“When did he call?”
“He just called. Monk, what’s going on?”
“I have something these people want, and they’re using Orville to make sure I give it to them.”
“Are they going to hurt him?” I didn’t want to think about that.
“Not if I can help it. It’ll be ok, Coretta, I’ll take care of it.”
I waited for her to respond. “I expect you to keep your word. I want that man back!”
“So do I.”
I did my best to assure her it would be all right. Judith sat with me as I talked to Coretta. I looked at the clock, it was already late in the afternoon; I couldn’t dither. I kissed Judith. “I have to go. Is there someplace safe you can stay till this is over?”
“I’ll be safe here. After there were some break-ins around here a few years ago, Martin decided we were vulnerable and had a safe room built. I can stay in there. I’m not leaving my home, Monk.” She held on to my arm. “Do you have to go?”
“Yes”
I dressed and she followed me to the door. We kissed for what seemed like ages. It still amazed me this woman wanted anything to do with me.
“Lock the doors, arm the security system, and stay safe. Don’t let anyone you don’t know in, and maybe some you do, ok?”
“Ok.”
I wasn’t going to say goodbye, it sounded too final. I kissed her one more time and got into the car. I watched to make sure she closed the door. I took out my phone and called Joanie.
“You rang?” She sounded surprised.
“Yeah, where are you?”
“I’m at home, where else would I be?”
“I want you to leave, get out of there and go someplace safe. Stay with a friend, a hotel, anywhere but there. Do you understand?” I knew how that sounded.
“Is this some kind of joke? I can’t just up and leave? I have a show to get ready for.”
“Goddammit, I don’t have time to argue with you. They already grabbed Jones, and they know about you. Take the stuff you need and get out of there. This isn’t a fucking joke. They’ve already killed six people, Joanie! Just do it, please.”
“Ok, ok, I’m going. You know this is really frightening, Buttman, you know that?”
“More than you know. Call me when you’re out of there.”
“It may be the last time you do hear from me,” she fumed.
“As long as you’re safe.”
She hung up and I left the beautiful house in the hills.
41
I turned off the engine and sat there, just like they wanted. Waiting, like I was told. Thinking of Judith, wondering what I would do… if I survived.
I didn’t see Joanie’s car. I looked at the phone. She’d left a message: she was at her club. She was safe. She also called me a fuckhead.
I continued to replay the time with Judith in my head, convinced that her newfound affection was more a response to what was happening along with a lack of sleep. Once all of this was over she’d come to her senses. Alarmingly, I was becoming remarkably good at convincing myself my actions had workable solutions. Whether I could convince anyone else was, for now, beside the point. That I could defend them at all struck me as important. It was while daydreaming that the man with the gun tapped on the window.
He had a pleasant face and a nice smile. He and the two men with him had on the uniforms of the landscaping company. That answered that question. I rolled down the window.
“Time to go?” I asked stating the obvious.
He merely kept up the smile. He gestured to one of the men, who got in next to me.
“Please follow me. No funny business.”
“Yeah, no one wants that.”
The man next to me pulled out his gun. I got that part. I waited for the truck to pull out and eased the Falcon into first, following at a respectable distance. The guy next to me was checking out the car.
“This is nice.”
“Thanks. It’s a 1964 Falcon Futura Sport convertible, 260 V-8. You like old cars?”
“Yes.”
With nothing better to do, the gunman and I chatted about vintage automobiles, early sixties in particular. He was into Impalas. They were ok, but I was more of a Ford man. He asked what I’d done to it. I told him I’d had the brakes redone; all discs, and that I’d had fuel injection put in. I was tired of dealing with carburetors. He talked about how hard it was to find an Impala for a good price. He had two that needed a lot of work. He was hoping to get one good car out of the two.
The truck wound its way to an industrial park, where the landscaping equipment was stored. I pulled into the spot the guy in the truck pointed to. While the gunman next to me looked at his compadres, I quietly took the 45 out of my pocket and set it down under my seat by the door. I got out and was led into the warehouse.
There was a large storage bay by the front door containing pallets of boxes. A set of stairs to the left led up to a long hall at the end of which were a series of offices overlooking the storage bay. In the first office was another gunman sitting at a desk. On the desk a computer monitor showed the entrances to the building. He motioned for us to go in the room behind him.
There in the room was another gunman, Jones, and Martin Delashay. Both were tied to their chairs. Jones looked ok minus a nasty welt on the left side of his head. Martin, on the other hand, was a bloody beaten mess. A third chair, next to Jones, was unoccupied. I sat down. Across from the chairs was a big desk, behind which sat a well-dressed man in his early forties.
“We have a problem to resolve, Mr. Buttman.”
“That we do. What do you propose?”
“That you turn over what you stole.” I admired his sense of ownership.
“And in return?”
“In return for what?” He wasn’t particularly jovial.
