Parallel Lines

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Steven Savile

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

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  About the Author

  Also Available from Titan Books

  ALSO BY STEVEN SAVILE AND AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Sherlock Holmes: Murder at Sorrow’s Crown

  Primeval: Shadow of the Jaguar

  Parallel Lines

  Print edition ISBN: 9781783297917

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297924

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: March 2017

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  © 2017 Steven Savile

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  Jane

  For then, for now.

  But mostly for the park bench in Covent Garden where you put up with me trying to work out what happened next, animatedly acting out the story and the aha! moment when I realized it wasn’t about that at all, it was about this.

  So here it is, twenty-five years in the making, your book. Believe me, it couldn’t have happened without you and Beryl Reid’s bench. That’s my way of absolving myself of blame. It’s all your fault.

  1

  KEEP AWAY FROM BABIES AND SMALL CHILDREN.

  The words were printed on the bottom of the plastic carrier bag like some irrefutable law of the universe. The wisdom of the supermarket checkout, Adam Shaw thought, trying not to focus on what was inside the bag. His hands trembled. That happened a lot these days. Dyskinesia. That was the fancy word for it. He’d got other dyses to look forward to over the coming months, too: dysphagia, dysarthria, and dyspnea. Dys. In his head he always called them the “dies”; after all that’s what was going on, slowly, increasingly painfully, one treacherous muscle at a time.

  Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. One out of three wasn’t a great showing on the old scoreboard of life. 33.3% recurring. A big fat fail in mathematical terms. It certainly wasn’t the deal he’d wanted to make with the universe back when the universe was up for making deals. It wasn’t as if he was going to rage against the dying of the light, he was just going to take it, because when it’s your own body killing you, really, there’s fuck all you can do to stop it. Fuck dignity, fuck being brave, fuck taking it like a man, and most of all just fuck. Fuck fuckity fuck-fuck-fuck.

  All he wanted to do was scream, but the dysarthria made it difficult to vocalize his anger. Now there’s some first-class irony for you, Adam thought, stuffing the bag into the deep pocket of his coat. It was heavy and pulled at the shoulder.

  That was a giveaway.

  It would be recognized for what it was by someone who knew what they were looking for. A passing cop on a donut run, say, he thought, watching a cruiser roll slowly down the blacktop away from him. The air around its tailpipe shimmered in the rising July heat. There was a food truck on the corner, a small line of customers waiting. Do they even do donuts these days? he wondered, Or is it all fro-yo runs and healthy-living shit now? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a fat beat-cop anywhere apart from on TV.

  Adam’s mind was all over the place. Stress, obviously. Understandably. He was struggling to keep it all together.

  This wasn’t him.

  He wasn’t a bank robber.

  Or at least he wouldn’t be for about another thirty seconds. When he opened the door, it’d be different. Then it would be him. And it would be him for the rest of his life. Right now he was still a good man. A good father. He needed to focus on that.

  It didn’t matter how many times he’d gone over it in his head, how meticulously he’d planned it to be sure no one would get hurt, there were always variables. Things you couldn’t plan for.

  When he stepped through the door of Chicago Liberty Bank he wouldn’t be Adam Shaw, probability specialist for Humanity Capital, one of Chicago’s biggest private insurance concerns; he’d be walking into a brand new life. Then it would be all about keeping his shit together. Not easy with the shakes. Even with the meds, he couldn’t control them, though he’d timed his Zanaflex so it ought to be at its most potent. He could already feel the tingling sensation in his fingertips. That was one of the side effects of the drug. It was better than the spastic twitch that would replace it in a couple of hours. His mouth was dry, too. That was another side effect, but given the fact he was about to rob a bank, a mouthful of saliva would have been a miracle on the bread and fishes scale.

  In and out.

  That was the magic.

  He figured he’d have a two-minute grace period. It wasn’t a lot, but that didn’t mean a lot couldn’t happen in that time. Life-changing things happened in less. He was living, breathing proof of that. His entire world had changed in two almost identical fragments of time. Two-minute blocks. Both of them had been in doctors’ offices.

  The first one was back in 2005, holding hands with Lily, listening to the results of her prenatal screen. It had taken two minutes for two words to sink in: chromosome abnormality. What the doctor meant was Down’s syndrome, but he was working towards naming the disease slowly. Yes, there was the possibility of a false positive. Yes, more tests would be needed. But for now they needed to be prepared to make a tough choice. In their place most people opted for termination. Neither of them wanted that.

  The second time, seven months ago, he’d been on his own. It had been a different doctor in a different office in the same building. The specialist had delivered his diagnosis and explained how he could expect the disease to progress. It was his problem and only he was going to be broken by it. That made it easier. Right up until the realization that it wasn’t only his problem. It was Jake’s problem, because he was all the boy had in the world. That had almost broken him.

