The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  A couple of oncoming cars passed me, and at one point I passed a green pickup truck that had stopped by the roadside. I could see two people inside. I didn’t think to look closely at them. Later on, I would wonder how things would have gone had I taken more of an interest in the green pickup.

  I kept my eyes peeled for the landmark Allen had talked about, and soon it came into view: a mushroom-shaped structure built into the hillside by the road, about thirty feet tall. Like our intended destination, it was an abandoned relic of the past; one of sixteen air defense locations set up around the city during the cold war. The site was a cylindrical tower topped with a wide, overhanging platform. The approach off the main road led you through the remains of a checkpoint. The pillbox was still there, as were the stern warnings against unauthorized personnel. But there was no one manning the checkpoint, and there were no gates to enforce the signs. I pulled into the access road and followed it up a slope, past the tower to the parking lot at the top. Unauthorized personnel were encouraged these days—the more recent signs welcomed tourists and advised them to ascend to the platform to take in the stunning 360-degree views of the mountains and the Los Angeles Basin.

  To my surprise, the lot was empty. I had expected Allen, with her head start, to be here by now. It had been her idea to meet up before going any further, and I had concurred. I was all too aware of whom we were going up against, and I wanted as much backup as was available.

  I pulled into one of the parking spots and left the engine running. I took my phone out and dialed Allen’s number again. No answer. Not a good sign. I cast my eyes back toward the main road, looking for approaching vehicles, but saw nothing. I couldn’t wait much longer—not while the Samaritan had a prisoner. A prisoner that I hoped was alive for now. It would probably take me longer to find the old movie set by myself, but it was better than twiddling my thumbs waiting for Allen to get here.

  I sighed and put the parking brake on. I had a lot to think about, but it wasn’t much of an excuse for not having any idea someone was approaching the car until I heard the voice.

  “Get out of the car, Blake.”

  Slowly, I raised my hands. I turned my head to the left to look out the open window. There was a nine-millimeter Kimber Solo pistol pointed at me. I recognized the owner.

  “McCall, right?”

  The bulky cop was wearing a Kevlar vest over a black T-shirt and was doing a professional job of covering me with the pistol: two-handed grip, steady aim, not close enough for me to reach. He answered me by jerking his head, wordlessly repeating his initial command. I kept my eyes on the muzzle of the gun as I slowly reached down with one hand and opened the door. He took a half step back, anticipating that I might try to slam the door into his legs. I hadn’t planned on doing anything of the sort, but it was interesting to note his precautions. I wondered how he’d found me, and for a brief moment considered the possibility that Allen had given me up. I dismissed that thought a nanosecond later. Leaving everything else aside, I got the impression she and McCall hated each other with a fierce purity. He’d be the last person on the planet she’d help out like this. At least, not intentionally.

  “Keep ’em high. Step out of the car slowly and put your hands on your head.”

  I did as instructed. As I got out of the car, I risked taking my eyes off McCall and the gun long enough to glance around the lot. It was still empty. I could see no one on the road, no one on the observation platform above us. No backup, no marksmen.

  “Where’s the rest of the party?”

  McCall smiled. “I’ll call them soon. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. But as long as McCall seemed to be willing to converse with me, I thought it would be a good idea to keep that going.

  “You know, I didn’t kill the girl in the warehouse. I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Sure, Blake. You just happened to be there. Ray Falco says hi, by the way. He’s the cop you sucker punched.”

  Looking at him, I knew McCall didn’t give a shit whether I was the Samaritan or not. He didn’t care because he knew the only thing he needed to know about me: that I’d punched out one of his guys and I’d gotten away from his team. Humiliated him in front of the feds. He had no intention of bringing me in. He was going to shoot me in cold blood and claim I’d resisted arrest. And there was nothing to stop him. He was a cop, I was a wanted fugitive, and the nearest witness was probably a mile away. If it turned out I really was the Samaritan, he’d be a hero. If I wasn’t? No big deal. I was a regrettable victim of circumstance.

  I considered my options. They were not numerous. So I asked him another question, partly to buy time and partly because I wanted the answer.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “You can thank your buddy Detective Allen. We call her the Fixer downtown. Did you know that?”

  “I guess you have to call her something. Besides twice the cop you’ll ever be.”

  McCall’s eyes narrowed. Not the response he’d been expecting. “Don’t you want to know how she gave you up?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t think she did.”

  “Think again.”

  “I think somebody hacked her phone. We set up this meet over our cells. Never a good decision if you can avoid it, but in this case we couldn’t.”

  “You’re a smart guy, Blake. You know what happens to smart guys?”

  “Yeah. They use dumb guys to do their dirty work. Hacking Allen’s phone in case she was in contact with me was an intelligent move. Too intelligent for you. Who’s pulling your strings, McCall?” I already had a pretty good idea. Agent Channing—he’d suspected Allen was harboring me and had used McCall to spy on her. He’d miscalculated, though, because McCall had no intention of including anyone else in this.

  McCall tightened his grip on the gun and gritted his teeth. “You are so fucking dead. You know that? I’m gonna put a bullet in your fucking brain and they’ll pin a medal on me. I’ll . . .”

