The Kidnap Victim Page 14

  Nicole tiptoed back down the hall. She had to save Bell. Nothing else mattered. She was only going to get one chance. She couldn’t let Mr. White take her. His partners were dead, and he’d want revenge. James was counting on her. She’d promised him she’d rescue her. She positioned herself to one side of the kitchen doorway and stood completely still, crouched and ready to strike.

  Cohen stepped out of the doorway and toward the bedrooms. Mr. White moved slowly up the stairs, pushing Bell ahead of him. She was trembling and gasping softly, as if she were too afraid to sob. “Keep moving.”

  Mr. White and Bell came out of the stairwell. “Where’s your partner?”

  “She got shot,” Cohen said.

  “I’m not stupid enough to try to take your guns. You can shoot me, but she’s still going to die. Back up into the bedroom.”

  Cohen backed down the hall and went into one of the bedrooms. Mr. White moved more quickly now, pulling Bell down the hall toward the kitchen. Just as he came through the doorway, Nicole sprang on him, grabbed his gun with both hands, and snatched it away from Bell’s neck. The revolver went off. Bell screamed. They all banged into the refrigerator, Nicole shoving herself between Bell and Mr. White as they struggled over the revolver.

  “Run,” she yelled.

  Bell stumbled backward and then turned and ran through the chaos in the living room and out onto the porch, where Denison was running up the steps. “Bell! I’m here! I’m here!”

  Bell looked around, disoriented and confused. “Dad?”

  He pulled her into his arms. “Come with me.”

  In the kitchen, Nicole and Mr. White were grappling, banging into the counter and the table, each trying to bring the gun to bear on the other. Nicole tried to head-butt him, but her feet slipped in Mr. Black’s blood, and she lost her grip on the revolver. She reached for her Glock as she fell. Mr. White shot her twice in the vest. She felt her ribs crack. He kicked her in the head. She blacked out. Mr. White took her submachine gun in one hand, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her through the living room and out onto the porch. Cohen was waiting out in the front yard, his feet planted on the sidewalk, his machine gun ready.

  “It’s still the same standoff,” Mr. White said. “You can kill me, if you don’t mind losing her. Move back.”

  Cohen stepped back into the yard.

  “Get up.” Mr. White, his hand still tangled in Nicole’s hair, pulled her to her feet. She gasped, holding her side. Mr. White pulled her down the steps and across the yard to the Jeep. Police sirens wailed in the distance.

  “We can still make a deal,” Cohen said.

  “We’ll see,” Mr. White said. He forced Nicole into the Jeep from the driver’s side, and kept the machine gun pressed into her side as he backed out of the driveway.

  Denison came running from the Suburban as the Jeep sped off. “Chase them down?”

  Cohen shook his head. “Cops are coming. We need to get your daughter home and make a new plan.”

  Bell, quietly sobbing, lay on the sofa in the den curled up in a ball. Denison knelt next to her, holding her hand. The doctor, a young south Asian woman wearing olive-colored slacks and a baby blue, long-sleeve button-up shirt, stood nearby. “Physically, your daughter is fine, Mr. Denison. I gave her a sedative. She should fall asleep momentarily. I can recommend some therapists.”

  “Dad, Dad,” Bell murmured. “She pushed in front of me, told me to run. We’ve got to help her, Dad.”

  Denison squeezed her hand. He blinked away his tears and swallowed hard. “Did they hurt you?”

  “The bad guy wanted to, but the others wouldn’t let him.”

  “The bad guy?”

  “Mr. White.”

  He kissed her forehead. He turned to the doctor. “Can you stay the night?”

  “Of course.”

  He went into the kitchen, where Cohen sat at the island drinking a beer. “My God, what are we going to do?”

  “That’s above my pay grade.”

  “Maybe it’s time for the police.”

  Cohen shook his head. “That’s the one thing we can’t do. We left three dead retrieving your daughter. This is our private fiasco. Besides, we don’t know where they are. All the cops can do is arrest us.”

  “We’ve got to do something.”

