by Diane Capri
“Possibly. I’ve seen photos of her. She’s freakishly hot. He wouldn’t be the first man to be interested. Which brings me to another point.”
“What’s that?”
“Her last known lover, also a soldier, died of a drug overdose. Opioids, apparently.” Another deep chuckle floated across the miles. “This woman is a Delilah for sure. Seems like no man can resist her. And there’s two of them, don’t forget. Her sister is every bit as beautiful.”
She cocked her head. “You think Reacher was bewitched by her? Mackenzie, Bramall, even the General? All victims of Delilah’s charms?”
“Stranger things have happened, Otto. Men are easily beguiled,” he replied. “Trust me. Women have more power than they may assume.”
“Okay. Thanks. Anything else?”
“Looks like Reacher and the general had a few conversations a while back, too. Reacher called West Point. They talked.”
“About what?”
“Still checking. All I have right now is a list of calls and the duration of each. No contents yet.” He paused. “Stay tuned.”
Suddenly, the world crashed around her and she felt exhausted. Her eyelids drooped, and she forced them open. She paced the room to stay awake, but it wasn’t working.
She said, “Cooper says Reacher was in St. Louis last night. Can you check that out?”
“Yeah. And I’m looking at Mackenzie and Bavolsky. I’ll call you when I have anything definitive,” he said before he hung up.
She flopped onto the bed, made a mental note to update Gaspar in the morning, and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 30
Friday, February 11
11:20 p.m.
St. Louis, Missouri
Scorpio owned half a dozen counterfeit passports from six different countries, but private jet travel inside the United States solved those problems. No passports required. Jets were faster than driving. They also avoided all the security screening issues for commercial flights.
He nodded, pleased with his decision. A private jet was the best option. He’d instructed Thorn to make it so.
He would not be returning to Rapid City. Nothing left to go back to now. Both his home and his laundromat had burned to cinders.
His physical possessions filled a single duffel bag, which Thorn had tossed into the plane before departure. Everything else he would ever need when he settled in Mexico was stored in the cloud. Gotta love technology. He grinned.
Scorpio had napped the entire four-hour travel time to St. Louis. Along with the adrenaline flooding his system, the nap had energized him. He awakened refreshed and ready to finish the Mackenzie business tonight. His nerves were abuzz with anticipation.
They deplaned at the private airport, a short distance from U Store Stuff. Scorpio washed his face in the airport’s executive lounge while Thorn collected the rental vehicle.
Scorpio approached the information desk, which was occupied by a middle-aged black man dressed in a business suit. “May I help you, sir?”
“I’m Arthur Scorpio. Do you have a package for me?” he asked. He’d called in a favor from a local contact to get what he needed. He’d never met the guy. Which was precisely the way he wanted to keep it.
“Let me check.” The man pushed away from the desk and into a room behind him. He returned with a small padded envelope. “Here you are, Mr. Scorpio.”
“Thanks.” Scorpio took the envelope, felt the keys inside, and nodded. He walked as well as he could toward the valet exit where Thorn was waiting with the engine running.
Storage units in places like U Store Stuff were notorious havens for criminal enterprises of all kinds. Anonymous, secure, and protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. All of which meant that the contents remained private and the owners protected from prying eyes and prosecution. Much more reliable than storing product in somebody’s basement, even if that meant the product was less accessible.
When his business was going strong, before Reacher screwed things up, Scorpio had rented several similar units in locations closer to Rapid City. Which was how he knew U Store Stuff was a perfect place for Mackenzie to hide Scorpio’s drugs.
And St. Louis was close enough to Mackenzie’s Chicago base that a low-level crook could easily have driven there in a rented truck, unloaded, and high-tailed it back in a rented truck without losing much sleep.
Almost anything could be inside those storage units, limited only by one’s imagination. Storage was private, solid, and cheap. Freezers containing dead bodies, stolen goods, drugs, cash, and more. All sorts of contraband could be stashed and reclaimed at any time.
