Kita said, “I have a theory, but it’s unproven. Let’s get going.”
Casey put her shoes on to cross the gravel lot, but took them back off when they reached the sidewalk. A block and a half later she was getting into a gray car that didn’t have a license plate. She estimated that they’d driven a couple of miles when Kita pulled off into the parking lot of a grocery store, then just sat there. “What’s going on?” Casey asked.
“Trying to figure out what to do with you.”
Plaintively, Casey heard herself ask, “Can’t I come home with you?” She started to feel desperate again. Romano’ll find me if I try to live homeless on the street!
Kita gave a sad laugh, “I wish.” After a moment, she said, “No. There’s a lot of reasons that wouldn’t work.” Musingly, she said, “I don’t think the shelter’ll take you ‘cause you’re underage, right? How old are you?”
Heart breaking, Casey said in a whisper, “Almost fourteen.”
“And we can’t rent you a motel room. I’m pretty sure they won’t rent to people under twenty-five.”
“Can’t you rent it for me?
Kita snorted, “I’m not twenty-five either.” She sighed, “I want to call your mother. What’s the number?”
“But, but…”
“I know, you don’t want her to have to tell you to stay with Romano. But you’re already gone. Your parents need to know that, since they might want to flee as well, right? And maybe they want to take you with them.” Kita turned toward her, “Or maybe you have a grandmother, or aunt, or someone else where you could stay. I think they should have a chance to help us decide.”
“Oh, okay.” Casey gave her the number.
“Your mother’s name?”
“Um, Jennifer.”
Patiently, “Your last name?”
“Sorry. Allen.”
“Stay in the car, doors locked, slouched down so no one can see you.”
“You don’t have a cell phone?!”
“I do. I don’t want there to be a record of my number calling your mom though.”
When Kita got out and walked toward the store Casey started trembling again. I feel safe with Kita here, she realized.
Roni went in the grocery store and looked around. There weren’t any payphones, but she found an empty manager’s office with the door standing open. Not seeing anyone who looked like a manager, she went in and picked up the phone, dialing the number Casey’d given her. The number rang for a while, then went to voice mail. Crap! She hadn’t considered this problem. At the tone she said, “Hello, Ms. Allen. I’m calling about your daughter Casey. She’s out of her previous… situation. I’m assuming you’re screening your calls but would like to know what’s going on. I’ll call you back, but not from this number so I’m hoping you’ll answer all your calls until you get the next one from me. Please don’t call this number back, it’s at a grocery store and no one’ll know what you’re talking about.”
Roni left the office and went to the store’s restroom to take off her gloves, mirror-glasses and balaclava. She roamed through the store and bought a hot container of fried chicken, a couple of apples and two bottles of Coke, one diet, one regular. She went back out to the car where Casey greeted her with wide eyes that carried a mixture of hope and dread, “What did she say?
“Voicemail. I think she’s screening calls. Want some chicken?”
Managing to look both relieved and disappointed, even in the dim lights of the windows, Casey almost whispered, “Okay.”
Roni had trouble eating in the dim light while wearing the mirrored glasses. She took them off, hoping Casey wouldn’t be able to make her blue eyes out in the dim light. As they ate, Roni said, “How long’s Romano had you?”
“Since May… It’s September now, right?”
Roni nodded, “And they’ve done… what to you?”
Casey’s eyes dropped and she didn’t answer.
“Have they… raped you?”
She blinked a couple of times without looking up. “Lots,” she whispered.
Roni thought angrily at herself, Of course they have, you idiot. Marco was about to do it again when you stopped him. You didn’t have to ask her that! “Sorry,” she said. “I guess at least Marco and Rick won’t be raping anyone anymore.”
“Yeah!” Casey said in a gratified tone. “But,” she said less happily, “Romano’ll just hire more guys like them.”
Looking into the distance, Roni said, “Maybe we need to do something about Romano himself, huh?”
With a tone full of longing, Casey said, “Yeah…”
They’d finished eating so Roni pulled the balaclava back down over her mouth, bundled up their trash and said, “I’m gonna go try to call your mom again. Wish me luck.”