  “We are doing something. We’re waiting for Bryan. He’s the one who’s going to have to sort this out.”

  Two hours later Bryan was in a rented Nissan Sentra driving away from the Jonas Grey Airport in Cricket Bay. The night sky was clear, and the traffic was light. He’s been trying to call Nicole ever since he had landed, but she wasn’t picking up, and he wasn’t going to leave a message. He was tired from traveling, paranoid from being chased by Spanish Mike’s people, and hoping, just hoping, that things here weren’t as bad as Nicole’s silence seemed to suggest.

  On the sidewalk in front of the terminal, a skinny woman wearing discount-store fashion, her face ruined by drugs and alcohol, was talking on her phone. “That’s right, Jenny. It was him for sure. He got away before I could get to my car.”

  “He got away? Is that what I’m paying you for?”

  “I’m sorry. I really am. I got his license plate, though.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. It’s a rental.”

  “Give me the plate number.”

  As Bryan pulled into Denison’s driveway, he noted the security features on the house: yard lights, window alarms, but nothing to provide protection if someone wanted in and could beat the police response time. He rang the doorbell. Denison answered the door.

  “You look like shit,” Bryan said. “Got here as soon as I could. I’ve been trying to call Nicole. Where is she?”

  Denison stammered. “I don’t know how to tell you this…”

  Bryan pushed past him. “Where is she?” He moved down the hallway, saw the doctor and Bell in the den, and stopped in the kitchen. “You must be the gunfighter.”

  Cohen nodded. His face was set, and he had his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol.

  “Where’s Nicole?”

  Cohen filled him in. Bryan turned to Denison. “So we got your daughter back in mint condition, except for a few scuffs. Narrowed them down from four to one. But we don’t know where the last guy took her.”

  “And Bell says this guy Mr. White is the bad one,” Denison said.

  “You should have waited for me.”

  “We thought we could take them.”

  “We? We? You don’t know a thing about this kind of work.”

  “She thought we could take them.”

  “And she thought wrong.”

  “I can get the money in the morning.”

  “God damn it.”

  He glanced at Cohen. His pistol was loose in his holster. “You can relax, soldier. I’m not blaming you.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yeah. It was just a bad break. You did your job.”

  “You still need my services?”

  Bryan nodded. “Oh, yeah. I’m definitely going to need your help. We’ve still got some killing ahead of us.”

  “What are you going to do?” Denison asked.

  “That bastard doesn’t know about me. We’re going to give him a chance to settle so that we have a place to find, then we’re going to get Nicole back, and I’m going to murder that asshole.”

  “How can you be sure she isn’t already dead?”

  “Nicole is too valuable to kill. He may be pissed about his buddies, but he still wants the money. As long as he thinks he can get the cash, he’s going to keep her alive. Count on it.”

  Billings stood in the dark by the front door to the motel room. Outside, the parking lot was quiet. In the light from the bathroom, he could see Nicole lying face-down on the king-size bed, her mouth gagged with a washcloth and duct tape, her arms tied behind her back, and her knees taped together. He set her phone down on the scratched-up table by the door next to the MP5K and the Glock. The Ke
vlar vest lay on the floor. He could see her eyes watching him, trying to figure him out. What a clusterfuck. Rudy and Kevin dead. That house was a death trap. He barely got out of there alive. This was her doing, and she was going to pay. He walked by her into the bathroom, urinated, washed his hands, and came back out into the room.

  “You fucked up. He got the princess, but I got you. You better hope they’re willing to trade a hundred thousand dollars for your skanky ass.”

  He dragged her off the edge of the bed, pulled out his pocketknife, and cut the duct tape binding her knees. “But the bank doesn’t open ’til morning, so we’ve got all night for you to tell me about your friends, particularly the big bastard who did the killing.” He cut through her belt and tossed his knife onto the night table. “First we’re going to get to know each other a little better. You owe me that much. You going to spread your legs and pretend that you like it?”

