Free Assume Nothing by Gar Anthony Haywood Page B

here? My brother—’
    ‘No.’ Dana’s brother Ken lived out in Moorpark and the home he shared with his wife and three kids there was big enough to accommodate another half-dozen people. ‘I want you where these guys will never be able to find you, and depending on their resources, hiding out with a family member might not be good enough.’
    Dana’s silence, and the look she gave him, said she thought he was taking his paranoia to new heights.
    ‘They found you once, Dana. They had my address, not yours. Until I know who these assholes are, I’m going to err on the side of caution.’
    She nodded, satisfied with his reasoning. ‘How long?’
    ‘I don’t know. A couple days at least, maybe more.’
    ‘Do you know what . . .’ She reconsidered, glancing at Jake, and tried again. ‘Do you have a plan?’
    ‘Not yet. But something will come to me.’
    It was a lie. He’d had a plan for hours now. It just wasn’t anything his wife would have wanted to hear.
    They’d both had over fourteen hours to sleep on things now, so Dana’s next question hardly surprised him. He’d asked it of himself more than once today. ‘Are you sure we’re doing the right thing? There isn’t anything else we can do?’
    ‘Other than go to the police?’ He shook his head.
    ‘I’m afraid, Joe.’
    ‘Yeah. That makes two of us.’
    ‘No, I mean for you. I don’t want you to get hurt or . . .’ She glanced at Jake again. ‘Or to see you do something that can’t be undone.’
    Reddick spooned some sugar into his coffee, gazed absently into the vortex he created stirring it around in his cup. ‘Let me tell you how things go down if we do the only other thing we can do and turn Baumhower and his pal over to the cops. They take Baumhower in for questioning right away but they don’t know who his friend is and Baumhower isn’t saying, so he remains at large. Maybe for a week, maybe for a month, maybe for as long as it takes them to squeeze a name out of Baumhower, and they can’t do that until they know what the hell this is all about.
    ‘They’ll expect me to tell them and I won’t be able to, because I don’t have a clue myself, which will only make them wonder if Baumhower isn’t right when he says I’ve got to be some kind of wack job off his meds who’s making all this shit up. You’ll corroborate my story, of course, but then they’ll talk to Jake, and what will he say?’
    He looked up at Dana and waited for her to answer.
    ‘He’ll say the big man in the mask was just a friend of yours playing a game.’
    ‘Exactly. Because that’s what we’ve told him, right? And now the cops aren’t just thinking I’m crazy, they’re thinking me and my “friend” in the mask are trying to set Baumhower up somehow. Trying to run some kind of bizarre extortion scam, or something. So they let Baumhower go and turn their attention to me, and now both Baumhower and his pal are free to look for you and Jake, find you, and kill you like they promised they would.’
    ‘But that would be crazy! The police would know Baumhower did it immediately.’
    ‘Sure they would. But they still wouldn’t have a motive for his threatening me in the first place, and without that, I’d look like a better suspect to them than he would. Estranged husband with a history of mental illness – I’d be tailor-made for the rap. And Baumhower – depending on what it is he’s trying to hide by keeping me silent about our accident – might actually prefer to take his chances killing us all than have the cops find out about it.’
    Dana’s head wagged from side to side, the color all gone from her face. ‘OK, enough. I don’t want to hear any more.’
    Reddick understood how she felt. He was long past caring, because caring was a luxury he couldn’t afford anymore, but he could have easily been sickened by it all himself. Knowing what he had to do – what the fates were giving him no choice but to do if he ever wanted to live a