“That’s romantic,” she said.
“I’m a romantic guy,” he said sourly, and reached around her to open the door.
“Joe.” Dave sounded alarmed. “What do I tell Vince?”
“Tell him I’ll be back.”
With that, Joe opened the door and they stepped out into the night. Nicky paused to bestow a quick pat on Cleo, whose velvety snout snuffling at her hand and arm seemed positively loving now, and then she and Joe slipped out the gate in the corner of the yard, did a wide circle around the crowd out front, and managed to make it to his car unseen. Only when he started the engine and turned on the lights did they attract any notice, but by then it was too late: He was pulling away down the street.
As they slowed down at the stop sign at the corner, a man came jogging out of the shadows toward them, waving at them to wait. For a moment, Nicky felt a frisson of fear, and then she remembered that the nightmare was over: The Lazarus Killer had been caught. This was a cop, she saw, as Joe got near enough so that she could identify the uniform. How safe was that?
“Bill Milton,” Joe identified him to her, and rolled down his window,
“Hey, Chief, can I catch a ride?” Milton was panting with the effort of catching up to them. He leaned in the window, glancing across at Nicky, talking to Joe. “My car’s blocked in back there, and I need to get to the police station. Dave said you’re heading to the Old Taylor Place, and it’s on the way.”
“Hop in,” Joe said.
Milton complied. He was still breathing hard when Joe slowed to a stop at the next intersection.
Then, without any warning at all, he slammed the butt of his gun into the back of Joe’s head. Nicky was still processing the unexpected blur of action and the sharp thunk when Joe slumped against the wheel.
24
NICKY WAS STILL GAPING at Joe, dumbfounded, when Milton grabbed a handful of her hair. The sudden sharp pain made her cry out. Her eyes watered.
“Put the transmission in park,” Milton growled. Her eyes automatically cut toward him. She felt the cold nudge of a gun against her neck and froze. With Joe limp and, presumably, no longer putting weight on the brakes, the cruiser was just beginning to roll forward.
“Put the transmission in park,” Milton screamed.
Nicky complied. The cruiser jolted to a halt.
Then something slammed hard into the back of her head and she knew no more.
A JOLT OF some kind of icy liquid in the face brought Joe instantly around. He blinked, coughed, and opened his eyes.
Milton was standing over him with an empty Mc-Donald’s large-sized drink cup in his hand. The contents, presumably not water because of the sweet smell and sticky feel, were running down Joe’s face and neck and wetting the collar of his white dress shirt. Sprite, he thought, tasting the citrusy tang on his tongue.
He could live with that. Or, he thought, as the situation he was in became clearer, maybe not.
“What the hell?” he said to Milton in amazement as an abortive movement brought him the unwelcome news that his hands were cuffed behind his back. He was, he discovered, lying on his side on a hard, cold floor. It felt like old stone, uneven and slightly damp. He was in some kind of weird room, a basement maybe, with a wet earthen smell and uneven walls. As far as he could tell, there were no windows, and the only light came from a camp lantern dangling from a hook in the ceiling. His jacket was missing, along with, he discovered with a quick downward glance, the Glock from his shoulder holster. A yellow-and-green bungee cord was wrapped tightly around his ankles, which explained the weird tingling he was starting to become aware of in his feet.
He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but he was sure about this: It was definitely not a good thing.
“You want I should just go ahead and waste him?” Milton said over his shoulder.
“Nah. Let’s see if he won’t tell me where my money is first. I bet he will if we ask him real nice.”
Joe knew the speaker was Vince even before the mayor stepped into the light. As Joe goggled at him, his brain had already processed the fact that this was major bad news.
“What the hell?” he said, to Vince this time.
Vince was looming over him, his shadow falling across Joe’s body and the floor. Joe registered that he was dressed in the same coat-and-tie rig that he’d been wearing all day. The only difference was that now Vince was holding a gun in his hand. His arm was down at his side and the gun was pointed at the floor, but it was unmistakably there.
