“Looks that way.”
“Thirty hours, Jake.”
He knew what I meant. Anybody who has ever worked in law enforcement knows that if an abduction victim isn’t found within seventy-two hours, the odds jump against the person ever being found alive. And Kerry had been missing more than forty hours now.
“More than that, maybe,” he said.
“But not a lot more.”
“Where do you want to start?”
“With Fechaya,” I said. “Where else?”
15
PETE BALFOUR
He had plans now. Oh, baby, did he have plans now!
Felt real fine when he got up Wednesday morning, no hangover even though he’d put away pretty near a fifth of Jack Daniel’s yesterday and last night. Slept like a baby. Rarin’ to go, full of piss and vinegar, blood and fire.
Fed Bruno, thought about feeding the woman again, but why bother, just be a waste of time now that he knew what he was gonna do with her, and left the house at seven. Stopped off at the Green Valley Café for a quick breakfast and just grinned and shrugged when fat-ass Jolene threw her mayor look at him. Nothing and nobody could get his goat today or ever again. Then he drove straight to the fairgrounds, got there just as Eladio was opening up the storage unit. The Mex seemed surprised to see him, but he knew better than to say anything. Thing was, meeting the deadline was important now—keep Tarboe and Donaldson off his back. Ought to be able to get all the major repairs done on time if he worked Eladio and the half-wit and himself bitch-hard for ten or eleven hours today and part of tomorrow, until it was time to run his errand in Stockton, then promise them double overtime pay to finish up.
He’d be tired as hell the next couple of days, but not too tired to take care of business. No siree, not with what he had brewing.
Luke Penny’d helped give him the first plan yesterday afternoon. He’d pulled into the Shell station for gas on his way back from Freedom Lanes, and Penny come out of the garage and wandered over, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. Pete Balfour wasn’t the only ugly dude in the valley—Luke was no prize, either, and the slather of grease across his chin hadn’t helped his looks none.
“Hell of a thing about Alice Verriker.”
“Yeah. Hell of a thing.”
“Guess you ain’t the sorriest person around, though. Huh, Pete?”
As mean as he’d felt then, he’d of liked to punch the greasy bastard’s lights out. Or tell him to go fuck himself, like he had that faggot Tarboe. But going off on Tarboe had been a mistake—he’d realized it sitting there in the Freedom bar with Verriker’s voice pounding away inside his head. He couldn’t afford to call any more attention to himself, not if he didn’t want people getting suspicious of him when he finally fixed Verriker.
So he’d swallowed his rage and said, “Me and Ned had our differences, but that don’t mean I’m not sorry for his losses. I feel real sorry for him, you want to know the truth. Real sorry.”
“Sure you do.”
“The truth, Luke. Some of the guys in the Buckhorn last night, they started a collection to help pay for Alice’s funeral and I kicked in more’n my share. Plenty more’n my share.”
Penny didn’t look like he believed it. But then he shrugged and said, “Well, Ned can use the help, that’s for sure.”
“Might want to kick in a few bucks yourself.”
“I’ll do that. Tonight, after work.”
“What I heard, Ned spent the night with the Ramseys, but they don’t have enough room to let him stay on there. Jolene, over at the café, said Jim Jensen might fix him up at his place.”
“That’s old news,” Penny said. “Jensen offered, but Ned said no thanks.”
“That right? How come?”
“Don’t care to be a burden to anybody. He’s pretty tore up, just wants to be alone for a while. So Frank’s brother’s letting him stay in his cabin up at Eagle Rock Lake until he pulls himself together.”
Oh, man, he’d near whooped when he heard that. “Might be best at that. When’s he moving up there?”
“Later today sometime. Joe Ramsey’s going up with him, get him settled.”
Once Balfour was out of the station, he’d smacked the steering wheel and let out the whoop he’d been holding back. That cabin up on the lake … fishing cabin, sat by its lonesome on the east shore. He’d never been there, never been invited, oh hell no not him, but he knew where it was and how to get to it. Verriker and Stivic and Ramsey and some of the others had batted their gums often enough about what a perfect getaway place it was.
