Don't Lose Her

by Jonathon King

  Or was that the floorboards again? Was he moving? Was he nearer? Was he close enough to slap her, strike her with a fist, or kick her swiftly in the stomach? She stopped moving and listened again. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt the moisture in the corners.

  “Please,” she said softly. “Tell me what you want. Please, let’s get this over with so I can take care of my baby. Please.”

  Chapter 6

  I left my car near the crime scene and walked to the federal courthouse, using the route I assumed Diane had taken to go to lunch. I knew I would walk it again later, in reverse, the way she would have. And with each step, I would try to put myself in her shoes, to see what she would have seen, to absorb what she would have felt—the wind from the east, the heat rising up off the concrete sidewalks, the sun, higher than it was now, bright on the top of her head at midday.

  Had there been any warning? Had she seen it coming, the threat and the menace? Had they tipped their hand, or was she completely surprised by the attack?

  Attack—I didn’t want to use that word about Diane in her condition, carrying her and Billy’s child low in her eighth month. I’d seen her only a week ago in their penthouse apartment overlooking the Atlantic. She’d been waddling around in the kitchen, making fun of herself, bumping her belly against the marble countertop, mocking herself as she opened the refrigerator door, and backing up while simultaneously making a beep, beep, beep noise like a tractor-trailer in reverse.

  “Heavy load here, boys!”

  Billy stood aside, smiling and looking back over his shoulder at me, gesturing with his palm at his wife: “Poetry in motion.”

  They had not come to this moment without hours of discussion, lying in bed side-by-side in the early morning hours and late at night when questions are often laid bare in quiet air.

  Billy was my best friend, and even though I had only known him for a few years, a long relationship between our respective mothers in Philadelphia tied us together. We knew each other’s demons.

  Billy had grown up in the faltering neighborhoods of North Philly, whose streets were lined by boarded-up and decrepit homes stained and wasted by the change from blue-collar factory jobs in the inner city to the concentration of white-collar office and consumer-­oriented jobs downtown. His father left before Billy could know him, a man made angry by his own hopelessness and lack of education­ and the addictions he’d ultimately bowed to.

  Billy’s mother endured the violence his father visited on her, but never took her eye off the goal of making her only son the beneficiary of lessons learned. Billy had cocooned himself with books and chess and learning and the avoidance of the plague of the streets. He looked back on his own childhood as something endured and to rise above.

  My own upbringing as the son of a third-generation South Philly policeman had its own bitter taste. My father, too, was often a raging drunk, a wife beater who succumbed to his anger and need to glorify himself by lording over those he could, most often his family—those closest to him.

  Billy’s and my own mother had eventually, or maybe inevitably, found each other at a Center City church and borrowed each other’s strength to rid themselves of their tormentors. But both Billy and I carried an inevitable question into adulthood: Would I ever bring a child into this kind of world?

  Now, in his early forties, with the strength and connection and love of his wife, Billy had come to answer yes to the question.

  As I entered the federal courthouse and headed for Diane Manchester’s chambers, I cynically wondered if he’d made the wrong decision.

  A man dressed in a dark off-the-rack suit and wearing an audio plug in his ear stopped me outside the judge’s hallway door. I gave him my name as he eyeballed me. Federal security, I thought. He spoke into the wrist-cuff of his suit and then opened the door to let me enter.

  I’d been in Diane’s chambers a few times and knew the layout. This was the outer office, typically paneled in cheap government-issued wood and adorned only with the standard displays of the judge’s law degrees and official certificates on the walls. There was an equally plain, catalogue-purchased desk where her secretary usually sat taking myriad phone calls from lawyers, bailiffs, bureaucrats, prosecutors, and fellow judges.

  But today, her secretary was not in his usual chair. Martin Andrews was instead sitting in one of the waiting area chairs, staring at an empty wall as if transfixed by some minute flaw or stain or perhaps an image of the unthinkable. A man who could have been the outside guard’s twin was in the desk chair, working at Andrews’s computer, tapping and studying, tapping and studying.

  “Marty,” I said to Andrews, who had yet to look away from his wall despite my entrance. The look of recognition came late to his face.

  “Oh, Mr. Freeman,” he said finally, and started to rise.

  I stepped to him instead and, closing the gap, forced him to stay seated.

  “You OK?” I said, extending my hand. He shook it without vigor.

  “I’m afraid I’m quite useless,” he said, looking from my face to his own desk.

  I shared the glance over my shoulder. “They can do that to you,” I said with a touch of conspiracy in my voice. “Don’t take it personally, Marty. They’ll need you before long.”

  I started to turn, but Andrews reached out to touch my sleeve with his fingertips to stop me.

  “She’ll be all right, won’t she, Mr. Freeman?”

  Even the sharp ones will plead for reassurance when they know it’s too early and too impossible to know yet.

  “Yes, Marty. She’ll be all right,” I said, being equally cavalier with the unknown.

  When Andrews turned back to the wall, I asked the man at his desk to let Mr. Manchester know I was there. Then I turned to the unmarked and unadorned door to Diane’s inner chambers and waited. The man did not take his eyes from the computer display before him as he also spoke into his sleeve. The door opened and another suit motioned me inside.

