Any attempt to touch him might accidentally snap his neck. So she moves to the spot he just left, grabs one corner of the bed’s headboard, and sends the entire bed sliding across the room and into the bedroom door, instantly blocking his path.
When he realizes he’s trapped, something inside the man snaps. His back hits the wall and he slides to the floor, pumping his hands in the air in front of him like a toddler having a tantrum. He’s wheezing like the wind’s been knocked out of him. If it has, it’s terror that’s done it.
Charlotte sinks down on the floor next to him. When he sees how close she is, he screws his eyes shut. “What are you? What are you? What the fuck are you?” he screams.
“Someone who needs you to tell the truth. What’s your name?”
His sobs have kicked ropes of snot from his nose. He spits them from his lips before he can speak. “T-Tommy. My name’s Tommy.”
“Where did they take him, Tommy?”
“I don’t know,” he whines.
She punches through the wall next to his head. He lets out a choking, wheezing cry.
“I think that’s a lie, Tommy. And if you tell me another lie, I’m going to break your legs. Slowly, all the way up the bones, every few inches.”
Struggling to catch his breath, Tommy says, “They’re gonna move him. If . . . if they don’t hear from me, they’re going to move him and I don’t know where.”
“Oh, OK,” she says. “Well, it sounds like they need to hear from you, then. I mean, that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? They need to hear you tell them you’re fine and you just ran in a different direction when the alarm went off. But you got away and you’re on your way to them now and they should wait for you where they are. Right, Tommy? Doesn’t that make sense?”
“Wh-what if they don’t believe me?” he sobs.
“You’re going to make them believe you, or they’re going to listen to you scream. Where’s your phone, Tommy?”
“It’s in my po-pocket.”
“Good. Get it out. And no sudden moves. I’m very jumpy.”
He straightens as much as he can in his seated position and pries his cell phone from his pocket. Then he looks at her like a frightened child.
“Deep breaths, Tommy.”
“What are you?” he whispers.
“I’m very angry you took my boyfriend away. But the good news is, that makes me easy to understand and easy to please. So do both. Make me happy, Tommy. Make me happy and this won’t get any worse.”
“You w-want me to t-tell them I’m OK and I’m coming to meet them.”
“That’s right. And find out where. If they’re moving him, find out where they’re moving him to. And if they’re not moving him, make sure it’s the same place they told you before. Got it?”
“Ye-yes.”
“Good.”
Tommy starts to dial.
It rings, and rings, and then finally goes to someone’s automated voice mail greeting.
“There’s no reception. They’re up the mountain.”
She reaches out and gently lays one hand on top of his head.
His eyes meet hers. His entire body shudders beneath her palm.
“Are you telling me the truth, Tommy?”
“I am,” he sobs. “I am. I am. Please.”
“Where are they?”
“There’s se-seismic stations . . . set up just down the mountain. It’s four miles up mountain on 293. It comes up on the left r-real fast. You gotta be careful. It’s a service road. But they cut it themselves. It’s still dirt and if you keep going . . . about twenty yards . . . you’ll come to a storage shed. That’s where they said they were taking him, b-but . . .”
“But what, Tommy?”
“Since I didn’t come back, they might have moved.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. But all our firepower’s up there. And M-Milo. He likes to work in secret, but the shed . . . The shed is . . . The shed’s where they had Lacey.”
“When?”
“Before they shot her . . . But I think he worked on her somewhere else.”
Worked on her. These words alone have her monitoring every tick of the hand she’s still resting atop his skull. His fragile, breakable skull.
Her mind races through the list of all the possible hideouts along 293’s lonely, twisting passage to the sea. There’s an old Buddhist temple up there somewhere that was volunteer maintained until it wasn’t. It’s a ruin now. Then there’s a spread of ruined limekilns surrounded by redwoods. The ones she visited with Marty when she was in high school; it was a long, grueling hike without a clear trail.
