Escalate Read online

  My first move was to go to the refrigerator and pull out a bag of carrots. I chomped away for a few minutes, then drank some water straight from the tap. I didn’t want to look like I was in a hurry to get to my computer.

  When I finally sat down in front of it, I opened up a video chat and clicked on Deanna Steele’s email address.

  When she answered, I noticed a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poster behind her.

  “How are you and Donatello doing?” I asked.

  She caught the reference immediately and flashed me a big grin.

  It looked good on her.

  “Let me get right to it,” I said. “It worked. Amanda took the money.”

  Deanna knew what this meant right away. Her father had been set up.

  I’d expected her to look pleased. What I got, however, was much more alarming. Her face crumpled as tears dropped down her cheeks. She sobbed soundlessly. I didn’t interrupt.

  “Thank you,” she finally said. “I felt like I’d lost my father. You gave him back to me.”

  Wow. That felt good. Aware that I was probably being watched, though, I played it cool.

  “Now what we have to do is make sure nothing gets in the way of the corporate merger,” I said. “You passed along your father’s passwords to the blackmailer, right?”

  “Yes, but if the software backdoor didn’t work,” she said, “I’ve just destroyed his career.”

  “I promise you,” I said. “Everything is perfect. The log-in password will take them to a mirror of your father’s hard drive with all the fake information we put in it.”

  “And the real information?”

  I held up a small keychain and the dangling USB stick. “It’s with me twenty-four/seven. No way are we trusting it anywhere in the Cloud. Any hacker as good as my brother and me would find a way to get there from your father’s computer. And we’re assuming the blackmailer has hired the best.”

  “Really,” she said. “How can I ever thank you?”

  “Let’s wait until the blackmailer takes the bait,” I said. “It will probably happen tonight, so I’m meeting with a lawyer to pull together the information we need. By noon the cops should be involved, and after that we can celebrate.”

  “I like the sound of that,” she said. Her big smile was back.

  “Cool,” I said. “And, um, thought I’d ask if you might want to meet me somewhere.”

  I gave her the name and address of the boxing gym.

  “To watch you work out?” She laughed. “Nice try. Muscles don’t impress me.”

  “I’ll be there late,” I said, “in case you change your mind. I’ll leave the back door unlocked.”

  She laughed again and waved goodbye. I did the same and ended our connection.

  The conversation had gone as well as I had expected. Deanna deserved an Oscar for it.

  And now the clock was ticking for the blackmailer.

  SIXTEEN

  Snap and flow, I repeated to myself. Snap and flow.

  I was the last one of the night, alone in the gym, facing the heavy bag in one of the corners.

  Billy, the owner, was okay with my staying late. He’d made a second set of keys for me and trusted me to lock up.

  Technically, they were my keys.

  Billy had no idea that I was the one who had purchased the building a few weeks earlier, when it looked like a rent increase might put him out of business. Six months’ interest on my trust fund had been more than enough to buy the building. As far as he knew, the landlord had sold the building to some conglomerate that would develop the property in a few years. Until further notice he was welcome to stay put, at a very reasonable rate.

  Snap and flow.

  To me, the heavy bag, more than the speed bag, is the symbol of boxing. Dinging the speed bag over and over takes a coordination that is mesmerizing for spectators.

  But the heavy bag—so wide you could circle your arms around it, and weighing half of your body weight—is where your grit and determination are built. How you handle the heavy bag makes the difference between slamming to the ring floor with buckled knees or having the ref raise your hand in victory.

  As long as you don’t get lazy with it.

  The temptation is to push your punches through it. The feeling of power you get by doing that is an illusion. You need to snap your punches, letting the impact of the bag bounce your fist back. Learn how to do this right, and you’ll punch harder and faster with less energy expended. And you need all the energy you can get. If you’ve ever been in a fight, you learn how much the adrenaline saps the energy from you.

  Snap and flow.

  It’s not about the punches you throw but how you throw them in combinations as you move around the bag. If you set your feet and throw the hardest punch possible, you are not flowing. Try that against a good boxer and watch your fist slip past the target. Then feel the return punch catch you square because your feet are immobile.

  Snap and flow. Snap and flow.

  I hit the heavy bag. RAT-A-TAT-TAT punches at 50 to 70 percent power, never pausing more than three seconds between combinations.

  It is far more physically demanding than hitting a speed bag. I’d been at it for ten minutes, and sweat poured from my skin, sending splatters of moisture at every impact.

  Snap and flow. Snap and flow.

  I kept my eyes on the exact spot I wanted to hit each time. I pretended I was trying to hit a quarter glued in that position. Too many boxers let their eyes wander around the gym as they hit. This is a complacency that will hurt you in the ring.

  Snap and flow. Snap and flow.

  I kept exactly within arm’s reach of the bag. I didn’t want to be in the ring against someone who always managed to be out of my reach and who always managed to sense when I’d moved within his reach. Without distance awareness, all the punches I threw would be meaningless once the bell rang.

  Snap and flow. Snap and flow.

  I was in my intense little world, my focus totally on the sound of my gloves against the bag.

  Snap and flow. Snap and flow.

