Saving Jason

by Michael Sears

  A black Lincoln pulled to the curb just ahead of us. An unremarkable sight in lower Manhattan. We kept walking. All four doors opened at the same time and four young men in sweatshirts and ball caps got out. I saw them but took no notice. Then they were standing on the pavement blocking our way. I stopped. Aimee looked up and then at me.

  “Are you Jason Stafford?” one of them said in a deep voice. He towered over me.

  “Who? My name is Howard Johnson,” I answered quickly.

  “That’s him,” said a short, pinch-faced man holding up a copy of the Post.

  A minivan pulled up to the curb in back of the Lincoln and the side door slid open. Two more men jumped out.

  “Get in,” the man with the newspaper said. “Hurry up, we’re all getting wet out here.”

  “What about her?” the first man asked. He was wearing a black Syracuse sweatshirt with orange lettering. He had the kind of forehead you rarely see outside of the Museum of Natural History. If he had gone to Syracuse, it must have been for rugby.

  Another one of the group spoke at the same time I responded. “Let her go.” For the briefest moment, I had hope that I could keep her out of what was to come. He had a mousy ponytail sticking out from underneath his cap.

  “Screw that, she saw us,” the first man said.

  The man with the paper was obviously in charge. He made his decision. “Bring her.”

  Aimee moved first. I don’t believe I had ever seen anyone move as fast, outside of a Jason Bourne movie. She swiveled on one foot, thrusting a raised elbow up behind her. It connected with the face of one of the young thugs and he went down like a dropped sandbag. Her off foot came up and, with a kick that Mia Hamm would have envied, landed in the groin of the guy with the newspaper. Two down. She stabbed at another man’s face with the open umbrella. He backed up quickly.

  The other three men had been as frozen in surprise as I was. We all moved at once. Two of them grabbed Aimee from behind, inadvertently getting in each other’s way. I leapt into the fray, snatching at the ponytail with one hand while swinging a roundhouse punch that never connected. The Syracuse man, who seemed to have the mass of a small planet, stepped up and tapped me on the temple with a leather-covered sap. I sank to my knees. I wasn’t knocked out, but I was no longer even a bit player in the fracas.

  Aimee landed on the pavement in front of me with two men on top of her. She was wriggling madly, but they each had an arm and were lying across her legs.

  “Kill the bitch,” the newspaper guy yelled in a gasping rasp.

  “No,” I mumbled while trying to get my arms and legs to obey any of the simple basic commands I was sending their way.

  “I got this,” the man with the sap said. He leaned over and tapped her. She stopped wriggling.

  They scooped us up and tossed us in the back of the minivan. Someone laid me across the bench seat and sat on my back while another wrapped my hands and ankles with duct tape. When he was done, he slapped another piece over my eyes. I fought the urge, but my brain decided that it was time for a reboot. I went away for a while.

  31

  Aimee was staring down at me. She was alive. So was I.

  “How’re you doing?” she asked.

  “My head hurts.”

  “Welcome to my world.”

  “Where are we?” I said.

  “No idea. I was starting to think you weren’t going to wake up.”

  I rolled up to a sitting position. The room started spinning and my headache got a lot worse.

  “Please don’t vomit,” she said.

  We were in a room. The walls and ceiling were covered in sheet metal. The floor was linoleum. Aimee was sitting on a folding chair. On the floor beside her was a battery-powered camp lantern that seemed to be already halfway through its cycle, the light adequate to see our surroundings—and each other—but not enough to read by.

  “I’m not going to throw up,” I said, though there was more hope than faith in the statement.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  I held my watch up to the lantern. “Is that right? I’ve been out for hours.”

  “I don’t know. What time is it? They took my phone.”

  “It’s after three.” I checked my pocket. “Mine, too.” Heather and the Kid would be at the neurologist’s for the Kid’s monthly checkup.

  “So who are those guys?” she said.

  “Give me a minute.”

  There was only one chair and she was sitting in it. I crawled over and sat with my back propped up against the wall. The room returned to a more stable condition. It was then that I noticed the balled-up wad of duct tape in the corner.

  “They left us untied?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head in both negation and amusement. “I took your tape off after I got rid of mine. I was worried about your circulation. Your hands were turning blue.”

  I looked at them in the dim light. They both appeared to be fine. “Thank you.” I felt my brow and around my eyes. Still tacky, but no other residual issues. “How’d you get untied?”

  Instead of answering, she stood up and clasped her hands behind her back. Then, slowly sitting, she folded her body back through her arms and brought her wrists up to her mouth. She mouthed biting.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Lots of yoga,” she said.

  “I was also impressed by your moves when they surrounded us. That’s not yoga.”

  “No. Muay Thai. Twelve years. But I’m not so proud of myself. It didn’t work, and it could have gotten us killed.”

  I had a feeling that getting killed was still a strong possibility, but I kept it to myself. “Still. One against six.”

  “I reacted. If I’d been smart, I would have just turned and ran. My training got in the way. Are you going to tell me who those guys are?”