This time Ms. Allen picked up part way through the first ring, “Hello?”
“Ms. Allen?”
“Yes, yes. Is Casey okay?
“She’s safe for now. I’m trying to figure out where she can go. She says that if she were to come home to you that’d cause problems? Romano’d do your family more harm?”
Allen made a grunting sound as if she were in pain, or maybe ecstasy. She gasped, “Who are you?”
“An enemy of Mr. Romano’s… and therefore, I believe, a friend of yours, right?”
“Can we meet?”
Roni hesitated, she could understand the way Allen hadn’t answered any of her questions. The woman had a lot of concerns right now, after all. But could Romano be there with her, telling her how to answer? Trying to set Roni up? Well, it doesn’t matter, Roni guessed, she could check out any meeting site invisibly, after all. Roni said, “Sure, where?”
There was a long pause, as if the woman hadn’t contemplated having to pick the meeting site herself, instead expecting the site to be forced on her. Then she said, “Casey’s favorite restaurant, fifteen minutes.”
Roni said, “Okay,” and hung up.
Getting in the car, Roni said, “We’re meeting your mom at your favorite restaurant. Which one is that?”
A silence stretched.
Roni said, “Casey?”
“My favorite isn’t what my mom thinks it is.”
“Doesn’t matter what your real favorite is,” Roni said, a little frustrated. “We need to go to the one your mom thinks is your favorite!”
“Oh. Yeah,” Casey said, sounding embarrassed. “Argosy Pizza.”
Roni pulled up directions on her phone. It was really close. She started her car.
Once they arrived, Roni and Casey got out and peered in the restaurant windows to make sure Ms. Allen hadn’t beaten them there. Then they went back out to sit in the car and wait for her.
Casey sat bolt upright, her foot folded under her to give her more height as she swiveled her head to watch the parking lot. Roni tried to study, leaving the light on her pad down low so it wouldn’t illuminate her eyes.
“That’s her car,” Casey said suddenly.
They got out and started across the lot to where Ms. Allen was parking. “You’re still not visible,” Roni said to the girl. “Let’s check out the car first, make sure someone’s not in the back seat, threatening your mom.”
“Oh!” Sounding frightened, “You think someone might be?”
“No, but it doesn’t hurt to be sure.”
Ms. Allen quickly got out of the car and started toward the pizza place. A quick check showed the back seat of her car was empty. No other cars had entered the parking lot. As Casey looked wistfully after her mother’s retreating back, Roni said, “You’re visible now. I’m not. Call out to her. We really don’t want to meet in the restaurant.”
“Mom?” Casey said.
Allen turned and, seeing Casey in the dim light, ran back toward her. “Casey!” she said in what sounded like a shriek, even though it was barely louder than a whisper.
Casey and her mother threw their arms around one another, hugging fiercely. Then Ms. Allen pushed her daughter back and looked at her, “Are y
ou okay?” She pulled her back into a hug, “Of course you’re not, how could I ask that?!”
Casey snuffled into her mother’s shoulder, “What’re we going to do, Mom?”
“Run,” her mother whispered ferociously. “Run like the wind. I’ve got a bag for you in the trunk of the car.” She glanced around the parking lot, “The woman who called me—does she work for Romano? Is she the one who got you free?” She leaned even closer, “Do you think you really escaped, or did they let you out so they could follow you?”
“No,” Casey said, without any doubt in her voice. “We escaped. She killed a couple of Romano’s men doing it. They might be after us, but I’m pretty sure they don’t know where we went.”
“My god!” Ms. Allen breathed.
“But, Mom, if we run, what’s going to happen to Dad and Robbie?”
“They’re going to run too. We’ve been planning for it. Dad’s packing the SUV with the stuff we’ve been getting ready for months. I’ll call him and they’ll take off too. They’ll meet us… somewhere.”
Roni turned and trotted back to her car, popping the trunk and pulling up the carpet. She pulled out an envelope and ran back to where the Allens were getting in the mother’s car. Letting herself become visible, she said, “Casey?”
