“Pee-pee!” Rickie yowled.
“Hush,” Laura told him. “It’s not polite to be so loud.”
Montana pulled up the van to a stop in the parking lot of a convenience store east of Keene, New Hampshire. The day was bright and clear, but bitterly cold. Laura and Rickie got out and went into the store.
Montana narrowed his eyes against the glare of sunlight on the snowdrifts. He decided that while Laura took Rickie to the rest room, he would try to put a call through to Conlee.
He dialed the number and waited. Conlee didn’t immediately answer. Montana cast a worried glance at the rearview mirror.
Trace looked more sluggish than before. He’d started coughing, and he showed no interest in his jar of pennies, the plastic lizards, or the marbles.
At breakfast, the kid had hardly eaten, and he’d spent the last fifteen minutes in the van dozing uneasily, sometimes mumbling in his sleep. What was wrong with him?
Hellfire, Montana thought, his teeth clenched. Stallings had been sick right before he’d been shot at Valley Hope. Had his goddamn germs lived on?
A distant receiver lifted, and a man’s voice said, “Yes? Isaac Conlee here.”
“Conlee, this is Montana. The boys are safe.”
“Montana, where are you? What in hell are you doing?”
“I called to say the kids are fine,” Montana answered. “I’ll keep you informed, that’s all I can do.”
“Montana, what you’re doing is illegal. Burton Fletcher could press kidnapping charges against you. That’s a federal offense, a life sentence.”
“I won’t bring them in until it’s safe,” Montana said flatly.
“And what if you decide it never is? Are you going to stay on the run for the rest of your life?”
“If I have to,” Montana said. “Tell me how Fletcher is. Make it quick.”
“In a semicoma still,” Conlee said. “When he talks, he makes no sense. But he seems to think his wife’s still alive.”
Montana had no time to waste on sympathy “What’s the word on the Zordani case?”
“Listen carefully, Montana. There’s important news on Zordani. The rumor’s true. Dennis Deeds hired the hit. We’ve got a snitch. The Cartel is clean. One of Deeds’s flunkies hired some loose-cannon Colombians, told them who to hit. Zordani’d been after Deeds, and Scarlotti started the bad blood between them.”
Montana listened, his face stony, as Conlee told him the story of Deeds, Scarlotti, the pier, the kidnapping, and the ransom.
“So you’re not up against the whole Cartel,” Conlee finished. “It’s just three, maybe four guys. Come in.”
“No,” Montana said contemptuously. “How did three or four guys without connections find out we were going to Valley Hope? The Cartel’s got to be mixed up in this.”
“I’m telling you this is contained. They had an extremely well-placed leak, that’s all. We’ll find it. We’ll find them. We’ll lock them up. It’ll be over.”
“It’s a long way from over,” Montana challenged. “Whatever leak they’ve got, it’s a killer. Have you swept the task force for bugs?”
Conlee gave a sigh of angry resignation. “We’ve swept this whole building four times. No bugs.”
Montana didn’t buy it. “A good bug isn’t found easy.”
“We’ve got CIA technicians coming in for a fifth sweep. If they don’t find it, it isn’t here.”
“What about that list?” Montana pressed. “I asked you for a list. Of everybody who knew we were going to Valley Hope. Do you have it?”
“I’ve got it,” Conlee said. “And it’s short. Who knew where you were going? And when? Only seven of our people. You, Jefferson, Stallings, and Becker. Me. Bitcon and Forstetter.”
“Who are Bitcon and Forstetter?”
“Bitcon is full-time task force. He set up the deal with Valley Hope. Forstetter is NYPD. A task force investigator on the Zordani case. He was told because he was going to replace Stallings. Stallings was coming down with something.”
“Somebody’s dirty,” Montana said. “Somebody talked.”
“Nobody we can find, Montana. The bureau’s run checks on everybody on the list, including me. They’ve run checks on the checks, and then checked those. Nobody’s got a bank account in the Bahamas or a Rolls-Royce parked in his garage.”
“Look,” Montana said, his patience worn thin, “if it isn’t one of them, it’s somebody else. Somebody knew. The Colombians didn’t just have a mystical vision of where we’d be—”
“The leak could have come from Valley Hope,” Conlee countered. “We’re checking. We’re getting to the bottom of this.”