Yeah, perfect. They’d never know how perfect.
By the time he got home, he knew just what he was gonna do. Thinking about it made him feel real good for a while. Good enough to let the woman out there in the shed have some food and water. The look on her face when he’d plunked the dog dishes down in front of her and told her to slurp it up the way Bruno did … worth a chuckle all the way back to the house.
But then Mayor Donaldson called up, and for a while he wasn’t feeling good anymore. Just for a while.
Where had he been all day? Why had his cell phone been out of service? Then the miserable old fart started in on him for insulting Tarboe and walking off the job. Said his behavior was inexcusable, said he had a foul mouth and a poor work ethic and no community spirit, whatever the fuck that meant. Said if he didn’t have the fairgrounds work completed by midnight on the third, he wouldn’t be paid the rest of the money due him on the county contract, and he might well have his construction license revoked for malfeasance, besides. Malfeasance. Jesus! Threatened him and ragged on him for three or four minutes until he was furious enough to slam the phone down, hard enough to bust the bugger’s eardrum.
Ramsey and Stivic and the rest of them wanted an asshole mayor, well, they already had one. You couldn’t find a bigger asshole politician in the county than Fred Donaldson. Matter of fact, they didn’t have to go looking for another valley to collect assholes in, because they had this one right here. Donaldson, Tarboe, every one of ’em who got a kick out of making Pete Balfour’s life miserable, they were the real assholes, not him, and they’d taken over and turned the whole valley and everybody else in it brown. Green Valley wasn’t Green Valley anymore, it was Asshole Valley.
Pretty soon the poison had started eating away at him again, and his hate was as big and hot as ever. He’d poured himself a double Jack and followed it quick with another, trying to take himself down from a boil to a simmer. But what the whiskey did, it made everything real clear in his mind, and he’d seen what he should of seen a lot sooner. Seen it clear as looking through a pane of new glass.
Killing Verriker would be sweet, but it wouldn’t change anything. Not one damn thing. The rest would go right on calling him mayor, pretending he was the one with “A for Asshole” tattooed on his forehead. Making a fool out of him, persecuting him, never giving him a minute’s peace.
Well, he wasn’t gonna let that happen. Wouldn’t let them drive him out, neither, with his tail between his legs like a whipped dog. He’d had as much as he could take. It was payback time again.
And that was when the second plan come to him.
Real quick, too, as if it’d been percolating in the back of his mind all along. Well, maybe it had been. Maybe it was what he’d been heading toward from that first night in the Buckhorn, when Verriker and the rest of them turned his life into a living hell.
Seemed pretty far out at first. And scared him some because it was Payback with a capital P, the kind that’d have every cop in the country after him. If he went ahead with it, how was he gonna save his ass afterward? But then the answer to that part of it come to him, too, how he could get away clean, and just where he’d go. The more he thought about it, the less scared and the more excited he got. They hadn’t shown him any mercy, why should he show them any? And the timing … oh, man, the timing couldn’t be more perfect.
So then he’d put in a call to Rosnikov’s legit business n
umber in Stockton. The Russian was there, late as it was, and when Balfour told him what he wanted, not in so many words because you had to be careful on the phone, Rosnikov said he could supply the package by Thursday night, and quoted a whorehouse price. Real cool, that Russian, like they were talking about apples and oranges. Didn’t even ask what he wanted it for. Not that that was any surprise. Rosnikov didn’t care what you did with the black market stuff he sold.
That cemented it for Balfour. He had the cash, with plenty enough left over. He had the time and the place all worked out. He was gonna do it, and no backing out at the last minute. Once his mind was made up, it stayed made up.
Oh, he was gonna raise some hell, all right.
Pure, sweet hell.
16
KERRY
Enough daylight filtered in to let her know it was morning. She’d been awake for some time, lying in the darkness, thinking about Bill out there somewhere, doing everything humanly possible to find her. Faith in him was all she had to hold onto now. There just didn’t seem to be any way for her to get out of here on her own, not that she wasn’t going to keep looking for one. Never give up, never give in. She kept repeating the words to herself, a kind of self-hynoptic chant to maintain calm.
