by Gayle Wilson
The man with the mustache walked to the front of her Jeep and, releasing the latch, held the hood open as he pumped a single bullet into the engine. Startled, she flinched away from the noise. Steam flared briefly into the dry air and then he dropped the hood.
He turned to look at her again, his dark face softening at the tears tracking unchecked down the pale, shocked translucence of her cheeks. “As if she were my own,” he said again. “I promise you that on my mother’s grave.” And then, casually shifting the gun to his left hand, he crossed himself.
Samantha made no reply, her breath catching in a small sob.
“Don’t worry,” he said almost kindly. “You’ll be told exactly what you should do. Everything will be fine if you obey the instructions.”
She watched him climb into the cab of the panel truck that had been parked across the road and start the engine. She stood motionless until it had pulled around the wrecked Jeep and headed back in the direction the car had taken, the dust rising in an acrid cloud around her. Then she was alone.
The entire encounter had taken perhaps three minutes. Three minutes to destroy her life. Three minutes to change everything about her existence.
She put her bound hands down on the hood of the Jeep, trying to think. Her sick fear felt like a fog in her mind. Maybe she should at least try to start the engine, she thought, but she could see the liquid pouring out from the bottom of the car, pooling in an oil-sheened puddle on the white roadway.
Finally, she just began to run. Not the way she had come, not following the two vehicles that had disappeared in the cloud of dust. Instead, she ran in the direction she and Mandy had been heading when they’d been stopped. Toward home. Toward the nearest telephone.
“CHASE McCULLAR?” a voice called, the words echoing as hollowly across the deserted concrete of the San Diego parking deck as Chase’s footsteps had been. Late-night deserted, but he hadn’t even thought about the emptiness of the place until the man spoke to him. “We’d like to talk to you, Mr. McCullar.”
Despite the fact that it was almost ten o’clock and he hadn’t stopped for dinner, or for lunch for that matter, Chase hesitated and then, curiosity overcoming his better judgment, he turned around. The man who had called to him was standing directly across the parking deck from where Chase’s vintage Jag was parked, standing just beyond the deepest shadows, barely visible. He wasn’t alone. There were three of them, all wearing suits, but Chase had been around too long to believe they were businessmen.
“It’s been a long day, gentlemen,” he said pleasantly. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“Tonight,” the one who had called to him said. He took a step out of the shadows, and his companions moved to stand behind him.
Just like a well-rehearsed dance routine, Chase thought, resigned amusement tugging at the corners of his mouth. A lot of his clients had entourages like this, serving to insulate them, they had hoped, from having to deal with the brutal realities of today’s world.
“People who want to talk to me generally come to my office,” Chase said, his voice still patient, still polite, but he was having to work at keeping it that way. “I’ll be in again in the morning at nine. You can make an appointment with my secretary.”
“I’m afraid this can’t wait, Mr. McCullar. It would really be better if you come with us now.”
The gun in his hand was deliberately revealed, held so Chase couldn’t possibly miss it. Not that he hadn’t been expecting something like that. It had been in the man’s voice from the first—that certain arrogance created by the knowledge that whatever he said could be backed up by a bullet.
Chase watched, unmoving, as they walked toward him across the painted lines of the exit ramp. They stopped too close to him, giving him an opportunity to act if he chose. They were big men, all three of them, chosen for muscle power, Chase thought with amusement, rather than intellect.
He could feel the adrenaline flooding his body. Despite the ever-present potential for something to go seriously wrong—potently represented by the big gun—Chase found he was almost anticipating what was going to happen. It had been a long time since he’d had a chance to relieve stress in such a physically satisfying way.
“Turn around, please,” the one who had done all the talking ordered, “and put your hands on the top of the car. Spread-eagle.”
“I’m not planning to shoot you,” Chase said, again fighting an urge to smile.
“I’d like to make sure of that, if you don’t mind.”
Chase hesitated for a second longer, looking into gray eyes that seemed totally emotionless. “Have it your way,” he said easily.
He bent his knees slightly as if preparing to set his briefcase down, but the motion he began swung the heavy leather satchel upward instead, accurately catching the .44 in its rising arc. The gun fired, probably simply a reaction to the case striking the gunman’s fingers, but he heard the bullet ping harmlessly against one of the metal girders over their heads.
Before Chase heard the gun itself hit the concrete somewhere behind the men, he had let go of the satchel and then caught it again. He repositioned his hands, one on either side of the case, using it now like a battering ram, slamming the hard, skin-covered metal edge into the first man’s forehead. With the force of the unexpected blow, the leader fell backward, briefly disrupting whatever action the other two had been attempting.
By the time Chase had thrown the heavy case into the midst of the three of them and had taken his own gun from its holster that nestled at the base of his spine, it was all over. The leader was sitting on the concrete, holding his fingers against the reddening mark the briefcase had made. The others looked as if they had just witnessed some sort of performance. Sleight of hand. And maybe they had. Chase’s only regret was that the encounter had been too brief to be satisfying, not even as stress reduction.
