Bait

by Karen Robards

  Sam’s insides twisted at the thought. Since this case had started, they’d been too late five times already. If it turned out to be six, and the next victim was Maddie Fitzgerald, he knew he’d be haunted by her honey-colored eyes for the rest of his life.

  THE SMELL of gasoline was slow to dissipate in the muggy air. Topping off her tank, Maddie thought she could almost see the vapors as a diaphanous, glistening film, rising hazily beneath the harsh light. Returning the nozzle to its niche, she screwed her gas cap back on and headed for the cash register. She paid for the gas, walked back to her car, and got in.

  The Brehmer’s sign still glowed orange in the distance.

  A sharp tap on the window made her jump so high that she almost banged her head on the roof. Her heart was hitting about a thousand beats per minute by the time she realized that the man on the other side of the glass was the same man she had paid for the gas.

  Cautiously, she rolled the window down a few inches.

  “Forgot your change,” he said, handing over a couple of limp bills and some coins.

  “Oh. Thanks.” Rolling up the window, she dropped the change in the console, stuffed the bills in her pocket, and started the car. Her pulse was still racing as she pulled out of the QuikStop. Her hands shook and she was freezing cold again, jittery, basically one big nerve.

  It had taken only that tap on the window to make her realize just how vulnerable she was. The hit could happen anytime, anywhere.

  No matter how hard she ran.

  If they’d found her once, they could find her again.

  She drove past Brehmer’s, heading for the expressway, but she didn’t even notice the glowing sign because the truth of her situation, now that she had been awakened to it, pulsated through her brain in its own huge neon orange letters.

  Now that they knew she was alive, they would never stop coming after her.

  Sooner or later, they would find her. And she would die.

  Boom. Just like that.

  Blindly, she drove right past the expressway ramp.

  Unless she beat them at their own game. Unless she got over the paralyzing terror that had haunted her for seven years. Unless she fought back.

  She was not defenseless. She had a weapon. The only question was, did she have the guts—the smarts—to use it? And survive?

  The bright warning of a red light stopped her. Glancing around, she realized that the expressway entrance was a good three blocks behind her, that she was waiting at an intersection with a gang of up-to-no-good toughs eyeing her from the corner, that the dark storefronts sported iron bars and the only other vehicle in sight was pulled over at the next corner with a miniskirted hooker leaning through the window.

  Not that any of that scared her particularly. She knew this part of town, knew East St. Louis, knew all the East St. Louises out there. They were in her blood. She’d grown up in a succession of them, each rougher than the first.

  But she had gotten out, made herself over, become somebody. She was a member of the Chamber of Commerce, for God’s sake. How funny—how cool—was that?

  She pulled into the parking lot just past where the hooker was now sliding into the car, turned around, and headed back toward the QuikStop. She would park there, make a couple of phone calls.

  It was called taking back her life.

  Then, maybe, if the gods were kind and the heavens smiled and her luck was just a little bit good, she would be going home.

  Or maybe not.

  ELEVEN

  Saturday, August 16

  By the time the taxi dropped her off at the airport, it was nearly five a.m. Pulling her little black suitcase behind her, Maddie headed for long-term parking, so tired that just putting one foot in front of the other required a serious effort. But she felt better. Not good, but better. Safer.

  She thought she’d managed to call off the dogs.

  The number was seared into her brain. She had called it often enough, years ago. The phone was still operational, still answered in the same way.

  “A-One Plastics.”

  The company didn’t really exist, of course. Or, rather, it did, but only as a front for the real operation: a loansharking outfit with ties to the Mob. She’d asked for Bob Johnson, and had been answered by a couple of heartbeats’ worth of dead silence.

  Then the man on the other end of the phone had asked sharply, “Who’s this?”

  His voice had bristled with paranoia.

  Identifying herself, Maddie had almost smiled. She was still scared to death of them, of what they could do; she knew her life hinged on how this phone call turned out; but still, it felt almost good to carry the war into the enemy’s camp at last.

  The man had denied any knowledge of Bob Johnson, but had asked her to leave a number where she could be reached.

  Not very many minutes later, her cell phone had rung, just as she had known it would.

  “This is Bob Johnson,” the voice said. Maddie thought she recognized it, but she couldn’t be sure. It had been a long time ago. And, after all, Bob Johnson was a code, not a man. For all she knew, maybe more than one person answered to it. Or maybe the person answering to it had changed. “Who is this again?”

  Maddie identified herself for a second time, and the pause with which her name was greeted told her that he recognized it.

  “Where are you, babe?” he asked finally.

  That was so blatant that Maddie laughed.

  “Like I’m going to tell you,” she said, then glanced nervously around the lighted parking lot to make sure that they had not already managed to track her to this out-of-the-way QuikStop. The Chrysler had been replaced by a red Dodge Neon. Its owner, a black man in a blue mechanic’s uniform, was busy pumping gas. She nestled the small silver phone closer to her face. “Remember all those ‘errands’ you guys had my father run? He kept things from them. Evidence. Enough to put quite a few people away for a long time. I’m just calling to tell you that if anything happens to me, if I die younger than eighty in any place other than my bed, letters are going to be mailed, giving certain locations where certain things are hidden, and that evidence is going to start popping up all over the place like a bad rash, and a lot of people are going to go down.”