One more bad sign.
“I want my money, Joe,” Vince said.
Joe took a breath and tried to make sense of the whole situation. It made no sense at all—except for the fact that if he didn’t get out of it, he was probably going to die.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” His words carried the ring of truth because, hey, they were true.
“My five hundred thousand dollars,” Vince explained patiently. “That you ripped off from that drug deal where you got shot. I want it back.”
Joe stared at him. Something was definitely awry here.
“Wait,” he said. “You were involved with that drug deal?”
“I was buying that coke, me and my organization, to bring down here and distribute. It was my money. It got confiscated, of course, along with the coke, when the bust went down. Only problem is, I found out from some of my people later that only four million, five hundred thousand dollars was logged in by the feds. What happened to the other half mill? I asked myself. Then I asked around. And the word came back: Right before the bust went down, a vice cop named Joe Franconi put the shakedown on my guys for ten percent of the pie. The four and a half million’s gone, and I accept that as the price of doing business. But that half million you took? Uh-uh. No way. I fucking want it back.”
Vince’s voice hardened at the end. Joe, busy absorbing a whole bunch of information that was new to him, simply stared at him for a moment. Vince—Vince?— had been the money guy on that deal? Of course, the word on the street had been that the drugs were slated for the South.
And Vince was a businessman, pure and simple. He lived for making money. Fixer-upper housing, hotel complexes, drugs: They were all the same in that they were moneymakers. And where there was money to be made, there was corruption. Joe’s eyes widened fractionally as it belatedly occurred to him that one of his own officers, Bill Milton, was apparently working for Vince. A dirty cop. And if there was one, there would be more. Vince, as a former vice cop himself, would know all about dirty cops.
Joe’s heart began to beat faster.
“I never took your money.” Joe said each word slowly and distinctly. He kept his gaze fixed on Vince, and at the same time tried to use his peripheral vision to assess his surroundings. He couldn’t quite work out where he was, but he had little doubt that it was somewhere on Pawleys Island. Pawleys Island, as he saw quite clearly now, had become Vince’s little fiefdom.
“I’m gonna refresh your memory one more time,” Vince said, and reached into his pocket. “This look familiar?”
When Vince withdrew his hand, there was something in it. He leaned over Joe, holding the object out. It was, Joe saw, a silver cigarette lighter. Joe’s eyes began to widen. . . .
“See the engraving?” Vince pointed with a stubby forefinger to the script carved into the lighter’s side. “It don’t say Mickey Mouse.”
In fact, it said “To Joe Franconi with love from Holly Alden.” Despite the iffy lighting, which made the inscription almost impossible to read, he knew, because it was his lighter, a gift from a former girlfriend.
“Just so we got things clear between us,” Vince said, “I’m gonna tell you that you dropped it when you shook my boys down, and it eventually got handed back to me. So why don’t you make this easy on both of us and quit with the bullshit? Tell me where my money is.”
The last time he had seen the lighter was when it was being tossed up and down in Brian’s hand the day before
the bust went down. Suddenly, a lightbulb went on in Joe’s head and everything, everything, fell into place. That was why Brian had sold him out to Martinez: to cover up the fact that Brian, probably with the use of Joe’s badge and ID, had shaken down Martinez’s business partners for half a million dollars. If things had worked out the way Brian had intended, by the time Martinez found out about the shakedown, Joe, the supposed perpetrator, would have been dead.
Offed by Martinez for being a fed.
And Brian would have been half a million dollars richer, with no one the wiser.
You son of a bitch, Joe said internally to Brian, not without a certain amount of admiration for the sheer ingenuity of the plan. It was simple, and almost brilliant—except for the fact that it had gotten Brian killed, and it looked like Joe was going to be next.
“Vince.” Having by now fully internalized the fact that he was in a shitload of trouble here, Joe got busy, mentally reviewing and discarding various options for dealing with the situation. “I never shook your guys down, I never took your half a million, I never did any of that. You got some bad information from somebody. The guy that did it was named Brian Sawyer. He must have convinced your guys he was me.”
