Hunt Her Down

by Roxanne St Claire

  “Exactly. What better way to find out the fourth than to give us a fake one? Now they have all four, and—”

  “All they have to do is kill us, put our bodies in the bottom of Lake Maracaibo, using the coordinates to the real location to get the money.” Her eyes widened. “You can’t let them do that.”

  “I don’t intend to.”

  All of a sudden, the motor screamed, the sound intensifying each second.

  Dan jumped to his feet to get into position. “Just stay flat on the floor and close to the wall, Maggie. And keep that duffel bag on your shoulder in case we have to run.” Or jump.

  The boat was flying straight at the stilt house, full power, and a flicker of lightning revealed that one man was steering a rudder in the back and another was standing on the bow, ready to throw something.

  Son of a bitch, they were going to blow the place up.

  Dan reached down and put a hand on her shoulder. “Listen to me. I’m going to fire out this window, but I may not hit him. While I’m shooting, you get down on the dock as fast as possible, and if you have to, jump in the water. Hide in the water. He’ll go for the house, not the dock. You’re safer there.”

  “How? Why can’t I stay up here with you?”

  He swallowed. “I think they have a grenade.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “No kidding. I’m going to shoot until I kill the bastards, hopefully before they let the bomb fly. Do as I say, Maggie.” He eyed the boat again. Come on, get closer.

  “What if you blow up?”

  “Take the boat to San Carlos, then fly home.”

  “Dan!”

  “Go!” He pulled her up, a little rough. They had seconds, less. “Go now, Maggie!” He gave her a solid push toward the opening, then catapulted to the window and started shooting.

  Nature blessed him with one more bolt of illumination, just long enough for him to see an arm flail and a fist-size pellet fly through the air. Maybe he’d forced an early throw. Maybe he had time.

  The grenade sailed through a hole in the bamboo, landing on the floor. Dan dove onto it, then twisted and blindly flung it back outside with all his strength.

  An explosion rocked the hut like an earthquake, trembling the shaky stilts and sending a massive spray of water everywhere.

  “You got them!” Maggie yelled.

  He launched to the window just as a bonfire of flames mushroomed from the boat, and splinters of wood showered a twenty-foot diameter around the explosion. As it died down, he scanned the water, looking for any sign of life.

  Maggie climbed back up the ladder and stood in the opening to the hut. “Nothing survived that.”

  Dan blew out a breath. “Including the boat.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  MAX’S FISTED HANDS were the only sign of how much anguish he was in. But Lucy knew him so well, she could feel the waves of self-loathing and anger pouring off him as he paced the office, stabbing his cell phone over and over again.

  It had been almost seven hours since Quinn had disappeared. Seven critical, interminable hours during which they couldn’t reach Dan and Maggie to tell them that Quinn was missing.

  “Where the hell is he?” Max paced the office he’d already crossed a hundred times, checking his phone yet again as if he could have missed a call from Dan, or the pilots who had launched the helicopter search ordered by Lucy.

  It had taken far too much time for them to get a chopper.

  Lucy sat on the sofa, her own misery just as deep and just as contained. BlackBerry in hand, she texted Sage, who ran the Bullet Catchers’ Research and Investigation Division—until next month, when she and Johnny Christiano would be getting married and moving to Italy to run her European operations.

  And she texted Jack, who made her smile with every word he wrote. Even with their history, Jack was concerned about Dan, and the upsetting news he faced when they found him.

  Her text to Jack was interrupted by a call; the FBI, North Miami Beach. Her friend Thomas Vincenze already had launched a region-wide search for Quinn. She signed off with Jack and took the call, giving Max a hopeful look.

  “Tell me you have news, Tom.”

  “Not on the kidnapping, Lucy. Every possible route out of Miami is being searched and we’re widening the child-abduction rapid deployment team, working with Miami-Dade police on a minute by minute basis. But that’s not why I called. The evidence Dan Gallagher wanted has been returned to the files.”

