Lia was humming on her way to the car, a silly ditty she’d made up about Julia. She carried a box full of supplies she no longer needed for this project. The hours of painting cleared her mind and she didn’t have to worry about getting to Scholastic during rush hour. She shook her head, enjoying the way her hair swished around her shoulders after being confined by a hair pick all day. A free evening lay before her, a treat, like a hot fudge sundae. Maybe she’d toss the dogs in the car, run up to Putz’s Creamy Whip. A hot fudge sundae for her and baby dishes of soft serve for the furred ones.
She balanced the box under one arm while she pulled her keychain out of her pocket. This dislodged the hair pick she’d stuffed there. It fell onto the pavement.
“Damn.” She set the box on top of her car and knelt down, fishing the pointed dowel out from under her car. Her body still ached from the tumble it had taken during her abduction and she groaned as she pushed herself up off the asphalt. She unlocked her ancient Volvo, leaving the keys in the lock as she slid the box of paint into the back seat. When she stood up, she felt a knife against her throat.
“Don’t move. We have your keys and your pepper spray. We’re all going to take a little drive.” Lia recognized the voice of the van driver. The smart one.
“What do you want?” Her throat, tight with fear, could barely push the words out.
“Shut up and get in the car, or I’ll give you a dose of your own medicine.”
Lia’s mind raced. It was suicide to get into a vehicle with an assailant, but how could she duck two assailants with the knife against her throat? What could she do? If she dropped away from the knife, could she get away before they maced her? If they maced her, they’d toss her into the car and she’d be even worse off than she was now. She froze while she considered possibilities.
He gave the knife a quick jab under her chin, just enough to nick her. “In. Now!”
She obeyed.
~
Eric watched in disbelief as two men forced Lia into the back seat of her car. What should he do? Call 911? They’d be gone before the police could arrive. For one insane second it occurred to him that his troubles might be over if he just let them go.
He gunned his engine and, tires squealing, rammed into the rear quarter-panel of the Volvo.
~
Lia heard tires squealing. The crash sent her Volvo rocking violently. Abruptly, the knife vanished from her neck. She twisted around and recognized Fredo from the police line-up, grinning at her with her mace aimed in her face.
“Feel lucky?” he asked, smirking.
She shied away, looked out the back window. Lonzo had his gun pointed at the driver of the other car. He pulled the trigger and hopped back in next to Lia. Fredo jumped the curb onto the grass and drove out onto Belmont Avenue, the car limping from the misaligned rear wheel.
“Yeah!” Fredo yelled, pumping his fist.
“Shut up,” Lonzo said.
The shot slammed Eric against the car seat. He bounced and slumped forward, waiting for the shot that would blow his head apart. It didn’t come. Lia’s car struggled over the grounds in a drunken path. He stared stupidly at his bloody shirt, struggling to stay conscious, struggling to think past the burning in his chest.
Phone.
He dragged it out of his pocket, stabbed 9-1-1 with a bloody finger.
“What’s your emergency?” The operator said.
“Armed carjackers,” he wheezed, “took a woman . . . Lia Anderson . . . Black Volvo 240 . . . license plate VZP-795 . . . heading east on Belmont . . . towards Hamilton.”
“Sir, are you all right?”
“They shot me.”
He passed out.
Hinkle caught the call and tore up Hamilton Avenue, lights flashing and siren wailing, hunting for Lia’s Volvo.
The ambulance pulled into the Belmont Convalescent Care Center parking lot, waved on by a crowd of people at the other end. The crowd parted to make room for the ambulance. Eric lay on the pavement where one off-duty nurse was compressing his wound with a pad made out of her sweater and the other gave him CPR. They had bloody grocery bags wrapped around their hands, an emergency version of universal precautions.
* * *
The EMTs took over, popping him onto a stretcher and into the back of the ambulance.
A patrol car pulled up and two officers got out. One began moving people away from the crime scene, the other approached the EMTs.
The EMT in the back of the ambulance shook his head. “We’re doing our best, but I think we’re gonna lose him.”
