Shallow Graves

in the South.
    My phone rang and I answered.
    My protégé’s voice was urgent. “Abe.”
    Shoulders tensed, I asked, “Has he turned off the highway?” I wasn’t too concerned; we’d exited over a half hour ago. The hitter would be forty miles away by now.
    “No, still following the decoy. But something just happened. He made a call on his mobile. When he disconnected, it was odd: He was wiping his face. I moved up two car lengths. It looked like he’d been crying.”
    My breath came quickly as I considered possible reasons for this. Finally, one credible, disturbing scenario rose to the top: What if the hitter had suspected we’d try a decoy and had used one of his own? He’d forced somebody who resembled him—just like the elfin man in our decoy car—to follow us. The call my protégé had just witnessed might have been between the driver and the real perp, who was perhaps holding the man’s wife or child hostage.
    But this, then, meant that the real hitter could be somewhere else and—
    A flash of white streaked toward us as a Ford pickup truck appeared from the driveway of a sagging, deserted gas station to the left and bounded over the highway. The truck, its front protected by push bars, slammed into our driver’s side and shoved us neatly through a tall stand of weeds into a shallow ravine. Alissa screamed and I grunted in pain and heard my protégé calling my name, then the mobile and the hands-free flew into the car, propelled by the deploying airbag.
    We crashed down a five-foot descent and came to an undramatic stop at the soupy bottom of a shallow creek.
    Oh, he’d planned his attack perfectly and before I could even click the seat belt to get to my gun, he’d swung a mallet through the driver’s window, shattering it and stunning me with the same blow. My Glock was ripped off my belt and pocketed. Dislocated shoulder, I thought, not much blood. I spat broken glass from my mouth and looked to Alissa. She too was stunned but didn’t seem hurt badly. The hitter wasn’t holding his gun, only the mallet, and I thought that if she fled now she’d have a chance to tumble through the underbrush and escape. Not much of a chance but something. She had to move immediately, though. “Alissa, run, to the left! You can do it! Now!”
    She yanked the door open and rolled out.
    I looked back at the road. All I could see was the white truck parked on the shoulder near a creek where you might hunt frogs for bait, like a dozen other trucks I’d seen en route. It perfectly blocked anyone’s view from the road. Just like I’d used a truck to mask my escape, I reflected grimly.
    The hitter was now reaching in to unlatch my door. I squinted in pain, grateful for the man’s delay. It meant that Alissa could gain more distance. My people would know our exact position through GPS and could have police here in fifteen or twenty minutes. She might make it. Please, I thought, turning toward the path she’d be escaping down, the shallow creekbed.
    Except that she wasn’t running anywhere.
    Tears rolling down her cheeks, she was standingnext to the car with her head down, arms crossed over her round chest. Was she hurt more badly than I’d thought?
    My door was opened and the hitter dragged me out onto the ground, where he expertly slipped nylon restraints on my hands. He released me and I sagged into the sour-scented mud, beside busy crickets.
    Restraints? I wondered. I looked at Alissa again, now leaning against the car, unable to look my way. “Please.” She was speaking to our attacker. “My mother?” No, she wasn’t stunned and wasn’t hurt badly and I realized the reason she wasn’t running: because she had no reason to.
    She wasn’t the target.
    I was.
    The whole terrible truth was obvious. The man standing over me had somehow gotten to Alissa several weeks before and threatened to hurt her mother—to force Alissa to make up a story about corruption at the government contractor. Because it involved an army base where I knew the commander, the perp bet that I’d be the shepherd to guard her. For the past week Alissa had been giving this man details about our security procedures. He wasn’t a hitter; he was a lifter , hired to extract information from me. Of course: about the organized crime case I’d just worked. I knew the new identities of the five witnesses who’d testified at the trial. I knew where Witness Protection was placing them.
    Gasping for breath through the tears, Alissa