  The fortune? “Can you deliver it to me?”

  “I can,” he said, without hesitation. “But in the meantime let me read it to you, because it does not coincide with the notes he copied.”

  Meaning they were at the wrong place in Venezuela. And they were out of touch . . . or worse.

  “Go ahead.” She wrote down the words and numbers and double-checked them, then held the paper out to Max. “Run it through the GPS and see what this does to a location if these are the latitude minutes and seconds,” she said softly. Then, to Thomas, “Who returned them?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, unhappiness clear in his voice. “The evidence clerk left me a note that they’d been returned, and now she’s under investigation for a lax security system.”

  “Looks like you have your work cut out for you, Tom,” she said.

  “Don’t I know it. I’ll call you within the hour when we get the next update.”

  “Thank you, and please, send the fortune over. I want to assure Dan we have the correct information.”

  “As soon as I can get a courier,” he promised, signing off.

  Max was already on the computer, frowning at the results, tapping keys in frustration. “Damn it,” he grunted, looking up when Cori came in with fresh coffee for them. His whole demeanor relaxed at the sight of her.

  “No word from him?” she asked, sinking onto the armrest to stroke his back.

  “Not yet.” he said tersely, focused on the screen again.

  “Max.” Just the word pulled his attention back to her. “It’s not your fault a thirteen-year-old pulled a stupid stunt in the middle of the night and got himself kidnapped, when he knew he was in a safe house for that very reason.”

  Max glanced at the file they’d found in Quinn’s room. “I shouldn’t have left that out.”

  “He was close enough to figuring it out. I figured it out with one good look at the boy.”

  “He wasn’t looking for it. Neither was Maggie when Dan showed up, so it’s no wonder Quinn didn’t see it.” Max shook his head. “Cori, can you imagine how Dan’s going to feel? Just put yourself in his shoes. In Maggie’s.”

  “I can’t even look at Peyton right now without crying,” she said softly.

  He gave her hand a squeeze and went back to the computer as Lucy came to see the results of the new coordinates. As she did, her BlackBerry buzzed again, this time with the name she wanted to see most.

  “It’s Dan,” she announced, putting the phone on speaker. “Thank God,” she said loudly, the thumping blades of a helo almost drowning out her voice. They had him. “Where are you?”

  “We just got picked up at the stilt house. No satellite for hours.”

  “I know,” she said, her heart sinking as she braced to tell him the news. “And I bet it was a false lead.”

  A lead and a trap.”

  She quickly told him about Thomas’s call, knowing all this discussion was delaying the most important news of all—the news that would have them on that plane in San Carlos and straight back to Miami, no matter what the new coordinates showed them. Dan delayed it even further by giving them an account of what they encountered at the Lake Maracaibo location.

  “I’ve got a new location, if these are real,” Max said into the speaker. “The town of Las Marías, just outside Maracaibo.”

  “We’ll fly up there as soon as we get to the plane in San Carlos. But it could be another goose chase. What makes you think these numbers are right, Lucy? Or that this Thomas guy is even legitimate?
”

  She knew Dan’s voice so well. He was tired, tense, frustrated, and sick of dead ends. And it was only going to get worse.

  She and Max shared a look, and there was enough silence that Dan must have picked it up.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  Max waited one second too long, so Lucy jumped in. “It’s Quinn, Dan.”

  “He took off in the Ferrari,” Max said.

  “He what? “

  “And he’s missing.”

  Silence. Long, aching, silence that Lucy wanted to fill with explanations and promises and reassurances that the best abduction team in Miami was on the case.

  “How long ago?” His voice was emotionless, as if he was trying not to let Maggie know yet.

  “About eight hours,” Max said.

  “Eight hours?” Dan lost the flat voice. “What happened?” Max filled him in, talking fast in case they lost the satellite link.

  “We’ll find him, Dan,” Lucy insisted. “The FBI and the Miami-Dade police have blocked . . .” The sound of the helo blades disappeared and Lucy held Max’s dark gaze. “I think we lost the connection.”

