Delusion Road (2 page)

But it was Morozov’s voice that made Griff’s skin crawl, an emotionless monotone so soft you had to listen closely when he spoke. You wouldn’t want to make Morozov repeat himself.

“Good you could come on such short notice,” murmured Morozov. Griff felt gooseflesh pucker the back of his neck.

“No problem, Mr. Morozov.” In fact, Griff had welcomed his boss’s phone call, which had given him an excuse to send the whore on her way. She’d already served her real purpose, being his alibi if he ended up needing one.

Morozov raised his right hand, studying his paper-white
palm in the grey light that struggled through the tinted window. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you how important this morning’s job was.”

“No, sir.”

Morozov turned his hand over, examining his thin fingers as if checking for hangnails. Or blood. “The prick had it coming to him.”

“Yes, sir,” said Griff, although that didn’t matter to him one way or the other. It was a job. End of story.

“Nobody fucks with Pavel Morozov and gets away with it.”

In the last two years, Griff had taken out enough pricks who’d had it coming to know the truth in that. “No, sir,” he agreed. Where was this heading?

Morozov let his hand fall to his lap, where it formed a small, white fist. “Then why is he still alive?”

Griff blinked. “He—isn’t. He couldn’t be. None of them could.”

Morozov turned to face him, and Griff felt his guts coil when eyes pallid as death met his own. Something flickered behind those eyes, and once again Griff thought of Gil Atkins. A second little girl had disappeared before the cops finally figured out what Griff had already guessed.

Morozov reached into a leather case on the seat between them and, for a heart-stopping moment, Griff expected him to pull out a gun. Instead, the man handed him a tablet, an Apple product that wasn’t even on the market yet. The guy who supplied Griff with his tech had shown him a prototype stolen from an R&D lab.

Morozov reached over and dragged colourless fingertips across the screen, enlarging a black-and-white image. It was
grainy, probably taken by a traffic cam, but Griff could still make out the features of the person behind the wheel of the old Dodge. A time stamp at the bottom right showed it had been taken minutes after the bomb should have exploded. “Son of a bitch,” Griff muttered. He looked up again, forcing himself to meet those pallid eyes. “I tested the detonator a dozen times. No way could it have failed.”

“It didn’t,” said Morozov, his toneless voice dropping a register. “Apparently, he left the house early.”

“But he
never
leaves early. I made sure of it. You could set your watch by the guy.”

“And yet there he is,” said Morozov, nodding toward the tablet in Griff’s hands before returning his gaze to the fist in his lap. Griff watched as the fist opened, the fingers unfolding like thin white worms writhing in the grey morning light.

Not a lot could push Griff’s buttons. You didn’t grow up with a mother like his, didn’t share space with guys like Gil Atkins, didn’t make a living the way Griff did now without developing a kind of armour. But the sight of those white fingers unfurling sent a tremor through him that reminded him of something he’d learned five years ago—not all nightmares come to you in your sleep. One was sitting beside him in the back of that town car. “I can take care of this, Mr. Morozov,” he said, handing back the tablet.

“My people warned me that a twenty-year-old was too young for this job,” murmured Morozov.

Griff opened his mouth to respond, but the small man silenced him with a wave of white fingers. “I didn’t listen to them,” he continued. “I reminded them how important youth
could be, how your facility with technology was superior to most, how eagerness and enthusiasm could trump lack of experience.” He sighed wetly. “Was I wrong?”

“No, sir,” Griff assured him. “You weren’t wrong. I can fix this.”

“The clock’s ticking,” said Morozov as the driver pulled the car over to the curb.

“I’m real sorry—”

“Not nearly as sorry as you’ll be if this matter isn’t resolved.”

“Yes, sir.” Griff opened the door and saw they’d come full circle, arriving back at the Franklin Street bridge.

The wind tore at him like claws.

P
ulling into Brookdale High’s student parking lot, Willa Jaffrey rolled her eyes at the words scrolling endlessly across the school’s electronic message board: “Welcome new and returning students.” What was supposed to be
this
returning student’s best year ever certainly wasn’t starting out that way.

First, she hated how she looked. After lying in bed until noon all summer, she’d found it hard getting up early that morning, and she should have given herself more time to get ready. Especially since her long blond hair, which had an irritating natural wave, hadn’t cooperated with her flatiron.