“Yeah, sure,” Montana said.
“Montana, where’s Jefferson? Have you got him with you or not?”
“Not,” Montana lied. “Why would I drag him along? I haven’t got enough problems?”
“Then where the hell is he?”
“I left him in good hands.”
“Why haven’t we heard from him? Why’s he not coming in?”
“Ask him, not me,” said Montana.
“The FBI wants a federal warrant on you. I can’t stall them forever.”
“If they put a warrant on us while you’ve got the leak, you’re playing right into the hands of the Colombians.”
Conlee was silent a moment. “All right, Montana. You’ve been warned. If you’re smart, you’ll come in now.”
Montana made no reply.
“Now,” Conlee repeated, and he hung up.
Montana hung up and turned to Jefferson, but he was asleep again, his lungs rasping with each breath.
Outside Laura was ushering Rickie toward the van. Her vivid auburn hair fluttered in the breeze, and cold had brightened her cheeks.
She looked up at him and made a gesture that asked, Can I keep him outside a while? Let him play?
He nodded. The parking lot was deserted except for them. Few cars traveled the highway.
Laura raced him back and forth across the parking lot until she was out of breath. Then she stood with her hands in the pockets of the white fur jacket, watching Rickie. The kid began to spin himself around at the edge of the parking lot, his lips moving a mile a minute. Montana rolled down the window an inch to hear him.
“A hundred bottles of beer on the wall,” Rickie sang loudly, twirling in unsteady circles.
“A hundred bottles of beer,
“If one of those bottles should happen to fall—”
Beside Montana, Jefferson coughed in his sleep. Montana reached over and touched Jefferson’s forehead. It was burning hot. From the backseat, Trace, too, coughed. Stallings was dead, but his virus went marching on.
A dismal feeling swept through Montana. He drew his hand back and stared out the window again at Laura standing so straight in the cold, her long hair rippling.
“Ninety-five bottles of beer on the wall,” Rickie sang. He looked up at the sky with a rapt, absent smile.
“If one of those bottles should happen to fall—”
Happen to fall, Montana thought darkly. He watched the little boy, and the line echoed in his mind. Happen to fall. Happen to fall.
Whenever Jorge Hepfinger came to New York, he stayed at the Plaza in a suite that overlooked Central Park.
Estrada sat on an ivory-colored velvet love seat, watching Hepfinger with ill-disguised impatience.
Hepfinger was hunched over a white-and-gilt desk, writing with painstaking precision in a leather-bound notebook. He was almost psychotically meticulous.
A sleek portable computer rested on the desk, plugged into the data port. Beside it a portable fax machine hummed, ready for action, its green light shining.
Hepfinger had asked Estrada to drop by because, he said, he wanted to show him some intriguing data.
But since Estrada’s arrival, Hepfinger had told him nothing. He seemed rudely absorbed only in penning his notes. He reminded Estrada of a roly-poly maggot, greedily burrowing into his mound of dead facts, lost
to all else.
“What have you learned?” Estrada asked at last. “Do you have something to show me? Or not?”
Hepfinger, startled from his reverie, straightened and turned to Estrada with a benign smile. “It’s like a chess game. One gets wrapped up in the strategy.”
“This isn’t a chess game. It’s a hunt,” Estrada said with an edge in his voice. “Speed is imperative. It’s best if the law never finds those children.”
Hepfinger folded his hands over his stomach. “As the Americans would say,” he observed cheerfully, “the law is doing a piss-poor job.”
“You can do better?”
He had given Hepfinger all the information that had come into his hands. Estrada had two excellent informants within the task force. They were quiet, unremarkable-seeming people who handled remarkable information, and they smuggled it out with boldness and ingenuity. But what good had it done?
“If only you hadn’t lost your primary source,” Hepfinger said sympathetically. “Valley Hope was unfortunate. Your baby gunmen hit all the wrong targets.”
Estrada didn’t need to be reminded. “We used them because we wanted to keep the crime tied to Dennis Deeds. It was a strategic decision.”
Hepfinger shook his head as if to say, It was a poor decision, a disastrous decision. But his utterance was placating and mild. “We won’t cry over spilt milk.”