“If you could get away with taking me down, I doubt whoever sent you here would still want to talk to me,” Chase said reasonably, no trace of anger in his voice. It was the simple truth. In his business, there was a certain reputation that had to be maintained.
“We weren’t going to kidnap you, Mr. McCullar,” the fallen man said. “We were warned that you carried, and that…” He hesitated, and Chase had time to wonder just what he’d been told and by whom before he finished. “That you might not come willingly.”
“I guess you should have listened to whoever warned you,” Chase said. “Now, why don’t you all just back up. Get away from my car. I told you it’s been a long day.”
“Look,” the speaker said, getting to his feet, his tone subtly altered now that the balance of power had shifted. “I’m sorry if—”
“I asked you to get the hell away from my car.”
“Maybe we made a mistake, but—”
“I don’t talk to people who pull guns on me. I don’t talk in parking garages. If you want to see me, make an appointment. Tomorrow.” The adrenaline was beginning to fade, to be replaced again by hunger and fatigue.
“Mr. Kincaid ain’t gonna like this,” one of the others said under his breath.
Chase wasn’t sure if the remark was directed at him or at the man who had botched the errand they had been sent on, but whichever of them he intended to warn, the name was enough to cause a reactive tightening of Chase’s gut. Mr. Kincaid. When you had grown up in south Texas, there was only one Mr. Kincaid.
“Sam?” he asked, trying to figure out why Sam Kincaid would want to talk to him. He might have expected something like this heavy-handed summons five years ago, but not now. Not after all this time. And especially not when you considered the present circumstances.
“Yes, sir,” affirmed the one who had just issued that probably highly accurate opinion.
“Sam Kincaid is the one who wants to see me?”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Why didn’t you just say that to begin with?” Chase asked.
Chapter Two
Chase had never been on the huge
Kincaid ranch, whose southern boundary lay almost thirty-five miles from the modest McCullar spread. Despite the social standing of the people he associated with these days, he couldn’t help but be impressed. He hadn’t been able to see much of the acres they’d driven across on the short trip from the private strip where Kincaid’s pilot had set the jet down. This was still a working ranch, he knew, although it was more noted nowadays for the horses it bred than for anything else it produced.
The house he was taken to was a big, white pseudo-Colonial that Sam had built for his second wife, Samantha’s mother, when they’d married. The old adobe ranch house, built by Sam’s great-grandfather, was still standing, several miles away from the new. Sam was too sentimental to tear it down, of course, but Texas gossip said Betsy Kincaid had made it clear she didn’t intend to live in a dwelling that held so many memories, especially memories of the first Mrs. Sam Kincaid.
Betsy had died of cancer more than twenty years ago. Sam Kincaid had buried two well-beloved wives before he had turned fifty. He had never married again, saying that he didn’t intend to take a chance on having to do something that painful a third time.
Chase expected to be made to wait, given his reception of Kincaid’s messengers, and he was surprised to find himself taken from the front door straight into an office where Sam Kincaid himself sat behind an antique rosewood desk, apparently just waiting for his arrival.
The old man had changed in the nine years since Chase had last seen him. He’d aged, of course. The thick mane that had still been salt-and-red-pepper then was now almost pure white, and the lines cut into the weathered skin were etched more deeply. The hazel eyes, hard and unflinching as adamant, were still the same as the night he’d ordered Chase McCullar to stay the hell away from his daughter.
Pinned by that unwavering stare, Chase felt remarkably the same as he had then. Despite the distance between that night and this, despite the changes in his own life, he felt as if he had been judged and found wanting. Just not good enough. Still not good enough. Not by a long shot.
He’d be damned if he’d speak first, Chase decided, fighting those now unfamiliar feelings of inadequacy. Sam Kincaid had sent for him, and he could make the first move. He worked on keeping his features incurious, but despite his best efforts, in the back of his mind were forbidden images that involved no one now in this room. Images of the one person who connected him to Sam Kincaid.
“They say you’re the best,” the old man said finally. “Is that true?”
Chase hesitated, wondering about the source of Sam’s information. And then, realizing that the comment could be taken in a couple of ways, he found himself fighting an unbecoming urge to laugh.
“I guess that depends on what I’m supposed to be the best at,” he said. He hadn’t been invited to sit down, but he walked to the maroon leather chair placed before the desk and sat in it anyway.
“Negotiating,” Sam said.
For a moment the quick spurt of fear in his belly almost overcame Chase’s control. Samantha had been his first thought, of course, but that didn’t have to be what this was all about. Kincaid had lots of friends. Maybe he was simply inquiring for one of them. Dealing secondhand wasn’t all that unusual in his business.
Chase swallowed the sick bile that had risen in his throat before he answered. He was pleased to think that nothing had changed about his expression or about the disinterested quality of his voice, but then he had had a lot of experience the last few years at hiding what he felt.
“I’m the best,” he acknowledged, almost without arrogance.
It was true. His was a relatively new profession, and one that Chase McCullar, given his heritage and experience, had been eminently suited for. The first time had happened by accident. He had been in the right place at the right time to do a favor for a rich Mexican friend whose wife had been kidnapped, and he’d been successful. No one had been hurt. The money had been delivered and the exchange made—all in a matter of days, and without the authorities being involved in any of it.