  Then something interrupted my focus.

  The sound of a single person clapping.

  I looked past the bag and saw the source of that sound.

  Jennie Lang. Smirking at me. And clapping in a manner that was clearly sarcastic.

  I stopped punching and wiped my forearm across my forehead to keep the sweat from dripping into my eyes.

  “Surprised?” she said. “Maybe you should think of locking the doors this late at night.”

  I was surprised. I said nothing. I was wearing a black workout shirt. It was soaked, and now that I’d stopped punching, the shirt felt as uncomfortable as the boxing gloves that kept my fingers prisoner. I wanted to keep hitting the bag.

  “You Retribution guys, you like privacy, right?” she asked. “You want to be some kind of shadowy Internet group that no one knows if it’s real or not.”

  She lifted her right hand. The gym was poorly lit because I had turned down most of the lights. But I could make out that she was holding up a cell phone.

  “You’re not that smart,” she said. “At the seniors’ center? You believed me when I said I was going back to supervising the window cleaning. Hardly. I ducked out and made it to my car before you could leave. I followed you home after your lunch with the chick with too much makeup. Seriously, you can do better than that. Victor and I talked about what to do. So tonight I follwed you again and la-dee-da, here we are.”

  Home. I had to give it thought. After lunch with Amanda Hill, I'd gone to… the grungy apartment. Not the mansion. That was a good thing. To her, then, I was Jace Sanders, the name I used on the apartment lease and the name I used at the gym.

  “Junior Wall Street,” she sneered. “Living in a dump like that? How pitiful, putting on that suit and pretending you’re some rich dude.”

  She took a step toward me, holding the phone at eye level. Short of assaulting her to take it away, I didn’t kn
ow what to do.

  “Jace Sanders,” she said. “I know your name. I know where you live. I know where you work out. And I’ve got this recorded. Your secrets are no longer secret.”

  It would have been worse—much worse—if she knew I was a Wyatt from the Wyatt Foundation. But this was bad enough. If she posted something on YouTube and it got any kind of traction, sooner or later someone would make the link.

  But that wasn’t the very worst part. There was a reason I’d been hitting the heavy bag so late this evening. And there was a reason I hadn’t locked the doors for my workout.

  “Look,” I said. “Could we talk about this tomorrow?”

  “No,” she answered. “Tomorrow you might be in a position to hurt me.”

  “And I’m not right now?”

  “No,” she said. “You’re not.”

  That’s when a noose dropped over my head and tightened on my throat like a ring of fire.

  SEVENTEEN

  “On your knees,” Victor Lang said from behind me.

  I was trying to understand what had just happened. Obviously the delay was too much for him, because the noose tightened and twisted.

  I gagged.

  “On your knees,” Victor repeated.

  I dropped. I was still wearing my boxing gloves. I couldn’t use my fingers to claw at the noose. Even if I could, I doubted it would help.

  Still, I had to try. I brought my gloves to my mouth and used my teeth to snap the Velcro loose on the right glove.

  “Stop right there,” Victor said. The noose tightened again, so tight this time it cut off my gag.

  “Ease off,” Jennie told her brother. “You don’t want to kill him.”

  “Maybe I do,” Victor said. But the pressure eased. I could breathe again. It didn’t help the pain of my knees pressed against the floor.

  “Impressed?” Jennie asked. “We decided on an animal snare. Because that’s what you are. An animal.”

  Now, at least, I could picture the situation. Victor was holding an aluminum pole with a noose at the end. While they talked, I started working my right glove loose again. My only chance was to get my fingers free, maybe try to spin and jerk the pole out of his hands.

  “Animal?” I said. I wanted to keep the conversation going, distract her.

  “You’ve bullied my brother from the beginning.”

  “I’ve bullied him?” I snorted. “Do you have any idea what he does to the younger—”

  I gagged again as Victor jerked on the noose.

  “Not so nice when I’m the one in control,” he said, “is it?”

  He was right. It wasn’t so nice.

  “Here’s the deal,” Jennie said. “Leave us alone. Completely. Or I will put your real identity out there. Got it?”

  I thought about the implications. She must have taken my silence as resistance to her demand.

  “Victor wants to strangle you and bury your body,” Jennie told me. “Just so you understand, I believe that’s easily done. We could march you out of here, put you in my car, strangle you in the backseat, drive somewhere into the mountains and dig a hole deep enough to hide the evidence. Even if someone found your body, who would ever link you to me and Victor?”

  At first that sounded ridiculous. But then I realized it wasn’t that impossible to carry out. An animal snare allowed someone to control huge dogs. If I didn’t walk along with the noose, they’d strangle me here in the gym and just drag my body to their car.

  As if reading my thoughts, Victor jerked the noose again.

  “I told Victor we didn’t need to go that far,” Jennie said. “We just had to convince you to stay out of our lives.”

  “Victor,” I said with gritted teeth, “was the one to invite me into your life.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Jennie said. “I don’t think it was a coincidence that Victor received an anonymous email telling him about Team Retribution and strongly suggesting he reach out to them.”

  My muscles were cooling, and I shivered.