Vince looked at him. Joe could see the tightening of the other man’s face, the slight flexing of the shoulders and the hands, including the one holding the gun, and accepted the fact that Vince was now his enemy and, equally important, firmly set on the course he had embarked on. Even if Joe managed to persuade Vince that he was telling the truth about not taking his money—and it was the truth—he was still going to die.
Unless he could manage to do something to prevent it.
“I brought you down here to the island so I could watch you,” Vince said. “Didn’t it ever occur to you that with your reputation, you should never have been able to get a job with another police department as long as you lived? You thought some old friends were pulling strings for you, didn’t you?” He laughed. “You don’t got friends that good, let me tell you. It was me wanting you that brought you here. I thought you’d go for the money sooner or later, and then we’d know where it was, and I would get it back. But you’ve been smart about that, I have to give you credit. Haven’t touched a dime of it so far as I’ve been able to tell.”
“That’s because I don’t have it. I’m telling you, you’ve got the wrong guy.”
“What I didn’t know at the time was that you were working for the DEA,” Vince said, and Joe barely managed to stop himself from grimacing. Having Vince aware of that was not a positive thing. Drug dealers hated honest cops. They hated and feared the DEA. “Had I known it, I would have done things different, like had you whacked back in Jersey. But here you are, and here I am, and now I got no choice but to deal with the situation like it is.”
Vince turned, making a sharp beckoning motion to somebody in the shadows. Joe took advantage of Vince’s moment of inattention to slide his fingers down inside the right back pocket of his pants. If he was lucky . . .
He was. The last time he’d seen his handcuffs, they’d been on Sid Levin’s wrists. But the key was there in his pocket. Joe had just touched it when Milton and George Locke—Et tu, George, he thought bitterly—lugged something out of the shadows and dumped it on the floor in the middle of the circle of light.
Nicky, eyes closed, limp as a bag of garbage, hands bound behind her back, bungee cord around her ankles, duct tape covering her mouth.
Joe broke out in a cold sweat.
SOMETHING WET and freezing cold smacked her in the face, and Nicky woke up slowly, a little groggily but enough to be aware that her head hurt and her arms ached—oh, wait, that was because they were tied behind her back. Also, her feet were asleep—ah, her ankles were bound—and there was something—duct tape?—over her mouth.
“She’s got nothing to do with this,” she heard Joe say in a sharp, hard tone. “This is between you and me. Let her go.”
That made her open her eyes. Her face was wet, she realized, with little rivulets of liquid dripping from it onto the floor. She was cold, shivering even. The room seemed to heave for a moment as if she were lying on the deck of a ship on the high seas instead of a mildewysmelling floor, but then her vision settled down enough that she could see that she was in some kind of old cellar or basement or something with a low ceiling, curving walls, and weird lighting. Joe was lying on his side on the floor about six feet in front of her, facing her, looking at her, his face tight with worry, his eyes dark with it. She gave him a little instinctive smile, because she was glad to see him even under the circumstances, or, as she thought about it, especially under the circumstances. Then she realized that she couldn’t smile because of the duct tape and grimaced instead, which didn’t work, either. Then she followed Joe’s gaze up to discover the mayor and a couple cops, Milton and one she didn’t immediately recognize, standing over her, all focused on Joe. The mayor was holding a gun, and the cop who wasn’t Milton—Locke, she thought his name was; he’d followed her around a time or two and she’d thought he was a nice guy—had a pocketknife in his hand. An open pocketknife with a shining silver blade.
It wasn’t a very big knife, but it was big enough to make her skin crawl. She was starting to develop a real phobia of knives.
The mayor snorted. “The hell it doesn’t have anything to do with her. She’s been poking her nose into stuff that doesn’t concern her, stirring things up, getting all kinds of people back in Jersey upset because she and her friends just can’t leave things alone. Business is up and things are going good and everything’s quiet, and that’s how we want it to stay. Little Miss Reporter here is making people nervous with the questions she’s been asking. Now that she’s found the trail, you think she’s just going to let it rest? Particularly if you disappear. She’ll be asking questions all over the place. Nobody wants that. Not good for business.”