“Shit, it’s hell getting a statement out of a dead man,” said one of the officers as the ambulance launched its siren and drove off. “Let’s look at the car, see if we can figure out what’s what.”
“Excuse me, officer.” It was one of the nurses. She had removed the contaminated bags from her hands and turned them inside out to contain the blood.
“There’s something you should see. When we found him, his phone was on. He was following someone on GPS. We thought it might be important.”
“Thanks, we’ll check it out.”
The bloody iPhone lay on the passenger seat. Officer Thurston pulled on a pair of neoprene gloves, picked up the phone and hit the wake-up button. The GPS tracking app was still running. A red dot sat less than a mile away on the map, past the end of Belmont Avenue.
“What do you think it means?” he asked his partner.
“Turn right, Fredo. Can’t you go any faster?”
“Relax. We’re almost there.”
Lia felt the prick of the knife under her chin as her car ran over a bump on the narrow, wooded lane. Shit, shit, shit. LaBoiteaux Woods. Not good.
“You got the necklace. What do you need me for?” Lia demanded.
Lonzo pressed the knife a little harder. “We just spent the night in jail because of you, bitch. We figure you owe us. Now shut up.”
“You won’t get away with this.”
Lonzo grabbed her hair and twisted with his free hand, making her cry out. He laughed.
“We will if you don’t testify. And we’re going to give you a taste of what will happen to you if you don’t tell the police you made a mistake.”
Sirens screamed in the distance.
“What do you think, Lonzo?”
“Can’t be for us. It's too soon.”
The sirens trailed off. The little bit of hope that had budded in Lia’s heart died. If they were looking for her, they were headed the wrong way.
Fredo stopped in front of a saw-horse barricade at the end of the lane. A sign posted on the barrier read “Closed for repair.”
Damn.
Fredo left the motor running and moved the barrier aside. He got back in and turned into the parking lot for the LaBoiteaux Nature Center, a rustic one story building that Lia knew was filled with ancient stuffed examples of local wildlife. She thought, absurdly, of a moth-eaten raccoon she’d seen there as a child. It had given her nightmares.
The parking lot was empty. Lia’s last hope, that there would be maintenance men on the premises, fled as Fredo drove over the weeds growing through the cracked asphalt. He parked in front of the building. The same snarling raccoon sat in the window. An owl with spread wings stared through the blinds.
“End of the line, sugar,” Lonzo announced cheerfully as he dragged her out of the back seat by her hair. “Hands where I can see them. Make me a happy man and maybe I won’t cut you up so much.”
“What about me?” Fredo whined. “She’s gotta make me happy, too. Can I have her before you cut her? I don’t want to mess up my shirt.”
More sirens, this time growing louder.
“Shit, Fredo, why didn’t you put the barrier back? Quick, in the woods.”
They dragged Lia into the trees as the first patrol car blew into the parking lot, slew around and screeched to a halt broadside to the building, red and blue lights flashing silently on the roof.
“Take her,” Lonzo said, thrusting Lia
at Fredo. She stumbled as he grabbed her arm, twisted it up behind her back and forced her behind a large tree.
“What are you going to do, Lonzo?”
“I’m going to give these cops something to think about.” He pulled his gun out of his waistband and waited for the first head to appear.
The doors on Lia’s Volvo hung open. Hinkle stared at the abandoned car, at the woods, and thanked God that he always wore his kevlar, and that the gun shot victim had been tracking Lia. He wondered if he’d ever learn why someone had Lia on GPS. Detectives rarely shared such details with street cops. Two more patrol cars screamed up, followed by a third, forming a line across the parking lot.
Hinkle got out, staying low behind his car and duckwalked to the next patrol car.
“What do you think?” he asked Thurston. “They can’t be too far ahead, but which way?”
“Hundreds of acres out here. We might need a chopper and dogs.”
“Maybe we can get him to show himself,” Thurston’s partner, Williams, said. He grabbed a bullhorn out of the truck. “This is the police. We know you’re in there. Come out with your hands up.”
A bullet blew out the light bar on Thurston’s car.
“Not so far ahead, then,” Hinkle said.