Her black mood also had to do with the vehicle she wasn’t driving. She’d spent days that summer poring over brochures from her dad’s dealership, deciding which car she liked most and choosing the options she wanted. He’d promised that her early graduation present would be delivered in time for the first day of school but, instead of sitting behind the wheel of a sexy new Camaro—Victory Red with graphite racing stripes—she was driving a black SUV that practically shrieked law enforcement. “There was a production glitch at the factory,” her father had explained when he’d handed her the keys ten minutes ago, Willa glaring at the vehicle’s dealer plate:
Jaffrey 3.
“Your Camaro won’t
be here for a few more weeks.”
Weeks
? She’d been tempted to pitch a tantrum in the middle of the dealership’s parking lot—one of those nuclear meltdowns she’d thrown when she was little—but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. Even her dad couldn’t pull a brand-new Camaro out of his ass.

And on top of everything else, she hadn’t spoken to Wynn for days.

Like every summer, Willa and her parents had spent the week before Labour Day at their cottage on the Bay of Fundy. Although she’d loved the place when she was younger, that particular stretch of rocky shoreline along Delusion Road was a technological black hole, one of the handful of places in Nova Scotia still without Internet or cell service. And since the cottage didn’t have a landline, the past week had been like living underwater, so she’d been relieved to hear her phone chirp repeatedly with messages as bars finally reappeared on the display during their drive home last night. Oddly, none of them were from Wynn. She’d tried calling him but kept getting his voicemail and, by the time they reached Brookdale, she’d begun to worry something terrible had happened. But her fears had vanished when she’d seen what was waiting on their door-step—a bouquet of yellow roses celebrating their five-month anniversary.

Her mother had been quick to point out to Willa’s dad how long it had been since she’d received flowers from
him
, but Willa tried to ignore his “For Christ’s sake, not
this
again” and her mother’s “Would it kill you to put
me
first for a change?” rant, which she’d heard so often in the last few months. Instead, she’d carried the roses to her room and tried calling Wynn to thank
him, but it went to voicemail again. Sometime after she’d gone to bed, he’d sent her a text saying how much he’d missed her and telling her he’d see her at school in the morning.

So, yeah, what with her hair, no Camaro, and missing Wynn, it had been a lousy beginning to her best year ever. And obsessing about it now made her miss the parking spot she’d just driven past. “Damn!” she muttered, braking and shifting the SUV into reverse.

If it hadn’t been for the beep of the backup alert, she would have struck the guy who suddenly appeared on the dash’s large touch screen. Willa slammed on the brake and the vehicle seesawed momentarily. Her heart in her mouth, she pressed a button on her armrest to lower her window. “I almost hit you!” she shouted to the tall guy with the hoodie who’d crossed behind her.

He didn’t even glance back, just kept walking toward the school, his head down.

“Jerk!” she grumbled, then turned completely around to see if there was anyone else behind her before easing into the space.

She was getting her things out of the SUV when she heard a honk from a VW Golf as Britney Lamontagne pulled into a space a few cars over. In a moment, Willa was on the receiving end of hugs from her and Celia Waters.

“We missed you!” her friends trilled.

“You have no idea,” said Willa, “how many times I reached for my cell to call you guys.”

“How’d you stand being in the dead zone?” asked Celia.

Willa grimaced. “What was worse was listening to my parents bicker for seven days.” Hearing them snipe at each other so often, she’d wondered why they’d chosen to spend the week together. She’d even asked her father about it one evening, but
he’d just said that all couples squabbled. “I bet you and Wynn get on each other’s nerves from time to time, right?” he’d said.

But he was wrong—Willa had lucked out in the boyfriend department. During the five months she and Wynn had been together, they’d never had a single argument. Not one. Wynn d’Entremont had moved from Halifax to Brookdale a little more than a year ago to live with his remarried dad, and it had taken zero time for the muscular, blue-eyed son of the town’s mayor to fit right in. There was no question that he was the best-looking guy at Brookdale High, not to mention the top athlete and the sweetest boy she’d ever dated, the roses being a perfect example. Sure, no one was more aggressive than Wynn on a hockey rink or soccer field or rugby pitch, but that was just his competitive nature, which had led all three of his Brookdale teams to district championships and earned them two provincial titles. When he wasn’t trying to score a goal, he was a total gentleman. In fact, he could be
too
much of a gentleman sometimes. When it came to the physical side of their relationship, he always stopped at second base despite her growing willingness to run to home plate.