  “Of course you’re going to shoot me, McCall. It’s not like you have any other option. I mean, I beat the crap out of Falco, and he wasn’t ten pounds overweight and twenty years past his prime.”

  It was a life-or-death gamble with fifty-fifty odds. Like betting everything on red at the roulette table. McCall was either going to do the smart thing and put a bullet between my eyes, or he was going to rise to the bait. His finger tightened on the trigger and his nostrils flared, and then he slowly lowered the gun, sliding it into the holster.

  He took a step forward and swung his right fist into my stomach. I had already decided to let him get in a couple of good blows: I would give him confidence, stop him from reconsidering the decision. I tightened my stomach muscles but still, it felt like being slammed in the chest by a fencepost. My goading of McCall had been designed to produce this reaction, but he really was a lot stronger than he looked. I anticipated his follow-up move and rolled with the punch that came from his left. His third blow came a split second faster than I’d anticipated, and he managed to land a solid punch just above my left eyebrow. I fell back a step and wiped blood out of my eye. Three solid hits in less time than it takes to tell it. McCall knew it, too. The smile was back on his face.

  “Not so talkative now, huh? You got more smart comebacks for me, Blake? Let’s hear ’em.”

  I shook my head. “My mother always told me to be nice to the elderly.”

  Wham. Another hammer blow to the stomach. I tensed again and my stomach muscles absorbed a lot of the force, but I didn’t want to take another one like that if I could avoid it. I dropped to the ground, doubled over. I hoped he wasn’t a Marquess of Queensberry guy; it would screw up my next move. McCall didn’t disappoint me. Instead of offering a hand to get me back on my feet, he took a step back and aimed a hard kick at the side of my head. I blocked it with a forearm and then blocked a second, keeping my eyes locked on his feet and timing the moves. When the third kick came at me, I was ready. I grabbed his boot
with both hands and twisted it around hard, yanking him off his feet. The Kevlar he was wearing meant it was useless to hit him on the upper body, so I chose a lower target. I summoned up all the anger I’d suppressed during the last few blows I’d taken and channeled it all into my right arm as I punched him in the balls. McCall screamed and kicked out again. I dodged backward and launched myself at him, landing on top of him and nailing him straight across the bridge of his nose with a right.

  His hand went down to the holster and came back up with the pistol. One problem: he wasn’t out of my reach anymore. I grabbed his hand at the wrist and pushed it back as he squeezed the trigger and the gun went off between us. I smashed my forehead into his nose again and brought my other hand up to join the first one, smashing his hand off the ground until I felt a couple of bones break and the pistol slipped uselessly from his hand. The fight wasn’t out of him yet, though. He slammed his left fist against the side of my head, hard enough to make me see a white starburst that temporarily obscured his twisted, hate-filled face. I still had a pretty good idea of our respective positions. I squeezed his broken hand with my left hand. As he screamed out, I let go with my right, brought my arm up, and slammed my elbow into his face. Once, twice, three times.

  I blinked the vision back into my eyes and saw that McCall had stopped fighting. He was still breathing, although it came out of the bloody hole where his mouth was with a rasping sound.

  I kept ahold of the gun and carefully got to my feet, watching him the whole time in case he was playing possum. He wasn’t. The second or third of my elbows to his head had sent him deep into dreamland. I wiped some more blood out of my left eye and looked around. Still no one around, still no Allen.

  I certainly didn’t want to risk McCall coming to and following me, so I took a few seconds to pat him down. I found his backup piece—a compact Ruger .380—strapped to his ankle and put it in my pocket. I found a set of car keys. He’d probably parked down the road a little, out of sight. I bunched them up and threw them off the top of the hillside in the direction of the San Fernando Valley. Then I unlaced his boots, removed them, along with his socks, and tossed them as far as I could in opposite directions.

  Before I left, I did my good deed for the day. I put the bastard in the recovery position so he wouldn’t choke on his own blood. As I headed back to the Camaro, I wondered how McCall would explain this situation. I decided that he probably wouldn’t mention it to anyone ever again.

  81

  The man Jessica Allen knew as Eddie Smith listened as she told him where she wanted to go and then nodded. “Yeah, I know where it is. You’re meeting somebody up there?”

  “My partner,” Allen said flatly. She was looking straight ahead as they followed the course of the road.

  The Samaritan smiled and kept driving. Not too fast, not too slow. There was no need to rush. She’d asked him to drive her in the very direction he wanted to go. Although, of course, he wouldn’t be dropping her off at her requested destination. The place he had in mind was a little farther away, a little more secluded. The dusk was closing in on them now. He clicked on his full headlights.

  There was silence for a couple of minutes. He’d been absolutely right to be concerned: between them, Allen and Blake had worked it out. Or rather, perhaps not all of it, but enough to bring them out here, to where it had all begun.

  The Samaritan glanced over at Allen and she looked instinctively away. Still jumpy from what had very nearly been a fatal crash, perhaps. Or did she suspect something? She’d been cagey earlier in the garage, as well. It didn’t really matter though, not now. It was too late for them by the time they were sitting beside him in the passenger side. He felt a flutter of excitement in his gut at what was to come. Allen would be an indulgence. An unscheduled bonus. He’d followed her in the hope she’d lead him to Blake, but there had been no sign of his old comrade in arms. No sense wasting a trip, however. And he had no doubt that Blake would mourn her loss. Another reminder of who was the better man.