A patrolman approached Peter and Brent in the Vasari living room. “We’ve got a situation. Carjacker pinned down at LaBoiteax Nature Center, trading fire. They have a hostage. Her name is Lia Anderson. They say you needed to know.”
Peter looked at Brent. Brent shrugged, tossed him the keys to his Audi. As Peter bolted out the door, Brent called, “Don’t you get bullet holes in my car, dammit!”
* * *
Peter flipped on the grill lights on Brent’s Audi and hit the siren. LaBoiteaux Woods was a straight shot up Hamilton Avenue from Ludlow. He cursed the need to pass through the Northside business district. It would cost time he couldn’t spare. He blew past District Five, down the inclined viaduct towards Knowlton’s Corner. He barely slowed at the five-way intersection, zipped into the oncoming lane to pass the line of vehicles stopped at the light, and played chicken with cars that had nowhere to go on the two-lane thoroughfare.
Peter listened to radio chatter as the the business district ended and the road widened, past Millionaires Corner and up the hill. The stand-off continued at the LaBoiteaux parking lot. So far, they only knew they had one unidentified gunman taking cover in the woods behind Lia’s car. Peter bet it was the Vasari cousins. That no one had seen Lia and the other carjacker worried him.
Just below the top of the hill, he turned off his siren and pulled into the LaBoiteaux Apartments. The apartments backed up to the west side of the woods, a few hundred yards from the nature center. There had to be a path from the apartments to the trails behind the nature center. If there wasn’t one, he would make one.
Peter took precious seconds to grab Brent’s kevlar vest out of the trunk and pull up a map of the LaBoiteaux Woods trails on his phone. He pulled to the south end of the parking lot behind the apartments and jogged across an open field featuring an abandoned tennis court. On the far side, he searched for a break in the woods to indicate a path.
He heard gunfire.
Lia counted the shots. Five, so far. How many shots did Lonzo’s gun hold? She wished she knew more about firearms. Peter once told her that newer pistols could easily hold 15 rounds, but you could get magazines that would hold 50. Lonzo was grinning. He couldn’t be running low.
The chorus line of officers behind the wall of patrol cars held their fire, though they had their guns out and pointed in Lonzo’s general direction, arms and pistol butts resting on the roofs of their cars.
Lonzo kept them pinned down. Every so often, an officer would attempt to sneak out from behind the cars and Lonzo would shoot, like he was attempting to pick off duck silhouettes at the county fair. This could go on for hours.
Fredo pressed against Lia’s back, holding her against a tree, bark biting into her cheek, her shoulder screaming from the way her arm was twisted behind her. Her cheek was clammy from him breathing on it. She thought he still held her kubotan in his other hand.
But his attention was drawn into the tense stand-off and his grip on her wrist had eased. There had to be something she could do while he was distracted. If only she still had her kubotan. She’d like to give them a stiff shot and - Shot! How could she have forgotten? Her kubotan only held three shots of pepper spray, and she had forgotten to load a replacement cartridge.
It was empty.
Fredo was still stronger than she was. She mentally inventoried her pockets. So many things could be used as weapons. If she could find a substitute for her kubotan, she might have a chance. Then she remembered her hair pick, a five-inch, pointed wood dowel. She’d originally bought dozens to tool copper foil with school children. She’d shoved it in her hip pocket after she picked it up off the asphalt earlier.
Could she sneak her free hand back and pull it out? He was standing so close, maybe he couldn’t see with her twisted arm in the way. If she could keep the rest of her body still enough, maybe he wouldn’t notice.
She considered stomping on his instep to make him step back, then discarded the idea. No leverage from her position. It would only make him mad, and it wouldn’t give her enough time to dig out the pick and ready herself for an attack.
London fired off another shot. Fredo whooped and bounced against her. She used his movement as cover to position her free arm closer to her pocket and proceeded to inch her hand back, mindful of the narrow gap between their bodies.
The tips of her fingers slid into her hip pocket. She felt around until the tip of the hair pick was positioned between her index and middle fingers and slowly began working it out of the pocket.