For a long time she waited, expecting Balfour to show up again, praying he wouldn’t. And he didn’t. Outside, the dog barked a couple of times, but they were meaningless sounds. Then she heard the distant noise of an automobile engine starting up. Balfour’s pickup truck? Must be: the engine noise increased once, twice, the way it did when you goosed the throttle.
Kerry waited a while longer, then threw off the filthy canvas and crawled over to the door, used the knob to lift her cramped body upright so she could switch on the lights. The first things she saw when her eyes adjusted were the two dog dishes next to the bench. Disgust tightened her throat again; the memory of the greasy stew made her stomach churn. What an inhuman piece of garbage Pete Balfour was. Stick your face in the bowls and slurp it right up. She’d have done that, too, if she’d still been bound, just like a dog. Humiliating enough scooping up the stew with her fingers, all but wiping the dirty dish clean. It had taken an effort of will not to drink all the water, to save about a third. She’d need it today to stave off the dehydrating effects of the heat.
If she lived through today. If Bill didn’t find her, or she didn’t find a way out of here herself before Balfour came back and did whatever he was planning to do to her …
Fear thoughts again. Don’t!
She paced her prison for a time, working some of the painful stiffness out of her legs. Did a series of aerobic exercises to loosen the cramped muscles in the rest of her body. All the while, listening and hearing nothing from outside. Then she went back to the door, bent to peer at the lock.
Bill had taught her some things about locks, even showed her once how to use a set of lock picks. Could this lock be picked? It looked to be a simple deadbolt, not new, with no interior locking lever; you’d need a key to open it from either side. The key slot was small, too small to see through, but if you had the right tools—slender pieces of metal a few inches long—you might be able to manipulate the tumblers and spring the bolt.
Metal. Nails, a coat hanger, even a couple of large paper clips. Was there anything like that in here?
The handles on the gallon cans of paint … they were fairly thin, one of them might work. But that hope died quickly. The handles were firmly attached, and she didn’t have the strength to twist off even one end, nor any kind of tool to pry it loose.
She investigated the cartons next. Emptied each one, shuffling through the contents. Nothing.
The TV set. She moved over to examine it both front and back. Plastic case, inset controls, its electrical cord taped to the back panel. She had no idea what was inside one of these older models other than a picture tube. Dump it on the floor, break it open on the chance there might be some piece she could use? Not until she’d looked everywhere else, and maybe not even then. If she couldn’t get the door open, couldn’t get away, Balfour would see the wreckage when he came back and know she had gotten loose and she’d have lost her one last desperate chance.
She pulled the spread canvas into the middle of the floor and folded it together, then got down on all fours and crawled along the walls and the row of storage lockers, felt along the locked cabinets beneath the bench. No loose nails that had been dropped and forgotten; there wasn’t even a driven nail anywhere that hadn’t been hammered flush to the wood.
On her feet again. The ice chest? The latch handles and plates were tightly fitted. The door opened easily enough, but all it revealed was a smooth-walled emptiness.
The armchair? She felt the brass studs, found one that wiggled a little; she managed to work it free. Damn! Too short. What about the underside, the springs? She tilted the chair up from the back, over onto its arms. Torn cloth covered the inner parts. She ripped it all the way off, coughing from the dust that plumed into her face. Springs, yes, but they were thick, coiled together … useless.
An involuntary sound vibrated in her throat, half grunt, half growl. Her hate for Balfour flared hot again; he hadn’t only treated her like an animal, made her eat like an animal, now he had her sounding like one.
She started to pull the chair back into its upright position. Stopped when her eye caught and held on the edge of the frame where what was left of the cloth hung in tatters. The cloth had been fastened with tacks—thin, square-shaped, and two-pronged, the heads about half an inch wide and the thickness of a large paper clip. How long were the points that had been driven into the wood? If both were the same length as the head, that would make each an inch and a half when straightened out. Long enough and sturdy enough?