  This time the silence wasn’t as long.

  “You know what happens to little girls who make big threats?” The voice had turned ugly. “Things that aren’t so nice.”

  Maddie laughed again, the sound as brittle as she felt. “You mean, like somebody sending a hit man to knock me off? Oh, wait, somebody’s already done that. But he messed up, and I’m still here. And I mean to stay that way. Look, I don’t want any trouble. I just want to live my life in peace. So I’m trying to come up with something here that works out for all of us. Nobody bothers me, and I don’t bother anybody. That evidence never sees the light of day.”

  “What kind of evidence are we talking about?”

  Maddie thought fast. “You want an example? Okay. My father was there the night that Ted Cicero was whacked. The guy who did it threw the gun away afterwards. Later, my father went back and got the gun.” She paused for effect. “I can’t be sure, of course, but I’d be willing to bet that there are fingerprints all over it.”

  The sound of an indrawn breath told her that she’d scored. She remembered well the night her father had come back from witnessing the hit on Ted Cicero. He’d gotten drunk and cried, and told her everything, to her horror.

  “Where is it?” he asked, rasping now.

  “I want to be let alone,” she said, keeping her voice steady with an effort. “If I even think there’s a hit man in my vicinity, I’m going to give the gun—and everything else my father kept—to the FBI. They’ve already been in touch with me, you know. Looking for your hit man. I don’t want to, but if I have to choose between getting whacked and going to the feds, I pick the feds.”

  She could hear him breathing hard. “If I recall right, you got a history with the feds yourself.”

  �
��So don’t make me choose.”

  Maddie could feel his tension emanating through the phone.

  “What kind of other stuff are we talking about here?”

  Her heart was racing, and her stomach had tied itself in so many knots by this time that Houdini himself couldn’t have straightened it out. But she didn’t let so much as a hint of that come out in her voice. She knew these guys: They were jackals who preyed on the weak. The key to surviving was to convince them that she was strong. Strong enough to carry out her threats.

  “Tapes, for one thing. He used to carry a little mini tape recorder in his pocket sometimes. When he went out on jobs. And, let’s see ... oh, yeah, there was that stack of hundred-dollar bills Junior Rizzo gave him—I don’t know what job it was from, but I’m sure the feds would find it interesting. And other things. Lots of other things. He liked keeping souvenirs.”

  There was more silence.

  Then, “Babe, let me give you some advice. The smart thing for you to do is to come on back here where you belong, and bring all this stuff you’re talking about with you. Hand it over, and quit threatening people. Nobody wants to have to hurt you.”

  Maddie snorted. “Don’t give me that. Nobody gives a shit about hurting me. But I’m telling you: You hurt me, and you hurt yourselves. I have enough evidence here to put a lot of people away for a long time. And I’ve arranged it so that if anything happens to me, anything at all, if I have a heart attack or choke to death on a pretzel or whatever, you better believe the shit’s going to hit the fan—for you and yours.”

  “Potty mouth,” he said, sounding angry now. “In my book, there’s nothing worse than a woman with a potty mouth. Just for the record, I don’t know nothing about no hit man. Or no Fat Ted Cicero. Or Junior Rizzo.”

  “What, are you afraid somebody’s listening in? They’re not, at least not from my side. Like you said, I don’t want anything to do with the feds. Not unless you make me choose.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about anything you’re talking about.”

  Maddie made a sound of disgust. “You go tell whoever’s in charge what I said,” she said. “And get back to me. Real soon. Like within the next couple of hours. Or I’m going to have to start making some moves to protect myself.”

  With that, she hung up. Then, not sure how technologically advanced the goons might have become since she’d last had occasion to cross paths with them, she peeled rubber out of the QuikStop and headed back toward the city, where she drove aimlessly around the interstates because she was afraid to stop anywhere.

  Call her paranoid, but she had hideous visions of hit men with global-positioning devices zeroing in on her cell phone. Maybe they had some twisted version of an On-Star service of their own now, an automatic locater, something like 1-800-Bang-Bang-You’re-Dead.

  By the time the phone rang again, she was a raw bundle of nerves, having scared herself to the point where she was on the verge of chucking the whole plan and hightailing it for as far away from St. Louis as she could get.

  But then Bob had gotten back to her, telling her that while nobody had any knowledge concerning any of the stuff she’d been talking about earlier, they had a deal. Basically, live and let live.

  Of course, when the Mob acts like you’re their new best pal, the next thing you’re liable to feel is their knife in your back.

  Maddie knew that as well as anyone, although she thought she had succeeded in making them think that they had more to lose than to gain by killing her.

  On the plus side, she was telling the absolute truth about the stash of evidence. Her father had always been convinced that someday he could use the things he had secretly squirreled away to free himself from the Mob’s grip. He had called his accumulation of stuff his “insurance policy,” and had kept it in a locked strongbox, which he carefully hid. Unfortunately, the last time she had seen that strongbox had been about a week before she’d fled.

