Hidden Allegiance: A Jackson Quick Adventure Read online

“Downstairs,” she calls without turning around and starts down the stairwell, past the Pickle bodies, and toward the third floor.

  Mack looks at me and shrugs before joining her, so I follow both of them down the stairs and past the carnage on the landing. Two flights later and we’re in the garage. The sirens are loud, maybe around the corner on Kirby, and there is an elderly couple standing in the driveway. The woman is on her cellphone, presumably with police.

  I grab Bella’s hand and, with the laptop tucked under my other arm, lead her quickly past the dumbstruck couple and to the Pickle Suburban at the curb. Doing his best to keep up, Mack trails close behind us.

  “Hey, y’all,” the woman calls. “You can’t just leave. The police are on their way. You need to stay here and wait.”

  Ignoring her, I split with Bella at the rear of the SUV. She gets in the passenger’s side, I climb in behind the driver’s seat, tossing the laptop into the back seat, and Mack hops inside next to it. Shifting the SUV into drive, my foot slams onto the accelerator as a pair of flashing blue lights appears in the rear view.

  “We’re screwed,” Bella says, turned to look behind us. “Another cop is following us!”

  A second set of lights flashes in the rear view and closes in on us as I narrowly avoid a Honda Civic parked curbside.

  I spin the wheel hard and brake, losing the back end of the Suburban as I turn right on Avalon Place, heading west toward another major street called Shepherd Drive. Bella slides into me before finding her seatbelt.

  “It won’t be long and they’ll have a chopper up,” says Mack.

  “The news?” Bella asks.

  “The cops,” Mack says, holding himself in place with a handle above the window as I make a sharp right onto Shepherd, turning south toward the freeway.

  “Then the news,” I add, pushing on the accelerator to give myself a little bit of distance from the Houston Police Department cruiser slaloming its way between parked cars to keep pace with us.

  “Don’t get on the freeway,” Mack says.

  “Why?” I ask, flying past a red light at Westheimer, narrowly avoiding a taco truck and a Volvo station wagon.

  “You’ll be too easy to spot,” he says. “Trust me.”

  I glance at him and then the blue lights in the rear view. So far, it’s just the one cop giving chase.

  “Look out!” Bella screams.

  I cross West Alabama and slide to the left of an oncoming police car, nearly hitting an SUV head-on in the intersection.

  “Turn back around,” Mack instructs. “Head back the other direction!”

  At the next cross street I wait until the last second and whip the wheel to the right, screaming around the corner. The police car nearly misses the turn, but stays with me.

  “Where’s the second police car?” Bella asks.

  “We don’t have much time,” Mack reminds me. “We lose these cops now, or we’re screwed.”

  I pass another intersection and look to my right. There’s the answer to Bella’s question. The second cop was running parallel to me and is now heading south to join the chase. The streets narrow, with cars parked on both sides, and I make another turn, heading back towards West Alabama.

  “Watch it,” Bella calls out. “The light is turning!”

  I gun it through the yellow light, hitting the intersection after it turns red. We clear the cross street and hear a loud crash behind us. Bella tells us that the first cop car is out.

  “He clipped another car and spun out,” Bella says. “The second one’s not far behind.”

  “Westheimer’s up here,” Mack tells me. “Turn left.”

  I follow his instructions, accelerating out of my turn on Westheimer, almost losing control of the car before realizing there is no way we’re escaping this time.

  “What time is it?” I ask.

  “16:55 local,” answers Mack in military time.

  “Rush hour,” I lament, my foot on the brake, stuck in traffic, and blue lights flashing five cars back.

  ***

  Bella opens the passenger door just wide enough for her to slip out. It takes me a second to realize what she’s doing. I grab the laptop from the back seat and Wordlessly, Mack and I follow her, sliding out of the SUV, crouching low as we weave our way past the left lane of traffic and onto the sidewalk.

  We’re walking quickly, but as nonchalantly as possible away from the police car with the hope he doesn’t spot us. It doesn’t work.

  “Stop!” We hear over the loudspeaker on his car. “The three of you, this is the Houston Police Department. Do not walk any further.”

  We bolt around the corner. Mack, carrying the maps, is hustling with as much speed as he can muster. We reach the other side of what looks like a church, chugging through a parking lot. In the distance, the familiar whip of helicopter blades is growing louder.

  “We have got to get out of sight,” Mack huffs. He’s right. When that helicopter spots the three of us, we’re done.

  We round a corner of the building, running next to a baseball field behind the church.

  “We should split up,” I suggest. “They’ll be looking for the three of us. Let’s go our separate ways and meet up in Conroe at the airport.”

  “It’s 5 o’clock,” Mack says, still running. “Let’s meet no later than ten o’clock and get out of here.” Mack disappears between a couple of small buildings next to the field.

  Bella is maybe three strides ahead of me. She hasn’t turned around, so I pick up my pace to pull even with her as we pass a street sign that reads “Fairview”. She turns right and then left, and I follow her down another narrow street called Peckham.

  “Bella, did you hear Mack?”