  She drove her boots into the carpet and sprang up, banging her shoulder into his chest. He staggered back. She turned to face him, pivoted on her left foot to swing with her right, but he stepped out of range, and her momentum spun her around. He grabbed her from behind. She kicked and writhed. He punched her in her cracked ribs. She groaned through her gag and fell limp. He tossed her face down onto the bed and jerked her pants down. She turned her head to try to look at him. He pushed down hard in the middle of her back. “Quit struggling. This isn’t your first time.”

  12

  Gangbangers

  The next morning, the gunfight at the rental house was on all the local TV news shows. Three men dead, the house riddled with bullet holes. The gang taskforce was in charge of the investigation. No leads. Denison and Bell were still asleep when Bryan and Cohen left in the white Sentra, tracking Nicole’s phone. It appeared to be moving away from the White Sands Motel when the signal died. They rolled into the motel’s potholed parking lot. The motel was a single strip of rooms built in the 1960s, peeling paint and missing screens, located next to a pool hall and a whiskey bar. The parking lot was empty. Bryan got out of the car and went into the office. The window air conditioner whirred as if the fan blades were bent. An elderly woman wearing a cardigan sweater sat at a stool behind the wire mesh-enclosed counter, watching a cable news show. “Were you working last night?”

  “Got here at seven a.m.” Her dentures clicked as she talked.

  “How could I get ahold of the night guy?”

  She studied his face. “You know him?”

  “I just need some information.” He pushed a twenty-dollar bill through the slot in the mesh.

  She took the twenty. “He’ll be here at seven tonight.”

  “No address?”

  She shook her head.

  Bryan drove out onto the boulevard and turned onto Trion Drive. Cohen looked in his side mirror and then over his shoulder. “I think we’ve got a tail. Check out the old Lincoln.”

  Bryan glanced in the rearview mirror. A yellow Lincoln with tinted windows was two cars behind. Bryan took a right turn. The Lincoln took a right turn. Bryan took a left. The Lincoln took a left. The light at the approaching intersection was green. Bryan got in the left turn lane. When the light turned yellow, he swerved out of the turn lane and drove through the intersection, causing the car behind him to slam on the brakes and honk its horn. Cohen looked over his shoulder. “He’s boxed in the left turn lane.”

  Bryan sped up, took the next left turn, and then another quick left.

  “What are you doing?” Cohen asked.

  “Trying to come up in back of them so we can find out who they are.” He sped through two residential intersections, took another left, and came back out on Trion Drive. Up ahead, the Lincoln was stopped at a traffic light.

  “Good driving.”

  “Yeah, as long as I don’t lose them.”

  The Lincoln circled around a few times, as if it were trying to find them, and then took an entrance ramp onto the beltway. Three exits down, the Lincoln got off the beltway and pulled into the Weekender Motel, a truck driver’s motel just south of the interchange. Groups of men dressed in jeans and work boots sat on folding chairs in front of the motel room doors drinking from bottles in sacks. “New players,” Bryan said.

  “They were following you.”

  “I had some guys after me before I got here. Hard to believe it’s them, but they certainly are persistent.”

  “You going to add them to my list?”

  “One problem at a time. Nicole’s our priority.”

  Bryan pulled into the motel and stopped behind a parked tractor-trailer rig. “See which room they go in.”

  Cohen hopped out and peeked around the trailer. The Lincoln slipped into a parking spot about halfway down the lot. Four Latinos piled out and went into room 179. Cohen watched the door shut before he went back to the Sentra.

  “Hard guys. Definite trouble.”

  “They must have seen me rent the car, but they didn’t follow us to Denison’s or we’d have met them there. Time to change cars.”

  They returned the Sentra to the Enterprise car rental at the airport. Then they walked over to the long-term parking section of the parking deck and waited. A middle-aged man in a sports coat, overnight bag on one shoulder, parked a Toyota Highlander. Short trip. One or two days, tops. A black woman in a pantsuit, one rolling suitcase that would fit in the overhead compartment, parked a minivan. Maybe three or four days. Then a couple wearing Eddie Bauer travel clothes parked a Honda CR-V and unloaded three suitcases. “They won’t be back this week,” Bryan said.