“What’s with the squirming, hot stuff?” Fredo breathed into her ear. “I think you like me on you.” He gave her pinned shoulder a bump for emphasis.
Her shoulder screamed as he applied pressure to the twisted joint.
Pick now firmly in hand, she jabbed the make-shift weapon into his outer thigh, hoping to hit the nerve located there.
“Bitch!”
Fredo’s leg contracted in pain and he lost his balance. He windmilled and fell as Lia stumbled away. He remembered the pepper spray, hit the plunger. Nothing happened. Lia got her legs under her and ran hard towards the rear of the nature center, away from Lonzo and his gun.
“What the hell is going on?” Lonzo yelled.
“Bitch stabbed me.”
“Get her back!”
Lia raced out of the trees, behind the building, across the rear lawn to the trailheads, veering onto the first path she saw. Down the trail, heart pumping, adrenaline pouring through her veins as she heard feet thudding on the trail behind her, as she pushed harder and harder. The trail dropped away in a series of steps. She tripped, but kept running and somehow regained her balance.
What to do? Climb a tree? No suitable trees around. Duck into the woods? She’d make too much noise, he’d find her. If she could round a curve in the trail, maybe she could duck behind a tree, but she’d need a better lead and bigger trees. Fear spurred her on.
The feet were closer. She didn’t dare look back.
The pain of a sudden stitch stabbed Lia in the side. She stumbled and Fredo was on her, sending her to the ground.
She screamed.
“How about it?” He panted, grabbing her hair, twisting, pulling her head up as he straddled her back. “We’re all alone here. This could be fun.”
Winded and furious, Lia realized she was still holding the pick. She jabbed at his thigh. He caught her wrist and laughed, a derisive grunt. With a quick twist he had her hand open and she felt the pick fall away. She struggled and bucked against him as he pinioned her wrists over her head.
“Honey, you’re more fun than the mechanical bull at Bobby Mackey’s. Now lay still for a moment, or I’ll have to beat the shit out of you. You can buck later, I promise.”
“No way in H
ell, asshole,” Lia spat out. She yanked her elbows down, attempting to pull her hands away. Fredo held fast.
He wrapped one large, knobby hand around her neck, squeezing her larynx, the tips of his fingers drilling into her skin. He leaned over and drawled into her ear.
“As long as you’re still warm, I don’t really care if you’re dead or not.”
Lia stilled.
Peter stood in the woods fifty feet from the nature center, working out his best move. The shooter, likely Lonzo, was on the far side of the building. There was a large, grassy expanse behind the center. He could work his way through the trees around the open yard and come up from behind, get the drop on Lonzo, but that would take longer than he liked. Every second increased Lia’s danger. He could hug the back of the building, but he might be seen. Fredo could be anywhere. He decided to risk it. He unsnapped his holster.
Lia screamed behind him.
Peter pounded down the trail hugging the west side of the park, searching for the cross trail linking it with the others. He scanned the woods for signs as he ran. If he missed the turn-off, it could cost Lia her life. Shit, Dourson, you’re always a day late and a dollar short when Lia runs into trouble. If you don’t make it this time, you won’t be able to live with it.
He found the cross trail, followed it to the first fork, turned back towards the nature center. The trail forked again. Which way, which way? He strained his ears to hear over the thundering of his heart. Last time, both options were wrong. He picked out a thrashing sound, and grunts . . . ahead, to his left. Peter took off again, rounded a curve. They were lying on the trail. Lia’s struggles ceased as Fredo pinned her to the ground, whooping gleefully.
All thought left Peter’s head. He dove forward.
~
Fredo’s hand ripped away from Lia’s throat as his weight flew off her back. She flipped over to see Peter grappling with Fredo, the men rolling and trading punches beside the trail. She pushed herself up off the ground and stumbled around, searching until she spotted a fat branch. She limped over to it and picked it up. It was two inches in diameter and over four feet long, trimmed during a tree removal and left on the ground to rot by a park worker. She turned towards the grunts and thuds of battle.
Sneak Thief (A Dog Park Mystery) Page 24