  Both times the words had been delivered in disinterested tones, the message utterly matter-of-fact even though the doctors were taking a sledgehammer to his existence. He understood in a very real way why ancient kings wanted to kill the messenger when presented with bad news. He could have wrung the specialist’s neck if it meant he could go back just a few minutes in time, to a point before the sledgehammer hit and the first cracks started to appear.

  Some nights Adam lay awake envying those lucky bastards who went out with an aneurysm on the toilet. There was something glorious about the idea of straining so hard something in your brain ruptured. It was so radically different from the fate that awaited him.

  His death had begun with the shakes. Few people could point to the actual moment in time they began to die. It wasn’t a gift he would have bestowed on anyone. Actually, it was nothing as glamorous as a fully-fledged tremor. He’d woken up one morning eight months ago with a twitch in his little finger that wouldn’t stop for more than an hour, while he stared at it, fascinated by the errant digit doing its own thing, he’d assumed it was a trapped nerve or something equally mundane. The disease would progress into difficulty swallowing, forming words, and ultimately, breathing. In other words Adam Shaw was dying one muscle-dependent bodily function at a time.

  He’d been living with the diagnosis for seven months: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The disease had a Major League Baseball All-Star as its poster boy. Lou Gehrig’s disease. It sounded like it should have been a stat printed on Adam Shaw’s rookie card. To stretch the baseball analogy way beyond breaking, the last seven months had taught Adam one single excruciating truth: life delights in throwing one beanball after another and doesn’t give a shit about the rules. It’s all about hitting you until you go down. If he’d been in the batting cages, they’d have turned the pitching machine off to put him out of his misery long before now.

  He couldn’t afford to be sick. It was as simple
as that. It wasn’t just about phrases like “Medicaid,” “pre-existing condition,” “insurance premiums” or any of the vast array of other magic words that made up the vocabulary of the high cost of a slow death in the United States of America. It was about Jake. It was always about Jake.

  His son was eleven now. It had been his birthday last week. They’d worn paper hats and had cake Adam had dropped on the floor because of his fucking treacherous hands. They’d giggled about it, but Adam could have cried as he struggled to scoop up the mess. He hated what was happening to him. Jake didn’t understand. He just blew out the candles and made a wish. Even with that duplicate chromosome and a host of other problems that had come to light over the last eleven years, Jake had a conservative life expectancy of thirty-three, meaning he was going to outlive his father by a good twenty years.

  Adam was good with numbers. He had to be, with his job. He spent every day calculating the different ways people would die given their age, education and other environmental factors. He knew better than anyone that the numbers never lied. Lily had always joked that he was on the autistic spectrum, the way he could rattle off statistics and draw correlations between seemingly unlinked numbers. It was just what he did. Slightly obsessive, just a little bit odd, and one hundred percent Adam. In every good joke there’s a grain of truth. He knew his nature made him difficult to live with. His obsessions ruled his world, but they were what made him indispensable to his employers, saving them millions as they withheld hope from other desperate people who had no idea how badly the game of life was weighted against them.

  Latest estimates had the cost of raising a child—a healthy one—from birth to adulthood up near four hundred thousand bucks. Working with the theory that Jake would essentially never leave childhood, that was basically two childhoods, or in terms of cold hard cash, eight hundred thousand dollars. Just thinking about it was dizzying. They were the kind of numbers that made you go blind if you stared at them for too long, and the absolute worst of it was that they weren’t even close to the truth. Jake’s special needs multiplied those costs, conservatively, threefold, meaning Adam needed to lay his hands on two and a half million before he died.

  Sometimes he felt like Rain Man with stuff swirling round and around in his head day and night, mocking him. They weren’t just numbers now. They had dollar signs attached. One hundred and thirteen thousand six hundred and thirty-six dollars and thirty-six cents a year. Nine thousand four hundred and sixty-nine dollars and seventy cents a month. Say it quickly enough and it didn’t sound too bad, now. Two thousand one hundred and eighty-five bucks, thirty-one a week. Round and around they swirled. Three hundred and twelve dollars and nineteen cents a day. Doable, surely? Thirteen dollars flat an hour. That was four bucks seventy-five more than minimum wage in this town, but in reality it only equated to a measly twenty-two cents a minute. Not even half a cent a second. But he couldn’t find it. That was the ultimate kick in the nuts. Not even half a cent a second.

  His entire savings would be eaten up in ninety-six days.

