by Sharp, Tracy
“Yeah. I kept using your name and he knew I’d take him to you. He’s pretty smart.”
“Yeah, he is.” I had poor Buddy in a bear hug and I wasn’t letting go. He didn’t seem to mind.
Callahan came over to me, his eyes concerned. “Leah, I’m sorry. I’m the one that told you not to worry about Jesse, not to follow him while he was on his date.” He lifted his hands. “I’m an idiot.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said, looking miserable. “Me too. And now Sean’s dead.” He stared at the ceiling. “Woodard’s dead. I don’t care how. He’s dead.”
Jack stood with his arms crossed over his chest. “Absolutely.”
“Why didn’t he tell me what he was doing? I would’ve gone with him.” Patrick wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
I shook my head. A part of me did blame both of them, just a little. Though I knew it was only my fear that I’d never see my little brother again. “No, it’s not your fault, guys. This is all Woodard’s doing.”
“I’m here to help with whatever the plan is to get Jesse back,” Cal said. “Anything you need me to do. Count me in.”
“Thanks. I appreciate that.”
Patrick gave a deliberate nod. “Whatever we need to do.”
Cal pulled his cell from his pocket. “I’ll call Will.”
“Hey, man. The more the merrier,” Jack said. “We can use the help.”
I nodded. “Yeah. We could use him too. I don’t think we’re in a position to refuse any help.”
“Got that right,” Jack agreed. “Tell him he’s invited to the party.”
Sharon lifted a hand. “I’m in, too.”
She’d been standing off to the side, watching and listening to everything that had been going on. She’d been so small and unassuming I never even really noticed she was there. Sharon had always been that way. She could be standing right beside you and you wouldn’t really notice.
“I don’t think so, baby,” Jack said.
“I want to help,” she said with more force this time. “Sean was my friend, too.”
Jack pressed his lips together, keeping whatever words he wanted to say, inside.
The stakes were getting higher by the minute.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We were trying to formulate a plan when Jack’s phone rang. We all jumped, our nerves on edge. Jack got up and answered it.
“Hello?” He looked at the floor, his eyebrows knitted. “Amanda? Are you okay?” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Where are you?”
Cal and I looked at each other. It sounded like bad news.
“Where are you?” Jack said again. “Stay where you are. I’m coming to get you.” He hung up the phone. “That was Amanda. Finn gave her a beating for leaving with us. She’s at a payphone on Cherry Street.”
I didn’t even think about it. “Let’s go.” I jumped up, heading for the door.
Jack and I went to get Amanda while Cal waited for Will with Patrick and Sharon. I could tell by the way he looked at me, his eyes not leaving mine, that he wanted to come with us. “See you in a few,” he said.
I nodded. “Yeah. Sit tight.”
We didn’t have much time to waste. Cherry Street was much like Jarrett Street, but worse. The people weren’t quite so nice there. A vulnerable woman on her own wouldn’t last long on Cherry Street. If she didn’t get beat up by territorial hookers, chances were she’d be taken by one of the gangs in the area. Or maybe by a predator looking for a free lunch.
When we got to Cherry Street, we drove quickly, scanning the sidewalks for a phone booth. Hookers were catcalling and flashing their stuff at us. I avoided looking at them, trying to focus on finding the phone booth.
We came to an empty one and my chest felt like it had been hit with a brick. “She’s not in there.”
“There’s another one down the road,” Jack said. “She must be in that one.”
We kept going. The street was becoming darker and seedier by the second. On this stretch of the road, the hookers looked like the walking dead. They were bone-skinny and deathly white, their hair like straw and their eyes sunken. Some milled about slowly, talking to themselves and shaking their heads or laughing. Some sat in doorways or on the curbs staring out into space. I doubted they had ten teeth between them. None of them cared what happened to them. They lived for their next fix.
Finally we came to the next phone booth. Amanda sat on the ground with her back against the door. She looked out through a pair of purple, swollen eyes, toward the darkness surrounding the booth. Clearly she’d already had to fight to keep the door to the booth closed, and I doubted that anyone out here actually ever wanted to use the phone.
We pulled up to the curb and Jack kept the engine running as he got out of the car. He looked in at me, his eyes holding my own.
“Stay here. I mean it.”
This was one of the few times I chose not to argue. This was a no man’s land. A land of the walking dead. I didn’t want to stick around for a few live ones to show up.
Jack reached the phone booth and knocked lightly on the door. Amanda started. She’d been watching the darkness so hard that she hadn’t seen him coming. Sometimes that happens. You spend so much energy watching out for monsters you don’t see what’s coming up right behind you.
Her face seemed to relax, though it was hard to tell. Finn had made a mess of it. In addition to the two shiners, she was also sporting two fat lips, both split and bloody. Using the walls of the booth to steady herself, she slowly stood up and opened the door for Jack. He took her gently by the arm and led her to the car.
I glanced around nervously and was alarmed to discover that we’d drawn some attention. Several of the walking dead were shuffling over to the car and a few young men wearing their colors were paying special attention to us.
I was getting more nervous by the second. “Jack! Hurry it up!”