  Jennie’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “Thought so,” she said. “It was you.”

  Yeah. It was.

  “Did someone else ask you to step in to bother us?” she asked. “Is that how Retribution got into our lives?”

  I imagined how it might sound, telling her that I was her older brother. And that I was trying to find a way to help their family. My family. But how do you tell someone that everything they know to be true just isn’t?

  “Answer,” she said, sudden fury in her voice.

  “I sent the email because of your missing brother,” I said. This, at least, was absolutely true. That I meant me as well as Elias when I said missing brother was something I still didn’t know if I should ever reveal.

  “Elias?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “Where is he?”

  Before I could think of an answer that might make her happy, two large men walked out of the shadows and directly toward us.

  Each carried a baseball bat.

  EIGHTEEN

  I was on my knees. Victor could see clearly over my head.

  “Jen!” he said. “Behind you.”

  She turned her head, and at the sight of the large men she took an involuntary step toward me.

  It was an intimidating sight. Both wore black sneakers, black jeans and black sweatshirts. The sweatshirts were stretched by massive chest and arm muscles.

  Both also wore black masks.

  The muscles and size I didn’t like so much, but I was relieved to see them wearing masks. If they didn’t want to be identified, it meant they intended to leave witnesses alive.

  As to whether the witnesses would be undamaged by those bats, I had no answer.

  I did know that what made the men more frightening was that neither slapped the bats against their palms. Barking dogs are less frightening than, say, silent rottweilers advancing with intent in their eyes.

  Jennie moved quickly behind me. The noose kept me from moving my head, but I could imagine her standing shoulder to shoulder with Victor.

  “Weird party,” the first guy said, stopping three steps away from us. “Time to break it up.”

  “Any closer and we snap the noose so tight it takes his head off,” Jennie said.

  Nice to have a sister so concerned about my health.

  “Then we’ll be searching a dead body instead of a living body,” the second guy said. “Makes no difference to us. As for you, I’d say the video surveillance will make for a nice long prison term.”

  “Video…” Jennie’s voice echoed uncertainty.

  Convenient that I hadn’t brought it up as a subject for discussion. But yeah, there were small cameras in discreet places. While a boxing gym isn’t the kind of target that a jewelry store might be, insurance companies give better rates if you have surveillance in place. As the new owner of the building, I’d had cameras installed not too long ago.

  “We really don’t care what you’re doing to him or why,” the first guy said. “Trust me on this. All we want is the USB stick.”

  The second guy stepped closer. He extended the baseball bat and tapped my left cheekbone with the end of it.

  “Well, princess,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “Victor,” I said. My hands were in front of me. My right glove dangled from my fingertips. All I had to do was straighten my fingers and it would fall. “Now would be a good time to remove the snare.”

  “I’d rather watch them hurt you,” Victor said.

  If I hadn’t allowed myself to believe it before, I knew it now. The kid was seriously messed up when it came to any kind of moral code.

  The second guy tapped my other cheekbone with the end of his bat.

  “And now would be a good time to tell me where the USB stick is,” he repeated. “Last chance.”

  “It’s in my boxing glove,” I said. I flicked the fingers of my right hand, and the glove bounced across the floor.

  The first guy took a quick step. Keeping his
bat in his right hand, he used his left hand to grab the glove and shake it upside down.

  The USB stick, in a small ziplock bag to protect it from my sweat, tumbled to the floor.

  He scooped it up and slid it into his front pocket.

  “Sorry, princess,” the second guy said, tapping my cheekbone one more time. “Apparently you’ve been a pain. We have instructions to hurt you in return.”

  “Victor,” I said. “Need help here.”

  Victor shifted his voice, and I knew it was directed at the men in masks. “You don’t need to hurt us, right?”

  “You’re not part of this,” the first guy answered.

  “Victor,” I said. “Remember when I kept five guys from beating on you? Drop the snare. That’s all I need.”

  “I also remember you trying to make me do community service,” he answered. “Like I’m some kind of project of yours.”

  Jennie said to me, “They hurt you bad enough, Victor and I will have time to find out where the video surveillance is stored, and we can erase it.”

  “Nice to have friends,” the first guy said. He turned to his partner. “Let’s get this done.”

  The guy in front of me raised the baseball bat. “Nothing personal,” he said.

  “Same in return,” I told him. “You guys started this. I’m happy to escalate it.”

  “What?” he asked.

  I answered with one word. I spoke it clearly and loudly. “Retribution.”

  All the lights went out.

  NINETEEN

  Fire codes demand that when the power goes out in a commercial building, emergency lights powered by battery automatically go on. I knew this from the paperwork I’d had to go through when buying the property.

  These lights did not kick in. The interior of the building was the black of a night sky without stars. Given time for my eyes to adjust, I might have been able to find an outline, but whatever light seeped into this part of the building from the windows at the front was, at this point, useless.

  “Nobody move,” growled one of the two thugs in the dark.

  Too late.

  I’d already reached over my shoulder with my gloveless right hand to grab the end of the pole. I yanked it from Victor’s grasp. Immediately the noose slackened around my neck. He yelped. I ignored that.