by D C Young
It took a good twenty minutes to navigate the dirt lane and finally arrive at the rundown place which belonged to Oscar Valencia. Our two Harleys rumbled up into what was, for all practical purposes, the ranch yard, and then were silenced.
“Whadaya want?” Oscar’s voice called out, there was a slight Hispanic accent to it.
I followed the sound of his voice and saw him stepping from around the house with the shotgun in his hands.
“He’s not exactly the welcoming sort,” Sledge muttered.
“It’s not a problem,” I responded.
“Maybe not for you, but the three of us can be dead from that thing,” Sledge replied.
“Just follow me,” I giggled. I raised my voice. “Quite a place you’ve got here, Oscar.”
“Who are you?” he called out. “And stay back. You can talk from there.”
I kept walking toward him as I talked. “We just need to ask you some questions.”
“Ask your questions somewhere else.”
“Spread out behind me a little,” I called over my shoulder. I didn’t know if my companions were armed. It didn’t matter, but I really didn’t want any of them to shoot him. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Don’t hurt him,” Sledge spat.
“Hey now, what are you doing?” Oscar started getting nervous. With us spreading out, he was at a major disadvantage. He moved the muzzle of the shotgun from one to the other trying to decide what to do.
It was time to force his hand. I rushed forward and he turned the muzzle in my direction. Just as I’d known would happen, as he pulled the trigger, the firing clicked in empty air. It was one of the things I’d done the night before. He threw the shotgun in my direction and tried to run, but I flashed forward and tackled him just as he got around the corner of the house.
“I’m sort of insulted that you don’t remember me,” I grumbled as I held him down with my knee in the middle of his back.
I heard heavy boots behind me and then saw the meaty hand of Sledge reach down, grab Oscar by the collar of his jacket and pull him out from under me and up onto his feet.
“Let’s go have that talk,” Sledge growled
Oscar’s feet were barely brushing against the dirt as Sledge escorted him to the front porch of the wooden shack and sat him down on the rickety chair. Sledge stood beside him and crossed his arms as I leaned against one of the posts holding up the roof and Taz and Caroline leaned against the wooden rail.
“You want money?” He quivered as he spoke. “I don’t have much, but you can have it all.”
“We want to know about a kidnapping,” Taz snarled. “Our daughter, to be exact.”
“I don’t know anything about a kidnapping, honest…” He stopped speaking as he looked in my direction and finally made the connection of who I was in his brain. “You the lady took down Juanita for rustling cattle, aren’t you?”
“So you do remember me,” I grinned.
“I just got the little girl for her. I brought her from those abusive parents in South Texas. I did her a favor. The poor little girl was…”
“Can it!” I snapped. “Give us the real story.”
As I spoke, Sledge reached down to Oscar’s shoulder and squeezed, digging his finger deep into the man’s shoulder. The man cried out in pain and uselessly tried to maneuver out from under the massive grip. “Please, no, don’t. I’ll talk. I’ll talk!”
“Those weren’t Analisa’s real parents, were they?” I resumed in a calm voice. I was playing a hunch, well not really, I believed in Analisa’s gift. “You took her from someone else, just like you’ve taken hundreds of other children. Maybe you’ve even taken the daughter of my two friends, huh?”
“I’ve taken no children,” he protested.
Sledge moved his hand back down to Oscar’s shoulder.
“No. No. I swear it.” Oscar crossed himself as he looked up at Sledge and then back at me. “On the life of the Virgin herself, I never took no children.”
“I don’t know that the Virgin would appreciate that lie,” I countered, rising away from the post and leaning in his direction. I took his lower jaw into my hand and turned his eyes directly toward mine. One look in my eyes and Oscar knew I would get the truth out of him one way or another.
He gulped. “There was a man. He was an aide for Senator Antonio de Armas. They brought children here and I took them places to hide them until they called for me to bring them back, but I have done nothing since bringing Analisa. I have not seen the man again since he was terminated from the senator’s staff. He may not be alive. This thing is very big… very big. I swear it.”
“Name?”
“Will… William Forrest. He is probably dead. No one near this thing lives long.”
“And yet, you’re still alive,” I smiled as I released my grip on his jaw, looked down at the wet spot in his trousers and the puddle that had formed under the chair. “For now.”
I turned and strolled off the porch and back toward Sledge’s Harley. “Come on guys.”
“You’re one bad ass chick,” Sledge mumbled over his shoulder to me just before he started the bike.
Chapter Nine
The faces of the three people, they had the physical features that resembled humans anyway, were something out of a horror movie and they were focused in on him. Two of those faces he had endured for about ten hours. It was when that third face, which had seemed to be soft, human and quite attractive, initially, showed up when he began to fear more for his life than he ever had before.
Since William Forrest had been dismissed from the staff of Senator de Armas, he had expected death to come calling. He’d made himself disappear in the deep woods of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the north and east of Sacramento. He’d taken every safeguard and lived in a constant state of paranoid readiness. He’d been certain that no human being on the face of the earth would ever be able to find him. He’d been right to a certain extent. No human had found him, but these creatures staring at him had.