Scorpio could have opened units all night long, and the odds were better than gambling in Vegas. He’d probably have found drugs of all kinds. But he was only interested in reclaiming property that belonged to him. He knew precisely where to look.
He had investigated the U Store Stuff facility website, which boasted security as well as twenty-four-hour accessibility. Both of which suited his needs perfectly.
The lot was surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence. Only a single electronic gate permitted one to enter or exit. Using a unique, personal security code to gain entry to the lot, one’s possessions were available at all hours, every day of the year, U Store Stuff boasted.
Scorpio smiled and shook his head. So often, people overlooked the obvious. The huge lot allowed for business expansion, sure. It also left enough room for a small helicopter to land in the undeveloped corner. Thieves could bypass the electronic security completely in other ways, too.
Not that he’d need a helicopter or planned to break in by cutting the fence. Scorpio’s forte was technology and familiarity with the dark web, where everything was available to seekers with the skills to hunt.
He began with a customer list for every leased unit on the U Store Stuff lot. Less than an hour of computer time, coupled with clever and knowledgeable searching, yielded three security codes, each of which would open the gate.
He shook his head. People would never learn. Which was the good news.
A few minutes later, Thorn pulled the SUV into the driveway. He stopped at the keypad and punched in the first code. Worked like a charm. The big gate rolled open and Thorn drove through.
Scorpio wagged his head. Laws and security systems work against law-abiding citizens. Criminals don’t care. They are never stopped by such measures. When would people figure that out?
Mackenzie rented two units here, Scorpio had learned. Unit D-6 was leased to T. Mackenzie and rent was paid automatically by a monthly credit card charge. Unit K-7 had been paid in cash upfront for an entire year.
Scorpio figured the cash payment was more likely to yield results, but he was prepared to check both, just in case. A guy like Mackenzie was dumb enough to store all sorts of things. After all, he’d found loose gemstones, a pistol, and that flash drive in Mackenzie’s bedroom safe, which a sharp teenager could have opened in a couple of seconds.
Unit D-6 was closest to the entrance. Thorn drove directly to it.
Scorpio frowned the moment he saw it. What the hell?
The door was open. Orange traffic cones were placed across the entrance. The concrete floor was wet. Large fans were set up to blow the water into a drain in the center of the floor and dry out the concrete before the overnight temperatures caused the water to freeze.
Another orange cone was placed in front of the exterior brick wall. A shiny new hasp was anchored in place by fresh mortar. Another fan was aimed at the new brick. Mortar could freeze, too, and the ice crystals would weaken the bond. The repairs had been done by a competent crew.
Scorpio shook his head and gripped the handle of his cane, thinking things through. Whatever had been stored in D-6 had been removed. Damage had been caused in the process. The damage was recently repaired. By tomorrow, D-6 would be ready for new tenants.
Not ideal at all.
“Park in the next lane and come back here. Check inside. See if you ca
n determine what happened,” he told Thorn.
“Ten-four, boss,” Thorn replied. He parked the SUV, left the engine running, and trotted back. He was gone for ten minutes.
When he returned, he said, “Looks like a gunfight. Concrete block walls have been patched in several places. Ricochet damage from bullets, if I had to guess.”
“What about the water on the floor?” Scorpio asked.
“Power washer did a good job of removing whatever it was. The floor’s pretty clean. Around the drain were some dark spots that could have been blood caught in the crevices.”
Scorpio nodded and took a deep breath. He didn’t care that some fool was probably killed inside. He only wanted what he’d come to collect. “Let’s try Unit K-7, four buildings east.”
Thorn pulled through the lane and turned right on the other side. He turned right again into the lane between units labeled J and K.
Unit K-7 was almost in the center of the long brick building. From the exterior, this unit looked the same as D-6, but the sitemap had listed the dimensions as ten-by-twenty.
Thorn pulled the SUV straight into the driveway, headlights shining on the gray garage door.
Scorpio handed him the envelope with the keys inside.