And then there’s the mountain. A mountain covered with long slopes of pines and redwoods where they could be doing god knows what to Luke far from anyone who could hear.
“Why did they take him, Tommy?” she asks.
“They want to find out what he knows.”
“And then what?”
“Make sure he never tells anyone.”
She was about to release the top of Tommy’s skull, but this news keeps her hand in place.
“How are they going to do that?” she asks.
“I don’t know. But you better get there before they do. Milo’s . . . intense.”
“Intense?”
“Sick. He’s . . . sick. On the inside.”
“You better hope I do, too, Tommy, because we’re not the police.”
She gets to her feet, backs away, and pulls the bed away from the door by one hand.
When she steps into the hallway, several flashlight beams hit her face at once. They outline the barrels of at least two guns she can see; one’s real big.
“Looks like someone has a secret stash,” Cole Graydon says.
“Back up,” Charley says.
Cole says, “Why don’t we take a breath and just—”
“Back the fuck up! Right now!”
Just then, the lights throughout the house flicker back on. There are hums and whirs, and even a few warning beeps, as power meets appliances in every room of the house. Now she can clearly see Cole and two of the security team members who brought him to the boat launch earlier today. They’re standing just a few feet away from her. The younger of the two holds a formidable-looking shotgun aimed right at her chest, but his stance makes clear he’s more interested in defending his boss than taking her down. The older balding guy’s got his Glock out.
In the sudden glare, none of them looks as confident as Cole first sounded in the dark. As for the man himself, he’s winded and glassy-eyed. It’s the first time she’s seen him truly frightened.
“They have Luke,” she says, as if she’s speaking to dumb children. “They have Luke because you either fucked up or lied to us. You told us we were safer here than anywhere, and now those sick fucks have Luke, and they killed Lacey Shannon a few hours ago.”
Nobody says anything.
“Get out of my way,” she says. “Get out of my way or I’ll blow this whole thing apart.”
“What are you going to do, Charley?”
“I’m going to get him back.”
“What are you going to do to get him back?” Cole sounds gentle, conciliatory. She gets his meaning. He’d probably show her a picture of Richard Davies’s corpse right now if he could. But he can’t. So he better get the hell out of her way.
“Whatever it takes,” she says.
Cole nods, reaches out to the shotgun held by the guy next to him, and encourages him to lower it with several quick taps on the barrel.
“No matter what happens, I’ll clean up the mess,” he says quietly. “It’s the least I can do.”
She takes a step. Shotgun Guy lowers his weapon. The older man with the Glock takes a few steps back, but he keeps his aim on her. His right shoulder looks like it’s magnetized to Cole’s left one. She takes another step, then another, then at the last second, she spins, bringing her face as close to Cole’s as it’s ever been. To his credit, he doesn’t flinch or look aw
ay.
“The very least,” she whispers.
Then she’s out of the house. Outside, everything seems normal, except for the fact that the driver’s side door is missing from her car. The two plainclothes security guards are both engaged in cheerful-sounding conversations with different neighbors, probably delivering some bullshit story about what all the fuss was about earlier.
She slides behind the wheel of her Volvo and peels off into the night.
39
Jordy’s willing to die for this, he realizes. He’s been crouching in the brush for a while when this realization sweeps over him with the quiet, bone-filling certainty of God’s truth.
Before he started on the road to righteousness, he had nothing but disdain for the suicide bomber’s rush toward martyrdom. He thought it vainglorious, lazy. Arrogant. Who was he to determine that God only had one job for him? Strap a bunch of explosives to your chest the first time out, and you were just letting yourself off the hook for a lifetime’s worth of ministry. To be truly faithful, he was sure, was to lead the longest and most productive life you could.
But now he gets it. It isn’t arrogance. It’s pure faith meeting desperation. Hidden in the shadows just uphill from the seismic stations and the storage shed, waiting for possible invaders, Jordy Clements feels like he’s inhaling the suicide bomber’s despair, their sense of being cornered, of having no time left to enact God’s will on earth.