Casey’s mother let out a little shriek, but Casey wasn’t surprised to see the dark form of her friend. “Kita, thanks… for everything. My parents have an escape planned so I’m going now, okay?”
“Yeah, here’s something to help,” Roni said, handing her the envelope.
“How’ll I find you?”
“I’ll have to find you instead,” Roni said regretfully.
“But, what if Romano catches us?! What if we need you?!”
Roni hesitated, then leaned close, “If I give you my cell number, can you memorize it and never write it down or tell it to anyone, not even your mother?”
“Yes!” Casey said, looking vastly relieved.
“Promise not to use it to try to figure out who I am?”
Casey nodded vigorously.
Casey and her mother got in her mother’s car and her mother quickly pulled out of the lot as if she feared pursuit. She went around the block and actually started driving north instead of south, the way she’d started out. She tossed her cellphone to Casey and said, “Call your dad. Tell him to meet us at our third spot.”
Robbie answered her dad’s phone, sounding frightened, “Hello?”
“Hey squirt. Can I talk to Dad?
“Casey!” he said sounding tautly excited. “Dad’s packing the car as fast as he can. He asked me to see if I could take a message.”
“Okay, tell him to meet us at the third spot.”
“So we’re going?!” Robbie asked excitedly.
“Yeah… we’re going. See you there.”
After Casey hung up, her mother said, “Turn off the phone. All the way off and take out the battery, in case they put tracking software on it.”
Casey’s heart thumped. “What if they’ve got trackers on the car?” she asked, sounding frightened, even to herself.
“Dad checked over the car before I left. I really hope it’s clean.” Her mom hesitated, “Who was that woman?”
“I don’t know. She had me call her Kita, but I don’t think it’s really her name.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“Um, Romano and his guys had just killed these people and then Marco, one of Romano’s guys, was going to… do stuff to me. She showed up and just killed Marco before he could do anything.” Casey found herself strangely reluctant to say anything about Kita’s invisibility.
Casey’s mother didn’t say anything in response. When Casey looked over at her, tears were streaming down her cheeks. Her mother reached out a hand and Casey took it. Her mother squeezed her hand but didn’t seem to be able to say anything. I shouldn’t have said that thing about Marco doing stuff, she thought.
Eventually her mother tried to speak, but seemed to be choking on something because her voice kept croaking unintelligibly. She swallowed a couple of times and cleared her throat, “I’m so, so sorry. She shook her head. I want to pull over and hug you so bad, but I don’t think we should stop, no matter how bad I want it.”
“That’s okay, Mom. We need to get somewhere safe first. Where are we going?”
“Even though I’m pretty sure the car’s clean,” her mother rasped, “I don’t want to say it.” Her mother cleared her throat again, “That woman gave you something when we left, what was it?”
“Oh,” Casey said, looking down at the envelope she still held and realizing her mother was worried it might contain a bug or a tracker. It’d be crazy for Kita to do the things she did, then put a tracker on me, but Mom wouldn’t know that. “Let me see.” Casey tore open the envelope. It had a wad of paper in it. She turned on the dome light, Hundred dollar bills…!
Back in the lot just off campus where she kept her car, Roni’d walked a hundred feet away from it before she realized she’d forgotten to put the license plate back on and had to turn back.
When she got back to her dorm room Madison was gone. This’s good. I can try to edit the video of Romano killing those people. She downloaded the video from the phone to a jump drive and made sure it was deleted and overwritten on her phone. Then she played the video. Like she’d thought at the scene, she had video at the beginning and the end but not of the actual killing. However, in the words of Tillman and Romano, the audio track of the video provided a fair play-by-play description of what was happening. Roni clipped off the beginning and the end and put it on the jump drive all by itself. She erased and wrote over the video files on her computer, then went to bed. I’ll send it from a public computer tomorrow. To everyone at FBI Headquarters. Her last thought was, Not from the university library though.
Chapter 7
Fred Rector looked up as Joaquin, one of the tech weenies, stepped into the opening of his cubicle, looking excited. “Boss, somebody e-mailed a video file of Romano to a shitload of people up in DC!”