  The claustrophobia that had first descended upon me during my two years’ stay as a guest of the federal government began to kick in. The walls were closer. Every time I blinked, the room got darker and smaller.

  “Just give me a goddamn minute,” I said, though it came out in a low growl that spoke more than the words.

  “I liked you better unconscious.”

  There wasn’t much to say to that. I pushed upright, using the wall for support, and forced myself to look at our surroundings. The walls were no longer advancing. They were behaving just like walls—only covered in metal.

  “Have you noticed? Our voices echo, but there’s no outside noise. It’s like a recording studio in here.”

  “You don’t cover the walls of a recording studio in metal sheets.”

  “No. And usually the door has a knob.” I had worked my way around to the far end of the room, where there was a door in the middle of the wall. Where a knob would have been, there was just a hole. I bent over and looked in. Or out. It didn’t matter, there was nothing to see. No light. Nothing.

  An idea began to take shape. “Hey,” I said. “Look under that chair. Is there a plug? Or a drain of some kind?”

  She stood up and moved the chair. Mounted in the floor was something that looked very much like a shower drain.

  “How’d you know?”

  “I think I’ve figured it out.” The words L.I. ICE and a logo of a giant ice cube bracketed by two smiling penguins came to mind. “This isn’t a room. We’re in the back of an ice delivery truck. And I’m willing to bet I know where it’s parked.”

  She looked around the space. “An ice truck? All right, I’ll buy that. But how do you know where it’s parked?”

  “Are you wearing heels?”

  She looked at me as though I had spoken in Farsi, but she turned her leg so that the lantern light fell more directly on her shoe. She was wearing black pumps with a solid, sensible two-inch heel.

  “Damn,” I said.

  “What?
”

  “Sorry. I need a six-inch spike. If this is an ice truck, the door release is through that hole. You run a screwdriver or an ice pick through there and it opens the door from the outside.”

  “And me without my ice pick,” she said.

  “Or even a hatpin.”

  “You’re about three generations too late for that, I’m afraid.”

  I tried pushing the door. It was as unyielding as the wall around it.

  “Don’t you carry a pen?” she asked.

  I laughed. “A pen? I’m not as old as I look.” I walked the perimeter, banging my forearm against the wall at random points, hoping for a hollow response. All I got were sharp echoes.

  Aimee waited until I got back to my starting point by the door. “So when are you going to tell me who these guys are and what they want with us?”

  I tried the door one more time.

  “They left us a light,” I said.

  “And two water bottles.” She pointed to the far corner where two twenty-ounce bottles of Dasani rested against the wall. “Which means they’re coming back. But I don’t know whether that’s good news or bad. What do you think?”

  “Why were you following me?” I said.

  “You don’t believe in coincidence, do you?”

  “Not since about second grade.”

  “Who the hell are those guys?” She was close to yelling.

  I turned to her reluctantly. I still had a ton of questions, but it was time to share with her the few answers I had stumbled upon. “This may take a while.”

  I told her about the microstocks, the one-hundred-year leases on the trucks and the garage, the chop shop, and even the bison. I told her everything. Well, not everything. At least not right away. I put off the part about the financial advisor getting killed until I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I’d like to think that I was protecting her from the worst news, but I knew better. I was having trouble facing it myself.

  32

  There’s too much of it that I just don’t buy into, Stafford. Why kill the FA when there’s nothing for the feds to hang on Becker?”

  “Parking,” I said. “That’s conspiracy. RICO. Right?”

  “Let me list the problems. First, who murders over a reporting violation? That’s nuts. Next. Intent. It’s not parking if the financial advisor believed that his clients were taking legitimate risk. You’d have to prove that there was a prearranged timing and price where the clients were ‘guaranteed’ a profit. And, you’d have to prove that our broker knew about the arrangement before it would impact the firm.”

  “They killed a man. He was set to testify and they murdered him.”

  “You don’t know that. We know he was killed. You have no idea why, though. Maybe his wife hired the hit man. Or the daughter did. What you have is an ugly coincidence. That’s all.”

  “Blackmore believes he’s on to something. He must have more information that he’s not showing.”

  “I told you when you first came to me with this, I looked into it. There is no case.”

  “So why is Virgil in jail?”

  “Because Blackmore is a grandstanding politician, not a prosecutor. Virgil will be out on bail by tomorrow morning. He might already be out. Blackmore doesn’t need to actually convict him of anything. He’s already got what he wanted. His name in lights as being tough on Wall Street crime.”

  “And next year he can run for mayor on that,” I said.

  “Eventually, Virgil’s lawyer will get the case thrown out and he can go back and pick up the pieces of whatever’s left.”

  “There won’t be much. If he hasn’t lost the firm already, he will have in six months. The press will make sure he never comes back.”

  “And what happens to us?” I said.

  She shrugged. “We’re back to my original question. Who are these guys? And what have they got against you?”

  I picked up the water bottles and handed her one. “If they wanted to kill us, they’d have done it already. They gave us water and light. You have to think they want us alive, if not comfortable.”