The only thing he can be proud of in this moment is that he made all his foot soldiers abandon the clearing and the storage shed after Tommy Grover didn’t come back from the Prescott snatch. That was a smart move, even if Milo thought he was overreacting.
He also ordered Bradley Kyle, their best driver, to evac with the black Econoline van that’s been their main transport all day. Bradley’s the one who brought all the foot soldiers up from town before Jordy and Milo went and picked up Henricks; he’s also the one who brought Jordy and Milo back up the mountain after they dropped off Milo’s truck. Now he’s heading over the mountain and then south on PCH, putting as much distance between him and Altamira as possible.
Before the team left to get Prescott, they’d already used their ATVs to move Lacey and Pete’s bodies. All evidence from Lacey’s brief stay has been scrubbed from the shed, which was easy, because there was barely any to begin with. In the hours just before he brought her down to meet Pete Henricks, Milo had been using narcotics on her, not fists, so she’d arrived with no open wounds.
Now, the same ATVs they used to relocate the corpses have taken Milo, Prescott, and three foot soldiers up the mountain to Milo’s workshop of choice.
Meanwhile, Jordy and two of his best guys are sitting stakeout just upslope from the clearing to see if Tommy’s absence is going to signal the arrival of law enforcement.
Sure, it’s possible Tommy could come wandering through the woods any minute, disheveled, a little worse for wear, but not under the thumb of whoever popped out of the woodwork down at Prescott’s house.
Jordy doubts it.
Jordy wasn’t there, but based on the description Milo and Manuel gave of how quickly things went to shit, he knows someone important was watching the place. And that means Prescott must have talked to someone, and that means Prescott knows something, and that means Jordy waited too damn long to send the guys after him.
And why was that? Because of Lacey, dammit.
Because of his weakness for Lacey.
If any other dumb bitch had jammed them up like this, he’d have let Milo use his typical methods, and they probably would have got something out of her in a few hours. But instead he made them slow down and wait while he gave them bullshit speeches about patience and steadiness and resolve. Remembering those words now gives him the urge to throw himself off the nearest cliff.
Of course, Milo’s acting like it can all be saved. And parts of it probably can be. But Milo always gets chipper and optimistic when he’s about to unleash agony on someone. Torture makes him feel useful.
The more time that goes by without any disturbance from the woods below, the more Jordy finds himself getting a little optimistic, too. There are some best-case scenarios, even if he’s afraid running through them in his head might weaken his resolve.
For one, Tommy might have escaped.
Also, he might have been killed, which means he won’t say much.
Or, despite being in restraints, he might prove faithful enough to keep his mouth shut.
If only he knew Tommy better. If only Tommy was one of his guys and not Milo’s.
The guys sharing the brush with him now are his—Bertrand Davis and Mike Frasier—former Recon Marines like him who also saw shit in Afghanistan that reshaped their view of the world. Things they can’t share with people stateside because they know they’ll just feed into the pansy liberal view of America as some great invader and corrupter of barbaric shithole countries. They know the truth is different—America’s moral decay is weakening its fiber, its very spine, and the country’s sliding downhill as a result. You don’t fight the kind of barbarism they’ve seen by trying to understand it. You only try to understand it if you don’t want to fight the unchecked sin within yourself, and if that’s the case, you aren’t out to save anything but your pride—a state that describes most citizens of this once great country. The country’s would-be heroes are being weakened a few years out of the womb. They grow up questioning Christ because they’re taught to question everything from the very idea of patriotism to their own God-given gender. Freedom and self-indulgence are not the same thing. No man who gives in to his every instinct is free.