  The judge’s chamber was essentially one huge room with three of the walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. There were three doors and no windows. One door led to Diane’s courtroom, one to her private bath, and I’d just walked through the third. The dominant feature in the office was a ten-foot-long oak conference table surrounded by chairs and positioned in the middle of the room.

  This would be where the meetings with case lawyers and prosecutors and trial participants were usually held. I’d seen the table often strewn with opened law books and documents and case files and half-filled coffee cups and the wrappings and residue of late-night dinners.

  Today, there were four men huddled at one end, focused on two laptop computer screens. Newly strung wires ran across the polished surface leading from the computers to the multi-button telephone hub at the center. The device, the size of a small mixing bowl, looked like a kid’s computer game handset, with a digital readout display at its center, several color-coded buttons on one side, and a perforated speaker section, all sitting on a raised, three-legged base. It was the hub of all incoming and outgoing office calls, be they private or conference. The FBI agents had obviously tapped into it and were ready to record and feed all information into their own computer database instantly. No one had to say they were waiting for a ransom call.

  At the far end of the room, Billy sat at Diane’s own broad but far from ornate desk. He looked up when I entered, closed his laptop, and stood. I’d never seen him look so stiff, unemotional, and blank. He was staring at my face as if in assessment. His coffee-colored skin seemed to have lost all lines and texture.

  Always dressed in the finest suits, he’d somehow grabbed a plain, dark jacket and slacks that were eerily appropriate for a funeral. He stepped around the desk stiffly, devoid of the easy and athletic movement with which he usually carried himself. I was forced to judge that he was holding it together by pulling inside and showing nothing, neither personal
pain nor anger nor panic.

  The agents at the table glanced up as I stepped past them. One started to greet me, but hesitated as I headed directly for my friend.

  I reached for Billy’s unoffered hand and squeezed it in spite of him and pulled him close to me, touching his shoulder with mine. I didn’t even try to speak. It would have been an insult to a man of his intellect and experience to toss out a comforting statement like the one I’d given Andrews outside.

  “Thanks for coming, Max,” he said, the tone so flat it made me wince.

  If there had been even the slightest hint of panic in his first phone call to me, it was now forever gone.

  “Mr. Freeman,” a voice behind me said.

  I turned to see one of the table men, who had waited an appropriate time for Billy and me to greet each other, and had now stepped forward.

  “Agent Duncan,” he said, offering his hand.

  I took it.

  “Mr. Manchester has requested your presence, sir. And it is, we believe, in our interest to have you here.”

  I looked into the freshly shaved face of a senior agent whose words did not match the look in his eyes. I guessed him at near sixty. He’d been red-haired once. Now, the gray was filtering back from his temples, and deep crow’s-feet stamped the corners of his eyes. A familial balding pattern had left his scalp exposed and a veined and red-splotched nose exposed his dependence on too much liquor to salve the grinding visions of ugly human deeds he’d seen over a career.

  “I understand that you have some law enforcement experience,” he said. “And will thus be familiar with the jurisdictional parameters under which we work.”

  He was telling me that he was the boss. The FBI was in charge. Don’t get in the fucking way, and don’t even think about doing anything either active or overt.

  But I am nothing if not active and overt when the safety of my friends is at risk. I had been a cop in Philadelphia for several years, had been in the detective bureau for a short time before the stink of bureaucracy sent me back to working the streets. Then one night while responding to a Center City holdup, someone’s bullet pierced my neck and my return fire blew the heart out of a thirteen-year-old child.

  I’d come to Florida to get away. But some things never leave you. I had a head full of such things. And one of them was the inability to sit still when someone needed me.

  “I fully understand,” I said to Duncan, meeting his eyes, giving him my best “sir, yes, sir,” attitude.

  He motioned me to the table.

  “We have tapped into all the communications and computer lines here in the judge’s office in anticipation that whoever is responsible for Judge Manchester’s disappearance will make telephonic or digital contact,” Duncan said.

  “We are also coordinating with all local law enforcement on a BOLO for the white van observed leaving the scene. And there is another team tracing all possible routes from that scene to access any additional video from both government and private security cameras.”

  Duncan looked up at me. “But as you might guess, that will take some time.”

  Perhaps the agent was trying to discern how long I’d been off the job: whether I’d been brainwashed by the movie and television depictions of the government’s Big Brother access to every mounted camera on every street corner and shop entrance and satellite lens in existence.

  I knew it didn’t work that way, even if it was in the interest of law enforcement to have the average citizen and especially the idiot criminal element believe it. It might be a deterrent, but it wasn’t true. Few of those cameras are monitored, or even maintained to ensure that they’re working. And there is no overwhelming computer net that links them all together. That fantasy has been around since Patrick McGoohan starred in the television series The Prisoner, and it isn’t any more a reality now than it was back then in 1967.

  The government net is increasing, and such surveillance might be scrapped together in a matter of weeks, but it wasn’t going to happen during a commercial break.