“What do you want?” he asked. His entire body shook with terror and he forced the next question out of his mouth. “Are you here to kill me?”
There was a long silence while the three, undead faces continued to focus on him, but no words were spoken. The one of the three that looked like a male, reached up with a long, sharp fingernail and acted like he was extracting a piece of flesh from a long fang. His eyes never moved off of William.
“I really wasn’t involved…” he started. “Okay… I was involved. I followed orders, but it wasn’t my idea. I did what I was told to do, but I’m not the one who was giving the orders. There were others in charge who called the shots.”
He wasn’t sure if the three creatures in front of him were there because of what he’d done with the kidnapped children. He knew that what he’d done would lead him to his end.
“What are you rattling on about, William?” the pretty one asked. “If there is something you need to tell us, why don’t you make it a little bit easier to understand?”
Her smile was fetching, but at the same time terrifying. William swallowed the thickness that had built up in his throat. “What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything.”
A week before, he had wished that it could all come to an end. He was tired of hiding. He was tired of being paranoid. He was tired of constantly wondering when his time would come. He’d hoped for some sweet release to come, but since it had arrived, he discovered that he didn’t want to die, but he did want out. As the three stared at him and waited, his voice broke into one last plea.
“I don’t want to die,” he sobbed.
“Oh, sweetheart, you’re not going to die,” the pretty one said.
There was no comfort in her voice or her smile.
“No?” William squeezed the word out of his constricted throat.
“No, but you need to tell us how Senator de Armas was involved and exactly who he was working with.”
“Senator de Armas wasn’t involved,” W
illiam replied. The understanding that his visitors didn’t know as much as they thought they did suddenly leapt into his mind. If they didn’t really know what was going on, then he could give them false information that would lead them down another trail. He’d have to run again and relocate, but he was going to have to do that anyway…
“You’re not running anywhere,” the other woman in the room announced.
Had she read his mind?
“Yes,” she said aloud. “There’s really no point in trying to trick us.”
“You don’t understand.” His voice became desperate. He was a man caught in a trap from which he could not escape. “If anyone finds out that I talked, I’m history.”
“Do we look like the type that spreads gossip?” the male asked.
“Just give us names, William,” the pretty one whispered, drawing his attention back to her.
She was really quite attractive and he felt himself being drawn to her. Had the three of them not scared the life out of him, he might have considered turning on the seductive charm he’d used to land plenty of beautiful women, sometimes two at a time, when he’d worked for the senator.
“Just give us the names, Romeo,” the other female snarled.
“You’ll feel so much better when you do,” the pretty one cooed. Her eyes softened and she started caressing his thigh just above the knee. She parted her lips slightly, ran her tongue over her teeth playfully and winked. “And, well, maybe…”
William knew that talking to anyone, especially giving the names of those involved in the abduction ring would mean certain death. He knew it and he fought against it, but he felt himself weakening in her presence. “I… I… just can’t… they’ll…”
He didn’t even complete the sentence because the pretty one in front of him had leaned in close to him. He felt her breath on his neck. She smelled like she was an entire field of roses. Her soft hair brushed against his face. His heart was thundering in his chest and the tiny spot in his throat where he had been trying to breathe had closed off completely.
“Just tell me their names,” she whispered.
The names began to flow out of him as though the water hose on a car radiator had broken. He spewed everything he knew and the names of all of the people who he had knowledge of without holding anything back. In many ways, it was a sweet release, just like the one he’d hoped for. It freed him inside. The heavy burden of the secrets which had built up inside of him gushed out and he felt as though he was so light that he’d soon begin to float.
As he finished telling everything he knew, he felt her soft lips on his neck. He closed his eyes and sighed. She was going to give him his reward and it was going to be a sweet one. When he felt the fangs penetrate the vein in his neck, there was a brief moment when reality struck, but then he relaxed into a sweet state of ecstasy.
Chapter Ten
The fact of the matter was that even though she was a vampire and she had certain desires that needed to be fulfilled, Sam had never gained the stomach for Veronica’s savage ways. On principle, and partly due to the savagery of her own attack years before, Sam had kept those desires tucked away and had avoided allowing them to be carried out. Maybe she should have interrogated William in the same way that she’d interrogated Oscar, but something in the sleaziness she’d sensed in him had caused her to take the route she had; handing things over to Bjorn Ironside and Veronica Melbourne.
After seeing Veronica bite into William’s neck, Sam had left the cabin and waited outside in the darkness alone. When the others rejoined her, she had apologized to Bjorn and Veronica for her behavior should it have offended them. They’d passed it off as nothing and told her not to sweat it, but she’d continued to feel… guilty for possibly coming off as somewhat self-righteous.
She’d beat herself up all of the way back to her home. As she drew closer to her neighborhood, she realized that she really didn’t want to look her daughter in the eyes. “Oh god, Tammy, please don’t be home,” she whispered.
When she arrived at her house, she flew into the backyard and landed in the tree house where she transformed back into her human form. She peered toward the house to see if any lights were on. There were none. “Good,” she whispered as she moved toward the ladder to begin her descent.