  “I think you’re whistling past the cemetery. We’ve been abducted, Stafford. Kidnapped.”

  There wasn’t much to say.

  We turned out the light before the battery went dead. Sitting in the dark kept my claustrophobia in check. It also meant we didn’t have to stare at the despair in each other’s faces.

  Aimee stayed on the chair and I laid down, blocking the door. If our captors returned, I’d be the first to know. Time passed. Hours, but we disagreed as to how many. It would have been simple enough to turn the lantern back on, but we both felt it was better to preserve what few resources we had. The dark seemed less oppressive knowing that we could dispel it at any time with the flick of a switch.

  My head still hurt and I felt drowsy. Concussion or depression? Either way, the brain was shutting down, refusing to examine my predicament because there were no happy endings. No lucky breaks. When the door opened behind me, we were going to be killed.

  Only, when the door opened, I rolled out and down a flight of steps, banging into two or three sets of legs on the way down. Three male voices were all yelling at me and at one another. I rolled down the last step and up onto my feet. I ran.

  I ran right into the arms of a fourth man. It was the big man with the sap. He took me by one arm and began to reach into his pocket.

  “Oh, no,” I yelled. “I’m sorry. It was an accident.” I dropped to my knees. “Please don’t hit me again.”

  “Get up.” He helped by pulling straight up on the arm in his grip. I got up.

  “Get him in here,” someone said, and I found myself propelled on windmilling feet up the steps and back inside the truck. My few seconds of freedom had cost me a severe pain in my shoulder, but I had learned that my deduction had been correct. The lights were dim in the huge garage—the big banks of fluorescents had not been turned on—but I had seen enough anyway. And we were being held captive in an L.I. Ice truck with the two stupidly grinning penguins on the side. The faint smell of long-gone horse closed the deal.

  The inside of the truck felt uncomfortably crowded. My claustrophobia began to creep back, with the walls developing a liquid look as though they had morphed from solid planes to mere surfaces through which I could fall, and like Alice, fall forever. I sank down and sat on the floor. It helped a little.

  Aimee had not moved from the chair. The lantern had been tossed in a corner. The light coming in through the door was all we had. It wasn’t much, but I could see the four men, who now stood over us. There was the little nasty guy who had identified me from the Post; his big friend from the Stone Age with the big S on his chest; a slightly older man—mid-thirties, I guessed—with flat, expressionless eyes, wearing a suit and tie and sporting the kind of pompadour you might see in a road company revival of Grease; and the impeccably dressed, good-looking man whom I had first seen with Jim Nealis—and last saw arguing with the Mouse.

  33

  What is she doing here?” The little man was no longer in charge. The speaker was the guy I’d seen with Nealis. His accent made it come out “doon he-ah” and the way he said “she” made it sound like a slur.

  “She was with him,” the weasel said in an aggrieved whine. “What were we supposed to do?”

  The young boss turned to the man with the pompadour and rolled his eyes. They were surrounded by screwups.

  He turned to Aimee. “What were you doing with him?”

  “How are you, Mr. Scott? Jason, I want you to meet Joseph Scott of the C-3 branch. I think you were looking for him earlier today.”

  “I asked you something. What were you doing with him?”

  She looked up at him with half-closed eyes. It was a languid and satiated look. “None of your business. It’s personal.”

  “Get out. You expect me to
believe you were on your way to a nooner with this old guy? Not a chance.”

  If there was any chance that Aimee could pull this off, we might just get out alive.

  “What do you know about it? Your idea of a hot affair is a tube of KY warming gel and your laptop.” She turned to me. “He’s been warned about watching porn at his workstation.”

  Stone Age man thought this to be very funny. So did the little weasel. Scott smiled, but he wasn’t amused. The other guy could have been a monument to Stoicism.

  “No more BS, lady. You two are working together. What’s he been telling you?”

  “Usually he just tells me he likes to do me from behind, but I like being on top—so we compromise. And, like I said, it’s really none of your business. Can I go home now?”

  “I assume you two have met before,” I said.

  “Shut up, Stafford. I’ll get to you.”

  “I told you we looked at his trades,” Aimee said to me. “He was clean.”

  “How can he be clean?” I asked. “I told you what this place is. There’s got to be forty or fifty trucks hidden here.”

  That got a reaction, but not the one I expected. Scott laughed. “‘Hidden’? What’s hidden? It’s a garage.” Then it hit him. “And how the hell do you know what’s outside?” He turned on the three musclemen to see who had screwed up. They looked as surprised as he was.

  “And the chop shop,” I said.

  They looked even more bewildered.

  “I saw it all a week ago.”

  The weasel spoke. “That was you? You was the asshole who got chased over the fence?”

  The hard-eyed man looked at him. “What’s this?”

  “Last week. Like he said. We were out here feeding the herd when out of nowhere some idiot in a suit goes running off across the field and got the animals all stirred up. That’s when that young bull got the fence burn.”

  Scott broke in. “What the hell were you doing out here?”

  “Investigating penny stock trading. I found this place by searching documents. I saw the chop shop.”