  Duncan stood at ease, as if his required update was finished. He waved a hand in Billy’s direction.

  “If you would like to join Mr. Manchester in putting together a list of possible contacts, you are welcome to stay on as long as you wish.”

  I looked at Billy, who had returned to Diane’s desk.

  “What about the State Department?” I said to Duncan.

  The man raised his eyebrows.

  “You already know the judge was working on the Escalante extradition,” I said. “The kidnapping of judges and journalists in South America is a well-known byproduct of the drug wars there. Would the idea that they might adopt the same techniques here not be an immediate summation of motivation?” I said, adopting the agent’s galling use of technical lawyer-ese.

  I watched Duncan’s eyes. The man was a rock. He didn’t give a single “tell.” No twitch, no crinkle of facial skin, no flit of an eye—a formidable poker player.

  “That, Mr. Freeman, is not my purview,” he said, and turned away to his telephonic-digital-whatever-it-was that his team was focused on.

  “Thus the State Department,” I said. But it could have been a statement to the wall. I went back to join Billy.

  He had reopened his laptop and was tapping away at keys in a way I had no chance of keeping up with.

  “He threatened her, Max.”

  “What?”

  “Marty Andrews said Escalante made a veiled threat in open court this morning by commenting on her health and the health of our baby.”

  I stayed silent because I could feel the warm spark of anger flaring behind my eyes.

  Finally, I glanced over at the gathering of the feds.

  “These guys know that?”

  “Of course,” Billy said, not looking up from his computer. “They’ve sent someone down to the lockup cell to speak with him. But I’ve got my own Wi-Fi set up here and I’m pulling together some contacts I have in Colombia. Businessmen, but very connected businessmen. Word gets passed very quickly among the moneyed class. This kind of thing will have ripple effects.”

  I noted that Billy was not using Diane’s name. He was going impersonal, probably as a coping mechanism, but it was jarring to hear.

  I also noted the lack of any stutter in his speech. Billy is a face-to-face stutterer and has been since childhood. Whether it was from the physical abuses by his father or Billy’s own penchant to avoid people and find comfort in books and computers, he’d developed a stutter that occurred only when he talked face-to-face with others.

  Over a phone line or even out of sight on the other side of a wall, his speech was flawless. But when talking directly to another person’s face, command of his voice and tongue eluded him, and his stutter was pronounced.

  Though the odd handicap kept him from ever being a courtroom lawyer, it in no way stole from his brilliance in knowing the law and the inside workings of government and business. His dual degrees in law and business, from Temple University and Wharton, only honed an already exceptional mind. His connections were worldwide. His client list was long and distinguished, and he was as adept at legal counseling as he was at steering those clients toward wealth-building investments and opportunities.

  Billy knew where the money was, both here and overseas. And he knew those who had it. Thus the list of friends and people who owed him was enormous, and powerful.

  But I also knew what money could do. And the beauty of being a private investigator instead of a cop was the advantage of using it.

  “Can you pull together every major federal cocaine bust made in the tri-county area over the last couple of years on that thing?” I asked.

  Billy didn’t look up, but cocked his ear, thinking, trying to guess my angle.

  “Yes.”

  “Get me the addresses of those busts and names. If Escalante is involve
d with this, then the sellers he’s been feeding product to might be the ones with ears.”

  “I’ll get you a printout,” Billy said, agreeing with my strategy without saying so. “And I’ll get you some bribe money.”

  “Twenty-dollar bills,” I said. “Thieves and dealers don’t trust hundreds anymore.”

  “Just tell me how many,” Billy said. “She’s out there, Max, and I need her back.”

  Chapter 7

  OK, shit-hits-the-fan time,” Rae whispered when they finally got there. She knew it was coming, knew it when Danny gave her the instructions­ and then when that asshole Geronimo looked her in the face and just pointed his finger. Danny had told her the woman was coming and all she had to do was watch her, keep an eye on her, don’t let her do anything stupid or try to get away or scream or pound on the door or anything. Just watch her and don’t say a word.

  Say nothing—that’s the one thing Danny really hit hard on. And that’s what Alvin the Indian from fucking Keewaydin who everyone called Geronimo meant when he pointed his finger at her. Not a word. No voices. No words. No accents. No skin touching skin. Absolute silence until it was over.

  Yeah, right, no skin touching skin, unless you meant Geronimo’s braves shoving the woman through the door of this crappy little room onto the crappy little cot. So now she’s here. Your job? Just watch her in silence.

  Rae could tell in an instant that it was some rich bitch, even with a bag over her head. She could tell by the Ann Taylor suit and the hint of expensive perfume still seeping off her. Yeah, even a trailer-trash girl like her had been to the mall in Traverse City and had tended bar at the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa, where the big money wives dressed up and flaunted it, sitting at the bar and crossing their legs with that shush of expensive nylons and dress fabric that never gets worn from excessive use or the touch of an iron.

  And just as quickly, Rae could tell the woman was pregnant from the way she swung with her bloated belly and protected it as she kinda bounced on the mattress when the braves shoved her, shielding her stomach above all and not giving a shit if her head hit the wall.