  Bryan broke into the driver’s side, hotwired the ignition, and opened the passenger’s door.

  “Pretty quick,” Cohen said.

  “Practice makes perfect.”

  They drove back to Denison’s with the windows open, the salt air blowing through the car, Cohen tapping his foot, and Bryan humming to himself. Finally Cohen spoke. “This time’s going to be harder.”

  Bryan nodded.

  “No element of surprise.”

  “Yep.”

  “We going to wait for night?”

  Bryan turned onto Lighthouse Boulevard. “I’m going to try to put the gangsters into the mix.”

  Cohen shifted in his seat so that he could concentrate on Bryan’s face. “How’s that?”

  “Asshole isn’t expecting them.”

  “Okay, but how are you going to get them to cooperate? They want to kill you.”

  “But they don’t know how to find me. So I’m going to call them up and see if I can’t help them with that.”

  They parked the CR-V behind Denison’s garage and came in through the kitchen door. Denison and Bell were sitting at the island. Denison was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing yesterday. He didn’t look as if he’d slept very well. Bell wore a baby-blue robe with little cows printed on it. She was hunched over her coffee, gripping the cup as if it were her last hold on reality. She didn’t look up. “Where were you two?” Denison asked.

  “Tracking Nicole,” Bryan said.

  “Find her?” Denison asked.

  “No such luck.” Bryan and Cohen sat down at the island. Bryan filled them in.

  “So there’s gangsters after you, and that guy—Mr. White—pulled the chip from the phone,” Denison said.

  Bryan turned to Bell. “How do you feel today?”

  “I still can’t believe what happened. It’s like a dream. Everything was in slow motion until Nicole yelled for me to run.” Tears started down her cheeks.

  Denison put his arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay.”

  Bryan turned on the charm. “Yeah, slow motion, that’s how it is sometimes.” He nodded. “I’m sorry, Bell. I know you want to forget, to just blank the last two days out of your mind, but right now I have to ask you some questions so that we can help Nicole. Are you up for that?”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “Great. This guy—Mr. White?”

  She nodded.

  “What can you tell
me about him?”

  “I don’t know much. They kept me locked in a storeroom. It was like a basement.”

  “Anything could help.”

  She glanced at her father, and then looked at the floor. “The first night, he came into the storeroom thinking that I would have sex with him. Said it was no big deal, that he knew Nicole had sex for money. When I screamed, he tried to shut me up.”

  Denison’s mouth fell open. “But the Doc said—”

  “Nothing happened, Dad. The others came and made him leave.”

  “Really?” Denison asked.

  She nodded. “None of them wanted him to hurt me.” She covered her face with her hands. “And now they’re dead.”

  “None of this was your fault,” Denison said.

  “I know, Dad. I know. I just can’t get it out of my mind.”

  “Anything else?” Bryan asked.

  “When they were leaving, I overheard the guy with the acne scars telling Fred Stein that Mr. White was crazy. I never saw him after that until you guys came to rescue me. When he had the gun on me and was pushing me up the stairs, I thought for sure I’d be raped and murdered.”

  “But you’re safe now,” Denison said.

  Bell started crying. “With the other guys dead, there’s no one to protect Nicole.”

  Denison held her and rubbed her back. Then he turned to Bryan. “When you go, I’m going with you.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I pushed her away, and it wasn’t her fault.”

  “James, this isn’t about you making yourself feel better. You’re a civilian. You can’t be part of this.”

  “How can you be so cool? He’s got Nicole. I know she means everything to you.”

  “Yeah. You’re right. She’s my everything. I want to kill that asshole so bad that I can taste his blood in my mouth. But Nicole is still alive. I can feel it. And if I give in to my emotions, if I’m not thinking completely straight, I’m going to miss the chance to save her. And I’m not going to live with that.” He took out his smartphone. “Let’s see if he’s put the chip back in her phone.”