The next time it had been a request from a company that had, with the signing of the NAFTA agreement, moved part of its operations into Mexico. The CEO had ended up held hostage by a guerrilla group who had asked for twenty million dollars and settled for six. Again the exchange had been flawless, and Chase McCullar, who had been referred by the friend he’d originally helped, had been in business.
He hadn’t known much about the financial aspects to begin with, but he knew the country on both sides of the border, and he was smart. The other he had learned.
Now he had a set commission. For companies it was fifteen percent of whatever the payoff was. Most corporations below the border carried insurance against the possibility of an employee being kidnapped. For negotiating the release of private individuals Chase charged only ten percent. Given the wealth of his clients, he could probably just as easily have gotten his normal fifteen, but he sometimes felt that what he asked was too much for what he did.
Sometimes he had to fight his own guilt over requiring those so anguished by the kidnapping of a loved one for any fee at all. Sometimes he felt as if that aligned him on the other side—with the kidnappers, with the bad guys.
Only to Jenny had he ever expressed those doubts. She had reminded him that he was providing a valuable service to people who could well afford to pay for it, and that he was the one taking all the risks. Transporting enormous amounts of money in a country that was rapidly becoming as lawless as its South American drug-cultured counterparts was incredibly dangerous.
Most companies and families were more than willing to pay his fee in order to have someone else take care of all the details and to assure them that nothing would go wrong. Ten percent wasn’t enough to cause resentment among the wealthy; it was enough for his needs; and it was small enough to get him a lot of quiet referrals in the elite circle that was usually targeted. The kidnappers were becoming bolder with every success, even on rare occasions venturing across the border for their high-profile victims.
A couple of jobs he had done for free, because amateurs had made a mistake and the families targeted weren’t really wealthy enough to raise the ransom. Despite their lack of resources, those families had still needed his expertise—maybe needed it even more so—to negotiate the safe release of their loved one.
“Then I’ve got a job for you,” Sam Kincaid said, bringing his attention back to the present.
“I pick my own jobs, Mr. Kincaid,” Chase said. He wondered if that was the old feeling of inferiority speaking. Or if, like Samantha, he just wanted to resist doing what Sam Kincaid told him to do because no one else ever did. “I decide what jobs I do.”
“You ever turn one down?” the old man asked. The question was subtlely mocking, and echoes of their last interview again intruded into the room.
“A couple.”
“Why would you do that? I understand you make good money doing what you do.”
“Because they didn’t feel right.”
“Not on the up and up?” Sam asked, still shrewd, despite his seventy-plus years.
“Because I believed they were home-cooking,” Chase agreed. “Somebody was out to make a quick buck from the insurance company.”
“That ain’t what this is,” Sam said. His eyes dropped for the first time, locking on the gnarled, arthritic fingers of the big hands that were laced before him on the gleaming surface of the desk.
“Why don’t you tell me about it, and then I can make a decision,” Chase suggested.
Sam nodded, hooded eyes still focused downward. Chase could see the depth of the breath he took. His lips tightened, almost pursing, before they opened again.
“Some Mex bastards took my grandbaby,” he said.
The hazel gaze cut up to Chase’s face, deliberately raised to catch whatever reaction he’d had to that statement. Chase didn’t think there had been one—at least not outwardly. And now that he knew for sure it wasn’t Samantha who was being held, the band a
round his chest loosened minutely. Until he realized what Sam’s statement meant.
“Samantha’s baby?” he asked. He hadn’t known there was a baby. He had heard about her marriage, of course. Jenny had told him. He had always figured she had so he wouldn’t have to find out from someone else. Samantha had married one of those men Sam would consider ideal to be her husband. Somebody rich and powerful. Old money. Position. Somebody she’d met on a trip to Europe, he thought Jenny had said. He hadn’t listened too closely to anything but the first.
He had long ago recognized it was his fault that he’d lost her. In the first few weeks while he’d been trying to deal with what had happened to Mac, he honest-to-God hadn’t even thought about contacting Samantha or worried about what she might be feeling. Not while he’d taken care of Jenny and made all the arrangements. Not even while he had been consumed by making sure that Rio paid for what he had done. He had simply trusted that Samantha would be waiting for him. Just as she had before.
It had been like a kick in the heart when Jenny told him the truth. One more agony at a time when he had thought he couldn’t bear any more. It had seemed then to be just another treachery. It had taken him a few months of endless grief and fury over Samantha’s betrayal before he remembered what he’d said to her that night The crap about just doing it and getting on with their lives. One-night stand.
He had thought, then, that she’d understood that had only been an attempt to drive her away. He had thought she had called his bluff. Gradually the realization had come that she might not have understood, not unless she was a mind reader. And finally the bitter understanding that no matter the reasons, with her marriage it was too late to do anything to change what had happened.
But Jenny hadn’t told him anything about a baby. Of course, he hadn’t talked to his sister-in-law in almost six months. It was too hard. Too painful. She always wanted to talk about Mac. That was something he still couldn’t bear.