on the laptop in his center console. Every second spent on the run made him look like an even bigger suspect in the killing of the cop back in Brookford. Even if this guy let him live, his life would be a total mess for a long time.

Even Montana would be mad at him for being left alone.

Montana. Maybe the guy was a dog lover.

“I know things don’t look good for me, but can I make a call for my dog? He’s just really special and I want someone to look out for him,” Dylan asked. He felt tears welling in his eyes.

“I don’t give a fuck about your dog,” the man in back snapped.

So much for that idea.

They drove on in silence until they reached Manchester and the intersection with 101 and 93.

“93 has high-speed tolls. I assume there are cameras, but they probably aren’t monitored in real time. It’ll take days to get to Canada on these back roads,” Dylan said, more interested in getting the whole experience over with than anything else at this point.

“Fine,” came the abrupt reply.

Dylan navigated the car onto the highway and brought it up to speed.

After only a few minutes at full speed there was a sign warning of construction and reduced speed.

“Could be a good place to escape.” The British accent sounded sweet. “Or to die.”

“Look,” Dylan started before the traffic slowed, “the way I see it now, this ends with a bullet in the back of my head. Either it happens in front of a cop and you go down for it or I wait and it happens in the woods somewhere in Canada and no one ever finds my body. Which one would
you
prefer?”

The man in back did not immediately reply.

Construction work had not begun yet and there was not even a noticeable slow down in traffic. Dylan clenched his fist in frustration.

There was bound to be more construction at some point. He needed to think of a plan to take advantage of the opportunity when it arose.

“I’ve escaped from maximum security facilities in three countries,” the man in the back seat said. “Getting caught and locked up is a pain in the ass, but it’s not the end of the world for me. You still wind up dead.” There was a tinge of laughter in his voice.

“Then let me help you for real. Montana is the only thing in the world I care about. If my life is over and I can’t help him, I might as well go all-in with you,” Dylan said, thrashing between giving up and fighting for survival.

“What color is my hair?” the man in back asked.

“What?” Dylan assumed he misheard or misunderstood the question.

“If you look in the mirror again, you’re dead. What color is my hair?” the man asked again.

“Brown?” Dylan responded nervously.

“Keep driving, eyes forward, and you have one chance to survive. If you don’t believe me, try something, and your precious doggie will never see his master again.”  

Dylan had no idea if he had been right or wrong about the hair. He started to think about what the man looked like and how he would describe him to a sketch artist. Nothing distinguishing came to mind.

The guy in the back of the car was your average, stereotypical white man. Somewhere between five-ten and six-two, he probably weighed anywhere from one-ninety to two-twenty. His hair was brown, or dirty blonde, or was he wearing a hat? There was absolutely nothing about this man that would make him stand out.

While the miles raced past, Dylan developed a new hope—that the man would pass out. His hip was bleeding badly and clearly he had been up early that day. The only problem would be in determining when he was out.

Please let him snore.

When they reached Canterbury almost fifty minutes later, Dylan decided to think only good thoughts.
Don’t think about escaping, don’t think about the hassle he would face if he lived, think only about walking in the woods with Montana.

His dog had kept him sober on a number of occasions. Now he was keeping him from breaking down and giving up.

“Don’t go daft on me,” the man in back said as they entered Vermont.

So much for passing out,
Dylan thought.

“I really gotta piss,” Dylan said, stating a fact more than asking to stop.

“I don’t fucking care. Piss or don’t piss, you stop the car and you’re dead,” his captor answered.

The urge really hadn’t been present long but suddenly the need for relief consumed him. Dylan thought he heard water and then seemed to notice every pond and wetland on the side of the road. As they cruised along at seventy miles an hour, Dylan scrunched his toes and then released them. His fingers squeezed the life out of the wheel and then stretched out as straight as he could make them.

A new set of options raced through his head. He could just start peeing and sit in it or he could try and unzip his fly and try to relieve himself in the foot well.

There was something about being found dead in a car sitting in a puddle of your own piss that bothered him. Though when a bullet passes through your brain, your body probably loses control anyway. Dylan earned himself a few minutes of relief by trying to think if he knew for sure that dying would cause you to release your bowels.

He couldn’t peg it down as a fact, so Dylan decided to classify the concept as a probability but not a guarantee. If he was going to be found dead in the car, it was going to be a disgusting scene regardless of whether he pissed himself now or not.

Still, he didn’t want to be uncomfortable, so he reached down and unzipped his fly. The car swerved a little as he aimed at the floor by his feet before letting go.

A calm relief washed over him as the urine left his body.

“Aaaahhhh.” The sound spilled from his lips when the pressure on his bladder was completely gone.

“No more, drama princess. Eyes on the prize, and you might see your doggie tonight,” the man said. Exhaustion was clear in his voice this time.

“How are we going to handle Customs? I don’t bring my passport when I walk Montana.” Dylan didn’t want there to be any panic fouling things up right at the end.

“That’s okay. I don’t like Customs anyway, too many busybodies,” the man answered calmly.

There was no panic from the passenger. He was not scrambling to come up with a plan or figuring out what to do. There was some sort of plan being followed and that made the whole situation even more confusing for Dylan.

Was it possible that the cop in Brookford was corrupt and it was actually a deal gone wrong? Who plans a crime in southern New Hampshire with the Canadian border as a key part of their getaway plan?

There were so many fields and forests in New Hampshire it seemed like overkill to be hiding a drop in the wall of a restored building. Someone would have had to remove the clapboards and sheathing to hide something in the wall. That’s a lot more work than packing whatever it was in a waterproof bag and burying it under some leaves out in the woods.

Dylan considered one of his first thoughts about the man behind him, that he was trained and professional. The guy was not there for a small bag of drugs or a few stacks of bills. What type of crime would be fitting of an international pro and take place in Brookford, New Hampshire?

Art thief? Maybe. Jewels? Possibly. Was there another international high-end currency that could fit inside a small hole in the wall?

Industrial espionage. Boston was home to a multi-billion dollar medical technology industry. Drug formulas and product plans could easily fit on a thumb drive and be hidden in the wall of an old building.

He was proud of his reasoning and analysis. Were there other clues to help him confirm or refute his theory?

A Mercedes Benz flew past in the left lane.

Instinctively, Dylan checked his outside mirrors for other cars about to pass him but they were empty. At the last second, he remembered that looking in the rearview mirror was prohibited and he averted his eyes down. The stack of papers in the passenger seat caught his attention.

Realizing that they could be clues and not wanting to be caught reading them, he looked away. He needed to inspect the papers but not get caught.

Checking the left outside mirror again gave him an idea.

Dylan’s eyes settled into a rhythm; left outside mirror, right outside mirror, stack of papers.  The top paper was a map.

On his third glance at the stack he found the name of the map — Monson Village. A star drawn in blue ink was over a symbol with the words “Gould House” written underneath.

Dylan already knew that his walk led him through Monson and past the Gould house, and that was where the man had been tearing apart the wall. The map offered no other information.

Unfortunately the stack of papers was too neat. The map on top obscured most of the writing on the papers beneath it. After several glances, the only letters he could detect were “ease” on the top right corner of the second paper down.

“Mmmmmph.” The man in the back grunted in pain.

“You okay?” Dylan didn’t really care, but asking felt like something he was supposed to do.

“Take the last exit before the border and go east on Caswell. After the big barn on the right, slow down to ten miles an hour. If there is anyone behind us, pull over and put your hazards on,” The man in back explained. “Do what I say and you live. Fuck up—”

“And I’m dead. Kind of a theme for whole ride, I get it,” Dylan finished for him.