Void - The Wheelman

LENNON FELT A TAP ON HIS SHOULDER. IT WAS THE parking attendant.

“Can I help you?” he said, but his tone was just the opposite. Can I get rid of you quick, so I can go back to my booth?

Lennon shook his head. But the attendant persisted.

“What kind of car you looking for?”

Lennon ignored him and scanned the last row of cars, near the edge of the lot. He knew they hadn’t parked the Prelude here, but maybe some parking attendant moved the cars around somehow. They did that sometimes, especially to clear a street for a work crew; they just loaded the cars on flatbeds and moved them where they wanted. Although that seemed highly unlikely, Lennon searched anyway.

The attendant seemed to give up, and walked back to his booth. He kept giving Lennon strange looks.

Fuck him. Where the hell was the car?

Only two possibilities.

One—and this was another highly unlikely event—somebody decided to boost the Honda Prelude, and got a nice surprise when they looked in the trunk. In this case, Holden would have been correct to be nervous, and the fates were working against them all.

That was bullshit.

The more likely possibility was that one of his partners, Bling or Holden, had double-crossed him. Of course, that brought up two additional possibilities: one, the betrayer was either working with the Russians, in which case he knew the battering van was coming, and braced himself for impact, then led them to the Prelude. Two, the betrayer survived the Russian ambush just as Lennon had, but beat him to the Prelude and sped away, assuming the others were dead. Lennon hadn’t rushed back to the Prelude, thinking it was better to heal first and let the heat die down.

But now he saw that hesitation was just one of a long series of mistakes he’d made in the past twenty-four hours. If Lennon had gone right for the Prelude, that Saugherty prick wouldn’t have caught him napping on Kelly Drive, and he would have only two deaths on his tab, instead of at least … how many was it? Two, three (Saugherty), four (his big friend), five, six, seven strangers with guns? For a decidedly nonviolent heister, Lennon had racked up an uncomfortably large body count.

Sort it out later. Solve the problem now.

“Dude.”

It was the parking attendant again.

“Phone. It’s for you.”

He held out a cell phone.