“The papers, I have something you want, you have something I want. We make an equitable trade. Straight up, no funny business as your man said.” I looked at the armed man standing next to him.
The man at the desk took a harder look at me. I don’t know what he was expecting, but it wasn’t what I was giving him. I played my part. Forget the roiling stomach, or how hard I was trying to keep my leg from shaking, I had to stick to the game plan, there was nothing else.
“And what do you expect me to give you, Mr. Buttman?”
“These two.” I pointed to Jones and Delashay.
“Nothing more?” he asked.
“Nothing more.”
The man smiled, but not the kind that made you feel good or happy. “And what makes you think I’d be willing to do that?”
“It’s a fair trade, one that’s eminently doable. I suppose you could work me over like you have Delashay, but that won’t help because the papers are in a bank deposit box that requires my signature and my face not beaten to a pulp; people notice that kind of thing…” I gestured to the fading bruises on my face. “If you kill me like the others, then you’ll never get it, and if you could get a replacement document you’d have done that already, but with Boyer dead and Delashay’s wife unlikely to play ball, I don’t think that’s an option. I’m your best bet.”
The man got up and came towards me. “Why should I believe you? You might not have anything, just a smart mouth. What’s to say you won’t demand more; money, as an example.”
“I might not be very important in the grand scheme of things, but I’m not an idiot. I get that I don’t have a lot of bargaining power, so I’m not inclined to ask for more than I can get. As for money, believe it or not, that’s not terribly important to me. It
might be to you, or to Delashay and his people, but I’m not interested in having you put a bullet in my head, or in the heads of these two. So no, I’m not demanding anything more. As to whether or not I have the documents, I have till tomorrow to prove that I do.”
“You act as if you have me right where you want me? Do you think that’s a wise thing to do?” He took a pistol off the desktop and held it in his hands.
“No, I’m merely stating my position. I’m well aware that you can do what you want, and there’s little I can do to stop you.”
The well-dressed man put the gun to my head. The sweat was rolling down my forehead and I was extremely thankful I hadn’t eaten anything recently, but I kept my eyes on the man. He went over to Delashay and put the gun to his temple. Martin’s was shaking, tears running down his face.
“Why are you so interested in this man? You’re fucking his wife.”
“Yeah, I’m fucking his wife, and, truth be told, I don’t particularly care about him, but enough people have died already. I won’t be party to another. If killing him is that important, you can hunt him down later, but not now.”
“And if I kill him now?”
“How important is what I have? It’s your decision, but you can’t have both. If you kill him, then you might as well kill me.”
He turned to Jones. I could see the ghost of James standing behind him. “And this man, this…”
“Because he matters to me and because I promised his wife, that’s why.”
The well-dressed man returned to me. The wheels were turning. “Alright, Mr. Buttman, we have our terms. Tomorrow you get me the papers, and in return you get these two, nothing more. Until then you stay right here.”
“Agreed. Oh, one more thing though.”
“You said nothing more…”
For some reason that made me smile.
“I lied. If we have to stay here then we need food and I want these two untied. We’re not armed and we’re not going anywhere, plus at some point they may need to use the bathroom. Martin already does.”
Our captor laughed. “Alright, but you pay.”
It was a good thing I went to the bank.
The food, for the most part, went uneaten. Much as I tried to get them to eat, Jones and Delashay weren’t hungry. We were, in turns, taken to the bathroom. I found some medical supplies for Martin. He was slumped down in a corner. Jones, too, had found a corner, but on the other side of the room. I sat in a chair nursing a BLT.
“They’re just going to kill us, you know.” Jones, ever the optimist.
“Probably, but there’s more going on here than meets the eye. The three of us are just pawns. You know, lures, bait.” I looked over at Delashay. “Martin, who first suggested this to you? Boyer, Tophanovich, Desiree?”
“Why do you care?”
“Just answer the fucking question!” I still didn’t like the guy.
“All of them. Jeremy needed money. He said there was a private account that had been set up years ago when Sphere was sold. We could use the money to solve our problems. Boyer would take care of the paperwork.”
“That way you could run off with Desiree and not have to deal with Judith and the corporation.”
“Yes.”
Jones was listening. “I don’t understand? Why would you kill Boyer if you needed him to do this?”
“She didn’t mean to, she…” What a dope.
“Yes, she did,” I interrupted. “She just killed him too soon. Maybe she was supposed to wait till after I gave her the papers, not before, but he pissed her off. Boyer liked to humiliate her, and when I walked in, he thought he’d have some fun at her expense. They may have been playing you for a sap, Martin, who knows. It doesn’t matter, you were all dead the minute you agreed to this and by pulling in the rest of your motley crew you got them killed too.”
Martin leaned up against the wall. “What do you mean?”
