Hostage Zero

He’d dozed in the camp chair, leaving the sleeping bag and the air mattress for Jeremy. He hadn’t intended to sleep deeply. He hadn’t intended to sleep at all. Hell, he hadn’t intended a single moment of what had happened during the last twenty-four hours.

It didn’t matter, because he was wide awake now, and so was the new day, the sun hanging low and golden in the east. Without moving his body, he opened his eyes and scanned as far to the sides as his eyes could shift. The morning revealed nothing.

Another crack. Rustling.

From the darkness of the tent, Jeremy whispered, “Harvey?”

The words were barely audible, but they registered on Harvey’s ears as a shout. “Shh,” he hissed. “I hear it.”

The boy’s face appeared in the triangular opening of the tent. “Who is it?”

“Maybe it’s just a deer,” he hoped aloud.

“But I heard a car,” Jeremy said.

Harvey’s stomach fell. He hadn’t really believed that it was a deer, anyway.

Jeremy crawled out farther. “It’s them, isn’t it?”

Keep it together, Harvey told himself. Losing it now wouldn’t help a soul.

“Harvey?”

“Shh!” This time, the hiss was emphatic. More than anything else, they needed silence. Silence and invisibility. A trip back in time to undo his decision to get involved in this crap would be good, too.

“I’m scared, Harvey.”

What part of “Shh” did the kid find confusing?

Jeremy kept coming. He crawled all the way into the open, and then over to Harvey, where he crouched next to the camp chair. He clutched Harvey’s arm.

He expects me to protect him, Harvey thought. What a stupid move that was. Harvey Rodriguez had room for exactly one important person in his life, and that was Harvey Rodriguez himself. If Jeremy-a stranger-thought for an instant that he would risk even momentary discomfort for some larger, nobler cause, then he was woefully mistaken.

The sounds of movement grew steadily clearer. Within a minute, he could hear voices. A few seconds later, he could hear what the voices were saying.

“…no goddamn sense.”

“When was the last time this job made sense to anybody?”

“So I gotta pay for it? This shit just ain’t right.”

Both voices were male, and both sounded neither young nor old-a conclusion confirmed just a few seconds later when Harvey got his first glimpse of them. Thirty yards away, they both wore jeans and T-shirts, and as they waded toward the tall grass, they headed directly toward the spot where Harvey had discovered the unconscious boy.

Jeremy’s hand tightened on Harvey’s arm. “It really is them, isn’t it?” he squeaked.

“Don’t move,” Harvey said. With the sun rising over the tent, into the eyes of the visitors, there was a chance that they could remain unseen if they just didn’t move. These guys weren’t moving with any sense of danger, which meant that they were likely to accept their surroundings as is. It’s human nature to accept a first impression as normal-making it possible to literally hide in plain sight. But thousands of years of evolution still had not erased the instinctive alarm triggered by movement.

Both men had a wiry athletic look about them, a clear source of pride for the one closest to Harvey. His T-shirt was at least two sizes too small, straining the fabric at his biceps and pecs. He was also the one who carried the folded gray body bag under his arm. It bothered Harvey that he could recognize it for what it was.

“Lie down,” Harvey whispered. “Very, very slowly.” As he spoke, he wrested his arm free from the boy’s grasp and pressed down on his shoulder. Jeremy did not resist. He lay flat on his belly, his arms tucked under his chest.

With the kid stable on the ground, Harvey edged his own butt to the front of the camp chair and pressed his shoulder blades against the sling backing. The effect was to lie flat, his front to the sky, though his eyes never moved from the visitors. Warnings against movement notwithstanding, a smaller target was always better than a larger one.

“So where is he?” asked Body Beautiful.

“I know what you know,” the other one said. He was as powerful looking through his shoulders as the other one, but wore his T-shirt looser. And his hair was longer-over his ears but not over the top. “He’s here somewhere.”

“Sayin’ it don’t make it so. Jerry said to go to the end of the parking lot and then straight till you’re almost in the water. That’s what he said, and that’s where we are. Show me a dead kid.”

His butt on the ground now, Harvey could still see the tops of the visitors’ heads above the swaying grass.

“Then he’s got to be here somewhere.”

“Maybe somebody moved him,” Muscles said.

“No way. Somebody found him, this place would be lousy with cops. It’d be all over the news. They’re already ape shit over the shit at the school. Can you imagine the shit if one of the kids was found dead?”

Muscles nodded. “Have it your way. How’d a dead kid get up and walk away?”