She hurried across the yard, opened the door leading in from the back deck and started across the den in the direction of the master bedroom. She was going to make it without…
“Mom?” Tammy’s voice whispered in the darkness.
“Yes, Honey,” Sam answered. “It’s me.”
“Are you just getting in?”
“Well, yes.”
“It’s like 3:00 a.m.”
“It is?”
“Where have you been?”
“Working on the case, Honey.”
“You been out with Sledge?”
“No. I was with Bjorn and Veronica.”
“So, how’s it going?”
“How’s what going?” Surely my daughter didn’t want to pick that moment to chit-chat and catch up on things. I really didn’t want to…
“The case… how’s the case going?”
“We got a major lead tonight,” I answered, hoping against hope that Tammy would be satisfied with my answer and wouldn’t want to draw me into a longer, mother-daughter, middle-of-the-night chat.
“Cool. I hope you solve it.”
“Yeah, me too,” I sighed. Her tone sounded dismissive, but I waited to see if she was finished.
“Goodnight, Mom… or good morning,” she giggled.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I laughed.
“You mean later in the morning?”
“Yeah… later in the morning.”
I rushed to my room and went straight into the shower. I had to wash off what I was feeling, though it wasn’t something that soap and water could reach. When I got out of the shower, I didn’t feel any better. I knew I wouldn’t but it had been my first reaction. I worked at squeezing it out of my mind as I crawled in bed and reached for the notebook and pen on the nightstand. I felt a sense of relief, even if it was only temporary, while I copied down the names I’d gotten from William onto a clean page. Some of the names seemed common to me, but others were a little bit more obscure.
When I finished writing, I dropped the notebook on the bed beside me, pulled my knees up to my chest and stared down at the list. One thing leapt out at me immediately. Very few of the names on the list were B-listers. In fact, the names on the list could be considered to be some of the most elite and powerful movers and A-listers in Hollywood and around the state of California. The sudden rush of intimidation coming from just reading those names was enough to wash away the guilt I’d been feeling only moments before.
“How the hell are you going to get to any of these people?” I mumbled.
It wasn’t as if Sledge, Taz, Caroline and I could rumble up to the front doors of the mansions of the people on the list, push them into a chair and make them tell us what we wanted to know. Even with Veronica and Bjorn’s help, I couldn’t hope to scare those people into giving up what they knew or admitting their involvement. I had no doubts that there were some deeply woven webs that interconnected the people on that list and if I started to dig into it… “I’d be like that unsuspecting little fly,” I whispered.
The case had been sort of like one of those Russian dolls. When you opened one, a smaller doll was inside. When you opened up that doll, you found another smaller doll. In the case I was working on, we’d opened up several dolls and found a Rubik’s cube in the center of it. What I feared was that attempting to turn the faces to match up the colors might cause the thing to explode.
“Sledge is going to piss himself when he sees this.” A half of a laugh escaped her as she had a visual image of the big man, but his pants stayed dry. Somehow, Sledge pissing himself didn’t seem to apply.
Though it wasn’t a dead end by any stretch of the imagination, it might as well have been. The fortress
es systematically constructed around the people on that list were impenetrable. It was something she certainly didn’t have the connections or contacts to break through. For the first time in a long time, Sam had hit such a huge roadblock she’d actually wondered if this case was something she needed to lay aside and consider unsolvable. But the real problem with that line of thought was that she had simply come too far to give up.
Sam closed her eyes and let out a long breath. If she took on the level of people she now knew were possibly involved, she would need to call out some bigger guns than she alone possessed; way beyond brute muscle like Bjorn and Veronica. Was she willing to go to such lengths to solve the case? Would her career, her life and privacy, survive bringing down an abduction ring of the magnitude suggested by the names on her list? There had to be a way to avoid that, didn’t there?
“Yeah, Sam, you could just drop it. Turn this all over to Detective Sherbet or even Spinoza,” she muttered to herself. She was in way over her head. If she kept pushing the case forward, she’d bring Sledge, Caroline and Taz way in over their heads too. She would probably even get them killed; but she knew how important it was to find Taylor.
“Listen to yourself!” she snapped. The moment the question had entered into her mind, her determination rose up to answer it. “Of course she’s that important. So, how do we do this?”
She stared at the list for several minutes before the answer popped into her head. Find the weakness, negotiate with that weakness to get Taylor back and then walk away from the whole thing. Sort of a run in, snatch the one you want and get out thing. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody gets angry. Nobody gets killed. Well, nobody else gets killed, anyway. We get Taylor back, Caroline and Taz are happy and the case is closed. It could be that simple… right?
Chapter Eleven
I was still sitting at the desk in my office running down the list I’d gotten from William when I heard the unmistakable rumbling of Harley Davidson pipes approaching my house. I didn’t even have to look out the window to know where that growing beast was going to stop. When I did look, however, I saw Sledge engaging the kickstand, setting the bikes’ forks to the left and swinging his leg over his bike. His eyes took in everything around him in a slow, 360 degree glance, before he started to lumber toward the front door. It was the first time I’d really considered the use of the word to describe someone walking, but it really did fit Sledge.