“The law thinks they’ve gone to Philadelphia,” Estrada said.
“Correction.” Hepfinger held up four pudgy, well-manicured fingers. “The law thinks four went to Philadelphia. Montana, Laura Stoner, the twins. And that the black man’s been left behind.”
Estrada narrowed his eyes. “You disagree?”
Hepfinger chuckled.
On Monday afternoon, someone using Jefferson’s credit card had bought four one-way tickets on a red-eye flight to Philadelphia.
The tickets had been picked up and boarding passes issued; the airline computers confirmed this, but not if anyone had actually used the seats. Flight attendants were being tracked down, but so far, their memories were hazy. The flight hadn’t been crowded. Neither empty seats nor full ones had been conspicuous.
Hepfinger rose and paced to the room’s mahogany minibar. He opened it and took out a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate with almonds. “A snack?” he asked Estrada hospitably.
Estrada shook his head, his mood dark. “I have men poised and waiting in Philadelphia. A word from me and they move. But are you saying they’re not in Philadelphia?”
Hepfinger began neatly peeling the gold foil from his bar. “The trail’s too clear. Therefore, it’s false.”
Estrada challenged him. “You can’t know that.”
“One never leaves a trail,” Hepfinger said, his mouth full, “unless it’s the wrong one.”
“They were desperate,” Estrada said. “They had no choice.”
Hepfinger shrugged good-naturedly. “They had dozens of choices. Why, for instance, leave New York?”
“The black man,” Estrada said. “Is he in New Jersey? He told his ex-wife he was in New Jersey.”
“Perhaps. But if I were going to hide a black man, what better place than Harlem?”
“You think he’s in Harlem?”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly he’s anywhere,” Estrada said. “Possibly he’s dead. This is all speculation, nothing more. I need facts.”
Hepfinger walked to the desk and tapped a stack of folders. “It’s one thing to procure information. It’s another to evaluate it. One has to ask the right questions.”
Estrada knew Hepfinger’s reputation well, but he was finding the man insufferable. Irritation sharpened his voice. “What are the right questions?”
Hepfinger sucked an almond clean of chocolate, withdrew it from his mouth, and set it carefully in a crystal ashtray.
He said, “The obvious questions are, ‘Where is Montana? Where does he have the woman, the twins?’ Trails go a certain way, but they lead to nothing.”
“Yes?” prompted Estrada.
“Attention should be paid to the key question. Where is the black man?”
Estrada frowned. Jefferson hardly mattered. Jefferson was beside the point.
Hepfinger smiled his bland, maddening smile. “Jefferson was wounded—badly. It’s certain he needed medical attention. The Bronco’s owner said he was bleeding ‘like a stuck pig’—a colorful phrase, if vulgar. But I digress.”
You certainly the fuck do, thought Estrada.
Hepfinger took another large bite of his candy bar. “They had to get help for Jefferson. But from whom?”
“The law’s asked that question,” Estrada said. “The law’s done background checks. I’ve given you the information. It’s all there.” He pointed to the folders.
Hepfinger waggled his hand, a gesture that said Maybe yes, maybe tip.
The FBI was interviewing friends, relatives, neighbors, and fellow workers of Montana, Jefferson, and Laura Stoner. The bureau was running checks and double checks on any medical personnel the three had in their pasts. The job was time-consuming, tedious, and far from complete.
“Ahh,” sighed Hepfinger, “who treated the black man? It’s like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack.”
“Why’s it matter? It’s Montana, Stoner, and the twins I need.”
“Bear with me,” Hepfinger said, cocking his head almost coquettishly. “First, this person who treated the black man has shown loyalty. He—or she—has reported nothing. Second, for all we know, Montana, the woman, and your twins may still be with him. Third, if they’ve moved on, they’d need money, transportation, a safe destination. Their host may have provided any or all of these.”
Estrada nodded, somewhat mollified.
“And if they’ve moved on,” Hepfinger continued, “this is the crucial question: Was Jefferson left behind? Or is he still with them?”
Estrada said, “Why would Montana take him? A wounded man would only slow him down. And one so conspicuous? A giant—and black into the bargain?”
“Because he may have plans for him,” Hepfinger said.
“Plans? What kind?”