Keeping an eye on our new friends, Jack helped Amanda into the backseat and the sounds of her labored sniffles made me cringe. Her nose was broken. Not a surprise.
Jack climbed in, slamming the door. “Jesus. This place is spooky.” He quickly pulled away from the curb and headed down the street, his eyes darting around in all directions.
“No shit.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Amanda kept repeating.
“Hey, don’t you be sorry,” he said to her. “It’s that sick fuck who did this to you who’s gonna be sorry.”
“I shouldn’t have gone back, but I was so scared.”
“It’s not safe for you there, Amanda. You know that now, right?” I said.
She nodded, her hair falling into her eyes. I wondered how well she could see.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
“All right. I’m gonna get us out of here first, okay?” Jack said. “Place gives me the willies.”
“He’s gonna kill me, so I have to tell you this before he does,” Amanda said, her voice sounding flat.
Her words sent a chill through me.
“Hey,” I said. “He’s not going to kill you. You stay with us and you’ll be fine. We’ll get him before he can hurt you again. First we have to get you to the hospital.”
She let out a strange giggle and shook her head. “It’s not gonna matter what you do. They’ll fix me all up and he’ll come back and kill me. I know it. I’m a walking, dead woman.”
“Stop it!” My voice sharp. “He isn’t going to kill you. Not unless you give up and let him.”
“He isn’t ever going to lay a hand on you again, Amanda.” Jack’s voice was calm and cold. “Believe me. That’s over. He’s over.”
“Look, there’s no time. Listen to me.” Her voice was anxious as she tried to look at us through the swollen slits of her eyes.
“Okay.” Jack glanced in the rearview mirror at her. The desperation in her voice had gotten his attention.
“There’s a way you can get him. And I hope that you do, because he’s a very bad man.�
� She stopped to take a breath and when she lifted her face and opened her mouth, I could see she was missing her front teeth. I shuddered but tried not to show it.
“He’s been stopping women on the highway. He waits until he sees one that he likes and stops them for speeding. He makes them leave their car and come with him, then he takes them some place and…”
Jack and I waited, both our mouths had dropped open. We knew what she was about to say.
“He rapes them in his police car.” Her words dropped off to a whisper.
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
“Jesus,” Jack said. “And the women are too afraid to tell anyone because he’s a State Trooper.”
Amanda nodded. “Tonight he said he could do anything he wants and get away with it. He said if he wanted to kill someone, nobody would ever find out. Then he looked at me, really strangely, and said that maybe he already had.”
“He thinks he’s above the law,” I said.
“He is,” Amanda said. “There are cops who will cover for him no matter what because it’s a boy’s club. They’re not all bad and lots of them wouldn’t want to believe that he’s doing these things. There may be a way.” She reached down her leg and moved her hand under the leg of her jeans into her sock. With a shaky hand, she handed me a small black book.
It looked like a little address book but it had only lined pages, like a journal would. The first several pages were filled with names. I flipped through the pages of names printed in small, block letters. “What is this? His list of girlfriends?”
“No,” Amanda said. “It’s a list of the women he stopped on the highway.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Jack’s voice incredulous. We were in the hospital parking lot and he held the little black book in his large hands. “There’s got to be over a hundred names on the list!”
Amanda nodded. “I didn’t believe him at first. I thought he was just trying to scare me. Now I think it’s true.”
“What changed your mind?” I asked her.
“Because a couple of the names on the list belong to women who’ve gone missing,” she said. “Did you hear about them on the news? One went missing in April. The other in June. Their cars were found on the highway, on the side of the road.”
I nodded, my stomach flip-flopping. “Oh my God.” The implications were chilling. How many hadn’t been reported missing and hadn’t yet been found?
Jack’s jaw was set. “What else do you know?”
“I know he’s got your brother,” she said to me.
I stopped breathing for a moment. “Where?” I wanted to shake her until she told me.
“I don’t know that. I know it’s a shack somewhere. He doesn’t have much time.”
“Where is Finn?” Jack asked her.
“He’s been suspended. He’s out with Woodard somewhere.” Fresh tears sprang from her eyes and she took a shuddering breath. “I know they killed your friend tonight. I think they did it at that same shack. If not, then out in the woods behind it.”
I felt sick. “How do you know this?”
She wiped her eyes with both hands. “I heard them talking. Daniel said he wouldn’t be poking around in anyone’s business again. You’d better hurry and find your brother.”
Images of Finn and Woodard hurting my little brother flooded my mind and I bit my lip to stop myself from screaming. “Fuck. How are we going to do that?”
“Daniel’s in his other car. The BMW. He’s got a tracking system on it in case it ever got stolen. We can find him.”
My heart leapt. “Thank God.”
Jack smiled. “Amanda, you’re a doll.”
She tried to smile back but her lips were too swollen and sore.
“Come on, let’s get you into the hospital,” Jack said.
We helped Amanda out of the car, each of us sliding an arm around her.
“Can you walk?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
Jack kept his voice level. “Finn was hoping you’d come to a bad end on Cherry Street, wasn’t he? That’s why he dumped you off there.”
“Yeah. He said he’d be amazed if I lasted an hour, and that if I made it out of there and he found out, he’d come and kill me.”
