Don't Lose Her

by Jonathon King

  Knowlton spun his head around. “Come on, Rae, you scaredy-cat …”

  But her next “Goddammit, Dave!” caused him to give in and flip on the headlights. And there it was: a dormant, hundred-ton flat car squatting thirty yards in front of them that would have surely sheared the heads of everyone in the car. Knowlton yanked the wheel, and they jolted off the rails and came to a bouncing stop on the railway ties.

  “Radar,” they called her. The name and reputation was set. You better listen to that girl ’cause she knows what’s going to happen.

  Yeah, Rae used that, too. She learned how to count cards at the blackjack tables at the Indian casino at Peshawbestown and because she used that new talent in front of her friends, it bolstered the image that she could somehow look into the future. Who was she to dissuade them?

  But now Danny was using it to mollify her.

  “You know it’s gonna work out, Radar, ’cause you always know.”

  With his left hand over her shoulder, he inched closer, forcing her thighs farther apart and pulling her into him, her chest into his, her butt sliding on the seat, her exposed genitals opening. She knew what he was doing and let him.

  “The damn woman’s pregnant, Danny—you can’t bullshit that,” she whined, using her little girl voice. “I’m alone up there watching her and they got her arms tied behind her and she’s hungry and thirsty and I’m hungry and thirsty and what the hell? Did you know it was gonna be like this? ’Cause if you did, I’m gonna kick your ass.”

  By then, Danny had moved his lips off her forehead and brushed them over the curve of her ear. She felt his warm breath tickling her there and she knew that he knew the effect it always had. Then consciously she slid her butt even farther forward on the toilet seat until her moistness touched his cowboy belt buckle; the shock of cold metal against her broke the spell.

  “Goddamnit, Danny,” she hissed as she pushed him away. “What the hell is going on with the freakin’ cutting torch and the van all in parts!”

  Danny backed off and just shrugged his shoulders.

  “Geronimo said get rid of it,” he said. “The tools were already here, and I was bored. It ain’t the way I’d get rid of a stolen car, but what the hell? I don’t know a damn thing about Florida, and the places I’d dump it probably don’t even exist down here. It’s not like I got anything better to do while we’re hiding out in this sweatbox anyway.”

  “Chop it into little pieces and get rid of it? Was that Geronimo’s idea?” Rae said with a tone in her voice that sounded both knowing and ominous at the same time. It made Danny turn.

  They locked eyes for a moment, and Rae knew Danny had picked up on her meaning and that they were thinking the same damn thing.

  The kids back home may have made fun of Geronimo behind his back, but the rumors about the big Indian kept those jokes to a whisper. Everyone knew Alvin worked for the casinos. Danny said he was just a leg-breaker for the bosses when some dumbass bettor got in over his head and needed to be convinced to pay up. But when a group of kids sitting around at a fire pit on a September evening started telling ghost stories, the rumor always came up that Geronimo had done away with more than one missing casino problem by cutting up the bodies with a big old frontier bowie knife and hiding the pieces in the woods around Kalkaska County.

  “You know that’s bullshit about him dicing up bodies, Rae,” Danny said. Rae turned away as if she hadn’t even heard and changed the subject.

  “You gotta get us some food and something to drink besides fucking Coke, Danny. Because that woman’s gonna get sick and she’s right about that baby, it needs some damn nutrition.”

  She was lighting into him and ignoring the rise in her voice when a knuckle suddenly cracked sharp on the door and brought instant silence.

  Danny looked up into her eyes and blinked once. Then he nodded. Rae mouthed the words, “Make this right.” He nodded again and stood and left.

  Chapter 14

  A sunset smeared with soft reds and shades of purple was coloring the western sky when I left Attorney Milsap’s office. I thought briefly about the view from my river shack out on the edge of the Everglades: someplace quiet and serene. Someplace where pregnant women weren’t kidnapped and drug dealers didn’t feast on addicts and capitalism didn’t turn the world greasy and greedy.