Thorn slipped the transmission into park and climbed out of the SUV.
He used the headlights to illuminate the padlock, which was shackled to the hasp attaching the brick wall to the door on the right side. He poured the keys out of the envelope into his palm. He tried the first key, which didn’t fit into the lock.
The second key slid in, turned, and the shackle released from the body of the lock as if it had been lubricated. He lifted the shackle from the hasp and dropped the lock with the key into his oversized pocket. Then he opened the garage door. It was well lubricated and rolled up without so much as a squeaky wheel.
When the door opened, Scorpio stared at the front grille of a black, late model Expedition XLT. The familiar Ford logo perched smack in the middle of it.
The SUV was enormous. More than seventeen feet long, seven feet wide with the mirrors, and six feet high, it pretty well filled Unit K-7. A big man like Thorn couldn’t walk around it unless he turned sideways to do so.
Scorpio cocked his head as if a different viewing angle would solve the puzzle.
None of the personal data he had located on Mackenzie reflected ownership of the big SUV.
It had no license plate on the front, which was required in Illinois and Missouri.
That could mean this SUV was a rental from one of the nineteen states that required only a rear plate. Or the plates could have been removed to slow identification.
Scorpio could run the plate through the dark web databases if Thorn could get the number off the back.
Thorn went inside Unit K-7 to check out the vehicle. He turned sideways, leading with his right shoulder, and tried lifting the door handles. The vehicle was locked.
He used a microbeam flashlight to look through the tinted windows. He pulled out his camera and snapped the vehicle identification number through the windshield. Then he snapped a few photos through the side cargo windows.
By the time he’d closed and locked the garage door and returned to the driver’s seat, Scorpio had his laptop set up and connected to the dark web using an encrypted hot spot.
“There’s two dead bodies inside. I don’t recognize them. Given the situation, I’d guess they’re not exactly model citizens.” Thorn passed his phone to Scorpio who flipped through the photos quickly.
“Anything else in the vehicle?” Scorpio already had the VIN entered on his screen and pushed the button to search.
“Not that I could see.”
The Expedition was registered to a woman in Kentucky. With the VIN, Scorpio quickly located the key fob code to unlock the doors. He copied the code to an app in Thorn’s phone and handed it back to him.
“Search the SUV quickly,” he said. “If you find anything that belongs to me, grab it. Leave everything else in place.”
“Ten-four, boss,” Thorn replied as he left the warm SUV and retraced his steps to open Unit K-7 again.
While Thorn handled the SUV, Scorpio ran the corpse photos through facial recognition. It didn’t take long to identify both from media accounts of several arrests.
“Joey Two” Rosinsky and “Little Hugh” Nowinsky. Killers in the Big Mike Bavolsky “Polish mafia” gang. Based in Chicago, but operating in Illinois, Indiana, and Missouri.
He found lots of data on Bavolsky. He was no choirboy, but he had a pretty daughter and a very hot wife. The girl was maybe sixteen or so. She’d been cursed with her father’s stocky Slavic genes.
But the mother. Wow! A blonde, lanky beauty. Pretty enough to have been a model or an actress. Chained to Bavolsky.
Scorpio shook his head. She was spectacularly gorgeous, but she was no brain trust, for sure.
As he ran down Bavolsky’s list of crimes, Scorpio saw Bavolsky was big league for a small-time guy like Mackenzie. If he’d killed two of Bavolsky’s men and lived to tell about it, Mackenzie was a much bigger problem than Scorpio had anticipated. Good to know.
Thorn locked up Unit K-7 and returned. “Nothing in the Expedition belonging to you.”
He handed his phone to Scorpio, who reviewed the photos.
Scorpio wiped the app and the code from the phone and tossed it into the front seat.
“Thought these might come in handy.” Thorn tossed a shotgun and a box of breaching shells into the passenger seat. “Now what?”