“Random people, government people, or FBI people?” Fred asked acerbically. He hated ambiguous statements.
“FBI people,” Joaquin said as if he thought it unimportant. “Get this, Romano and his guys murder the Tillmans in the vid!
So, the Tillmans are dead, Fred thought. He’d been afraid of that when they’d lost contact with Tillman. “Let’s see the vid,” he sighed. Maybe it’ll be good enough for an arrest.
Joaquin pulled the vid up on Fred’s computer. It started in what looked like Romano’s recycling facility in Blayton. The first shot showed Romano talking to someone who appeared to be a low-level crook. Romano was telling the guy that the local cops had turned over a public submission of a list of drug dealers. That’s why we’ve got an FBI task force down here now, he thought. The local police were all on the take, or scared shitless of the mob. Either way, they stopped citizens for speeding and arrested punks for vandalism, but they looked the other way when Romano and his sleazebags did the really horrible stuff.
After the crook left, the camera followed Romano into a plain vanilla office and straight over to another door at the back of it. It went through the combo locked steel door. The camera swept the next room and Fred saw Tillman, held by a couple of Romano’s beefy enforcers. He also saw an underage girl in nearly transparent clothing hand Romano a drink. Then Romano kicked someone on the floor and the video dropped down to show nothing but floor! “Crap, the video doesn’t show what’s going on?”
“No, Mr. Rector,” Joaquin said, “but listen to the audio.”
Fred did. The audio recorded Romano demanding answers from Tillman and threatening a woman, presumably Tillman’s wife, down on the floor. Tillman begged unsuccessfully and offered answers he’d almost certainly made up on the spot. Then a sickening thunk sounded like a knife entering someone’s body. Romano said, “Kill him.”
A moment later Fred heard a stomach-turning crunch.
Then the
video came back up. It panned around showing Tillman lying on a woman who had a knife in her eye, presumably Mrs. Tillman, though she was too bloody for him to tell for sure. The two enforcers were leaving the room. And it showed the scantily-clad, terrified-looking girl, crouching in the corner, hands over her eyes, crying.
The video ended.
Crap! Except for the beginning out in the warehouse proper, the video only showed Romano from behind or partial profile. The audio sounded damning, but it would’ve been so much better if it’d shown the deed being done. Fred sighed, “Get Browning to look that over. If he doesn’t see any legal problems with using the video as basis, tell him to apply for warrants to search the premises and to arrest Romano and his two sidekicks. Suspicion of murder, child molestation, sex slavery, whatever he thinks’ll work. Soon, I don’t want to get tied up in legal crap so long that those bastards have time to clean things up.”
“Um, the ‘sidekicks’ haven’t been seen lately.”
Fred turned disgustedly, “Really?!”
Joaquin nodded.
“Aw crap.” There goes our chance of turning one or both of them to give evidence. “Get warrants anyway, maybe they’ll turn back up.” It’d sure be nice if these bastards would get in a fight with their drug suppliers and wind up dead, like the Castanos did over in Lareta.
As if he’d been mind-reading, Joaquin said, “Um, you should know that there are rumblings on the street that the hit on Special Agent Mullaney and Chief Smith over in Lareta was by Romano’s men too.”
A sick feeling welled up in Fred’s stomach. He tried not to let it show on his face. “Well, we’d better get that son of a bitch put away before he kills any more of our people, hadn’t we? Get Browning on those warrants.” Joaquin left.
Not for the first time, Rector wished he could just send a SWAT team down to blow Romano and his minions away. Surely that son of a bitch deserves to die!
Rector stepped out of his office—which was just another cubicle among the set his task force was using in some rented office space. He asked his assistant to set up a meeting with Lareta’s new mayor. He needed to show the flag down there, sound sympathetic about Chief Smith and tell the mayor they were looking into what’d happened—without letting on how little progress they’d made so far. He also needed to feel out the Mayor on what he thought was going on down there. It seemed obvious that someone in the mob was trying to move back into the Castanos’ vacated turf. If the Mayor dissembled, it’d be a sign the mob already had control of local government.
The Boy Who Couldn’t Miss Page 14