  But who are you kidding, Max? Out there in your one-room hideout, you listen to the night-hunting owls and herons and gators and fish gulping smaller fish every black evening. Is that the nature of all things? Does the world feed on itself until Darwin’s biggest, smartest, and most adaptable become so fat yet so insatiable that they bring on their own demise?

  “You are one cynical bastard, Max,” I said out loud.

  I needed to see Sherry. I put my three phones on the passenger seat beside me—one for CQ, one for Milsap, and my regular cell, which Billy would call if anything changed—and headed for Victoria Park.

  Sherry’s house was in an old Fort Lauderdale neighborhood that had ridden the ups and downs of South Florida real estate with only minimal damage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a post-WWII boom created a population surge in Florida headed by young soldiers and pilots and Navy men who’d come to train here and had fond memories of a place in the sun with fresh ocean breezes where cheap homes could be built or purchased for them and their young families. In places like the aptly named Victoria Park, single-story houses with barrel-tiled roofs and hardwood floors popped up on open acreage and even on created land, where entrepreneurial developers dredged out tons of swampy marl both to build up a solid foundation for home-building as well as to create canals to the sea. As the people moved in and then spread out to create lakefront suburbs in the same manner, “old” neighborhoods like Sherry’s became quaint and “historic,” tucked under the shade of old live oaks, gumbo limbo, and silver palms.

  After one of the inevitable real estate dips in the 1990s, Sherry bought a small bungalow on a cop’s salary and it became her respite from the world around her. Since the loss of her leg, I’d spent as much time here as I had out in the Glades shack.

  “Moving in, Max?” she’d tease, but with a certain edge. It was a part of our relationship we still hadn’t quite sorted out.

  When I turned the corner onto her street, I could see her little MG, newly outfitted with hand controls for the brakes and accelerator on the steering wheel, parked in the driveway next to my F-150 pickup truck. I pulled the Fury onto the swale in front of the house and called Billy on my regular cell.

  It was a quick and morose conversation that ended with an agreement that I would meet him at the federal courthouse in the morning. My friend didn’t sound like he would be sleeping soon, and I wasn’t sure I would be, either. We’d both done what we could do for now. Bad people had the upper hand, and it was not where either of us liked to be.

  I got out, locked the Fury, and walked between the cars to Sherry’s gate, which opens to a walkway leading to the back of her house. Before I reached the patio deck, I could hear the familiar liquid plunking of one foot kicking and the soft, rhythmic splash of swimming strokes. Sherry had outfitted her backyard pool with a jet pump system that created a steady current against which she could swim. She had done this before the accident as a supplement to her distance-running workouts, and now it had become a sort of savior for her head and body.

  The aqua glow from the submerged pool lights reflected up into the leaves of the oak whose boughs spread above her backyard and formed a canopy. The mixture of green leaves and shimmering blue gave the natural roof a calm but surreal feel. I stepped up onto the wooden deck and for a minute just watched her swim, the lithe body, skin whitened by underwater lights, moving with an effortless rhythm that belied the strength behind each stroke.

  It took a second, more focused look to pick up on the unnatural movement of her hips. She had learned somehow to curve her single right leg in and perf
orm a one-beat kick that resulted in an odd kerplunk, but still afforded her a straight and true course. The body adapts. Human beings adapt. It’s what we do.

  I sat down in a lounge chair, put the three cell phones down on the table next to me, and closed my eyes.

  I felt droplets, first on my arms, then on my chest, and then on my face. In my half-consciousness, my mind went to blood. With an internal vision of red, an actual taste of metal gathered on my tongue.

  “Max? Are you awake? Max—wake up, babe.”

  Sherry’s face was above me, her wet blonde hair tucked behind her ears. But the ends still dripped water on my cheeks.

  “Jesus!” I said, startled.

  “No, just me,” she said. Then she bent closer, putting her still-cool lips on mine. The taste of chlorine replaced the metallic hint of the blood that had somehow seemed so real a moment before. She pulled over another lounge chair and sat, using a towel to cover the stub of her missing leg.