“To them, our hosts, this is about a lot of money, millions upon millions, and they’re killing everyone who has any connection to it to cover their tracks, but there’s no money. It’s all a setup. A trap! People; people a lot more powerful than you and I, are using us to flush them out. And for our sakes, you better hope they’re watching and waiting. Why else would someone like Marsyas Durant give a damn about us? It’s about revenge, vendetta; all that crazy shit.”
“Whose vendetta?” Jones was unconvinced.
“I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I’m just trying to get us out of this alive.” Maybe they were right outside, Miguel and his people. I could only hope. I had a plan for the trip to the bank, but that depended on guts and a steady hand, something I didn’t have. “I’m tired. We should try to get some sleep.”
But sleep was hard to come by. I kept going over my plan until I nodded off. It didn’t last. Between Martin moaning and Jones snoring, whatever passed for sleep had no effect. Maybe the man had coffee. I thought about Agnes and Judith, if for no other reason than I liked to think about them. Their curves, the feel of their skin, the way they tasted, all played back again and again. It was better than dwelling on a bullet to the brain. It must have worked, or exhaustion took over because the next thing I knew they were standing over me; the gunman, the well-dressed man, and an older gentleman I didn’t recognize.
“When does the bank open?” the old man asked.
“9am.”
I got up and looked at the others. The fear had returned. It was eight-thirty. I was taken to the front door where the car enthusiast was waiting.
“Get him there and back. Understand?”
We understood.
42
The car guy wasn’t as talkative this trip, no doubt due to the fact that he might have to shoot me. I made sure the 45 was where I left it. Other than the gloom in the car, the weather was quite lovely, cooler than normal with a nice ocean breeze. That’s why we live here. Traffic wasn’t bad either. I turned on the radio and we listened to Mariachi music. The credit union was open for business. The car guy told me to park where he could see me. The windows were big enough that you could see most of the interior. Like I was going to run away. I did what he asked and found a nice spot right in front. I got out. The car guy thought about joining me but I told him no. It wouldn’t take long. I’d be back.
I left him in the car.
The teller led me back to where the safe deposit boxes were. I pulled out the box and grabbed the papers. My phone went off. The number was unknown. I didn’t like that the phone went off just as I was ready to leave.
“Buttman,” I said, my heart pounding.
“How many are upstairs?” He asked.
It took me a minute to figure out what he wanted. Oh yeah…
“One in the first office at the top of the stairs, and three inside the second office with two captives, the desk is to your right. That’s where the old guy and the guy in charge are. The guy with the shotgun is straight across from the door. The chairs, where the two captives are, are to your left. What about the guy with me?”
“Bring him back.”
“What if he shoots me first?”
“He won’t.”
I didn’t find that particularly reassuring.
That was it. The line, or whatever it was, went dead. It was on and I was going to pass out. With my heart racing and my head faint, I took a few deep breaths, closed the box, and locked it. I thanked the teller and went to the car. The car guy was still there. I was hoping he’d get cold feet and take off!
No such luck.
“Let me see the papers,” he said as I got in. I handed them over. While he was checking th
em out, I grabbed the 45 and pointed at him.
“I’ll take those back now,” he saw the 45 with the hammer cocked back, “and your weapon.” He put the papers down and took out his gun. I took the papers. “Take out the magazine and throw it in the back. Now the gun, throw it back there too.” He did like I told him. “This is what we’re going to do. You’re going to drive, no funny business. Maybe you were told to shoot me, maybe not, but I like this arrangement much better. With any luck, it’ll work out and we’ll both get out of this alive. Got that?”
“Yeah, I got it.”
I got out of the car, papers in hand, while he slid over to the driver’s side.
“You know how to drive a stick?”
“Yeah.” The car guy was not happy.
I didn’t care. I put the papers in my jacket while keeping the 45 level. He turned the motor over, and we drove back to the warehouse. I felt more and more anxious as we got closer. What the fuck was I going to do? I didn’t want to shoot the car guy any more than I wanted him to shoot me. And God only knows what was going to happen once we made it to the warehouse. I didn’t think I could face Jones and Delashay shot to death, but what choice did I have? I had nowhere to go. That chance was gone. I was certain I was having a heart attack. Something terrible was happening and it was dragging me down with it. We pulled into the lot.
The car guy stared at me.
“Alright, let’s go.”
We got out and I kept the 45 by my side, as if I could hit the right side of a barn. The car guy opened the front door. Before I knew what happened we were both on the ground, the 45 out of my hand, surrounded by four men in black clothes and black masks; all well-armed. They quickly put a bag over the head of the car guy. He started whimpering.
“You Buttman?” It was the voice from the phone.
“Yeah…”
“Your friends are upstairs.” I watched as they took the car guy to a van in the warehouse. The other four from upstairs, all with bags over their heads and their hands tied behind their backs, stood by the van.
Where Fools Dare to Tread Page 33