“If she disappears, people will ask all kinds of questions.” Joe’s voice was faintly hoarse. He sounded afraid, and the idea that Joe was afraid scared Nicky worse than anything else. “Maybe nobody much will look for me, but her—you’re making a mistake with her. She’s got family, friends, a whole damned TV audience of probably millions who will be looking for her.”
“They won’t have to look for her.” The mayor gave Joe a smug-looking grin. “They’ll find her. And you, too. Tomorrow, maybe, or in a couple of days. See, lots of people—probably even some reporters—saw you two leave your house together in your cruiser, which is what gave me the idea to do it tonight. Carpe diem, right? At this moment, that cruiser is sinking to the bottom of Salt Marsh Creek. You two had a tragic accident, ran right off the road, and drowned before you could get out of the car. Your bodies were washed away, and when they turn up, you’ll be so decomposed, nobody will know for sure what the hell happened to you.”
Nicky realized that the thudding sound she heard was the hammering of her heart.
“It won’t work,” Joe said. But she could tell from his tone that he thought it might. His face was hard and set, paler than she had ever seen it. He was almost on his back now, looking up at the mayor out of narrowed eyes.
“Oh, yeah,” the mayor said with cool confidence. “It will. In fact, it couldn’t have played out any better. I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to do this since Miss Reporter here started stirring the pot up in Jersey. Then tonight you gave it to me on a platter. With all the excitement because the Lazarus Killer’s been caught, you two will be just a tragic footnote to a bigger story. ‘Police chief and reporter killed in accident after unmasking killer.’ I can almost see the headlines.” He poked Nicky in the back with his foot. “Sounds like your kind of story, doesn’t it?”
Nicky flinched instinctively, and as she did, her eyes fell on something small and pink and sparkling wedged in a crack in the floor. A woman’s ring . . . It was so out of place that it made her frown, and then she realized that she was frowning because it niggled something deep in the recesses of her memory.
Without warning, the mayor reached down and ripped the duct tape from her mouth. The force of it yanked her head inches off the floor. The sudden sharp pain made her cry out. Joe started cursing, and made an abortive movement that was instantly stilled as the mayor pointed his gun at him.
“Goddamn you, Vince, if you hurt her . . .” Joe’s voice was thick and guttural with anger.
“That’s gonna be up to you.” He looked at Locke and held out his hand, and the cop put the pocketknife in it. Apparently, this was a common enough practice with them that it didn’t require words. Then, knife in hand, Vince shoved his gun around his back somewhere out of sight and knelt by Nicky’s side.
She sucked in air. Her gaze shot to Joe. She could see sweat beading on his upper lip now. He was as helpless as she was. Her stomach twisted, cramped.
And still that ring sparkled, sparkled, worming itself into her mind. . . .
“See, here’s how it’s going to go down,” Vince said to Joe. “I’m going to start cutting her face, and I’m going to keep cutting her face until either she has no face left or you tell me what I want to know.”
“Look here,” Nicky began desperately, forcing the words out through her dry, cramped throat, not sure where she was going with it but not about to just lie there in silence while she was carved up like a Thanks-giving turkey. “If all this is over just half a million dollars, maybe I can—”
Then she broke off as the memory of where she had seen that ring before struck her like a two-by-four over the head. In the picture of Lauren Schultz that was clipped to the front of her file, the teen was wearing that ring. She had just gotten it the day she disappeared, as a birthday gift from her parents.
Lauren Schultz’s ring, Tara Mitchell’s face cut to ribbons, Tara Mitchell’s father murdered the year after she had been . . .
“Oh my God,” Nicky gasped as she looked up at Vince. “You killed those girls. You killed Tara Mitchell, and Lauren Schultz, and Becky Iverson.”
Superstition Page 44