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” he said. Allen said nothing, probably not wanting to think about the crash.

  It was true, she really was lucky to be alive. The small explosive charge he’d placed inside the wheel well was intended only to disable the car, not to cause a fatal accident. He hadn’t counted on her driving this road like a lunatic. He was glad she’d survived. For the moment.

  As the road curved around, the platform of the observation tower loomed into view, about a mile or so distant. In another minute or two, it would be time to let the mask slip.

  He’d been giving the matter of dealing with Allen some thought. Usually, it was enough to lock the doors and keep on driving. The other women out here had all reacted in the same way, progressing through the same steps in the process. Had he been the academic type, he could have written a self-help book on the stages of dealing with one’s own imminent murder. First, there was confusion, transitioning quickly into disbelief. Then fear. Then bargaining. From there, things diverged somewhat from the traditional stages of grief. They never had time to get depressed, and he was reasonably sure none of them ever progressed to anything like acceptance. Instead, they seemed to bide their time, perhaps hoping some unlikely circumstance would arise that would allow them, somehow, to escape. He was always mildly surprised that none of the victims seemed to move on to the use of force, to make a last-ditch effort to effect an escape. Soon enough, they all looped back a step to fear.

  He harbored no illusions that the standard pattern would hold for Detective Allen. As he turned off Mulholland and passed the boundary for the San Vicente Mountain Park, he rehearsed the sequence actions in his mind. He would pull to a stop and wait until she turned away from him to open the passenger door. Then he would say her name casually, as though she’d forgotten something, and when she turned back to him, he would hit her full in the face. If she was still conscious after that, he’d take the time to bind her hands for the remainder of the journey. Then the fun would begin.

  “Smith.”

  The Samaritan turned his head and found himself facing down the barrel of Allen’s Beretta nine millimeter. Despite his surprise, he was impressed. He had glanced in her direction immediately beforehand and she’d been looking out the window. She must have drawn and aimed the weapon in a fraction of a second.

  “How fucking stupid do you think I am?” she asked.

  The Samaritan said nothing. He saw no reason to attempt to continue the pretense. That would be demeaning. He let the cop talk as his mind worked out a solution to the current problem.

  “You just happen to appear at my parking garage, and then all of a sudden you just happen to be there right after I get a blowout? Only that wasn’t a blowout. I heard a pop before I heard the tire blow. You rigged it, didn’t you?”

  “Very good, Detective,” he said. “I apologize. I certainly didn’t mean to insult your intelligence.”

  “Nice cover, I guess. A photographer. Lets you return to the scene of the crime without suspicion.”

  An astute observation, the Samaritan thought. But that wasn’t the only advantage to posing as Smith. The ability to speak to contacts within the LAPD had been a bonus when the first three bodies were discovered. He’d been reassured to discover how little they knew, before Blake decided to stick his nose in.

  Allen was shaking her head. “I should have known earlier. You slipped up the other night, on the phone. I just didn’t realize it until now. You knew the LA cases were different from the others because the victims looked so alike. ‘Like sisters’ you said. Only we hadn’t released any details of the murders in the other states, so as far as anyone knew, all the victims looked like that.”

  “You’re right; that was sloppy,” he said, growing more impressed with Allen even as he admonished himself.

  “What have you done with Kimberley Frank?”

  He smiled. He guessed this had been Blake’s discovery. “She’s alive, Detective Allen. You might get to meet her, i
n fact.”

  He’d slowed down as they talked, but now the entranceway to the missile site was approaching on the left-hand side. He let his foot drop a little on the gas pedal, and the needle began to climb.

  Allen leaned closer until the gun was pressing against his temple. “Stop the car. Now.”

  “Okay.”

  The Samaritan yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, timing it perfectly so that the car slammed into one of the solid concrete gateposts at the entranceway. Allen’s side of the vehicle took the brunt of it, but both of them were flung forward and back violently as the truck smashed to a stop. A secondary jolt bounced them forward again as the truck’s back wheels, which had lifted off the road on the abrupt impact, came back down to earth and bounced. The gun had been jolted from Allen’s hand and had landed in the footwell. Her head lolled to the side, stunned. The Samaritan decided not to take any chances. Before the detective could shake off the effects of her second crash in the space of half an hour, he reached his right hand across and pinched the carotid artery. Just long enough to knock her out; he didn’t want her impaired in any way for later.

  She opened her mouth and her eyes rolled toward him, and then they rolled upward and her head dropped against her chest.

  The Samaritan opened the driver’s door and got out of the truck, surveying the damage. The passenger side of the hood was caved in around the solid concrete gatepost, and from the way the vehicle had come to rest, he could tell he’d snapped the front axle. He cast a glance up at the parking lot but saw no sign of anyone waiting. Had anybody been there, they would surely have come running at the sound of the crash. There were no other cars parked up there, meaning he’d have to make the rest of the journey on foot.