“That,” Hepfinger said with obvious satisfaction, “is my point. He would need him for only one reason.”
“And that is what?” Estrada asked in exasperation.
Hepfinger sucked another almond clean and set it aside. “He intends to split up the twins. The black man will go with the woman and one boy, to protect them. Montana will take the other.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Estrada protested. “The black’s still wounded. He’s good for nothing.”
“Wounds heal,” said Hepfinger.
“They take time to heal.”
“Time,” Hepfinger said, his blue eyes twinkling. “Suppose this Montana is doing just that, taking his time? That means he’s doing things carefully. He’s been underground before. He’s not an amateur.”
“The five of them together? It’s insane,” scoffed Estrada. “Impossible.”
Hepfinger ate the last of his candy bar, then licked its crumbs clean from his fingertips. “Then where is the black man? Whoever he’s with may be able to tell us something crucial about Montana’s modus operandi.”
Estrada shook his head unhappily. Sifting through the list of medical connections was proving a daunting job even for the FBI.
The problem wasn’t a lack of leads, but too many of them. Laura Stoner had lived in New York for four years and her work had brought her into contact with doctors, nurses, therapists. Jefferson’s ex-wife and ex-girlfriend were both RN’s. Montana, through family and friends, could be linked to a dozen nurses and doctors.
In addition, vice work had taught Montana in nasty detail about the medical world’s slimy underbelly. There was, for instance, an MD named Falk who’d lost his license, but practiced without it. Montana knew of him, of two more just like him, and of a score of men and women who were far worse.
Hepfinger opened the fol
der that held the lists of medical people being questioned.
He said, “The pattern of the FBI’s investigation concentrates on Montana’s underworld contacts. And one of them, Falk, used Jefferson’s credit card to go to the Bahamas. The FBI’s looking for him. But I think they’re wrong. I don’t think Montana went to a criminal.”
“Why would he drag innocent people into the situation?” Estrada objected. “It doesn’t fit him. The police say as much. It’s not his style.”
“Who would you trust if you were in mortal danger?” Hepfinger asked smugly. “A criminal? Or a friend? And if you were in danger, would you do the expected? Or the unexpected?”
He picked up a sheaf of papers from the folder and handed it to Estrada. “These are the medical contacts the three had in a sixty-mile radius of Valley Hope. They couldn’t have traveled much farther with a man that badly wounded. Even if the FBI has questioned these people, question them again. The answer may lie here.”
Estrada scanned the list, which was penned in Hepfinger’s flawless handwriting. Fifty-three names were divided into three columns, according to whom they were linked.
Laura Stoner Thomas J. Jefferson Michael M. Montana
Ira Klein, M.D. Danella Miller, R.N. Lynda Trentino, R.N.
Sally Butz, R.N. Shelanna Cowpry, R.N. Ed Rosen, Paramedic
Marcus Whitt, D.D.S. Quentin DePew, M.D. Cosette Kent, L.P.N.
J.L. Brainard, M.D. Lola Hoch, R.N. LeRee Smiley, R.N.
G. Lazenbee, L.P.N. Lana Hoch, R.N. S.K. Munk, Paramedic
DeLana Brown, R.N. Casswell Depp, M.D. Marcia Galli, L.P.N.
Treena Valdez, D.O. Lea Mayberry, R.N. Ferris Wong, M.D.
Copley, D.O. U.S. McCall, D.D.S. Wm. F. Ponti, M.D.
Alice Zamchow, R.N. Fiona Lords, R.N. R.J. Epp, Paramedic
Jon Redmond, L.P.N. I.I. Washington, M.D. Forrest Serb, D.V.M.
R.M. Fleet, D.M.D. Candy Zangwell, R.N. Caitlin Moss, R.N.
Kara Gold, M.D. Tisha White, L.P.N. Nan Rogers, L.P.N.
Bessy Janeway, R.N. Mary Ferarri, L.P.N.
K.O. Jefferson, D.V.M. Marco DeMario, M.D.
W.B. Linway, D.C. Lucian Martino, D.D.S.
Juan L. Perez, M.D.
Estrada turned the page and began scanning data on the names. His expression was bleak. “My God,” he said, “some of these people are fucking veterinarians.”
See How They Run Page 18