“Don’t talk to me about bickering,” Celia moaned. “I had to babysit my dweeb brother while Mom went out with her eHarmony hookup.”

Willa grinned. Following her divorce from Celia’s dad, Rachel Waters had started dating with a vengeance, and Celia was forever entertaining her friends with stories of the losers who’d been seeing her mother. Two weeks ago, when yet another new guy had arrived to take Rachel out for coffee, Celia had snapped a photo of him so the three friends could compare it with his eHarmony profile. Thanks to Celia’s mother using the
same password for everything she did online, the girls surfed unhindered through her matches until they found Dewayne Eisner. The picture he’d posted wasn’t recent and, although his bio said he loved to exercise, that description could only have been accurate if, as Britney suggested, he worked out at Dairy Queen. Willa had snorted over the guy’s blatant lies and given silent thanks for Wynn, who never tried to be anything other than what he was.

Reluctantly shelving thoughts of her boyfriend, Willa asked, “How’d you spend
your
Labour Day weekend, Brit?”

“You don’t wanna know,” warned Celia.

Britney sighed. “I cleansed my colon.”

“Ew!”

“Not much else to do with Todd away in New Brunswick,” said Britney.

“Now
there’s
someone who could use a colon cleanse,” offered Celia, nodding at a rusted Hyundai Accent that had been circling the parking lot and was now pulling into one of the few remaining spaces.

Britney snickered, and all three watched as the driver—an overweight senior named Russell Shaw—killed the motor and got out. “Jeez,” murmured Britney, “he’s even fatter than he was in June.”

Celia snorted agreement. “Nice to see you, Russell,” she cooed as their chubby classmate approached them. “Lookin’ good, man.”

His ample cheeks reddened as he passed them. “You, too,” he mumbled, turning to give the girls a shy smile. But the toe of his no-name sneaker caught the edge of a drain grate and he nearly went down.

“Walk much, Russell?” Britney called after him, to Willa and Celia’s giggled delight.

Russell gave a pained shrug and kept going.

“Loser,” muttered Britney, turning again to her friends. “Hey, I heard there’s fresh meat in our class.”

“More international students?” asked Willa.

“Besides them. A girl and a guy.”

As the three made their way toward the east-wing entrance, Celia said, “Man, wouldn’t that suck? Starting your senior year in a new place and not knowing anybody?”

Willa couldn’t imagine anything worse. Sure, a small-town school like Brookdale High couldn’t offer all the programs available in bigger communities, but she liked knowing everybody inside its walls. Well,
almost
everybody. Ahead of her, she could see the tall guy she’d nearly run down earlier, and she was pretty sure he was one of the imports. No one from Brookdale would wear a jacket in early September—already the air felt like a moist second skin, and the heat would only worsen as the sun climbed higher. This guy even wore his hood up. “There’s one of them now,” she muttered.

“Who?” asked Britney.

Willa nodded toward the figure moving up the steps ahead of them. Even with his shoulders hunched and his head down, he towered over most of the people he passed.

“You mean Son of Lurch?” Britney asked. “What dumbass wears a hoodie this time of year?”

“The kind of dumbass who can’t be bothered to watch out for cars,” replied Willa, filling them in on what had happened.

Celia scowled. “Hey, you!” she called. “Stretch!”

Everyone on the steps turned, with the exception of the guy
in the hoodie, who’d made it to the top landing and was now reaching for the door.

“Lankenstein!”

He turned, confusion etched on the part of his face Willa could see under the hood. She was right—he was an import. “You talking to me?” he asked.

“Yeah. You.”

“What d’you want?”

“A word.”

Willa wasn’t surprised to see the now-silent crowd on the step part, making room for him to pass. Most nodded and smiled at the three friends below them as they moved aside, but two in the group—Russell Shaw and Greg Phillips, a gangly guy with galloping acne—glanced quickly down as if suddenly mesmerized by their feet.