Kerry dumped the chair forward again, yanked and twisted at the remaining tatters. None of the tacks pulled out, but two were no longer flush against the wood. She tried wiggling one of them free, succeeded only in tearing a fingernail. What she needed was something to pry it loose. Yes, but what?
There wasn’t anything. She’d been over every inch of this hellhole … no tools of any kind, nothing, nothing.
The dust in the hot, stale air brought on another coughing attack. She stepped away from the chair, went to lean against the bench until the fit passed. Her mouth was like a wasteland again … a little of the water that was left? Just a sip. The temperature in here would be sauna hot by midday, whenever midday was; she’d need fluid more then.
She pushed away from the bench, leaned down to where the dog dishes were—and she was looking straight at the TV set.
The electrical cord, the two-pronged plug!
Kerry almost kicked over the water dish in her haste to get to the television. She dragged the TV around, tore off the tape holding the cord to the casing. Half a dozen yanks on the cord convinced her that she couldn’t disconnect it, and there was nothing she could use to pry open the back of the cabinet. The only way she could make use of the plug was to carry the set over to the upended chair.
Bulky, difficult to wrap her arms around so she could take firm handholds. She maneuvered it to the edge of the bench, slid one hand underneath, the other around to grip a back corner, set her feet, and eased it off against her chest. The set’s weight buckled her knees and she almost dropped it. Then when she turned, she nearly tripped over the dangling cord. She managed to hold on, her fingers slipping on the smooth plastic casing, just long enough to stagger to within a few feet of the chair. Thrust her body into a low, forward arch just in time: the TV was only a foot above the floor when it fell.
Even so, the crash on impact seemed as loud as a gunshot. Immediately, the dog began barking outside. Between yaps, Kerry heard the animal come running toward the shed, but she couldn’t tell how close it came to the door. She stood still, catching her breath as quietly as she could, until the barking subsided. Whirring sound then: the pit bull’s leash ring sliding over the ground cable. Moving away again.
Part of the cord was
caught under the television; she pulled it free, saw with relief that the plug had escaped damage. So had the TV itself, except for a crack on one corner of the casing. She sank to her knees in front of it, worked it over close to the back of the chair, trying to make as little noise as possible. Still, the dog’s acute hearing set off another round of barking. But it didn’t last long this time, only until she had the set close enough so that it no longer scraped on the rough floor—close enough to reach the tacks with the plug.
The prongs were too wide and too thick to slip beneath tack and wood; she had to use the edge of one prong to work each tack up from the corners. When the first one finally came free, she saw that the spike ends weren’t quite as long as she’d hoped. The metal was fairly malleable; she was able to pry the ends apart. Good. With the help of the prongs, she straightened the tack out. If she could twist two of them together to make a longer, sturdier probe …
She tried it as soon as she had a second tack loose, again with the aid of the plug. It could be managed, another slow task hampered by arthritic cramping in her fingers, but when she had the two tacks wound together, the piece didn’t look or feel tensile enough to manipulate the lock tumblers and snap the deadbolt. She’d have to twist a third tack onto these two, and even then, it might not do the job. There were four more in the chair, enough to make two probes.
It would take time to pry them up, time to fit them together, time to work with them on the lock. Time, enemy time. She prayed as she worked that Balfour wouldn’t show up before she was finished, before she could at least try to get herself out of here.
17
Donald Fechaya was not the man we were after. We knew that five minutes after we found our way to 1600 Old Mountain Road.
The address was an old farmstead, not too well kept up. Green clapboard house, its near sidewall and part of the roof repaired with unpainted sheets of plywood. Vegetable garden, fenced in with chicken wire on one side, and a tumbledown henhouse on the other; a row of fruit trees and a small, dry-looking cornfield at the rear. Chickens and a fat red rooster pecked and clucked among the weeds and dirt in the front yard.
Hellbox (Nameless Detective) Page 12