“He’s not going to get to you now,” I told her.
“Count on that,” Jack said.
Suddenly, Amanda’s breath seemed to leave her all at once. She sagged forward, her knees buckling.
“Amanda?” I looked down at her, trying to lift her up.
We both held on to her but it was like holding dead weight. We let her down softly. Jack saw it first.
“No!” he yelled. “NO!”
Then I saw it.
The red flower blooming on her chest. She was dead before she’d even touched the ground.
* * *
The cops questioned us. We told them it had been Finn who’d messed up Amanda’s face and that he’d threatened to kill her several times. We told them about him dumping her off on Cherry Street and telling her that if she survived the night he’d find her and kill her. We told them all of that. The problem was they knew Finn. He was a cop. He was one of them. It was like trying to convince a family member that good old grandpa is a pervert who likes touching little kids. They don’t want to hear it.
They’d check it out, they said. There had been a lot of drive-by shootings in the area. It wasn’t exactly a safe place to be. Bad part of town and all that.
I kept the little black book stashed in the pocket of my jacket.
We were on our own.
So we went back to Jack’s to regroup. Will was there. He sat at the table with Callahan, Sharon and Patrick. The three guys sipped from bottles of beer while Sharon sat with her small hands wrapped around an over-sized mug. They were looking toward the door, waiting for Amanda to come through it. When she didn’t, all eyes were on Jack and me.
Cal spoke first. “You couldn’t find her? She wasn’t there?”
“Yeah, she was there. Finn had given her the once over.” Jack paused, looking up at the ceiling and taking a deep breath. “We drove her to the hospital. They shot her in the back as we were helping her across the parking lot.”
Nobody said a word for a long moment. Patrick raked his hands through his white blond hair. Will shook his head, his eyes disbelieving.
Callahan banged his fist on the table. “Those fuckers! They’re gonna die!” he screamed. His face was red and his eyes were wild. I almost took a step back. I’d never seen him lose control.
“Go easy, bud,” Jack said, walking over to Cal and patting his shoulder. “We’ll get him. We need to keep our heads about us.”
“How?” Cal said. “These bastards have gotten away with everything, including murder, and nobody’s been able to stop them. How are we supposed to do it?”
Jack held his hand out to me and I handed him the black book. He dropped it in front of Callahan. “There’s some proof of what Finn’s been doing while he’s playing good old State Trooper Finn on the highway. There’s over a hundred names in that book. He’s raped every one of those women and two of them have gone missing. Their cars were abandoned on the highway. Let’s all take a guess at who was there handing out tickets on those nights?”
“We didn’t feel that placing this book in the hands of the police was wise just yet,” I said.
“Good move,” Will commented.
Suddenly there seemed to be a new energy in the room. A sense of determination that buzzed in the air around us.
I stepped toward the table and stood over them, looking into their anxious faces, wondering what I ever did to deserve such amazing friends. “Before she died, Amanda told us that Finn and Woodard have Jesse at some shack somewhere.”
“So what’s the plan? How are we gonna get him back?” Will said.
Jack told them about the tracking device Finn had on his BMW.
Will nodded. “How are we going to crack the code to activate the tracking devi
ce?”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “And how are we gonna track it?”
“It can be tracked either by phone or by using the Internet. This is where we could have really used Jesse’s skills. He could hack this easily,” I said. “Do any of you know anyone with any hacking abilities? Not just good computer skills. We need a hacker.” I could hear desperation seeping into my voice.
Jack and Patrick looked at Sharon and smiled.
“You said you wanted to help,” Jack said. “You’re on, babe.”
She placed her mug on the table and looked up at me with large, dark eyes. “I can do it.”
Finally. A stroke of good luck. Sometimes when everything seems completely lost, a guardian angel or God, or whatever you believe is out there looking out for you, will smile down on you and hand you exactly what you need at that very moment. These small miracles are few and far between. You want to hope that you won’t need many of them in your lifetime.
As it turns out, Sharon is a closet hacker. The only ones who knew this were those closest to her. Only Jack, Patrick and a few hacker friends knew her by her hacker name, which she didn’t feel comfortable divulging. This was fine by us. We were just happy to have her around.
This little lady was a powerhouse of computer and Internet knowledge. She didn’t explain to us what she was doing and her fingers flew across her keyboard so fast it was impossible for any of us to follow her. Nobody was about to ask her to explain it to us. We didn’t want to distract her and waste time. Also, it seemed private. Like she had an intimate relationship with the computer.
I’d seen Jesse like this many times. I envied his ability to shut everything out except what he was concentrating on at that very moment. Sharon was the same way. The deep focus she had on the computer screen was amazing. It was as if none of us were there in the room with her. As long as she could get the job done, I didn’t care. For the second time that night, I was happy to step back and let somebody else take the wheel.
“Got it,” she said after a few minutes, her voice excited and triumphant.
“Sharon, you rock.” I moved in to see the screen. It was a map of the capital region, and a tiny red dot was pulsating in the right hand corner of the map. She pointed to the dot with a delicate finger. “There, see? They’re in Hudson.”