  “I think he hung up,” Max said, with the weary knowledge of a lifelong friend.

  Cori put her arms around Max’s thick neck and rested her head on his shoulder, the comforting gesture making Lucy ache for Jack.

  She crossed her arms and looked hard at Max, her mind working in high gear. “Someone sent him to the wrong place. Someone who knows what’s going on with these fortunes. We have to figure it out on this end and assure they find the right location, and take down whoever is end-running them.”

  It was all she could do for her friend right now.

  Something was very, very wrong. Maggie knew that before Dan disconnected the call, and there was a sickening swirl in her stomach.

  As he put his mouth to her ear and delivered the worst possible news, all she could do was stare at him, her teeth starting to chatter.

  Missing.

  Kidnapped.

  She put her hand to her mouth to hold back a scream, though her throat was chocked tight.

  “Don’t worry. We’re going straight back to Miami,” he said.

  She shook her head uncomprehendingly. “Why wouldn’t we?”

  He explained that the last fortune had inexplicably been returned to the FBI evidence file, and didn’t match their coordinates. “But we’re going home. We’re going to find him.”

  She reeled. “It’s been eight hours. He could be anywhere. He could be here, if Viejo wanted him badly enough.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy to get him out of the country.”

  “But someone could,” she insisted.

  “Yes, someone could,” he agreed. “Like a person who ran a cargo company. Or a con artist with connections in prison who can make false docs. Hell, the head of the Miami FBI could get a kid out on a private plane.”

  Maggie slid her hand into Dan’s. “They’re going to want a ransom,” she said. “They probably want the fortune, so let’s give them the real fortune. What if this latest coordinate is right? We could fly there right now on this helicopter and find that money.”

  “We could also go to San Carlos and be back in Miami in a few hours.”

  “We’re so close, Dan,” she insisted, gripping both hands now. “Getting this call right now, when we’re in this helicopter . . . it means something.

  “What if the money’s right there? The money we need to save Quinn.” She pulled him closer, desperation making her determined to prove her point. “If we go back there, all we can do is give them our theories, what Ramon said and Lola did. That won’t get Quinn back. But if we have that money in hand, they’ll give us Quinn.”

  “We don’t know that. Paying ransom is very, very risky.”

  “We don’t have a choice. Please.” She squeezed his hands. “Let’s go and see what we find. We’re almost there. If we don’t, we might regret it forever.”

  He regarded her long and hard. “I’ll kill someone if anything happens to that boy.”

  “You can get in line behind me.”

  “I feel responsible,” he said.

  “Because he took a joyride in a sports car when he knew he was being protected? He’ll feel my wrath when we find him.” If they find him. She clung to the anger; so much better than giving into the fear.

  “It wasn’t a joyride.” He spoke so softly, she barely heard him over the deafening roar of the engines and blades.

  “What?”

  “He was running away. In anger.”

  Her heart slipped a little. “Why?”

  “He found a Bullet Catcher file on you. It had been amended to note that you were pregnant before you arrived in the Keys.”

  She just stared at him, then closed her eyes, her head throbbing with pain. And now, he was somewhere unknown, terrified, alone, betrayed. She knew just how he felt.

  “Call her back,” she said quietly. “Tell her we’re flying to Maracaibo.”

  He did, and requested that a car be waiting when they reached the airstrip. Captain Simon would take the helicopter back to get the plane, and meet them here in a few hours. That’s all Dan was allowing. A few hours to get to Las Marías, look at the location, and leave.

  They disembarked the moment the chopper touched down, holding hands as they ran across cracked concrete to where a man stood waving to them, indicating a black pickup truck. Dan spoke to the man, gave him some cash, and then they took off.

  Despite the predawn darkness, it was hotter than the worst August afternoon in the Keys, the air so thick with humidity she was damp before she closed the door.

  “Work the GPS for us, Maggie,” Dan instructed as he put his gun on the seat between them. “I’ll need a free hand for my weapon.”