  Still running, she replies, “Yes, you want to split up. Meet back at the airport.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “Yes.” She keeps her eyes ahead, not looking at me. “Whatever gets us out of here,” she says between heavy breaths. “If you want to be on your own, I’m fine with that.”

  “Good,” I tell her, acting as though I’m too stupid to realize she’s baiting me. “I’ll see you by 10PM.”

  She stops cold. “What if you don’t?”

  “What if I don’t what?” I stop too, listening for the helicopter, looking for the cops.

  “What if you don’t see me by 10?” She looks all at once hurt, frightened, and angry, an amazing combination of expressions.

  “Let’s stick together then. If we go down, we go down together. We don’t have time to debate this.”

  She squeezes my hand and pulls away. “No, you’re right. Let’s split up. I’ll see you at ten.”

  She darts off to the left, between a couple of houses. The helicopter is getting close, so I take off in the other direction and into the parking lot of the Petco Animal Supplies store.

  I take a deep breath and slow my walk past the automatic sliding doors of the store and relish the overly air-conditioned smell of wet dog and cat litter. I weave my way unnoticed down an aisle to the aquarium section, pretending to look at the fine selection of Neon Tetras and Crowntail Bettas.

  I’ve got five hours to get fifty miles north to Conroe. Cops will be looking for me, George’s death will be on television soon, if it isn’t already, and thanks to our visit to his station, we’ll be the last ones seen with him. Bella and I, even under false names, will be identifiable as the former CEO of a major Houston company and the turncoat political aide who sent a governor to prison. Anyone who looks at the station’s security video will see that.

  Mack will be okay. He’s smart enough to get his way to the plane without getting caught. Bella will be okay too. She knows this city. She has friends who’ll help. She’s ridiculously resourceful when she has to be. She’s saved my life twice today, despite her loss of faith in me.

  As for me…I’ve
only gotten this far because of luck. Bella said it.

  I need help. I need someone who doesn’t trust the government, someone who’ll believe I didn’t kill George, and someone who can get me a weapon without asking any questions. Staring at the Grade A Koi fluttering around the air bubbles in the tank, the answer comes to me.

  I know exactly who to call.

  CHAPTER 6

  My shrink called it a “repression mechanism”. She told me, during our many sessions together, I’d chosen to forget key elements of my childhood to escape the pain of them.

  I told her there were, what I called, “black holes” in my memories: long periods of time for which I couldn’t account. People would ask me questions about things I couldn’t remember. It’s not that there was some hazy recollection. There was nothing. A black hole.

  Then there were the things I thought I remembered, but didn’t actually happen to me. They were what the shrink called “substitute memories.” I’d created them as a coping skill, false memories to mask the ones I didn’t like.

  I’ve read a lot about this stuff and there’s research that backs it up. Incredibly, there are two opposing parts of the brain that account for the suppression and the substitution of memories. Apparently it’s pretty common among people who suffer from post-traumatic stress.

  I guess my childhood, or what was left of it after my parents died, was post-trauma. It makes sense. I’ve got to be honest, though. I didn’t really buy into it until I started remembering snippets of my parents’ involvement with Sir Spencer and Liho Blogis.

  I’d forgotten their visits to our house, the arguments my parents had over my father’s job, my dad’s contention that, in some way, my mother was responsible for his line of work. The memories came back in snippets, short unconnected visions that made little sense to me in and of themselves. But the more of them I experienced, the farther down the rabbit hole I chose to fall, the more they made sense.

  At this point, I can’t be sure what really happened and what didn’t. I’ve got so many of these substitute memories floating around with the real ones, I can’t tell the difference sometimes. It’s like watching a television show of your life, not sure which parts were made better by Hollywood.

  The crazy thing is that my adult life, the part I can’t escape, seems more like some Hollywood action flick than anything I endured as a kid. I’m messed up.

  I’ve dragged the only woman who’s ever really loved me, other than my mother, into hell. True, she took the first few steps willingly, but I yanked her through the remaining eight circles.

  Limbo, check. Lust, check. Gluttony, Avarice, and Wrath, triple check. Heresy, I guess. Violence, definitively. Fraud, assuredly. Treachery, obviously. Lust may have been the only one she consciously chose. The only thing missing is Morgan Freeman finding a head in a box while Brad Pitt blows out Kevin Spacey’s brains.

  She’s lost faith in me. I can’t blame her, given how deeply we’ve descended. I know, however, I can fix it. I can free her and give her a better life, a life more closely resembling the one she had before I entered it.

  My plan is to ensnare the two men who I repeatedly removed from memory. I’ll play to their unbridled greed. I’ll plot them against each other. Whether I survive or not is irrelevant. If I die in the process, all of the memories I suppressed or substituted will die with me. It’ll be like they never really happened in the first place, as my mind would want.

  ***

  “Here’s what we know now,” a youngish, bottle blonde reports earnestly, gripping her microphone a little too tightly. “There are three people dead inside this Upper Kirby home. There is a fourth person outside of the house. He is also deceased.”

  The four people bellied up to the bar at Kenneally’s Irish Pub, across the street from Petco, are glued to the flat panel television hanging above the top shelf liquor. The volume is up loud.