  “You OK?” she asked as she looked into my face. Her cold fingertips were now on my arm.

  “Yeah, yeah, OK,” I said, shaking my head. “Wow, must have dozed off. What time is it?”

  She looked back at the large-faced clock by the kitchen window that she used sometimes to time her workouts.

  “Almost nine.”

  “Shit.”

  “Why? Got somewhere else to be?”

  “Uh, no. No. I just …” I ran my hands over my face.

  Sherry stared at me a few seconds longer. I must have passed her evaluation.

  “You want a beer?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  She wrapped her towel around her waist and then hopped, one-legged, across the patio to the back kitchen door.

  I hadn’t gauged how draining my anger and anxiety over Diane’s abduction had been. Sometimes you spend hours on surveillance or a stakeout, keeping your senses honed until your eyes burn, and your mind begins to play you. Sometimes you run hard and fight furiously until you think you can’t take another step, and then you take that step.

  But an emotional hurt, a constant internal push to do something that’s just out of reach, a feeling of frustration and helplessness, will strain both body and soul. Soldiers know this state; so do prisoners of war. To fight against it takes even more energy. Only a few can do it. Others break.

  “How’s Billy?” Sherry asked, returning with an ice bucket filled with four bottles of beer and setting it on the small wicker patio table next to my three phones.

  “Scared. Frustrated—and working every source he’s got to find information,” I said. “I just talked to him. He’s touched State Department contacts here and in Colombia. He’s pulling favors from people in financial circles from Miami to Caracas, anyone anywhere with even the slightest connection with Escalante.”

  “They’re going with the drug lord angle,” Sherry said, less a question than a statement of fact. She’d been in law enforcement for a long time and was the daughter of a Florida highway patrolman. She knew that you go with the obvious first. Hit hard with what you have, especially when innocent lives are at stake; if you jumped the gun, tough.

  “But no ransom demands?”

  “Not a word,” I said. “They’ve got taps on Diane’s office, the federal prosecutor’s, Billy’s penthouse, and the courthouse cellblock where Escalante is being held.”

  “They didn’t move him?”

  “No. He was there for the hearing when Diane was grabbed so they took him to the internal lockup downstairs. For security’s sake, he’s being kept there under armed guard. Billy said he isn’t going anywhere.”

  “Is Billy going anywhere?”

  “I’m going to pick him up in about, uh, eight hours,” I said. “He says he’s done as much as possible from the courthouse and needs to get back to his own computers at home.

  “He says the media hawks are outside the federal building, but he figures that early in the morning I can drive him out of the basement garage and get him to the penthouse without anyone seeing him.”

  I took a long pull of the cold beer and wasn’t sure I even tasted it.

  “They’ll be at the penthouse, too,” Sherry said.

  “Yeah, well, you know Billy. He’s already arranged for a limo to pull up in front of the building while we go around back in my pickup. You know the media cattle. They’ll all go for the limo to get the shot of the devastated millionaire husband of a kidnapped judge, and we’ll slip out the freight entrance.”

  I leaned my head back again and stared up into the blue-green glow spackling the overhead leaves. Diane rolled out of her chair and hopped behind me and put her hands on my shoulders and started kneading the tightened muscles there. It was something I usually did for her, massaging her swimmer’s shoulders and the calf of her good leg after the insane workouts she put herself through. The gesture almost made me feel guilty—almost. I let her continue.

  “The circles are spreading out,” she said, working with both hands. “The TSA and U.S. Marshals are all over the airports in West Palm, Lauderdale, and Miami. Coast Guard’s doing their thing, doubling up on the suspect boats they’ve already tagged as possible drug mules.”

  “But Escalante’s people aren’t stupid enough to try and move an unwilling kidnap victim through obvious channels,” I said. “They’ve got hundreds of private and commercial docks they could use to float her out of here. Never mind the private airfields and corporate jets they might commandeer.”