  “Is it dangerous here?”

  “Maracaibo is a pit from the depths of hell,” he said. “Maracuchos, the local marauding thugs, are some of the meanest humans to ever crawl out of it.”

  “Las Marías, too?”

  “I’ve never been there, but my instinct tells me it isn’t going to be Beverly Hills.”

  He gunned the truck out of the airstrip and they traveled through the winding streets, a maze of shanties, skyscrapers, and open areas where farmers were already setting up markets in the alleys between whitewashed apartment buildings. Maggie’s gaze darted between the deserted streets and the GPS, a stress headache feeling like a nine-inch nail from temple to temple as she called out the directions. The neighborhoods grew seedier, the potholes got deeper, the night seemed to get darker instead of breaking into dawn.

  Dan reached over and put his hand on her arm. “I don’t know if this is the bravest thing I’ve ever done, or the stupidest.”

  “Brave and stupid go hand in hand when you have a child.”

  “So I’m learning.”

  “Turn left in half a mile. When you love someone, you just do what has to be done.” Maybe he didn’t know that, yet. Maybe he’d never loved anyone. Maybe not everything came so easily to him.

  He glanced at her. “I totally underestimated you, Maggie. Then and now.”

  Her headache slid down to the vicinity of her heart. “You thought I was just a wild child. A runaway from my crazy home, taking up with druggies; then when you find me all those years later, I’m just a single mom working in a bar.”

  “I don’t know what I thought,” he admitted. “But you are one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever known, and one of the sexiest, and also one of the strongest.”

  “If we don’t find our son, Dan, I won’t be strong. My life will be over. So let’s get that money. And let’s get him back.”

  The way he exhaled said he didn’t agree but was doing it for her. “I feel like we’ve been sent on a scavenger hunt in this country, and I’m not at all sure what we’re going to find. But here we are; welcome to Las Marías.”

  Filthy, narrow streets barely big enough to fit one car, rows of tenements and wareh
ouses. At the corner where they had to turn, four men stood on one side of the street, two of them taking swings at each other, one staggering drunk, another massively barrel-chested, and all openly armed. As the truck approached, they stopped and stared.

  Maggie’s heart pounded hard, and she didn’t look to the side as they passed; Dan closed his fingers over his gun.

  He turned left, out of sight, and she watched the sideview mirror for any sign of them.

  “All right,” she said, returning to the GPS. “We’re basically there. It’s on this block.”

  One side was a parking lot with nothing but Dumpsters, a gutted bus, and trash. On the other side were two warehouses divided by a narrow, garbage-strewn alley. The only opening to the buildings appeared to be in the alley.

  “Bring your gun,” Dan said.

  As she reached in the bag for Smitty’s gun, he turned around to park with the driver’s side right at the entrance to the alley. “We’ll leave it unlocked in case we have to run for it. Come out on my side.”

  She slid across the bench seat and climbed out, looking up and down the empty, silent street. Dan stood right behind her, guiding her toward the alley, one hand on her shoulder, the other holding his weapon. The gun she held added to the sense of surrealness, sneaking through a Venezuelan alley, armed, her son’s life in the balance.

  Trash rustled.

  “Rats,” he whispered when she startled.

  Lovely. “Is that a way in?” She pointed to an undersize entrance to the building on their right halfway down the alley, partially opened. Dan inched it out with his foot, his gun raised as he looked in. “Nothing that I can see in there. Let’s try the other building.”

  Almost at the very end of the alley, they spied a metal door with a simple padlock.

  “If someone’s hiding money in there, wouldn’t they use a better lock?” Maggie said.

  “That would draw attention to it,” he replied, testing the lock.

  “Can you pick it or shoot it?”

  “Both, but picking will be quieter.” He pulled out his tool, working on the lock for a few minutes before it opened with a quiet ping. He slipped a flashlight out of the bag and directed her behind him. “Let me check it out first.”