  I joined them ten minutes ago, waiting for my ride. I’m in a booth, nursing a Guinness, trying to remain as incognito as possible. The barkeep was kind enough to let me use his phone.

  “Police sources tell me that all four people are men, all of them were killed in what appears to be some sort of shootout, which happened within the last hour.” The camera moves from the reporter to a live picture of George’s house. The television crew is apparently across the street, outside of the yellow crime tape that stretches the length of George’s property. “We also know that homicide detectives are en route to the scene here, as are a crime scene unit, and the Harris County medical examiner.”

  The live picture zooms in to an upstairs window in George’s house, through which I can see the dark outline of police inside. There are fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars cluttering the street and driveway. The camera zooms out again, reintroducing the reporter into the frame.

  “Again,” she says with as serious a face as she can muster, “this happened in just the last hour. And we do understand that at least three people fled the scene. HPD gave chase, but lost the suspects near Westheimer and Kirby. One officer was involved in a collision during that pursuit.” Video of the crash I last saw in my rear view mirror fills the screen.

  “Nobody was seriously injured in that crash, we are told. And while investigators haven’t given us a description of the suspects, the woman who called 9-1-1, first alerting police to the shooting here, can tell us a little bit more about them. She joins us live.”

  Oh crap.

  “Her name is Maxine Landiss.” The reporter turns to the woman who was on the phone as we ran from George’s house. “She tells me she saw the trio run from the house and get into a black SUV.”

  “That’s right,” the woman confirms, glancing back and forth between the reporter and the camera, “I saw two men and a woman come from the garage. One of the men was missing a leg. The woman looked familiar to me, but I can’t place her. She was pretty. The other man was young. He was carrying a laptop computer.”

  “You say,” the reporter presses urgently, “that one of the men was missing a leg? Tell me more about that.”

  “Well, he had a prosthetic leg. And even though he was an African American, he had lighter skin in spots.”

  “Anything else you can tell us?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Okay.” The reporter nods at the woman and turns back to the camera. “That’s the latest from here. We, of course, will stay on top of any new developments and get them back to you as quickly as possible. Reporting live in Upper Kirby, Kandy Bellman, News 4 Houston.”

  The screen switches from the reporter to the anchors in the studio. The woman anchor looks down at a ragged piece of paper before addressing the camera.

  “I’ve just been handed some information that is particularly distressing for those of us here at News 4 Houston,” she says. “The address of the deadly shooting is a home owned by our own George Townsend. We do not have confirmation that George was home at the time of the shootings, that he is one of the victims, or is in anyway involved. But in full disclosure, we wanted to let you, our viewers, know every bit of information about this fluid, developing story.”

  “I know that dude,” says one of the men at the bar to nobody in particular. “He’s the reporter who did all of those reports on the governor. He won, like, an Oscar or something.”

  “An Oscar is for movies, idiot,” says the older guy next to him.

  “Whatever,” says the movie fan. “He won some award. I saw them running commercials on it. He’s a big deal.”

  “Now turning to our local weather forecast.” The woman forces a smile and the screen switches to a wider shot of the anchor desk. It’s what’s called a “three shot” of the two news anchors and the meteorologist. “We understand there might be a chance for rain tonight?”

  My beer is already getting warm. I take a sip and swallow. Alcohol is probably not the best choice right now
. Staring at the glass, relishing the sour aftertaste of the beer, I lose myself for just a beat. Sitting in the bar, alone, I almost feel normal. The four guys at the bar are normal. A couple of them are in dress pants and dress shirts. Their ties are loosened at their unbuttoned collars and the gel in their hair has lost its grip. They’re finished for the day at their customer service jobs or sales positions. They’re drowning what they perceive as the mundane, repetitive nature of their lives before heading home to an empty apartment or a house full of kids.

  They’ve got no idea how lucky they are.

  The other two look like blue-collar types. They’re wearing jeans and heavy boots. One of them is wearing a dingy t-shirt with a large marlin sprawled across the back. The other is in a short-sleeved collared shirt. I’m guessing it has some company’s logo on the breast pocket.

  This is their place to unwind after a physical day in the heat and humidity, to talk shop before stepping outside to smoke a couple of cigarettes. Their girlfriends or wives don’t expect them home for a couple of hours.

  What I’d give to have their lives…

  “Hey.” A thin man standing at my table raps arthritis-thickened knuckles on the laminated wood in front of me. “You awake?”

  I snap out of my trance and focus on the man. He’s in his early sixties, with deep creases along his brow and stretching from the edges of his nose to his jawline. He’s tanned, with thinning hair slicked back against his narrow head. His eyes are powerful and pained.

  He’s wearing a tan cotton jacket, despite the heat, and it’s zipped up to his neck.

  He squints and asks again, “You all there, Jackson? I got here as quickly as I could. Thankfully, I was on this side of town running errands.”

  I nod and offer him the seat across from me. He sits down and wraps his fingers around my beer, asking me for a drink without saying anything.

  I nod again and he swigs from the glass until it’s empty of everything but foam. Licking the leftovers from the gray stubble above his lips he knocks on the table again.