The only solution to this, Jordy knows, is the single unifying fear of a greater power. This fear has to be instilled in all those who believe their sole purpose is to service their every craving, no matter how childish or perverse. And for it to be effective, this fear must be constant. True freedom, the freedom that saved nations, will come when people are liberated from their own base instincts. Only then will they have the clarity to pick up the sword of truth. Until then, their self-indulgence lays the country open to ceaseless corruption from outside its borders and endless, unwinnable wars in culturally inferior hellscapes.
Jordy is breathing deeply now, even as he adjusts his sitting stance.
There’s hope for their plan. Hope for the bones of it, at least. If Luke Prescott’s gone, he can’t testify to whatever Lacey told him about what she might have seen on his computer. If the dummy seismic maps haven’t been exposed, they can still use those to justify the orders for the explosives. The rest he can operate from the shadows.
But if Lacey passed Prescott something real, if the guy has evidence and he passed it to someone else, someone who was watching his house . . .
Then they would already be here, he realizes, with the first twinge of hope he’s felt in two days. They would have been watching us, not Luke.
But they haven’t been. If the feds were staking them out because Prescott had passed on damning information, they wouldn’t have just sat idly by while he put a bullet in Lacey’s brain or when Milo snapped Pete Henricks’s neck. They would have been tailing them earlier today when they drove Henricks up the mountain. They would have exploded out of the woods, guns drawn. But they weren’t.
He wonders, suddenly, if Luke’s not just a troublemaker but something else altogether.
Some sort of criminal who was under surveillance.
The thought speeds his heart, actually has him nodding at the shadows.
Is this a test, God? he prays. Are you enlisting us to wipe out a minor pestilence before our reign of fear brings your will to the country at large?
When he hears a low rumble, he believes, for a few blissful seconds, that God’s sent him an instant answer. Then headlights flash far downslope, silhouetting the pines and the redwoods briefly, before some sort of station wagon slowly makes its way up the service road toward the clearing.
A Volvo.
He’s been expecting an Altamira she
riff’s cruiser or maybe a black sedan that screams FBI. Instead, he gets a Volvo station wagon. What the fuck?
The car’s drifting in a way that suggests the driver’s lost control. It’s not going very fast, so when it slams nose-first into a pine trunk, the collision isn’t too jarring, but the tree dents.
The horn blares.
The impact canted the headlights so they’re shining slightly uphill. He’s not blinded, but he can’t see what’s behind the windshield. With the horn going the way it is, there’s no doubt someone’s slumped against it. Someone badly injured, possibly losing life. Tommy Grover?
Slowly, he gets to his feet.
A few yards away, Bertrand Davis does the same, eagerly looking to Jordy for a signal. The guy’s not Milo’s size, but he’s still a linebacker type. He’s turned his baseball cap backward, and even though it’s chilly up here in the mountains, his black T-shirt’s sweat stained, possibly thanks to the long, anxiety-producing wait.
A yard or two beyond him, and a little ways downslope, Mike Frasier rises from the brush as well. He’s about half Bertrand’s height, but thanks to a serious Napoleon complex, he’s got about ten times Bertrand’s courage. Frasier’s the kind of guy who’ll run into an enemy hideout with a grenade between his teeth while his bigger comrades come in hot behind him. Shortly after they first met, Jordy nicknamed the little dude Bottle Rocket.
Frasier starts walking toward them in a crouch, which says maybe he’s seen more of the Volvo than either of them.
Once they’re in a huddle, Frasier whispers, “Thing’s got no door on the driver’s side.”
“What?” Bertrand asks.
“No door. It’s gone. Like it’s been torn clean off.”
“It’s Tommy, man. It’s gotta be,” Bertrand whispers.
Jordy looks downhill. The horn’s still blaring, the headlights shining slightly uphill. Everyone else who was at the Prescott snatch has gone up the mountain with Milo. A strategic mistake, he realizes now, because there’s no one to ID the car. But none of them mentioned a Volvo. They said it was two different plain sedans, both black, that sped up out of nowhere, not a station wagon.
“He got hit, I bet,” Frasier whispers. “He’s bleeding out down there, man.”
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