  But since she was the only one who knew that, it didn’t really matter. Having the evidence didn’t help her at all. Having them think she had the evidence was what mattered.

  And it just might be enough to keep her alive. It was a risk, a gamble. Up until this moment, she’d never thought she had a propensity for gambling. But it seemed that now that the chips were down, she was proving to be her father’s daughter after all.

  Everything she had ever wanted was suddenly within her grasp. During the last seven years, she had even managed to make herself over into the person she had always wanted to be. The wrong-side-of-the-tracks, lock-up-your-sons, her-father-is-a-criminal girl was respectable now. Looked up to, even. A pillar of the community. “An inspiration to others,” as the president of the Chamber of Commerce had described her at the dinner where she’d gotten her award.

  She was not going to just close the book on that, or on the life that went with it. It had been too hard-won. Having done everything that it was in her power to do to make sure she kept safe, she was going to take a chance. She was going to stay.

  Which is how she came to be walking wearily past rows of cars in the St. Louis airport’s long-term parking lot as the sun pushed its first tentative feelers of color over the horizon. It was still dark, but not as dark as it had been. It was, rather, the deep, hazy charcoal of a newborn dawn. Beyond the yellow glow of the tall halogen lamps that illuminated the area, the airport was still and somnolent, not yet alive with the day’s bustle. In the distance she could hear the swoosh of an airplane as it raced along the runway. Closer at hand, the only sound was the steady hum of traffic from the nearby interstate. The faintest tinge of motor oil hung in the air. Even at such an early hour, it was still hot and humid outside—it was always hot and humid in St. Louis in August—but as she headed toward her blue Camry, Maddie was shivering.

  But not with the cold.

  She was scared, there was no getting around that. And she probably would be for a long time to come, until she had determined to her own satisfaction that her threats had worked to stuff the bogeyman back under the bed. But she should be safe enough at the moment, she calculated. To begin with, she was almost certain that she had not been followed on her aborted run. And if she had not been followed, then logic dictated that the hit man—whom she had last encountered in New Orleans—would not be lurking in this particular parking lot at this particular ungodly hour, just waiting to pick her off. Her flight had landed almost eleven hours before. Even if he had followed her to St. Louis, even if he had found her car in the lot, what were the chances that he was still around?

  Slim, she judged. But not quite none.

  Which left her as jittery as a caged bird in a roomful of cats. The nervous looks she could not help casting around were purely involuntary. So, too, was the quickening of her step as she neared the spot at the back of the lot where she had parked her car. When she had parked the car, on a bright, sunny Thursday afternoon, when the thought that her carefully constructed house of cards might be in imminent danger of collapse had never crossed her mind, it had seemed like as good a place as any, as well as a chance to work in a little aerobic exercise before she boarded her flight. Now, the closer she got to the space, the more isolated it seemed.

  The misty pools of light thrown down by the overhead lamps were a fair distance apart, and her Camry, in the last row, was almost beyond the reach of all of them. The farther she got from the last streetlight, the darker it got. The darker it got, the antsier she got. Her eyes darted hither and yon like bees drunk on picnic beer. Behind the line of cars, a tall, grassy bank rose just high enough to block a view of the road that veered off from the central artery to the terminal to feed the long-term lot. To her right, across another vast, mostly empty expanse of asphalt, clustered a group of large metal buildings, probably airplane hangars. To her left, even farther away, was the blocky concrete box that was the terminal.

  The good news was, there was not another human being in sight.

  That was also the bad news.

  What she
wouldn’t have given, just at that moment, for a patrolling cop.

  She was close enough to her car now so that she could almost read the license plate. The weariness that had caused her steps to drag just moments before had been wiped out by a burst of fear-fueled adrenaline. Walking faster, probing shadows for possible danger, she cursed the rattle her suitcase wheels made because she could not hear anything much over them and because they gave her presence away. Maybe she was being paranoid, but they seemed about as loud as a marching band. So loud that no one within earshot could be ignorant of her approach.

  But then, no one was within earshot—were they?

  Her nerves were getting the better of her, she knew. But she couldn’t help it. Her imagination went into overdrive, seeing danger in every swooping moth and hearing it with every random sound. She was alone. She was sure she was alone. But her body refused to be convinced. Independent of logic, her pulse raced and her stomach fluttered and her mouth went dry.

  As she drew even with the Camry’s back fender, her heart was pounding so hard that she could barely even hear the clatter the suitcase was making over the drumming in her ears. The sense of being isolated and vulnerable was so strong as she turned into the cramped space between her car and the Town Car beside it that she had to fight the urge to just abandon her suitcase on the spot and jump inside her car and zoom out of there as fast as she could go. But she couldn’t leave Fudgie—or her other things, either. Stowing them in the backseat would take just a few seconds more.

  Anyway, she was being totally paranoid. She couldn’t see anyone. She couldn’t hear anyone. And the reason for that was—ta-dah!—there was no one else in the parking lot.

  Punching the button on her key ring that unlocked the car, she hurried to grab the door handle at the same time as the interior lit up.