Scorpio clenched his teeth and kept his hands working the keyboard. He ran through the client list for U Store Stuff again. He’d found a third possible storage unit. This one, Unit GG-4, was leased and paid for by S. R. Sanderson. Rose Sanderson. Jane Mackenzie’s twin sister.
Could be nothing. But he’d come too far to leave without checking.
Scorpio said, “Let’s try one more. Head back toward the gate and keep traveling west. We want Unit GG-4 this time.”
“Ten-four, boss,” Thorn replied. He backed away from Unit K-7’s garage door and rolled to the end of the lane. He turned west, keeping the buildings between his vehicle and the highway.
CHAPTER 31
Saturday, February 12
12:20 a.m.
St. Louis, Missouri
Unit GG-4 was the same size as Unit D-6, ten feet by ten feet. Thorn pulled the bolt cutters from the back of the SUV and snapped the shackle from the lock.
Stacked inside were boxes of fentanyl patches and tablets. Scorpio recognized them immediately, even from his position in the back seat of the SUV and from a distance. The packaging and logo were unmistakable.
Were these his drugs? Thieves had stolen a lot more. But that was a while ago. This might be all they had left.
No way to tell until he compared the serial numbers on the boxes to his missing inventory. Nor did it really matter. He’d take them regardless of who owned them. Spoils of war. Compensation. Finders keepers. Whatever.
A big grin split his face, and he said, “Yeah, baby!”
He crawled out of the back seat and walked into Unit GG-4 to get a closer look. The white boxes were stacked on a pallet in the center of the floor.
“Can you fit this into our small SUV?” he asked.
“It’ll be tight, but we might make it if we lose some of the boxes and you sit in the front seat,” Thorn replied.
He returned to the SUV to rearrange the cargo area. The only available light was the SUV’s headlights, so he left the engine running. He began removing the opioids from storage.
Scorpio couldn’t help with the work. The drugs were lightweight, but he could only use one hand, and he needed that one to hold the cane. Instead, he stood guard.
He didn’t expect tenants or visitors to arrive at this time of night, but he leaned his left shoulder against a block wall and kept his right hand on the gun in his pocket.
He was cold, even inside Unit GG-4 where the wind couldn’t blow st
raight through his clothes. But the process went quickly. No vehicles approached.
Once Thorn had stacked all the intact boxes he could fit into the cargo hold, he opened the remaining ones. He stuffed individual blister packs and sealed patches into nooks, crannies, and crevices. When he finished, the small SUV was packed completely full, but not one single pill was left in Unit GG-4.
“That’s the last of it,” Thorn said, as he closed the hatch and the back doors.
Scorpio took one final glance around. Only the wood pallets that had lifted the pharmaceutical boxes off the dirty concrete floor remained.
He returned to the SUV and climbed into the front seat.
Thorn closed the garage door and propped the lock onto the hasp as best he could. The ruse would fool no one upon close inspection, but they would be long gone before anyone bothered to look.
Thorn took his seat behind the wheel and headed toward the exit. After an interminable wait, the sensor at the gate registered the vehicle ready to exit. It began the long, slow opening pull.
The SUV rolled through the gate to the end of the driveway and stopped at the road.
Thorn asked, “Where to now, boss?”
Two hours ago, the question would have annoyed Scorpio no end. The question would have been stupid. Now it wasn’t.
“You mean are we going to drive all the way to Mexico with an SUV full of opioids?” Scorpio said thoughtfully. “Just run these puppies directly across the border ourselves?”
The sheer boldness of the idea appealed, although the risk was great. Besides, he had unfinished business to conclude with Mackenzie and those two sisters. Not to mention Reacher.
And he had to find them all first.
Reluctantly, he shook his head. “Head south. Be extremely cautious. We don’t want to get pulled over for any reason. Let’s see how far we can travel before daylight.”
“Ten-four, boss.” He pulled onto the road. A couple of miles later, he said, “What are we going to do with all this product?”
Scorpio’s instincts said to get as far away from St. Louis as possible while he still could.