  Three hundred and fifty-two days carved up into four seasons of eighty-eight days a piece. In other words, he’d got enough money banked to see his boy looked after properly for one spring, summer, autumn, or winter, no more, no less. That was the reality of Adam’s bequest. Ninety-six days of living.

  The burden of care shouldn’t have rested solely on Adam’s shoulders.

  There should have been safety nets and safeguards and fallbacks and all sorts of checks and balances to stop a kid like Jake falling through the cracks, but with the infinite wisdom of pencil pushers with quotas to meet, the Disability Determination Services had put an end to Jake’s Supplemental Security Income, declaring that his disabilities didn’t result in “marked and severe functional limitations.” It was a joke. They’d had reports from his teachers, from his doctors, even from his physical and speech therapists. It didn’t matter. It had taken them five months to decide that Jake’s symptoms weren’t severe enough. Maybe they used astrology or called in psychics to gaze into a future where Jake Shaw was able to fend for himself without constant care and supervision? Or maybe the DDS just didn’t give a crap about Jake one way or the other?

  There was CHIP, of course. The Children’s Health Insurance Program, but Adam’s salary was a couple of thousand over the threshold, making it another dead end.

  Everything was about keeping Jake out of care, keeping him self-sufficient not only after Adam was gone, but during the months or maybe even years of disintegration where he wouldn’t be able to care for him.

  Sure, there were appeals, but appeals took time, and time was just another thing he didn’t have.

  He was never meant to go through this alone. That had never been the plan. It had always been him and Lily in it to the end. Only it hadn’t worked out that way.

  And that was why he stood outside the door of Chicago Liberty, about to radically change what little remained of his life.

  Did that make him a good father?

  Was it even a good excuse?

  In both instances, he needed to believe the answer was yes.

  * * *

  The best way to rob a bank is to get a degree in finance, get into a business fraternity, network your ass off and land a plum job pulling down a hundred thousand per annum plus bonuses. Better still, have a frat brother in the Treasury willing to look the other way when you dabble in a little usury, plying the unemployed and students with high-interest credit cards they can’t possibly meet the repayments on, or invest customer funds poorly and wait for the government bailout, giving yourself a nice incentive bonus for keeping the bank open. Then you’re just making money.

  Then there was that line from The Godfather: “A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Wasn’t that the truth? It had evolved of course. Now it was: “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank; give a man a bank and he can rob the world.” But the principle held. Bank robbery was a fool’s game. Much better to lie, cheat, and steal your way onto Wall Street; less work for a better payout. Adam Shaw didn’t have a degree in finance or law, and lacked a bank to call his own; his options were limited and he was desperate. He’d been forced to come up with another strategy. His gift was for numbers.

  He’d done his homework.

  He’d started by watching a lot of movies that offered a crash course in heists—some bank, others more elaborate in their nature. Unfortunately, if Hollywood had taught him anything, it was that there were as many different ways to rob a bank as there were movies on the subject. Over the last month he’d watched them all: Inside Man, The Italian Job, The Silent Partner, Run Lola Run, Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen, Point Break, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Dog Day Afternoon, Heat, The Bank Job, Reservoir Dogs and The Usual Suspects. His Netflix history was a veritable how-to guide that could and would be used in court against him.

  He’d done his reading, too. The FBI had published a wealth of information on the subject. And dispiriting stuff it was, given what he had in mind.

  The average bank robbery netted the thieves a princely 7,500 dollars, but went up to sixteen grand if a gun was involved, hence the contents of the plastic bag with its life-affirming message: KEEP AWAY FROM BABIES AND SMALL CHILDREN. Of course, the presence of a firearm turned it from robbery into aggravated robbery, and meant a fifteen-year sentence in Cook County if the shit hit the fan. If the gun went off, he was looking at thirty. Not that he’d be alive to serve either term out.

  He’d even posed the question on Reddit, crowdsourcing a solution to the problem. “How Would You Rob A Bank?” had garnered a good fifteen hundred helpful comments from devious minds. Most involved hurting someone or were straight rips-offs of movies like Die Hard 3, loudly proclaiming they’d detonate a bomb in a public place to divert police attention, or hit the Federal Reserve dressed up like a clown. One guy came closer, suggesting he’d hack the bank’s mainframe and upload a virus to do the dirty work.

  Getting his hands on the Beretta had been simple: a kid called Chris whose brother mowed the lawns in his neighborhood was a gun guy. Chris had bought the piece legally, using his own permit, scratched off the serial number and sold it on for twice the shop rate; if Adam was caught he’d just claim it had been stolen. The cops called people like Chris’s brother “straw men.” The city was full of them. Drug guys and gangs used them to tool up for drilling. That’s what they called it, “drilling,” like the blood that sprayed out of the back of their heads was oil and they’d hit the mother lode.