  As Sherry dug her strong fingers into my neck, trying to work the muscle fiber loose, we did the familiar dance we often did when she was on a sheriff’s case or I was deep into some investigation for Billy. We were riffing off each other, stating the obvious but also posing the possibilities.

  “They do these abductions all the damn time down in South America and over in the Middle East: multinational businessmen, judges, journalists, family members of the rich. It’s usually about money, isn’t it?” Sherry said.

  “I remember the case in Colombia where they held that woman politician for eighteen months,” I bantered back. “They kept moving her, town to town, building to building, until they got the president to give the drug lord a cushy, non-extraditable term in a local prison. A country club deal.”

  I let out a low groan when Sherry’s fingers found a particularly hard knot and pried in between the strands of muscle, working them loose. The woman had a talent for finding a way in.

  “The difference down there is that whole communities are dependent on the drug lords or scared shitless of them,” I said. “You’re not going to find that kind of intimidation here. Somebody hears something, sees something, and thinks they can profit off the information, they’re going to spill it.”

  “The sheriff has already put out the word,” Sherry said. “Everywhere from drug task forces right down to patrol. My friend over at the state attorney’s office was told the same: if you’ve got someone in a cell with info, squeeze him with a deal.”

  I let my head drop, chin down near my chest, stretching the neck fibers, letting Sherry go deep.

  “That takes time. Promises work too slowly. It’s a recession: money talks and bullshit walks,” I said, thinking of Johnny Milsap.

  “You’re quoting soiled politicians, Max.”

  “We’ve got to get Diane back.”

  Chapter 15

  She woke to the feeling of something touching her face. Her first reaction was to fight. But Diane was a fast learner. Coming out of her exhausted sleep, she recalled that the last time she’d cried out she’d been rewarded with a blow to the head. This time, she held back and let full consciousness come first. The grip she felt was pinching her lower jaw, shaking her awake, but in a less-than-forceful way.

  The shroud was still over her head; the blackness that met her open eyes was becoming … not normal or acceptable, but expected. From
under the drawstring, she felt something probing up from her neck, something small and sharp-edged; but again she stifled her panic. Not a knife blade, she thought, or a razor. Whoever was holding her jaw was also trying to work the object up to her mouth without creating an opening where light, or any view of the world, would be exposed.

  When Diane moved her head and rolled to one side on the bed, her captor allowed it. Then she moved her mouth to accommodate the probe. Another straw, she discovered, letting her skin feel the object, the rounded edge now at the bottom of her lip, working its way into her mouth. Water? God, she was thirsty. And she’d been given the soda before, though clumsily. She hesitated, but gave in. If they wanted to poison her, they would have already done so. She took the end of the straw in deeper and drew on it.

  What came onto her tongue was cool, the consistency of thick milk, but flavored with some kind of faux-fruit taste. She drew in more of the fluid, and the pincers at her jaw, obviously someone’s fingers, loosened. She swallowed. She let her taste buds work and her mind take over. This wasn’t some half-melted milk shake—not that sweet. But it was definitely something more than, say, strawberry-­flavored milk. She stopped drawing and took a breath, but kept the straw in her mouth. Could it be some kind of nutrition drink? Food in a bottle—Ensure or Boost or some other concoction? She sucked more into her mouth and swallowed. She didn’t resist, because she knew instinctively that it was sustenance, something for her and for her baby.

  The last time she’d met with her obstetrician, the doctor had said the baby would be gaining almost half a pound a week now. Was she starving her own child? It was hard to calculate how many hours she’d gone since last eating, but the anxiety and fear had drained her. She needed something to give her the energy to think, to assess, and to survive.

  Her baby was everything now. It hadn’t always been so. Only two years ago, she’d been already in her forties and single: career-oriented, too busy with her legal aspirations and following the family tradition. The lawyers and the society men of Palm Beach were just part of the game they all played. She’d never been serious about any of the men who’d dared to court her. She knew her family name was intimidating to them—all but Billy.